26
HAYDEN PARKS AT my house on Thursday night after work, and we take the trail through the trees back to Rum Room with our laptop bags slung over our shoulders.
“Does it ever bother you?” I ask. “Not being able to talk about what you’re working on?”
Creases form at the insides of his brows. “Yeah,” he admits. “More lately.”
“Really? Why?” I say. “She finally getting to the good stuff?”
He gives me a look.
“I’m just kidding. This isn’t a trap.”
“I know.” He slips his hand through mine, our knuckles locking together. After a minute, he says, “Almost everything she tells me, I find myself imagining her telling you.”
“So competitive,” I tease, bumping sideways into him.
“I just wonder how you’d react,” he replies. “What you’d say. How you’d write it.” After a beat, he adds, “I think about your Bella Girardi profile, and realize you’re probably getting entirely different stuff than I am.
Asking different questions.”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “I’m not really asking questions. I’m mostly
just letting her talk.”
He gives me a strange look.
“What?” I ask.
He shakes his head, the grooves in his forehead smoothing out. “I just think we’re having different experiences.”
“How so?” I ask.
“In a week,” he says, “I’ll tell you.”
“A week?” I cry. “That’s two days before she’s going to choose one of us. Aren’t you worried I’ll scoop you?”
“Fine,” he says, “a week and two days. We give her our pitches, and then I’ll tell you everything I legally can.” He stops walking, withdrawing his hand from mine only to offer me a handshake.
“You want me to say the same thing?” I ask.
“That’s up to you,” he says.
“I can really talk,” I remind him. “If I try to recap everything, you’ll get sick of me before I’m halfway through.”
He grabs my hand, yanks me into him, and kisses me there in the middle of the dark path.
“That’s a pretty good strategy,” I whisper happily. At the ridge that forms in his forehead, I specify, “For when I’m talking too much.”
“I’m not trying to shut you up, Alice,” he says. “It’s just that somehow, almost everything you say makes me want to kiss you.”
I laugh, but my heart is whirring like a helicopter attempting liftoff. I lace my hands against the back of his neck and grin up at him like the lovestruck fool I’m quickly becoming. His own expression remains serious, and I just know he’s thinking about next week, the week after, the week after that, an entire indefinite future with us on opposite sides of the country.
Despite learning early on the merits of being present, of focusing only on the moment you’re in rather than dreading all the ones that might follow, my grasp on this nearly perfect moment slips a little too.
“Come on.” I start back down the path. “Let’s go eat.”
Rum Room is packed, but the patio is entirely empty, so the host inside at the stand tells us to take whichever picnic table we want.
We choose one at the back edge, where we’ll be more or less tucked out of sight, and set up our computers opposite each other. I know I should be
working on my proposal, but I’m having trouble concentrating.
Stay in the moment, Alice, I chide myself. Worry about tomorrow when
it gets here.
Easier said than done.
“Let’s do something fun this weekend.” I bat my laptop screen down for a better view of him.
His left eyebrow curves upward. “Such as?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But we have Sunday off. Let’s do something.”
Some unspoken word balances on his bottom lip.
“What?” I press.
“I just…” He considers carefully. “I wondered if you’d try to see your mom again.”
Oh. Right. I think it over. “Next weekend.” Then I’ll either have good news to share with her, or be done holding my breath and able to tell her I wrapped up my work here and am heading back to California.
He nods, eyes back on his screen, but again, there’s something he’s not
saying.
“Hayden.”
“It’s none of my business,” he replies.
I frown. “Don’t say that. I want you in my business. I’m inviting you into my business.”
His smile is half formed and far from long lasting. He’s still tiptoeing.
“I promise,” I add.
“I guess I still don’t understand why you don’t want to tell her how you feel.” He hurries to tack on, “I want to understand. But I don’t.”
Now that I’m feeling less defensive, this line of questioning feels less like an attack. “I am who I am,” I explain. “I like the things I like. I’m good at the things I’m good at. And my mom—she’s her. Telling her that it hurts my feelings that she’s not interested in my work won’t change how she actually feels. She’ll just act different. And I don’t need that. I don’t want her to pretend to think what I do has value. That would feel so much worse to me.”
He nods, tight lipped, but I can tell it’s an I understand, not an I agree.
“So that’s it,” I say.
“Got it.” Under the table, his hand grazes over my knee. I think he means it to be calming, affectionate. But it sets me on fire.
I seriously doubt I’m making it another full week without having him.
Something possesses me to blurt out as much, and his hand tenses on my thigh, his eyes darkening. I shift forward to the very edge of the bench, his hand crawling higher along my skin, heat pulsing through me to the rhythm of the crickets’ song.
Around the corner from us, the screen door bangs open, and Hayden’s fingers retreat abruptly, right in time for a cute twenty-something server with a topknot and Converse tennis shoes to bound out.
“Hey, y’all!” she says brightly, pulling her notepad from her black half apron. “My name’s Tru. What can I get started for ya?”
Hayden clears his throat. “Ice water.”
“I might need something a little stiffer,” I say, genuinely not aiming for a euphemism, but by his sudden cough, I know that’s how it’s received.
I turn a guileless smile up to Tru. “Actually, we might need a minute,” I say, because clearly neither of us is quite fit for public consumption just yet.
“Sure thing,” she says. “I’ll be back in five.”
Five minutes, I tell myself, should be enough to make my body stop throbbing.
• • • AFTER DINNER, WE don’t even make it inside the rental before we’re kissing, slipping hands beneath each other’s shirts, whispering into each other’s skin and mouths and hair. We pause long enough to fumble the lock open and stumble inside.
“We’re not going to have sex,” he tells me while his tongue is in the notch above my collarbone.
“We’re not?” I say, somewhere between alarm and complete disbelief.
He shakes his head and pushes me toward the surface nearest the front door—the kitchen counter. “Not tonight.” He scrapes my shirt up over me
and tosses it aside before lifting me onto the counter.
“If you change your mind,” I say, reaching for him now, “let me know.”
I throw his shirt over his shoulder, and then, as he’s moving in between my thighs, I set a hand to the middle of his warm chest, holding him off. “Let me see you first.”
His face screws up, and my heart clenches with the realization that he’s shy about his body. “You’re beautiful,” I tell him earnestly.
His gaze lifts, the hard lines of his face cast in sharp relief. This time when he steps in close, I reach for his waist and pull him nearer, our stomachs kissing as he eases me to the edge of the counter. His hands trail up the sides of my neck, then back down my chest, cupping me through my bra as our lips melt together and draw apart, our breath mingling.
I slip one hand into his waistband, and he groans as my fingers curl around him. The sound drags down my spine like a fingernail, and I arch into him. One of his hands smooths around my back, makes its way up to the clasp of my bra while the other brushes my skirt up my thighs and gently slides under me, the heel of his palm pressing into me.
I cry out, my free hand gripping the back of his neck, seeking something firm and steadying as I move myself against him.
My bra vanishes. His mouth connects with skin. Our breathing frays, our pulses racing as we chase the sensations mounting everywhere we’re connected. My chest aches with the need for more pressure, and I pitch myself forward, his mouth drawing me deeper. I gasp his name.
He pushes me back, the same way I did, one hand in the center of my chest, his splayed fingers nearly spanning the width of my rib cage.
He looks at me hungrily, eyes dark as the Atlantic beneath a new moon.
“Have you changed your mind yet?” I ask between breaths.
In answer, he pulls me by the hips off the counter, turns me so that my back presses into the cold steel of the refrigerator, and thrusts his knee between my thighs, his mouth descending on my throat and his palms raking up my body.
“Is that a yes?” I whisper. His hands pin themselves against my hips as he kneels on the tile in front of me, one hand bunching my skirt as the other
tugs my underwear down.
He leans in, his breath warm and eyes tilted up to watch my reaction as he presses his mouth to me.
I forget all about the question. I forget all about every question that’s been haunting me. I forget my name. I forget how to control my body or the words rasping from my throat.
I forget everything that isn’t Hayden, isn’t this moment.
• • • WE DRINK DECAF. We eat the chess pie I got from the grocery store’s bakery the other day. (Okay, mostly I eat it, but he has a couple of bites.) We try to work on our separate book proposals from our separate couches, and when that fails, try to play a game of Scrabble, and when that fails, we end up making out on the couch. And though mentally I really am trying to stop at making out, I find myself climbing down him, undoing his fly, drawing him into my mouth. His hand is gentle against the back of my head, the sounds emanating from him making my toes curl and thighs twinge all over again.
“God, Alice,” he gravels out. “I love this.”
I pull back. “Me too.”
His eyes flick down to me, heavy lidded, lust drunk. “You don’t have to
say that.”
“I mean it,” I insist.
Even through the haze over his face, I catch a glimmer of skepticism.
It occurs to me then that in my effort to be positive, optimistic, and understanding, I might’ve made myself into an unreliable narrator of sorts, someone who can’t easily be trusted not to sugarcoat things.
A strange realization to have in this specific moment, but I guess wisdom doesn’t have to choose when to foist itself on a person.
“I promise,” I whisper, his expression melting into something more raw, more vulnerable than before, his hand featherlight in my hair. “I love touching you. I love kissing you. I love hanging out with you. I love this.”
He reaches for my face, draws me up the length of his body to kiss me sweetly, and I oblige, kiss him back until we’re both writhing, until I can’t bear going any longer without making him come. When I crawl back down him, his hips lift, letting me draw him into my mouth again. Bring him to the edge. Break him open, the same way he breaks me open. The sound he makes is something I know I’ll play back to myself later tonight while I’m
lying awake, aching for more of him.
His whole body.
His whole heart, a little voice adds. I push it aside.
Stay in the present.
When we’ve finished, when he’s drifted back into himself and pulled me up to lie against his chest, I murmur, “Tell me something no one knows about you,” and he’s quiet and still for so long I start to wonder if I’ve crossed a line.
Then he tips his chin down to his clavicle to meet my eyes and says simply, “I’m in love with you.”
I feel my lips part. Once I’ve absorbed it, I rush to reply, but he very lightly sets his fingertips against my mouth. “I don’t want you to say
anything now,” he murmurs.
“Anything at all?” I whisper.
The corners of his mouth twitch. “Anything about that. Not until after.”
I nod agreement, even as it feels like the words are climbing up my windpipe. “After.”
He kisses me once. “Should we watch something?”
I blink back the rising tears and reach toward the coffee table for the remote. Almost Famous is on. I don’t hear a word of it. My mind is an endless loop of I’m in love with you too.
After more than three decades on this planet, all it took was a few weeks and the right person to entirely rearrange my composition.
