REAL LIFE
Tuesday
USUALLY ON TUESDAY we take a day trip to Acadia National Park, the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen and, perhaps more importantly, the location of our favorite popover restaurant.
I’ve been dreaming about fluffy, strawberry-slathered rolls for weeks, but now all I want is to climb into a cool, dark hole with a barrel full of Tums and a two-liter bottle of ginger ale.
After a quick stop home to change, hydrate, and pee, we repack the cars with picnic supplies. The process of getting everyone and everything out the door is like herding cats on acid. Like the cats are on acid, and the cat shepherd is also on acid.
Right as Parth returns from using the restroom, Kimmy realizes she forgot her sunglasses and darts back inside.
Sabrina says, “Do you think the first two hours of their days on the farm are Cleo sending Kimmy back into the house for every individual item of clothing she’s forgotten to put on?”
“And once more when she accidentally puts her pants on her head,” Cleo calls from down by the cars.
“That’s not an accident, babe,” Kimmy says, barreling back outside. “I’m just waiting for the day you finally embrace my forward-thinking approach to fashion.”
“Wear whatever you want,” Cleo says. “I’m more concerned with what’s underneath.”
“Awh!” Kimmy kisses the side of Cleo’s neck. “I don’t know if you’re being lascivious or sentimental, but either way I’ll take it.”
Sabrina slaps her forehead. “The wine. Can you run down to the cellar and grab it?”
“Pick anything pink or white?” I guess.
She shakes her head. “It’s the Didier Dagueneau Silex from 2018. You mind?”
“It’s not that I mind,” I say. “It’s just that I recognized very few of those words.”
“Silex,” she repeats, jogging her multiple tote bags up her shoulders. “It says that on the label, followed by Didier Dagueneau, and you’re looking for the 2018. It’s a white.”
I drop my own bag inside the door as I double back. The door to the wine cellar sits ajar, the lights already on. Allegedly, there are bottles worth twenty thousand dollars down there. Hopefully none of those also starts with Silex and ends with eau.
As I descend, a faint rustling rises to meet me.
At the bottom of the steps, I round the corner and stop short at the sight of Wyn, limned in the soft golden overhead lighting like some tortured fallen angel as played by James Dean.
“Silex something-something?” he says.
“Sabrina must’ve forgotten she’d already sent you to get it.” I turn to go. “I’ve been staring at this spot for like ten minutes. It’s not here.”
I hesitate. When I pictured retreating to a cool, dark cave, this wasn’t what I had in mind, but if Sabrina has her heart on this particular wine, we’re not leaving until we find it. I mean that literally. When she gets an idea into her head, there’s little room for deviation. See also her reaction to Cleo canceling her and Parth’s visit to the farm.
I let out a breath and cross toward him, crouching in front of the shelf to run my fingers across the labels.
“I’ve checked everywhere,” he says, grumpy.
“It’s basically a universal law that if one person looks for something for an extended period of time, then the next person to walk up to it will spot it immediately.”
“How’s that going?” he asks.
Among the dozens of chardonnays, Rieslings, sauvignon blancs, gewürztraminers: no Silex.
“Satisfied?” he says.
The hair at the nape of my neck tugs upward at his bemused tone. My brain wanders to the absolute worst place it could possibly go in this particular room.
The cellar, for us, is full of ghosts. Not the scary kind. Sexy ghosts. I straighten up. “Just grab a white that doesn’t look too expensive.”
His eyes flash. “You want me to look for a Big Lots clearance sticker, Harriet?”
“Choose something they have more than one of,” I say, practically running for the stairs, like he’s a riptide I need to claw free from.
Halfway up the steps, I notice the door’s shut. Then I reach the top, and the knob won’t twist. Won’t even budge.
I knock on the door. “Sab?”
At the bottom of the steps, Wyn steps into view, a bottle of wine in hand. “The door must’ve locked,” I explain.
“Why’d you shut it?” he asks.
“Well, I was hoping it would automatically lock, from the outside, and I’d be trapped down here with you,” I deadpan.
He ignores the sarcasm and climbs up, brushing me aside to try the knob himself.
“Seems to be locked,” he says, probably to annoy me. He pounds on the door. “Cleo? Parth? Anyone?”
I can feel heat rising off his skin. I descend a couple of steps, check my pockets for my phone as I go. Once again, my pockets are tiny, and my phone must be in my bag, in the foyer.
“Call someone,” I say.
Wyn shakes his head. “I left my phone in the car. You don’t have yours?”
“Upstairs,” I say. “We’ll have to wait until they get sick of waiting and send someone to hurry us up.”
Wyn groans and drops onto the top step, setting the bottle down by his ankle. He bows his head and knots his fingers together against the back of his neck.
At least I’m not the only one panicking.
Of course, I’m freaking out about being here with him, and he’s freaking out because he’s claustrophobic. He has been ever since he was a kid and a broken armoire fell on him in his parents’ workshop while no one else was home. He was trapped for hours.
As soon as the door’s open, he’ll be fine. Whereas I’ll still be reeling from the purchase of a stupid coffee-table book.
The whole stairwell sways as an awful realization hits me. I latch on to the banister to keep from falling over.
“What? What’s wrong?” Wyn leaps up, steadying me by the elbows. His drawn mouth is visible in bits under the black splotches swimming across my vision.
“We were taking two cars,” I squeak out. “We were taking two cars, so all four of them could’ve left in the Rover.”
His eyes darken, clouds creeping across the green. “They wouldn’t.” “They might,” I say.
“We don’t need to assume that’s what happened. They could be back any second.” He stares at the ceiling, doing some kind of mental calculation.
I descend the rest of the steps, trying to regain the space between us. But he follows. “This isn’t my fault, Harriet.”
“Did I say it was?” I ask.
“You stormed off,” he says. “There’s an implication there.”
I spin back to him. “Wyn. We’re in a twelve-foot box. That wasn’t storming. There isn’t room for storming. But if your point is to remind me that I shut the door, point received.”
“I’m not blaming you. I just—who the hell has a door that locks from the
outside?”
“It’s a panic room,” I point out. “That’s what the little panel on the wall does. We could unlock it if we knew the code.”
His gaze clears. He climbs the stairs in three long strides to examine the panel. “There’s a button to call 911.”
How long will it take for them to realize something’s wrong? Will they drive all the way out to pick up the pre-hike popovers without trying to call us?
If they do call, will they assume we don’t answer because we’re driving? My stomach resumes its roiling nausea.
“You want to call or wait?” Wyn asks.
Now I’m doing the math of how expensive it might be to replace this door if the fire department has to ax it down or blow it up or something.
“I think . . .” I take a steadying breath, try to find a grip on some version of my mental happy place that has nothing to do with this house or this man. “I think we have to wait, for at least a while.”
It’s obviously not the answer he wanted. “Unless you don’t think you can—”
“I’m fine,” he says tersely, perching on the bottom step. He sets the wine aside and yanks his hiking boot off.
“Oh my god, Wyn,” I say. “It’s been five minutes. How long until you’re dropping your pants and designating a pee corner?”
He tears the foil from around the wine bottle’s cork. “I won’t need a pee corner. I’ll use this bottle when we’re done drinking it. You, on the other hand . . . you’re going to be out of luck unless you learn to aim, fast.”
I unfold my arms only to recross them when his gaze tracks the movement straight to my chest. “Are you walking around with a corkscrew in your pocket at ten thirty in the morning?”
“No,” he says, “I’m just happy to see you.” “Hilarious.”
His eyes steadily hold mine as he sets the wine bottle into his boot and smacks the whole arrangement against the wall.
I yelp. “What are you doing?”
He drives the boot against the wall again three more times. On the last hit, the cork leaps up the bottle’s neck a half inch. With another two quick snaps against the wall, the cork pops out entirely. Wyn lifts the open bottle toward me.
“I’m concerned that you know how to do that,” I say.
“So you don’t want any.” He takes a swig. As the bottle lowers, his eyes dart over his shoulder, toward the alcove under the stairs.
Heat swiftly rises from my clavicles to my hairline.
Don’t go there. Don’t think about that.
I know it’s ill-advised, but a part of me is desperately hoping there’s something to the whole hair-of-the-dog school of treating hangovers when I grab the bottle and take a sip.
Nope. My stomach does not want that. I pass it back to him.
“Parth taught me that trick,” he says. “I’ve never needed to use it before now.”
“Oh, you haven’t found yourself imprisoned with any other jilted lovers in the last five months?”
He snorts. “Jilted? Not exactly how I remember it, Harriet.” “Maybe you have amnesia,” I suggest.
“My memory’s fine, Dr. Kilpatrick, though I do appreciate the concern.” As if to prove his point, his eyes dart toward the nook under the stairs again. He can’t be seeing someone. He’d never go along with this act if he was.
Wyn may be a flirt, but he’s not disloyal.
Unless he’s in something brand-new? Not officially exclusive?
But if it were brand-new, then would he have already reached comfortable-relationship status?
The little so-called clues could just as easily be random bits of information I’m jamming together to tell a story.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t seeing anyone.
The bottom line is, I have no idea what’s going on in his life. I’m not supposed to.
He takes a few more sips. I guess it doesn’t do the trick for him either, because within minutes, he’s pacing. He rakes his hands through his hair as
he walks in circles around the space, sweat brimming along his forehead. “If only you’d brought your coffee-table book.”
Wyn looks abruptly back at me, eyes sharply appraising. “Then we’d have something to look at,” I say.
His brow arches, tugging on his lip. “What do you have against my coffee-table book, Harriet?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you suffer some kind of coffee-table-book-related trauma in the last five months?”
“That thing cost sixty dollars,” I say.
He shakes his head, goes back to pacing. “Is it a gift?” I say.
“Why would it be a gift?” he says. Not an answer.
“Because you never spend that kind of money on yourself,” I say.
The tops of his cheeks flush a little, and I really, really regret asking now. We go back to sitting in silence. Well, I’m sitting. He’s power walking in tiny rectangles.
Even after everything, it’s hard to see him like this.
When the defense of his charm gets peeled back, he’s always so expressive. It’s partly what made me pour out so many secrets to him all those years ago, the feeling that he absorbed some piece of whatever I gave him, felt what I felt. Unfortunately, the reverse was also true.
“You’ve been crammed in much smaller spaces,” I remind him as he’s passing me on his ninetieth lap (best guess; I haven’t been counting).
His gaze flashes toward the space under the stairs again.
Not what I meant. My face flames. “Like every single car you’ve ever been in,” I clarify.
“Buses are bigger than this,” he says.
“True,” I say. “But they also smell worse. It smells great down here.” “It smells damp.”
“It’s Maine,” I say. “It is damp.”
He tips his head back. “I’m freaking out, Harriet.” I stand up. “It’s okay. They’ll be here soon.”
“You don’t know that.” His eyes flicker back to me, the tension around his mouth revealing his dimples. “They might think we decided to hang back . . .”
I swallow. “Sabrina wouldn’t stand for that. We’re supposed to all be together.”
He shakes his head. He sees all the holes in that logic just like I do.
Sabrina might be annoyed if she thought we stayed back to score some alone time, but she’s already shaken up the natural order of things on our behalf, with giving us the nicest bedroom. Aside from that, if she tried to call and we didn’t answer, it’s not like she’d speed back here and storm upstairs to try to catch us in the act.
I try a different tack. “You come down here all the time. And you’ve probably been down here much longer than this, honestly.”
I try not to go back there.
I try not to revisit the memory.
The summer after he, Cleo, Sabrina, and I all graduated. Before we moved to New York to join Parth.
We’d driven down from Vermont, with all our stuff packed and ready for the big move. Parth had flown in from the city, fresh off finishing his time as a Fordham 1L.
It was his idea to play sardines, a kind of reverse hide-and-seek. We turned off all the lights, then rolled dice to see who’d hide first.
Wyn lost. We gave him five minutes to hide before we spread out to search through the dark for him.
Somehow I knew, the same way I always seemed to, exactly where he was.
I found him in the cellar. Under the stairs, there was a waist-high rack of wine, but behind it there was a dark nook, empty space, and he was tucked inside it. I almost missed him, but on a double take, I spotted a shifting shadow.
We’d lived together all year but were never truly alone, not like that. For walks, sure, or in the library, where there was always someone around the corner at the reference desk.
I’d almost convinced myself we’d truly made it to the level of platonic friends until, per the game’s rules, I climbed over that wine rack to curl up in the dark with him, and my thumping heart and flipping stomach proved they’d never stopped waiting for this moment, this closeness.
I clear my throat, but the memory seems to stick in my windpipe. “We must’ve been down here for at least an hour.”
I have no idea if that’s true. I just know every second before we touched felt like a century. Then once we did, time lost all meaning. I think of the black hole documentary I watched with my dad a few years ago, how astrophysicists speculated that there were places in our universe where the rules of time and space inverted, moments becoming a place where you could stay indefinitely.
“I had a good distraction then,” Wyn says. No flirtation, no charm.
Earnest Wyn. Matter-of-fact Wyn.
“You had the exact same distraction.” I hold my arms out to my sides, shimmering my hands.
He looks skeptical. “Fine, then distract me, Harriet.” I tut. “Where are the famous Wyn Connor manners?”
His eyes glint, only the left dimple winking into being. “Distract me
please, Harriet.” His voice drops a little.
I suppress the shiver that sizzles down my spine.
He takes another sip of wine and goes back to pacing, clenching and unclenching his fists. His hands, I know, go numb when his claustrophobia kicks in.
I have to do something. I have only one idea.
I stand, brush past him, and swing one leg over the rack under the stairs. “What are you doing?” he asks.
“Helping.” Careful not to topple the thirty or so bottles slotted through the rack, I swing my other leg over, hunching so as not to hit my head on the underside of the stairs.
“Yes, the extra one square foot of space is a huge relief.”
“If you put yourself into a smaller space, inside this room,” I say, “then you’ll know you can get out of that space whenever you want.”
“But we still can’t get out of the room,” he says.
“It’s not a perfect science,” I say. “But it’s something. And honestly, no matter what, we’re not trapped. Worst case, we call the fire department. But let’s try this first—I can’t afford an Armas-approved door, and I don’t want you to have to return that coffee-table book.”
A huff of laughter as he swings his leg over. That’s a good sign.
I sidestep to make room for him, but with the angle of the stairs, stooping isn’t enough this far back. I lower myself to the ground and scoot into the corner.
“Now what?” he grumbles.
“Now? Now we put our heads together and try to solve the Zodiac murders,” I say. “Sit down, Wyn.”
He promptly obeys. At this point, I think he’s in the exact right headspace that I could tell him to stand on his hands and sing “Ave Maria” and he might do it.
“Pretend you’re playing the game,” I say. “Pretend we need to be as quiet and still as possible until they find us.”
Raggedly, he says, “That’s not going to work.” “Wyn.”
His neck bows, his shoulders rising and falling with his shallow breaths.
“Wyn.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m trying not to freak out.”
“Don’t apologize.” Without thinking, I reach for his hand. After the initial spark of surprise, of recognition, I realize his fingers are ice-cold and shaking.
I flatten his palm between mine. “Look at me. Talk to me.” He keeps his head down.
“Talk to me,” I press again. “About what?” he asks.
“Anything,” I say. “The first thing that comes to mind.”
“Getting trapped under the armoire,” he says. “That’s all I can think about. Being sure I was going to die before anyone found me. Losing
feeling in my leg, and then the pain coming back worse when the shock wore off.”
“Okay, anything other than that,” I amend. I think about my meditation app, the visualization exercise I’ve been relying on these past five months. “Tell me about a place you love.”
He gives one firm shake of his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey.” I scoot closer. Our knees bump. “You don’t have to apologize.
Not for this.”
“I thought I was over this shit,” he huffs. “I’m doing so much better.
Everything is so much better—I thought this would be better too.”
It stings, hearing that: Everything is so much better. I brush the thought aside, clear my throat again. “Tell me about when we played that game.”
I don’t mean to say it. Or I don’t know, maybe I do. Maybe I need to know that he remembers, that he hasn’t totally forgotten what it felt like to love me, while I’m trapped with him burned onto my heart, my brain, my lungs, my skin.
Finally, his gaze lifts. There’s a beat of perfect stillness. “I was hiding,” he says thickly. “And you came down first. You almost missed me.”
“And then what?”
“And then I moved,” he says. I blink. “You moved?”
“So you’d see me,” he explains. “And you did. I scared the shit out of you, and I felt bad.”
“You never told me that,” I say.
“Well, I did,” he says. “I hadn’t been alone with you, not really, in a year, and you came down the stairs, and I wanted to touch you so badly. But you didn’t see me, and you started to turn, so I moved.”
My sternum heats. My thighs heat. Even the backs of my knees melt a little, wax too near to a flame.
“And then we heard footsteps,” he goes on, “and you were going to be completely visible, so I pulled you back into the corner with me, where you’d be hidden.” His fingers twitch between mine. Some of the warmth is returning to them.
“I pulled you into my lap,” he says hoarsely. “And I prayed Parth would go back upstairs without finding us, and he did. I could feel your heart racing, so I knew you must be able to feel mine too, and then I realized I was hard. I was so fucking embarrassed. I expected you to get out of my lap once we were alone.”
His eyes return to mine, his pupils dilated from fighting the dark. “But you didn’t.”
My heart races, the liquid warmth rushing out from my center as it replays in my mind.
How I stayed there, in his lap, with his arms around me, terrified that any movement would break the spell. Finally, one of my ankles started to go numb, so I shifted the slightest bit, and he let out an uneven breath at the motion that made me feel like I’d swallowed a hot ember.
Hungry, and desperate, and brave all at once. How he always made me feel.
“Then you touched my jaw.” He lifts my hand slowly, sets it against his scratchy jaw.
“I didn’t mean to,” I get out, almost defensively.
I don’t even know if I mean way back then or now. My pulse is screaming through my palm and fingertips into his skin. The memory of that fevered first kiss in the dark presses in on us from all sides.
“I thought I made you.” He tips his head so that my hand slides back toward his ear. “Just by wishing.”
“Wishing for things doesn’t make them happen, Wyn,” I say.
His hand circles my wrist, his thumb gentle on the tender underside of it. “Oh?” he says, his voice softly teasing. “Then what was it that made you finally kiss me, Harriet?”
Eight years have passed, and still my nerve endings light up with the memory of how our breath caught in an uneven back-and-forth, each of us waiting, debating what would come next, until I couldn’t take another second not knowing what it was like to kiss him.
“I didn’t kiss you,” I say. “You kissed me.”
He smiles unevenly. “Now which of us has amnesia?”
The rest of the memory crashes over me. How I tipped my chin up until our mouths brushed, not quite a kiss. How his lips parted and his tongue slipped into my mouth, and a full-body sigh, the pure undiluted sound of relief, slipped out of me. At the noise, he hauled me further up into his lap, any hesitancy dissolving into a fever, a need.
My skin erupts with goose bumps at the memory of his whisper against my ear—You’re so soft, Harriet—as his hands stole up my shirt to find more of me: The others won’t like this.
I’d whispered back, I like it, and his laugh shifted into a groan, and then a promise: I do too. I’m not sure I’ve ever liked anything more.
Sabrina had wanted to bring her boyfriend Demetrios on the trip, but Parth had argued that it would transform the vacation into a couples’ trip, which would ruin it altogether. In the end, everyone agreed it was best for the trip to stay friends-only.
I doubted they’d be any happier to hear that two of those friends were secretly going at it in the wine cellar. I couldn’t bring myself to care. Not until the second set of footsteps sounded on the stairs. That had snapped us back to reality. We’d jolted apart, put ourselves to rights, by the time Cleo found our hiding spot and joined it, per sardines’ rules.
I’d spent the whole rest of the night bracing myself for it to never happen again. But when we shut ourselves into the bedroom that night, Wyn picked me up and set me on the dresser, kissing me like not even thirty seconds had passed.
That was then. The mystery was the thrill.
Now I know how he’d taste, how he’d touch me, how quickly he’d become the foremost need in my personal Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Which is why I need to put distance between us again. His gravity’s too strong. I should probably just be grateful it hasn’t pulled all my clothes off me and dragged me into his lap.
“Harriet,” he murmurs, like it’s a question. His hand slides up along my cheek, the calluses on his fingers so familiar. I find myself leaning into his palm, letting him take some of my weight.
“Tell me about San Francisco,” he says softly.
My veins fill with ice. Logic regains a foothold in me.
“You know what San Francisco’s like,” I say, straightening away from him, cold air rushing in to kiss my skin as his hand falls away. “There’s a big-ass Ghirardelli store, and it’s always a little cold and wet.”
His nose drops, his mouth close enough that I can taste the wine on his breath. “The Ghirardelli store?”
“The whole city,” I say.
“Tell me about your residency,” he says.
A flare hits my solar plexus. Warning bells jangle. I know what he’s getting at—or rather whom he’s getting at—and a mix of anger and nausea squirms through my gut.
“What about the coffee-table book,” I say.
His lips curve in uncertain amusement. “What?”
My ears roar. My throat tightens. “Who’s the coffee-table book for?” He stares at me.
If he won’t say it outright to me, then I guess I’m going to have to be the one to ask.
“Are you dating someone?” I bite out.
The amusement melts off his face. “What the fuck, Harriet. Are you serious right now?”
“That’s not an answer,” I say.
His gaze wavers across my face. “What about you?” he rasps. “Are you with him?”
There it is. Acid rises through my stomach. A cleaving goes through my chest.
I refuse to cry. Not over something that happened five months ago. Not over someone who’s already told me he doesn’t want me.
“That’s what you think of me?” I scoot back from him until the wall meets my back. “You still honestly believe I cheated on you, and beyond that, you think I’d turn around and do it to someone else too.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Wyn says, his voice gravelly. “I’m not accusing you of anything! I’m trying to ask . . .”
“Trying to ask what, Wyn?” I demand.
“If you’re happy,” he says. “I want to know that you’re happy too.”
Now it’s my turn to stare at him in disbelief. He still wants absolution.
And what can I say? That I’m not happy? That I’ve tried dating someone else and it was the emotional equivalent of bingeing on saltines when all I wanted was a real meal? Or that there are whole parts of the city I avoid because they remind me of those first few months in California, when he still lived with me. That when I wake up too early to my screaming alarm, I still reach toward his side of the bed, like if I can hold on to him for a minute, it won’t be so hard to make it through another grueling day at the hospital, in a never-ending series of grueling days.
That I still wake from dreams of his head between my thighs, and reach for my phone whenever something particularly ridiculous happens in the cozy mystery I’m reading, only to remember I can’t tell him. That I spend more time trying not to think about him than actually thinking about anything. All that heady nostalgia and sweltering lust has become combustible, erupting into anger.
“Yes, Wyn,” I say. “I’m happy.”
He starts to reply. Overhead, a rapid series of beeps sounds, followed by the door bursting open and Sabrina’s voice: “HARRIET!? WYN?! ARE YOU OKAY?”
I call, “We’re fine.”
If he can be happy, surely I can be fine.
