Laugh (30 page)

He didn’t care.

When he got there, Nina was leaning against the battered bike rack in front of his dumpy building, holding a pink box.

He stopped in front of her, and even though he’d gotten his breath back on the walk home, he started breathing hard again, and stood, panting, lights dancing in front of his eyes, stinking from his shoes to his fucking neck.

“Yeah, what?” was what he said, which didn’t make any sense. Made him sound like a kid.

“I texted you.”

“My phone’s not charged.”

“Okay.”

“I just texted that I was coming over.”

“No way of knowing that.”

“I haven’t been waiting long, though.”

“Okay, but if you’re waiting for me, I think I’m in for the night.”

“I brought pie.”

“Not really hungry. Thing is, I’m just going to shower and crash. Maybe we can connect tomorrow, though I’m sure you’ll be busy.”

He wouldn’t look at her. Fucking pie, like it was a funeral.

“I’m here now, I don’t mind waiting until you shower. I don’t mind if you need to crash. I’m just here.”

“Didn’t know you were coming over, so I’m not really set up tonight.”

She shook her head and looked down.

He wondered how she had been told. If someone had called her, if she’d stopped by the clinic looking for him.

Didn’t really matter what she thought, did it? He could tell what she thought, her here with that pie. She thought he’d feel bad, and she wanted to make him feel better. He wasn’t stupid, even if he did stupid things.

Problem was, he didn’t want Nina to try to make him feel better, he wanted to makes things better for her. He wanted the ability to do that, or to think that he could try. They met because he was part of a project that would help the neighborhood, had even made plans to help more, to join together their efforts, and now she knew how much he was all mouth and how much he was actually getting stuff done.

He loved her, but he didn’t have to show up for some kind of funeral for her respect for him.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, and started to go in.

Stopped when she grabbed his hand.

“I don’t feel sorry for you. I feel bad that you’re upset and probably disappointed in yourself. I find that I’m not really worried about all the stuff you’re probably worried about, because I think that you and Lacey won’t stop until you figure something out. I’m just here because your day’s been bad.”

“I’m not good company.”

“You came to me after all that with Tay’s peppers.”

“Of course I did.”

Nina held up the box of pie, almost like she was flipping him off with it. “Let me in, Opie.”

He didn’t say anything more, he just walked to his building’s door and she followed. Followed him into his apartment, which was a mess. He ignored her, pulling off his shoes and shorts and walking straight into the shower.

He turned on the water without letting it warm up first, and it felt amazing.

He held his face under the spray and wished the water could just get everything out of his fucking head.

After a while, he could tell every place he had blistered or chafed on his run, because the water stung, but he just kept standing there, cataloging all the places his skin was broken.

The door to his shower opened, and then closed.

Nina’s wet arms came around him from behind.

“This is a good shower.”

“I rented the apartment for this shower,” he said. He kept his eyes closed and in the spray.

“You know, you’re messy, but you’re also really, really
clean.
”

“No one notices that.”

“Like, you could perform surgery on your kitchen counter. Store human organs in the fridge.”

“I know.”

“There are six towels on your bathroom floor, and I would lick the floor of this shower and not worry.”

“I like to scrub things when I’m freaking out, but the other stuff is overwhelming.” He could feel Nina’s breasts against him, and he couldn’t help it. The day had been long and awful and he was trashed from his run and everything he was feeling, but her softness along his skin was having its predictable effect.

“When I’m freaking out I call meetings and make everyone go through everything with me, again, ten times. I micromanage.”

“I yell.”

“I open my online banking app and expand every line item.”

“I wake up in the middle of the night, drive to the hospital, and audit all my charts.”

“I eat.”

“I lift.”

“I write long emails to Tay or Adam or Rachel or the administrator for the farmhands program or my producers with bulleted lists about everything I am thinking about.”

“I write my sister. Des.”

“Yeah?”

“But that’s a new thing. Probably helps more than the other things.”

“Did you write her about all of this?”

“Yeah. Didn’t help.”

“Maybe she’ll write back with something that will.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s this ledge along the side?”

Sam opened his eyes and turned around. Nina was looking at him, water in her long eyelashes, her skin shiny, her hair completely wet and plastered along her breasts, her shoulders, her arms. It made her face seem totally exposed and young.

Water was dripping from the ends of her nipples, sluicing between her breasts.

“Not sure. It’s a little high to sit on comfortably, but that must be what it’s for, it’s so long and deep.”

“Maybe something’s behind it? That’s bumping into the shower space?”

“I’ve thought of that. Could be.”

Nina put her hands on his upper arms and turned him. “Sit there.”

He did. The tile was cold under his ass, but not cold enough to keep him from reacting to the intensity in her face.

“I’ve told you about the other things I’ve done, when I’m feeling freaked out and lost.”

“Yeah,” he said. She looked at him steadily. Comfortable. She was a woman, careworn, beautiful, sure of herself. She looked sure of him.

When his mom had told him stories about her early marriage to his dad, their road trips, her gaffes as a new Catholic, how he saved his fares from driving a taxi so he could have his own chauffeur’s license someday, all of it—he had loved those stories because they made him feel he had come from love. That no matter how frustrated he became, how fucked-up, how much effort it just took him to fucking
live
, it was never hard for him to love.

He could love, even if he couldn’t show it the right way.

He didn’t need anything but to have the people he loved near.

So he could see them and know they were okay.

If he thought about Nina when she was young, when she was hurting, he wished he could have done something to make it easier for her. He didn’t know how that worked, exactly, because it wasn’t possible, but he
wanted
that.

He wanted her to be happy now, and he wanted her to have always
been
happy, and if there was anything she ever told him that made her happy or made her less sad, ever, in her whole life, he would be for that thing.

That’s a thing he would be for.

No matter what it was.

And if there was ever anything she told him that he could do now that would make her happy, that was a thing that he would do for as long as she would let him.

Even if that thing was to not be with her.

“Did it help? Help you feel better?” he asked her.

“I don’t—regret it. I don’t regret my life after I lost Russ. I can’t, because it gave me so many things. Everything that life did to me, it gave me so many things.

“If I hadn’t lost Russ, I don’t think I would have taken a chance on Tay. She wrote me this letter, with her résumé, telling me all the reasons she wanted to be my farm manager, and all the reasons I might not consider it, because she had been in prison. It was a long letter. If I’d still had Russ and was hiring, all those things she told me would have been reasons to find her story sad, to feel for her, to hope for her, to maybe even mention her to someone else, but they also would have been reasons to look for someone else, because Russ and I and our families had too much at stake.”

Nina put her hands over his knees, which were at her waist, sitting on the ledge. He felt a little vulnerable, turned on.

His body was tired. His brain was tired.

This, right here, though, was everything.

She was telling him where she had been, all this time she wasn’t with him.

“I think …” she said. “I think that sometimes it’s better if there aren’t any stakes, if you’ve lost so much that you don’t look at your life, you look at people. You just look at people. You don’t even look at what they’ve done. You just see the people.
Dios
, this is hard to say.”

“It’s okay,” Sam said. It was. It always seemed like no matter what Nina said, it made sense.

She made sense.

“Tay gave me everything. I didn’t even read her letter closely after she told me that she had found me and my tiny little farm on the internet, printed out a page from my first little website, and hung it on her kitchen wall. All that time I was giving her all that hope, and it made me so happy to find out. It made me happy that all
the time she was in prison, and I was hurting and working, all that time she was thinking about me and what I was doing and believed it was good.”

Sam put his hands around her face.

Kissed her, and it was wet and soft.

“I’m glad,” he said. “I’m glad you’ve had her to work with and to be your friend.”

“I think what you and Lacey are doing is good, too.”

“Right now, I don’t know what to say about that.”

“I know.”

She kissed him, and it was better. He gripped her waist with his knees and he kissed her, sloppy, all of his muscles tired and loose, finally.

His hard-on pressed against her breasts.

She looked at him and smiled, and now it was a wicked smile. That’s the only way he could describe it. Her brown eyes looked huge with about a hundred years of wisdom, and her mouth was pink.

She reached just past him, and this time, she rubbed her breasts against his erection and he closed his eyes, put his hand at her neck, then over her breast. Her dark nipple was so hard and bunched, it made his fingers ache to press it hard, to pinch and roll it, but he kept his touch light because that made her throat go flushed.

She leaned back again and had his shampoo in her hand.

She opened it, and then held it up high. He watched it drip over her chest, her breasts, some of it starting to lather in swirls of sopping bubbles, most of it just syrupy and glistening and somehow obscene-looking.

She smiled, and he would have smiled back but she grabbed his dick, pumped it with her soapy hands, and then pressed her chest into him, slippery with shampoo between the full curves of her breasts, lathering his cock with firm strokes and both hands.

She brought her hands up and squeezed her tits, closing her eyes.

She squeezed them around his dick.

Fuck.

“Nina.” He wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken but he couldn’t unscramble his brain to check. He just looked her all over, wet and hot and gorgeous, and then before he could ask her, ask her what, he didn’t know, he felt like he should just ask her
something
, she grinned again, and bit her fucking lip and
arched
, arched so that his cock slid between her breasts, her skin hot from the water, and it was too much and not enough.

Which was what he wanted. He wanted too much, the way it looked, the way he looked against her, how
much
it was, how intense it was, and also how she was so soft it wasn’t enough pressure, would never be enough pressure, and so this would go on and on and on, her smile, her wickedness, her ass thrust out with
shower spray bouncing off it.

“Kiss me,” she said.

Their kiss made everything better, made him harder, and every time she arched back and down to slide him through her breasts, their mouths would pull away a little from the other’s and they would have to start kissing again.

Then, over the sound of the water, when their tongues were rubbing together, he heard her moaning softly, and so he brought her closer with his knees and reached up to hold her jaw, feel the vibrations from her throat, and knowing she thought this was hot, too, that she was starting to pant while looking down where they were sliding together between their kisses—that made everything get full and throbbing, the pressure so intense he clenched his hands into fists to keep from grabbing her shoulders and slowing down.

Too much.

Not enough.

“Nina,” he tried again, and she looked at him, right at him, her face close, and then his mind was finally washed clean. His lower back went warm and buzzing, his body unhinged, went loose, while his chest got tight.

“I love you,” he said, because his love
was
this excess, of feeling, of sex, of skin, of Nina. All of it.

She closed her eyes, reached to kiss him again, the steam from the shower everywhere.

They kissed for what seemed like forever, and he came, came all over her, and while he came she moved her hands from her breasts to press him and stroke him, and he caressed her all over, her beautiful body, her heavy wet hair, and it felt so good. He hadn’t realized that his muscles had all gone tight, so tight, while he was coming, until they unspooled and released against his bones after the pleasure she gave him, and he shuddered.

He slid from the bench when he thought he could stand, and put his arms completely around her.

She put her arms around him.

The water grew cool and he reached over to turn it off, and then it was so quiet.

“Come on,” she said.

He dried her off, watching her skin rough up with goose bumps, looking at everything. Every mole, every place she dipped or rounded, the soft hairs from her navel to the shiny black hairs between her legs, where she was pink, where the sun had divided her up into rainbows and patches of golds and browns.

“I don’t know how to dry your hair. There’s so much of it.”

He watched her twist it in the towel, her breasts lift and her armpits hollow out, and it was so beautiful.