Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (31 page)

And then they reached it, and she still wasn’t ready.

* * *

When they turned onto her street, it was past nine o’clock.

She’d called both her mother and her sister from somewhere north of Chicago to tell them she’d be in late and would drive over to her parents’ place in the morning. Allie said Dan wanted to know where to reach her. He’d left a message on Ben’s phone and on her Facebook page. His mom had even called the house once.

If he calls, tell him I’ll be in touch. Soon. Tell him good luck in the game tomorrow
.

Ben must have heard her end of the conversation, but he hadn’t said anything.

Once they’d crossed the state line, he’d gone quiet. They’d had to stop around Kenosha, so he’d pulled over at Mars Cheese Castle and bought her a Taste of Wisconsin box, complete with a cheese in the shape of the state’s outline. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a joke or a treat or what, but when she kissed him to say thank you, he pinned her against the side of the van and kept her there until her knees started to buckle.

“Stay the night,” she’d said, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. It felt dangerous, exposing even that much eagerness when he was so closed off.

But he said, “Okay.”

Now he cut the engine and they sat in the driveway, pinioned in the beam of the security light mounted on her garage.

“Home sweet home,” she said.

She tried to see it the way he would, but it just looked like her house—a squat one-story ranch with beige siding, a two-and-a-half-car garage, and a bright red front door that she’d painted herself.

It didn’t have a lot of personality—a fact that seemed even more apparent now, with the sights of Bed-Stuy and Park Slope and Hell’s Kitchen still imprinted in her imagination. Her neighborhood wasn’t a neighborhood so much as it was a collection of almost identical boxes plopped down without regard to beauty or utility in the middle of what had once been a farm field. The trees were all spindly little babies, the roads broad and flat and perfectly paved.

Orderly, she’d always thought, but it must look pathetically unfinished to him.

“What do you think?” she asked brightly.

Please don’t hate my house
.

He opened the van door. “Show me the inside.”

She tucked her cheese box under one arm and went to retrieve the spare key from under the doormat, where her mother had left it hours ago. The front door stuck a little, and she had to jiggle the key to get it unlocked—the movement still automatic, almost unconscious.

“You don’t use a deadbolt?” he asked.

“I do. But Allie lost her key to it. Then she lost mine.”

“And you didn’t get another one made because …”

“This is Manitowoc.” She pushed the door open. “Well, technically my house is right over the line into Two Rivers.”

“Trivers?”

“Twoooo Riiiiivers.” She said it slowly, exaggerating each word. “But if you say it like that around here, people will look at you funny.”

“God forbid.”

She flipped on the lights and dropped her purse and the cheese box on the table by the door.

Ben walked in a few steps, studying the room as though the choice and arrangement of objects had meaning. As though he’d learn something about her, just by looking.

She studied it, too, for clues to who she was.

There was the brown corduroy couch she’d bought because she really wanted the red one, but red was impractical. There was her collection of candles in glass jars, all of them gifts she’d been given and felt obligated to use, though scented candles made her nose feel strange. It seemed the more she had, the more people bought them for her. She was afraid she’d developed a reputation now as a candle person.

The carpet was a dull shade of oatmealish gray that she’d talked herself into buying because she’d feared that if she settled on any of the choices that grabbed her—the arrangement of skinny orange and teal rectangles from the online company that sold carpet in tiles, or the brightly colored spiral rug she’d seen in a magazine—she would find, after a year or two, that she regretted making such a bold choice. Whereas she’d regretted the oatmeal-gray Berber carpet before the crew had even finished installing it.

Everything looked the same as when she’d left seven weeks ago, but nothing looked like
her
.

And it was full of Dan. Their picture on the mantel. The bowl on the table where he threw his keys when he used to make the drive down from Green Bay after practice and spend the night. The way he always looked on his favorite corner of the couch, his sock-clad feet resting on the coffee table, the TV tuned to ESPN but muted so they could talk.

Was it wrong that she felt a sweet ache of nostalgia for Dan on her couch? There had been a simplicity to that life—an ease to behaving the way people expected her to. If she’d married him, she might have found it stifling, but stifling was what she’d been used to. Stifling had been
comfortable
until that moment onstage when she’d listened to Dan’s proposal and felt her fingers tighten around the shrimp fork, her whole body saying
no, no, no
.

She became aware of the silence, and of Ben watching her. Waiting.

“You want to see the bedroom?”

It was the only room she’d allowed herself to decorate exactly how she wanted. The walls were four different shades of green, and the bed was “too modern,” according to her mother—a “mashup,” Allie said, because May had opted for the clean lines of a Scandinavian platform bed and then purchased a big fluffy pillow-top mattress for it that rose over the edges like a delicious soft muffin.

It felt like that, too. Like sleeping on a muffin.

Ben must have misinterpreted her highly misinterpretable statement, because he dropped the bags and stalked toward her until her butt was pressed against the couch and her hands were pressed against his chest.

“It’s the best room,” she clarified. Her voice came out funny. His eyes were making her short of breath. Those hungry eyes.

“I’ll bet.”

She laughed, but the sound was more like a sob. She didn’t know for certain if she wanted him to kiss her or leave her alone to find her way back to this place again.

Maybe she’d done the wrong thing, letting him drive her here. Maybe she’d ruined it—a decision as bad as drawing him would have been, only worse, because now she’d have memories of Ben all over her house. In her bed. She’d have to remember him and mourn him in this same space, crowded up against her memories of Dan and the knowledge of her decorating disasters. She’d have to find her feet again alone, here.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You want me to go?”

“No.” She reached for his waist. “I want you to distract me.”

He kissed her then, and he didn’t fuss around. He gave her the deep plunge of his tongue and his fingers speared in her hair, holding her in place as he insinuated himself between her legs. He gave her his directness, his heat, driving away all her fear and replacing it with certainty.

Her house didn’t matter. She could ignore the mess in her head, in her heart and her life, for a little longer.

Only the slide of his hands underneath her shirt mattered.

Only Ben.

“Nice place,” he said to her cleavage.

“Oh, shut up.”

He chuckled and thumbed her nipple through her bra. She dropped her hand between his legs and did her best to drive him crazy.

They stole one more evening together, a gift they unwrapped slowly and scattered all over her house.

His T-shirt across the back of the living room couch.

Her top and bra in the kitchen, where they stopped for water and got distracted when he lifted her up on the countertop and kissed his way down her throat to her breasts.

Her jeans on the floor in the hallway and all the rest of their clothes in the bathroom, which she insisted was part of the tour.

He insisted on a long, hot shower, a great deal of which he spent on his knees, teaching her what it felt like to be rendered boneless as a jellyfish.

She stayed out of her own way, allowing herself to be who she wanted to be, feel what she needed to feel, grab him and grip him and cling to him the way she had to.

He clung back, kissing her until her lips stung. Thrusting inside her until she couldn’t remember a time when this hadn’t been at the core of who they were together, this hot, heavy invasion and retreat, stringing her tight and pulling her apart.

“I like your bed,” he said. “This is a great bed.”

“Oh my
God
,” she said, because it was the only thing she could say.

He held her as their breathing settled, and she must have slept, because he woke her in the dark with slick fingers sliding over her clit. He moved inside her from behind as soon as he knew she was with him.

He pinned her down in softness, her hips high, her face in the pillow, and brought her to climax in a frenzied rush of heat and breath, a dream-orgasm that lasted as long as he kept saying her name, mumbling
May
into the space behind her ear.

It was almost unreal, their frenzy when they were alone together. Something like a fantasy. But she kept a list of its mundanities—his elbow getting caught in her hair, pinning her to the bed; the stinging pain of overtaxed tissue when he pushed into her at dawn; the used
condoms piling up in the trash can by her bed like ugly sea creatures drying in the sun. She lay awake as the room began to brighten with the first light of the day he would leave her, and she ticked through her mental list, because she needed to remember that he was real.
They
were real. However much pain came to her after he left, at least she’d had this.

She could tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

If life ever gave her another opportunity to make the choice, she knew which one she would choose.

May had been awake for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling and deliberately not thinking about anything, when she heard the car pull into the driveway.

She immediately rolled out from under Ben’s arm and looked around for pants. Any pants.

The doorbell rang just as her eyes landed on the clock: 9:45.

Bad. Very bad
.

Nine forty-five was deep into the morning by her mother’s standards, which meant that it could very well
be
her mother at the door, and here May was—two different kinds of pantsless, with a naked man in her bed.

Robe
.

She headed for the bathroom, ignoring the rustling sounds of Ben waking up.

But her robe wasn’t on its hook, because it was in New Jersey. At Dan’s house.

She found her underwear on the shaggy bathroom rug. Balanced precariously on one foot, then the other, she yanked them on. If she’d tried this maneuver in Ben’s bathroom in New York, she’d have hit her heel on the toilet or whacked a hip against the edge of the sink.

So there was the bright side to the situation: even though she’d never see him after this morning and she was about to introduce him to her mother with sex hair, at least there was plenty of space for panty-yanking maneuvers in her capacious bathroom.

The doorbell rang again,
DING-dong DING-dong DING-dong
.

Allie. Thank God. Their mother would never ring like that.

May’s relief lasted for three whole seconds, until she remembered that Allie still had a key to the doorknob lock, and she wouldn’t be shy about using it.

The thought sped her up, and she raced through the house, carrying all their clothes along with her. Ben came into the kitchen, bare-ass naked, just as she was doing a shimmy-wiggle-hop to get her jeans on. Her bra did nothing to restrain her boobs. He didn’t even pretend not to be watching.

“Can you erase that image from your mind?”

He gave her a cheeky grin. “What image?”

She pushed his clothes toward him. “Put pants on,” she pleaded. “You’re about to meet Allie.”

He diverted the clothes to one side and snaked his free arm behind her back to draw her close and kiss her, sleepy and slow. He was still warm from the bed, and his bare stomach pressed against hers. Her heart flung itself against her ribs. She pushed him away, trying to be stern, but smiling instead, because she couldn’t help smiling at naked Ben. “Pants,” she insisted.

“I like you frantic. It’s a good look for you.”

He put them on. She wiggled into a long-sleeved shirt and sprinted for the door.

May’s sister stood on the other side, feeding what looked like cold sausage to a little dog tucked under her arm. “I told her not to come,” Allie said.

She wasn’t even pretending to look at May. She’d already risen on her toes to peer over her sister’s shoulder, and when that didn’t work, she dropped back down and leaned to the side to see around her.

“Hi,” Ben said from the living room. “You’re Allie.”

May’s sister turned the last of the sausage over to the dog and gave Ben a little wave. “You’re Ben.”

Where Ben couldn’t see her, she made surprise-eyes at May and whispered, “Holy shit.”

What?
May mouthed back. She turned around, wondering what he’d done, but it was just Ben. Shirtless. Barefoot. His hair wasn’t long enough to be sticking up, quite, but it certainly looked as though he’d taken a shower, gone straight to bed, and spent half the night fucking someone.

Her hand rose to her own hair. There was really no question who he’d spent half the night fucking.

“Better than the picture,” Allie whispered.

Ben came right up behind May and shook Allie’s hand. He seemed not to mind about the dog, which was good, because Allie almost always had a dog somewhere on or around her person.

“I thought you might be gone by now,” Allie said. “I’m glad you’re not. I wanted to meet you.”

Ben flattened his hand against the doorjamb, his chest pressing into May’s back. “Here I am.”

A car approached slowly, and May noticed the blinker before it fully registered that she recognized the car. “No,” she said. “Oh fuck, no.”

“I told you, I tried to stop her,” Allie repeated. “I told her not to come. But she just kept saying, ‘Why isn’t May over here yet? I need her help with the macaroni salad.’ Then I said I would come and see on my way to the grocery store, but she was all—”