Who Do You Love (23 page)

Boyfriend,
Andy thought. That was what she'd been about to say—
I had a boyfriend who liked port.
He felt his heart speed up and made himself breathe deeply, thinking,
Be realistic, it's been years, you know she hasn't just been sitting around waiting for you, right?
He realized that a part of him had hoped just that. When the port came, she lifted the glass and raised her eyebrows, but he refused to taste it, not wanting anything to do with Rachel's other guys.

“So,” she said. They'd abandoned the pie—he'd had a single bite, and she'd pushed it away after a few of her own, saying, “Not hungry, I guess.” The waiters were gone; the hostess in her black dress was yawning at her podium. “We should get going before they kick us out.”

He wanted to ask her about the port-sipping boyfriend, about anyone else she'd dated, about Kyle Davenport, back at Beaumont. But was that fair? Hadn't he dated other girls? The female runner, in her thin red-and-white shorts; the sweet-faced girl from his Gender and Globalization class senior year; one of his neighbors, a woman in her forties with a deeply tanned face and a tight, almost boyish body, who'd done her laundry the same night that he did and had invited him to stop by if he wanted a beer? If he and Rachel were meant to be together, it would happen. Meanwhile, he'd told himself, it was only sensible that they explore. Date other people. Be free. He'd told himself all of this, and he believed it, and then he pictured Kyle with his arms around Rachel's waist, Kyle with his muscley tongue in her mouth, Kyle, naked and neckless, in bed with Rachel, his Rachel, and he'd punched his wall hard enough to pound a hole through it, the first thing he'd hit since Kyle's face.

“How was your last year at Beaumont?” he asked as they walked back to his car. In his phone calls to Brooklyn she'd told him about her life in New York City, her supervisor, her clients, the apartment her parents had helped her to rent in the West Village, but they'd never touched on her senior year, or spoken about how she'd ended up with Kyle Davenport.

“I moved out of the sorority house.” Andy, surprised, said nothing. “It was different, living on my own. But I was glad I did it. I think I was more ready to live in the real world than if I'd stayed in the Gamma house and had all my meals cooked and my laundry done. And then I graduated, and then I moved to New York.”

“When did you dump Kyle?”

“When did I what?”

“Kyle Davenport,” he said.

She turned to him, her eyes wide, her face scrunched up in horror. “As if,” she said.

Andy felt a great lightness rising through him. “I called one night, and I asked for you, and whoever answered the phone said you were out with Kyle Davenport.”

“Andy,” said Rachel. She'd turned to face him, and she looked completely serious. “If Kyle Davenport was the last man on earth, I'd date women.”

He felt like he was drowning, only the water was made of light. It was the strangest mix of emotions—anger, for having wasted so much time, joy that he'd been so wrong, that Rachel had always been the Rachel that he'd loved, who would never have even considered Kyle.

“So why would someone tell me that?”

Rachel, who'd been staring at him just as intently as he'd been looking at her, shook her head. “Some of the girls were pretty pissed about the thing at the formal. We ended up on probation . . . oh, whatever. It's not a big deal.”

Andy reached for her hand, and Rachel let him take it. She twined her fingers through his.

“So no Kyle,” he said, still feeling overwhelmed. Rachel shook her head and smoothed her hair with her free hand, a familiar, endearing gesture. He squeezed her fingers, tugging at her until they were hip to hip as they walked. “Every morning for six months I'd wake up thinking,
Screw it, I'm going to go see her. If she's going to dump me, I can at least make her do it in person.
And by the end of the day I'd have talked myself out of it again. I'd think,
She'll probably laugh at you.
”

“I would never have laughed,” she said.

They walked in silence through the parking lot. When they got to his car, he hugged her, holding her tightly against him, an embrace still on the right side of propriety, one that could still be considered friendly, but only just. When they broke apart, her face was flushed, her eyes shining. “I hope it won't be another five years before we see each other again.”

Instead of answering, Rachel reached for him, putting her small, warm hand on the back of his neck, lifting her lips to his. They kissed, first lightly, then more urgently, his tongue in her mouth, her hips tilted against his, her breasts against his chest, her whole body sending a message that was undeniable. “Want to come up?” he asked. She'd left her bags in his apartment, with the understanding that they'd pick them up after dinner and he'd take her to the hotel she'd booked. More than once, when they'd been talking, he'd offered her his bed, saying he'd sleep on the couch, and Rachel had turned him down, politely but firmly.

Without a word, she climbed into the passenger seat, smiling at him, saying, “Yes.”

•••

As soon as his front door was shut they started kissing again. Her tongue fluttered against his, and his hands were deep in the softness of her hair, and it was like time unspooled, carrying them right back to when they were teenagers. He pulled her against him, thinking that he'd never get her close enough, that if he could fold her inside of him, like a mother tucking a baby into her coat, he'd do it. He'd keep her warm, he'd keep her safe, he'd keep her with him always.

Taking her hand, Andy led her to his bedroom, which looked like every room he'd ever lived in—a bed, a dresser, the posters on the wall—except for a machine humming softly in the corner. Rachel stopped kissing him long enough to point. “What's that?”

“Oxygen simulator,” he murmured, his hands busy with the buttons on her blouse. “It's supposed to simulate altitude.”

Rachel said something that sounded like
For fuck's sake.
Andy felt relieved she hadn't seen the back porch, where a tank with a submerged treadmill allowed injured runners to run underwater, and then they tumbled onto his bed. She nibbled at his chin, his ear, touching his face with her fingertips, sighing, whispering “You feel so good.” Once, she pushed him back, propped herself onto her elbows, and asked, “How long has it been?”

Andy knew what she was asking, and it wasn't how long it had been since he'd seen her. He thought back to his last romance, if you could even call it that, ten minutes of undignified fumbling in the bathroom of a bar downtown. “It's been a little while,” he said. That girl—God, he wasn't even sure what her name was—had scribbled her phone number on his hand in eyeliner, if he remembered right, after neither one of them could find paper or a pen. The next week, when they'd met for drinks, Andy realized that they had absolutely nothing to say to each other and that, when he didn't have four beers inside him, she looked like an eel, with a narrow body and a big, horsey mouth.

Not many of the runners had serious girlfriends. Hookups were more common, a night or a weekend with another athlete who understood the deal, or a woman who'd attach herself to you at a meet, or in a bar. Andy remembered the time he'd spent with a television reporter who'd been covering the Olympic trials in Atlanta. She'd worn a girdle and had gotten annoyed when he'd laughed. “It's a foundation garment,” she'd said, her pretty face looking less pretty when she scowled. After they'd finished, he'd been starving, but all she had in the refrigerator of her chrome-and-stainless-steel loft was seltzer and a jar of pickles.

Not Rachel,
he realized, now that he had Rachel in his arms again, her lush curves and her soft skin, her beautiful hair, her beautiful scar. That was the problem with the reporter. That was the problem with all of them. None of them were Rachel.

He felt her slip down the bed. She unfastened his pants, eased his briefs over his hips, and brushed the length of his cock with her palm before taking him in her mouth. He sighed, eyes shut, thinking about how unbelievably good it felt when Rachel gave a throaty moan, then rolled her mouth from base to tip and whispered, “Look at me.”

He looked and saw that she had her eyes open, locked on his, as she opened her mouth, hollowed her cheeks, and slid all the way down. He wondered if some other guy had asked for that—
I want you to look at me when you do it
—or if she'd seen it in a movie, or read it in some magazine.
Ten Secrets to Turn Your Guy On
. Rachel's expression went from ardor to confusion as she felt him start to soften.

“What?” she asked.

“Shh,” he said, pulling her up so they were face-to-face again. He slid his hands between her legs, positioning fingers and thumb the way she'd taught him. Except that wasn't right. She hadn't taught him. They'd figured it out together, how to make her come. He nuzzled against her, his lips on her neck, nibbling and kissing his way up to her earlobe, where she'd always been ticklish. “Ooh,” she whispered. “Ooh! Oh, oh, oh,” she sighed as he worked his fingers against the slick seam . . . and then she forgot to pose, forgot about trying to look good, and lost herself inside her own pleasure. Andy watched her squeeze her eyes shut as she clamped her thighs against his wrist and snapped her hips up, once, twice, three times before she froze, all the muscles in her thighs and belly and bottom tense and quivering, and he felt her contract against his fingers.

Before she could recover, he'd rolled her onto her back and slipped inside her. After the first thrust he had to hold still, knowing that if he kept moving, if he gave himself up to the exquisite tightness, the heat, he would explode. He wanted her to come at least once more, with him, and he didn't want her to tease him, the way she sometimes used to if they hadn't seen each other in a while and he finished before she'd had a chance to get started.

“It's not a race,” she would say. “You're not trying to beat your personal record here.” He'd always taken care of her . . . or, sometimes, when he was sleepy, he would just curl around her, holding her close, with his fingers inside her and her fingers working at her clitoris, and they'd taken care of her together. But he wanted it to be good that night. He wanted everything to be perfect.

He reached down and stroked her cheek, then her hair. “Oh, God,” she whispered, swiveling her hips in a way he knew would send him right over the edge. “Oh, wait. Do you have a condom?” she whispered.

Andy opened his nightstand drawer and ripped open a Trojan. Rachel watched, frowning. “Tell me they sell those as singles,” she said.

He kissed her, pleased that she was jealous, thinking that he'd tell her anything she wanted to hear, and, finally, he slipped inside her again. She gasped and shut her eyes, and then neither of them spoke. She had one hand on his shoulder, the other slowly stroking his back, from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine.

“You feel so good,” she whispered . . . and then Andy couldn't hold back any longer. He plunged inside her, deep into that maddening clutch, that heat. Rachel moaned, her hands locked onto his shoulders, her breath against his face, her voice in his ear, urging him on.

“Oh, baby,” he gasped as she put her lips against his ear, whispering his name over and over, like a chant or a song or a prayer.

If there was going to be awkwardness, it would come when they'd finished; when they looked down and saw that he was still wearing his socks and she still had her panties hooked around one ankle. There would be the condom to dispose of, the strangeness of a woman in his bed for the first time in months, and Rachel would surely have something to say about his decorating skills, how his bedroom was as austere and empty as a cheap hotel room, with no bookshelves, no dining-room table, a secondhand couch in the living room, and the posters he'd had since college on the walls. But as soon as they were done, Rachel rolled into his arms, curling herself against his chest, and said, “I missed you!” in the friendly, happily surprised voice of a woman who'd bumped into an old best friend at the grocery store. With her hands balled into fists, she punched lightly at his chest, like it was his fault they'd been apart.

“I missed you, too,” Andy said. He'd been smiling for so long he was sure that his face would ache in the morning. “I feel like . . .”

“What?” she asked. “How do you feel?” He remembered how she'd always been interrogating him, quizzing him about his emotions, pushing him to give her more than just a “fine” or “happy” or “tired.”

“Like nothing's changed,” he said. “Like you went out to get bagels or something, and now you're home.”

“Now I'm home,” she said. He cuddled her against him, kissed her, then got up. In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water, took a sip, and carried it back to the bedroom. Rachel had opened her suitcase and pulled on one of her ribbed cotton T-shirts and the inevitable pajama bottoms, this pair blue-and-white striped.

He handed her the water. She drank, set the glass down, then sat up with her back against the wall, holding her arms out, waiting for his feet. “Oh, gross,” he heard her murmur as she inspected his battered toes, then worked her way up to his calves and his thighs, running her hands lightly over his limbs. “Your body is amazing,” she said. “I mean, I thought it was amazing before, but this . . .” She swept her hands from the tops of his thighs to his knees. “I guess I shouldn't be surprised. You basically work out for a living. If someone like you doesn't have
an amazing body, nobody does.” Rearranging herself until they were side by side again, she asked, “So what do you do all day?”

He told her that he ran, he ate, he lifted, he stretched, he slept, and then he rose to do it all again. He traveled to meets, he raced, he worked on shaving seconds or even fractions of seconds off his best times. Out loud, it sounded silly, the height of self-indulgence. There were people fighting wars and curing diseases, writing great books or, in Rachel's case, helping needy children, and what did he do? He ran around a track, slightly but significantly faster than a small group of other elite ­runners . . . and got paid more for doing it than she got for helping kids.