The Children(82)

Afterward they lay without speaking. Guin was cold where the sweat was drying and staticky hot where their skin made contact. It seemed equally possible he might turn and kiss her for the first time since entering the room, or that he might stand, take his clothes from the floor and his ring from her finger, and walk out the door.

For a long time he did neither. Nor did they speak. She didn’t turn to see him but knew he was awake, his thoughts impenetrable as fog.

Like the Wandering Country, she thought hazily. Maybe everyone was their own wandering country, and attempts to unite only led to further obscurity. Maybe all relationships were bold, doomed enterprises. Maybe . . .

Guin woke. Realized with a start she had fallen asleep. She wasn’t lying next to her fiancé on a puddle of pages, she was alone on a bare wooden floor.

Hank was gone, along with his clothes and her smeared and wrinkled story. When Guin brought a hand to her mouth with a whispered curse, she saw he’d left the engagement ring, trailing its comet’s tail of broken gold.





Fifteen Months Ago




Guin was sitting at a chain restaurant bar in the Toronto airport when the man who’d been checking her out from two stools away made his play.

It was mid-May, not quite six p.m., and the airport had an apocalyptic feel. All the flights were grounded by a storm. Families trudged by with weeping children, couples argued in half a dozen languages. The bit of sky she could see from the bar was a flat pewter, sizzling with lines of light.

It felt good to sit and watch the lightning, sipping her watery drink. Guin could, if she wanted to, postpone her return for a week, a month. No one was waiting for her anywhere.

The man down the bar said, “Good book?”

Guin pursed her lips. She was coming from a four-day festival in Prague, during which her sole panel appearance had been poorly attended. The mediocre thriller that lay open in front of her was a prop to deter conversation. “Not particularly.”

“Sorry,” he said, genial. “I’ll leave you to it. Unless—any chance you want to split a plate of fries?”

That made her look. The man was leaning over crossed arms to get the bartender’s attention, rolled-up sleeves cutting nicely against the swell of his biceps. Guin executed a quarter turn to consider him further.

He wasn’t, historically speaking, her physical type. But Guin’s taste for weedy, semi-tortured dirtbags—crystallized in an instant the day she laid eyes on a man named Arthur Borelli—had been waning. Since hitting thirty she’d found herself increasingly attracted to men who could stand their ground in a high wind.

This man’s eyes were heavy-lashed and soulful, his neck thick, his arms . . . his arms. He might start building a deck any minute.

“I’ll share fries with you,” she said. “And I’ll take a gin and tonic.”

“What kind of gin?” he asked, turning.

There was, as their eyes met, a palpable pop—of recognition, or lust. “I like everything,” she lied.

“She likes everything,” he told the bartender, then rubbed his hands together. “I haven’t eaten since Mexico. Just a couple meals on the plane.”

He had an accent Guin identified tentatively as Chicago. She felt her pupils dilate. First he’d build her a deck, then he’d grill meat on it. “So you have eaten,” she said. “Twice.”

He grinned at her. An excellent grin.

The drinks came and hers was clear and cold and a lot stronger than the one she’d ordered for herself. She put that down to the stranger’s eyes and arms and the softness of his mouth, the little indent in his bottom lip. It had been a long minute since she’d slept with anyone. Her last one-night stand ended on a pathetic note, the contemporary fiction author—weedy, check; dirtbag, check—she met at a Texas festival going strangely morose when they were through. He’d lain back on the puffy hotel pillows and confessed how sad it made him, as a former Ninth City kid, to think of Guinevere Sharpe having sex. Then he acted surprised when she sprang out of bed and put her clothes on.

“Where are you traveling from?” he asked.

“Europe,” she said succinctly. “How about you? How was Mexico?”

“It was . . . a lot of dudes in one house. Bachelor party.”

“Gross. Close with the groom?”

“Thought I was. Then I went to his bachelor party. He’s in Palo Alto, I was the only guy there not in tech. Every time one of them talked it was money, money, money.” He moved his hand like a Pac-Man eating dots. “Keto diet. Money. One of them told me drinking coffee was the same as swallowing poison.” He paused to down half his beer in one go. She watched the muscles of his throat. “This same guy took about a dozen internet supplements a day. All called, like, Alpha Male Mandom for Men.”

“No Beta Male One A Days?”

He laughed. “I love those. They’re shaped like the Flintstones.”

“Did you bail? Tell me you bailed.”

“I did. I packed my shit on day three. Who has a weeklong bachelor party?”

“A monster.”

He tipped his glass toward hers. “I made up some excuse and spent the rest of the week at a cheap motel, reading on the beach. Honestly, I might’ve stuck it out, but I had this bad feeling. I couldn’t shake it. Like, a premonition.” He leaned in. His eyes were very brown. “Then, get this. I’m on the plane this morning when I get a call from my mother. Frantic. Robbie—that’s the groom—his mom called mine, told her none of the guys made their flight back to California. They got arrested in Cancún. Not clear yet whether it was for assault or possession. You never know with alphas.”