She shook her head. “Private service. Just me and the lawyers. It just seemed like, after what happened . . .”
“You don’t have to explain,” Bird said quickly, but she seemed not to hear him.
“It was so strange,” she said quietly. “There were all these condolence cards, so many flowers, but all from, like . . . corporations. People were sorry to lose Ethan’s money. I don’t think anyone cared at all that he was gone.”
Bird didn’t say anything, and she took a drink, setting the bottle down with a light clunk.
“Anyway, that’s all over. Or will be. The lawyers said it should be settled soon.”
“You do anything for the holidays?” Bird asked, hoping for a subject change, and Adrienne’s mouth twitched.
“I went south for a little while, actually,” she said. “I saw my mother. Not that she knows it. She’s in a home. Alzheimer’s.”
“Sorry to hear that. How’s she doing?”
“She’s okay,” she said. “But I think . . . I think I want to move her. She should be somewhere better. Somewhere nicer.”
Sometime later, Bird glanced outside and realized that the sun had fully set. The bar was buzzing now with the after-work crowd, the afternoon sports fans long gone after a disappointing loss for the Sox that neither he nor Adrienne had seen. There had been another round of beers, and another—at some point Adrienne had switched to water, while Bird threw caution to the wind and ordered a whiskey—and their chairs had somehow pivoted so that they were sitting very close now, so close that their knees kept brushing together, close enough that he could smell her perfume. What is this? What’s happening? Bird thought, and then wondered if he was only imagining things. Maybe nothing was happening at all. Maybe he was just buzzed, more than buzzed—“buzzed” was receding in the rearview mirror as he rounded the corner and entered the long home stretch toward drunk—but she was staring at him with her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted, and that was happening, and so was the tugging sensation low in his abdomen, that gut sense of something electric in the air. He lifted his hand, which was moving so slowly that seemed like it might belong to someone else, and watched it close the distance between them to gently touch her knee. She lowered her eyes, looked at the hand on her leg, looked back up at him. Her parted lips began to move.
She said, “Do you want to get out of here?”
What is happening? What is happening? What the actual fuck is happening? his brain said.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
Her knee disappeared from beneath his hand as she stood up and pulled her jacket on. He followed her outside, the two of them pausing awkwardly in the parking lot as he realized that he had no idea where to go. There was a silence punctuated by the whooshing of traffic on the nearby road, the ticking of a streetlight from green to red.
“Your place?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Not there. I can’t. And anyway, it’s far.”
“My . . . car?” he said, and started to laugh, and so did she, the tension between them dissolving. She leaned into him and he wrapped an arm around her.
“My back seat glory days are over,” she said. “But look, look at that.” She pointed, and Bird looked, and saw the familiar logo of a discount motel chain looming on a lighted sign above their heads. Right next door, less than fifty yards away.
“It’s fate,” he said, and she guffawed.
“It’s a cosmic joke.”
“Not fancy enough for you?”
“Fuck you,” she said. “Let’s go. It’s cold out here.”
Ten minutes later, Bird was sliding a key card into the electronic lock, Adrienne hovering close behind. He was about to make another joke—something about the probable lack of champagne and caviar on the room-service menu—but when he turned to let her through the door, she was right there, right beside him, and then the door was closed and locked and her body was pressed against his, their lips brushing hungrily past each other as he fumbled in the dark for a light switch.
“Leave it off.”
The sign for the hotel loomed like an oblong moon outside the window. She stepped away from him and stood in front of it, silhouetted, her arms raised as she pulled her shirt over her head. He shrugged out of his jacket.
“I want to see you,” he said, and she laughed.
“Maybe I don’t want to be seen.”
He went to her, his hands finding her shoulders, dropping to encircle her waist. He could smell the warm, sweet scent of her body underneath the lighter note of her perfume or shampoo, and the tugging sensation in his low belly became a throb. He pulled her to the bed, pulled her down, the softness of her skin against his lips, the scratch of the cheap motel comforter against his back. Her hands were at his waist, undoing his belt, sliding his pants down over his hips. He felt the brush of her fingertips and said, “Oh,” and then there was no more talking.