* * *
“You know I love you,” he said when it was over.
She’d been half-asleep, dozing against the warmth of his body, thinking it was like having a slow oven in her bed. When he said it, her entire body jolted, like she was a glass in the cupboard, rattled by some unexpected force. “What?”
“I love you. I’ve been in love with you a long time. Maybe even since the first time I came over, when you were so mean to me.” He nudged her fondly. “Remember that?”
Diana cleared her throat. It felt like her tongue and her lips and her teeth were all new pieces of equipment, recently installed. “I was mean to you a lot of times.”
“You sure were, baby,” said Michael, and gave her shoulder a friendly pat. Diana laughed. The bed felt like a boat, small but sturdy, bearing the two of them in the sea of the dark, and she could picture his good-natured smile.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why what?”
“Why do you…” She could barely bring herself to say it. “Why do you love me?”
“Oh, honey.” He turned on his side and took her in both of his arms, holding her against him. His hand was in her hair, and he was whispering her name. “Because you’re my Diana. My beautiful Diana.”
“And it’s okay if I’m…” She swallowed in the darkness. “It’s okay if I’m not… completely okay?”
He propped himself on his elbows so he could look down, right into her eyes. “You’re perfect to me,” he said.
For the next three days and nights, they barely left Diana’s bed. On Tuesday night, when Diana went to work, Reese looked her over, then smiled. “I guess I don’t have to ask if you had a pleasant weekend.”
“What?”
He swatted her bottom with a bar towel. “Don’t ‘what’ me, young lady. I know that look. That look is a look of pure sat-is-fac-tion.” He nodded, pleased with himself, as Diana rolled her eyes. “Seriously, though, dear heart. You look happy. Healthy. Not quite so much the drowned rat I had the good fortune to meet last year.” He put his hands on her shoulders, and looked her in the eyes.
“I’m happy for you, darlin’，” he said, and walked off, humming a tune it took her a few seconds to recognize as “Sexual Healing.” Diana shook her head, smiling, thinking that she was happy, too.
* * *
One night in the springtime, as they lay in the candlelit loft, listening to a thunderstorm roll in over the bay, Michael finally asked the question that had been looming between them since the first time they’d gone to bed. “Will you go back to Boston again this summer?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t want to go, but she still couldn’t stand the thought of seeing one of those boys near the place that had started to feel like home.
Michael stroked her hair as the cottage shook with peals of thunder, and rain rattled against the windowpanes. When he spoke, her head was on his chest, and his voice was a warm rumble in her ear.
“You could stay.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“You really think those boys would come back?”
Diana didn’t know what to say. Or, rather, she didn’t know how to answer him in a way that wouldn’t make her sound crazy. Years had passed since that night on the beach, but the truth was, part of her did think that the boys could come back, and she did think that they would find her, and they’d come for her again.
Michael’s hand was warm and gentle. “Maybe you need a disguise.”
Her voice was thick, and her mind stuck in the memories of the bonfire, the feel of that boy on top of her, the sound of her hair, swishing on the sand as she’d fought. She cleared her throat. “What?”
“Like a disguise. A secret identity. What if you had another name? You know, like how Superman is Clark Kent? And Batman’s Bruce Wayne?”
At first, she didn’t realize what he was saying. “Like what?”
“Well, I’ve always liked Carmody.”
He rolled away to reach underneath the pillow, and when he turned toward her again he had a black velvet box in his hand.
“Diana Scalzi…”
She started to cry.
“Would you do me the great, great honor…”
She shook her head. “You don’t want me,” she sobbed, crying so hard she could barely speak. “I’m a mess.”
“Hey,” said Michael. “Look at me.”