As Angel carries Connor off to her room, Ryan drops his backpack onto the floor with a thump. The thought of those algebra and life sciences textbooks fills Angel with hot, yearning anxiety, because she must be falling so far behind. She probably can’t even fathom how far behind she is.
After Connor has been put down, Angel expects Ryan to go, but when she emerges, reattaching her bra under her shirt, she finds that he’s cleaned up the yammy high chair, done the stray dishes on the counter, taken out the kitchen trash, and is in the midst of wiping down the counters, too. Angel sits on the couch, tucks her feet under her, watching.
“What are you doing? Why are you being so nice?”
He rinses the sponge, places it beside the sink, and comes to sit beside her. “So how are you? Really?” His Adam’s apple bobs nervously.
Angel shakes her head. Her throat is tight, and, now of all times, she can feel the tears coming. And because she can’t bear to cry in front of Ryan, she pulls him toward her and kisses him.
His mouth is muggy and tastes faintly of a cherry cough drop. After she pulls away, he keeps his eyes shut and chin canted toward her for a beat too long.
When he opens his eyes, they’re gleaming, and he says, “I really, really like you.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.” Angel thinks with anguish about Lizette, the taunting quirk of her mouth when she’s about to kiss Angel. The unfairness is staggering—that he’s the one here, that she loves Lizette in the first place. Again, the tears threaten to come. She swallows and leans in again, but because she doesn’t want to kiss him, she pushes her hand up his T-shirt. Needing no encouragement, he pulls the shirt over his head, dropping it to the ground.
Ryan tucks his elbows close to his skinny torso. “Your dad’s out?”
“Yeah. We’ll hear him if he gets home.”
She traces her finger down his chest, and, in fact, there’s a narrow thrumming trench, and alongside it, an even paler scar. He’s nearly hairless—another thing she doesn’t remember from that first time—and his skin is a little sticky to the touch. He watches her, eyes hazy, lips parted, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He’s so trusting—though why he would trust her, she who has been so mean to him—is beyond her. It makes her hate him, and love him a little, too. If she could only be into him, it would make such clear, easy sense. She imagines pushing through his chest as though he were a too-ripe tomato, which makes her think of the sad tomato plants tended by Lizette’s brother, and then of Lizette. She imagines Lizette watching her here with Ryan, imagines the hot twist of envy Lizette would surely feel, so she leans into Ryan. She runs her hands down the smooth skin of his back, slides a finger into his waistband. See? she imagines telling Lizette.
Ryan murmurs. He lifts her shirt, then takes it off, and she allows this, allows him also to unhook her bra, still with the sense that she is performing for Lizette. She turns her back to him and peels the nursing bra off, sweaty and sour. She tucks it under her shirt on the cushion, then turns back, supporting her heavy breasts with her forearm. Her nipples are alarming: eager, wrinkled things, and she covers them, embarrassed.
But when his hand is in her underwear, his crooked finger digging around, she tenses. Angel lies against the couch, watching the light shift on the pebbled plaster ceiling. She wonders if she can feel any pleasure from this, and then, when she decides not, takes his bony wrist and removes his hand.
“You don’t want it?” he asks, disappointed.
“No.” She arches her back to zip up her jeans, then pushes herself up and away from him. “Sorry.” She puts on her shirt, balls up her bra to deal with later, and crosses her arms.
“I want you so bad,” he says, but not wheedling, just a statement of fact.
“Oh.” Angel tries to think of the kind thing to say.
Ryan sits up, too, and smooths his hair. The skin at his throat and chest pulses. He looks straight ahead. They both do, at Yolanda’s doll cabinet: the big-headed little blondes in their dirndls, the porcelain Princess Di with the satin wedding dress and gruesomely painted teeth, the dead-eyed Victorian girl with her elaborate velvet hat. Angel realizes she has no idea what those dolls meant to her grandmother, doesn’t know which were Yolanda’s when she was a girl, which were Valerie’s, why Yolanda bought the rest. And now, of course, it’s too late to ask.