Adam nods. “I wonder what it’s like to make a landmark.” He tells me he’s an architect, but not that kind of architect.
Then he asks what I was doing to the espresso machine before, so I tell him about Bodie and the penny and he laughs. I feel like our whole conversation is some kind of secret test and his laugh means I passed.
After dinner, I take our plates into the kitchen, and Adam is waiting when I get back. He holds the door for me on the way out. He nods, I nod, and we walk to my car together.
“Why were you homeless?” I ask.
“I got in a fight with my father,” he says.
“Yeah, me too.” I don’t want to talk about my father, so I don’t ask questions about his. And maybe he doesn’t want to talk about his father, because he doesn’t ask about mine. But it’s not uncomfortable to walk together, my footsteps filling the beats between his, and I don’t flinch when he gets in my car.
* * *
Adam throws his bag on one of the black canvas chairs and says, “What can I get you?”
“What do you have?” I ask, giving him a big smile, trying hard to act like I’m completely comfortable standing here in his living room.
“Water, milk, Coke?” he says.
“Coke,” I say.
He goes into the kitchen and comes back with a can of Coke and a bottle of beer.
“There’s beer too,” he says, plopping down on the futon. “If you want one.” He rests the can of Coke on one of the birch coasters and uses a bent metal corner of the footlocker to open his bottle with a quick pound of his fist.
I crack the can open, slurping the foam so it doesn’t drip on his futon, and say, “I’m good with Coke, thanks.” I can’t afford a buzz. I know enough about men to know the good ones don’t ever want to be alone with a sixteen-year-old girl. And I’m pretty sure Adam is one of the good ones. I can’t afford to say something that will give me away. I already messed up with him once.
“So you’re an architect?” I ask. He moved on from it quickly in the cafe, like he was self-conscious. Like how I’d feel if someone asked me to sing in the middle of just being normal. “You actually make buildings?”
“Well, in theory,” Adam says. “I’m getting my PhD now. And I’m not supposed to be working outside of teaching, but that woman I met with at Decadence? Anna. She’s converting a barn, and has ideas she doesn’t know how to implement, so I’m helping her draw up plans. She’s my first client.”
Everyone I knew in Little River worked on their own houses, turned barns into garages and garages to extra bedrooms, but they didn’t ever seem to have much of a plan.
“Is it hard to design a building when you’ve never built one?” I ask.
Adam seems surprised by my question. “I’m about to find out, I guess.”
He kicks off his boots and lines them up, side by side, heels against the trunk. He’s careful about everything—how he touches my arm or leans closer to show me a sketch from his notebook—like he understands that I might be scared and doesn’t want to add to it. I’ve never been around someone who didn’t have at least a little bit of reckless bubbling under their skin, but he doesn’t.
We talk for hours. I don’t understand a lot of what he’s telling me about his doctorate program at Cornell, the classes he’s teaching and something or someone called a TA, but he doesn’t seem to expect me to. And eventually he starts talking about ordinary things.
He’s twenty-seven. He’s from a place called Needham. He used to smoke, but only cloves. He quit when his favorite professor died of lung cancer in August, but when he’s working he still reaches for cigarettes that aren’t there. Now his ashtray holds loose change.
It feels like we’re playing house on an old fashioned TV show where the couple comes home and talks about their day. I never thought people actually did that. My dad, when he did come home, used to sit and smoke and be all stuck in his head like he wasn’t even there.
Adam’s voice is soft, but it fills the room. There’s more space than furniture, so every word echoes just a little. My extremities are thawed. The dark is outside. I wish this was actually what life was like, even though it’s just this simple little thing. Two people sitting on a couch.
Adam clears his throat and looks at the ceiling. “Another Coke?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say.
And then we’re back on the couch with his beer and my Coke and talking like we’re old friends or new friends, or I don’t know what. Like he’s forgotten how I almost kissed him last night.