If they do call, will they assume we don’t answer because we’re driving?
My stomach resumes its roiling nausea.
“You want to call or wait?” Wyn asks.
Now I’m doing the math of how expensive it might be to replace this door if the fire department has to ax it down or blow it up or something.
“I think . . .” I take a steadying breath, try to find a grip on some version of my mental happy place that has nothing to do with this house or this man. “I think we have to wait, for at least a while.”
It’s obviously not the answer he wanted.
“Unless you don’t think you can—”
“I’m fine,” he says tersely, perching on the bottom step. He sets the wine aside and yanks his hiking boot off.
“Oh my god, Wyn,” I say. “It’s been five minutes. How long until you’re dropping your pants and designating a pee corner?”
He tears the foil from around the wine bottle’s cork. “I won’t need a pee corner. I’ll use this bottle when we’re done drinking it. You, on the other hand . . . you’re going to be out of luck unless you learn to aim, fast.”
I unfold my arms only to recross them when his gaze tracks the movement straight to my chest. “Are you walking around with a corkscrew in your pocket at ten thirty in the morning?”
“No,” he says, “I’m just happy to see you.”
“Hilarious.”
His eyes steadily hold mine as he sets the wine bottle into his boot and smacks the whole arrangement against the wall.
I yelp. “What are you doing?”
He drives the boot against the wall again three more times. On the last hit, the cork leaps up the bottle’s neck a half inch. With another two quick snaps against the wall, the cork pops out entirely. Wyn lifts the open bottle toward me.
“I’m concerned that you know how to do that,” I say.
“So you don’t want any.” He takes a swig. As the bottle lowers, his eyes dart over his shoulder, toward the alcove under the stairs.
Heat swiftly rises from my clavicles to my hairline.
Don’t go there. Don’t think about that.
I know it’s ill-advised, but a part of me is desperately hoping there’s something to the whole hair-of-the-dog school of treating hangovers when I grab the bottle and take a sip.
Nope. My stomach does not want that. I pass it back to him.
“Parth taught me that trick,” he says. “I’ve never needed to use it before now.”
“Oh, you haven’t found yourself imprisoned with any other jilted lovers in the last five months?”
He snorts. “Jilted? Not exactly how I remember it, Harriet.”
“Maybe you have amnesia,” I suggest.
“My memory’s fine, Dr. Kilpatrick, though I do appreciate the concern.” As if to prove his point, his eyes dart toward the nook under the stairs again.
He can’t be seeing someone. He’d never go along with this act if he was. Wyn may be a flirt, but he’s not disloyal.
Unless he’s in something brand-new? Not officially exclusive?
But if it were brand-new, then would he have already reached comfortable-relationship status?
The little so-called clues could just as easily be random bits of information I’m jamming together to tell a story.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t seeing anyone.
The bottom line is, I have no idea what’s going on in his life. I’m not supposed to.
He takes a few more sips. I guess it doesn’t do the trick for him either, because within minutes, he’s pacing. He rakes his hands through his hair as he walks in circles around the space, sweat brimming along his forehead.
“If only you’d brought your coffee-table book.”
Wyn looks abruptly back at me, eyes sharply appraising.
“Then we’d have something to look at,” I say.
His brow arches, tugging on his lip. “What do you have against my coffee-table book, Harriet?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you suffer some kind of coffee-table-book-related trauma in the last five months?”
“That thing cost sixty dollars,” I say.
He shakes his head, goes back to pacing.
“Is it a gift?” I say.
“Why would it be a gift?” he says. Not an answer.
“Because you never spend that kind of money on yourself,” I say.
The tops of his cheeks flush a little, and I really, really regret asking now. We go back to sitting in silence. Well, I’m sitting. He’s power walking in tiny rectangles.
Even after everything, it’s hard to see him like this.
When the defense of his charm gets peeled back, he’s always so expressive. It’s partly what made me pour out so many secrets to him all those years ago, the feeling that he absorbed some piece of whatever I gave him, felt what I felt. Unfortunately, the reverse was also true.
“You’ve been crammed in much smaller spaces,” I remind him as he’s passing me on his ninetieth lap （best guess; I haven’t been counting）。
His gaze flashes toward the space under the stairs again.
Not what I meant. My face flames. “Like every single car you’ve ever been in,” I clarify.
“Buses are bigger than this,” he says.
“True,” I say. “But they also smell worse. It smells great down here.”
“It smells damp.”
“It’s Maine,” I say. “It is damp.”
He tips his head back. “I’m freaking out, Harriet.”
I stand up. “It’s okay. They’ll be here soon.”
“You don’t know that.” His eyes flicker back to me, the tension around his mouth revealing his dimples. “They might think we decided to hang back . . .”
I swallow. “Sabrina wouldn’t stand for that. We’re supposed to all be together.”
He shakes his head. He sees all the holes in that logic just like I do.
Sabrina might be annoyed if she thought we stayed back to score some alone time, but she’s already shaken up the natural order of things on our behalf, with giving us the nicest bedroom. Aside from that, if she tried to call and we didn’t answer, it’s not like she’d speed back here and storm upstairs to try to catch us in the act.
I try a different tack. “You come down here all the time. And you’ve probably been down here much longer than this, honestly.”
I try not to go back there.
I try not to revisit the memory.
The summer after he, Cleo, Sabrina, and I all graduated. Before we moved to New York to join Parth.
We’d driven down from Vermont, with all our stuff packed and ready for the big move. Parth had flown in from the city, fresh off finishing his time as a Fordham 1L.
It was his idea to play sardines, a kind of reverse hide-and-seek.
We turned off all the lights, then rolled dice to see who’d hide first.
Wyn lost. We gave him five minutes to hide before we spread out to search through the dark for him.
Somehow I knew, the same way I always seemed to, exactly where he was.
I found him in the cellar. Under the stairs, there was a waist-high rack of wine, but behind it there was a dark nook, empty space, and he was tucked inside it. I almost missed him, but on a double take, I spotted a shifting shadow.