“I thought I made you.” He tips his head so that my hand slides back toward his ear. “Just by wishing.”
“Wishing for things doesn’t make them happen, Wyn,” I say.
His hand circles my wrist, his thumb gentle on the tender underside of it. “Oh?” he says, his voice softly teasing. “Then what was it that made you finally kiss me, Harriet?”
Eight years have passed, and still my nerve endings light up with the memory of how our breath caught in an uneven back-and-forth, each of us waiting, debating what would come next, until I couldn’t take another second not knowing what it was like to kiss him.
“I didn’t kiss you,” I say. “You kissed me.”
He smiles unevenly. “Now which of us has amnesia?”
The rest of the memory crashes over me. How I tipped my chin up until our mouths brushed, not quite a kiss. How his lips parted and his tongue slipped into my mouth, and a full-body sigh, the pure undiluted sound of relief, slipped out of me. At the noise, he hauled me further up into his lap, any hesitancy dissolving into a fever, a need.
My skin erupts with goose bumps at the memory of his whisper against my ear—You’re so soft, Harriet—as his hands stole up my shirt to find more of me: The others won’t like this.
I’d whispered back, I like it, and his laugh shifted into a groan, and then a promise: I do too. I’m not sure I’ve ever liked anything more.
Sabrina had wanted to bring her boyfriend Demetrios on the trip, but Parth had argued that it would transform the vacation into a couples’ trip, which would ruin it altogether. In the end, everyone agreed it was best for the trip to stay friends-only.
I doubted they’d be any happier to hear that two of those friends were secretly going at it in the wine cellar. I couldn’t bring myself to care. Not until the second set of footsteps sounded on the stairs. That had snapped us back to reality. We’d jolted apart, put ourselves to rights, by the time Cleo found our hiding spot and joined it, per sardines’ rules.
I’d spent the whole rest of the night bracing myself for it to never happen again. But when we shut ourselves into the bedroom that night, Wyn picked me up and set me on the dresser, kissing me like not even thirty seconds had passed.
That was then. The mystery was the thrill.
Now I know how he’d taste, how he’d touch me, how quickly he’d become the foremost need in my personal Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Which is why I need to put distance between us again. His gravity’s too strong. I should probably just be grateful it hasn’t pulled all my clothes off me and dragged me into his lap.
“Harriet,” he murmurs, like it’s a question. His hand slides up along my cheek, the calluses on his fingers so familiar. I find myself leaning into his palm, letting him take some of my weight.
“Tell me about San Francisco,” he says softly.
My veins fill with ice. Logic regains a foothold in me.
“You know what San Francisco’s like,” I say, straightening away from him, cold air rushing in to kiss my skin as his hand falls away. “There’s a big-ass Ghirardelli store, and it’s always a little cold and wet.”
His nose drops, his mouth close enough that I can taste the wine on his breath. “The Ghirardelli store?”
“The whole city,” I say.
“Tell me about your residency,” he says.
A flare hits my solar plexus. Warning bells jangle. I know what he’s getting at—or rather whom he’s getting at—and a mix of anger and nausea squirms through my gut.
“What about the coffee-table book,” I say.
His lips curve in uncertain amusement. “What?”
My ears roar. My throat tightens. “Who’s the coffee-table book for?”
He stares at me.
If he won’t say it outright to me, then I guess I’m going to have to be the one to ask.
“Are you dating someone?” I bite out.
The amusement melts off his face. “What the fuck, Harriet. Are you serious right now?”
“That’s not an answer,” I say.
His gaze wavers across my face. “What about you?” he rasps. “Are you with him?”
There it is. Acid rises through my stomach. A cleaving goes through my chest.
I refuse to cry. Not over something that happened five months ago. Not over someone who’s already told me he doesn’t want me.
“That’s what you think of me?” I scoot back from him until the wall meets my back. “You still honestly believe I cheated on you, and beyond that, you think I’d turn around and do it to someone else too.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Wyn says, his voice gravelly. “I’m not accusing you of anything! I’m trying to ask . . .”
“Trying to ask what, Wyn?” I demand.
“If you’re happy,” he says. “I want to know that you’re happy too.”
Now it’s my turn to stare at him in disbelief. He still wants absolution.
And what can I say? That I’m not happy? That I’ve tried dating someone else and it was the emotional equivalent of bingeing on saltines when all I wanted was a real meal? Or that there are whole parts of the city I avoid because they remind me of those first few months in California, when he still lived with me. That when I wake up too early to my screaming alarm, I still reach toward his side of the bed, like if I can hold on to him for a minute, it won’t be so hard to make it through another grueling day at the hospital, in a never-ending series of grueling days.
That I still wake from dreams of his head between my thighs, and reach for my phone whenever something particularly ridiculous happens in the cozy mystery I’m reading, only to remember I can’t tell him. That I spend more time trying not to think about him than actually thinking about anything. All that heady nostalgia and sweltering lust has become combustible, erupting into anger.
“Yes, Wyn,” I say. “I’m happy.”
He starts to reply. Overhead, a rapid series of beeps sounds, followed by the door bursting open and Sabrina’s voice: “HARRIET!? WYN?! ARE YOU OKAY?”
I call, “We’re fine.”
If he can be happy, surely I can be fine.
12
REAL LIFE
Tuesday
BEFORE DINNER, WYN “goes for a run.” I’m reasonably certain this is an excuse for him to use the outdoor shower by the guesthouse, so I take the opportunity to fume while I lather up in the shower in our bedroom. Afterward, I riffle through my assortment of Tshirts, tanks, jeans, and sundresses. Basically I packed a blob of white, black, and blue.
And then there’s the lone splash of red, which I’d thrown in more to please Sabrina than because I actually planned to wear it. She’d sent the dress to me on my last birthday, without even knowing my size—she’d always had an eye for that sort of thing—and I’d tentatively thought of it as my Getting Back Out There Dress, though in my few depressing attempts to Get Back Out There, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wear it.
Now it strikes me more as the kind of too-short, too-tight, too-red dress you’d wear to the wedding of a man who jilted you, with plans to tip over his cake and set his tie on fire.