“Tell me to kiss you,” he says again, nudging my thighs wider to ease in between my hips.
I rake my hands down his back, take hold of his waist, keeping us pinned together. I feel his pulse in his groin, or maybe it’s mine. The lines between him and me have become fuzzy, insubstantial.
“What are we doing?” he asks.
“I thought that was obvious,” I say.
His hips rock into me, and god help me, my hands go straight to his ass. He lifts me against the door, my thighs around his hips, my arms hooked behind his head, his erection hard against me.
I want him on top of me, beneath me, behind me. I want him in my mouth, his clothes in a pile on the floor, his sweat on my stomach, his voice rough against my ear. I want anything other than to stop.
“What does this mean,” he asks raggedly, still cupping me, kissing me.
“I don’t know,” I say.
A low, frustrated sound dies in the back of his throat, and he stills, holding me firmly against the door.
“This is a bad idea, Harriet,” he says hoarsely after a few seconds, lowering me but not stepping back. “We can’t be together.”
The words knock the wind out of me.
“I know that,” I say.
And I do. He broke my heart, destroyed it. And even if I could forgive him, he’s happy in his new life. I know there’s no going back.
So why does hearing it make my chest feel like a split log?
I push against Wyn’s shoulders, pull my straps back up.
He steps back, murmuring, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I’m not sure you started it,” I get out.
He runs a hand up the back of his head, his brow deeply grooved. “I’m not sure that I didn’t either.”
“Then I guess I should say I’m sorry too,” I say.
His mouth twitches, a smile that’s anything but happy. He sighs. “This place.”
This place, indeed. It’s too easy to forget about the real world here, our circumstances, the things that broke us.
All the reasons there’s no finding our way back.
I flatten my palms against the door’s smooth wood. “We got swept up in it. That’s all.”
After a beat, he says, “I don’t want to do anything else that hurts you.”
“You didn’t,” I say.
I hurt myself, I think.
He looks over my shoulder at the door, almost guiltily.
“I think I should take a walk. Cool down.”
The thought of being any farther away from him than this is torment. I nod.
His eyes scrape down me and back up once more, heat washing from my head to my toes, a heavy pulse of need between my thighs.
“The bed’s all yours,” he says, and stalks past me. I slide out of the way so he can open the door. “Don’t feel like you need to wait up.”
It’s not that I wait up for him. It’s that as soon as I climb under the sheets, it’s like he hasn’t left at all, only multiplied. Every breeze from the cracked window is his mouth. Every brush of the sheets is his hand, moving across my thigh, over the curve of my stomach. Every creak of the settling house is his voice: Tell me to kiss you.
I try to think about anything else. My mind is caught on him.
Earlier tonight, as Cleo and I rested our chins atop our folded arms at the pool’s edge, legs sweeping in slow, luxurious kicks through the water, she asked, Any progress on your goal for the week?
And my eyes went straight for Wyn.
Not yet, I told her.
I don’t even know what I need from this week. To make it to the end without coming apart? Or without ruining Sabrina and Parth’s wedding?
My life has been on one set of rails since I decided to go into medicine. It’s been easy to make decisions with that as the governing force. Outside of that, I’ve rarely had to.
But I don’t want to regret anything at the end of this week. I want to feel like I used this time, even in a small way, how I wanted to.
And that’s what I fall asleep thinking over and over again: What do you want, Harriet?
I dream he climbs into bed with me. Arms up, baby, he says, and peels away my Virgin Who CAN Drive T-shirt.
There’s no one else, he whispers into the curve of my belly, the underside of my arm. Perfect, he says.
When I wake before sunrise, I’m still alone.
21
HAPPY PLACE
WEST VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY
WYN’S AND MY first place, just the two of us. A hissing radiator. A ghost who never does much, other than open a window when it’s cool out or knock a book off a shelf. Sitting on the floor, eating noodles straight from the takeout boxes because we don’t have a couch yet.
Side tables found on curbs and repaired to perfection by Wyn. A shelf installed above our bed, lined with the James Herriot paperbacks Hank used to read Wyn and his sisters when they were small. Plus one particular romance novel, whose origins neither of us even recall. （Wyn says it probably belongs to the ghost.） Our first place together, just the two of us, and it’s bittersweet.
Weeks ago, as the end of the lease on the Morningside Heights apartment drew closer, Cleo sat us down in a row on Parth’s squashy couch to announce she was moving.
Not just out of the apartment, or even New York.
To Belize, to work on an organic farm.
It’s called WWOOFing, she explained. You live there for free in exchange for some work.
And at first no one said anything. Until then, we’d been in a suspended reality. It had felt as if we’d stay like this, together forever, and nothing would change.
It’s only temporary, Cleo said, a six-month contract, but she was crying.
We all knew: this was the end of an era.
So we sat on the rug, our arms wrapped around her like we were a giant artichoke, her as our heart.
The night before she left, Parth organized a slideshow send-off, putting our favorite memories from the last three years up on the wall, and we cried some more, but in the morning, we put on brave faces and hugged goodbye outside JFK. See you soon, we promised.
We tried to find a new place to accommodate the remaining four of us.
We couldn’t.
Instead, Parth moved in with a friend from Fordham, Sabrina took over an Armas cousin’s vacant Chelsea loft, and Wyn and I scrounged up enough to rent the tiny apartment over the bookstore he’d been working at.
The whole first night we were there, I had to keep shutting myself in the bathroom for crying jags. I missed Cleo so much it hurt. I was afraid this was the end. That my friends would prove to be passing figures in my life, family becoming strangers.
After my last crying fit, I came out of the bathroom to a cry of “SURPRISE!”
Wyn had called Parth and Sabrina. They came, with pizza and champagne. “We had to christen the place,” Parth said.
“Plus, I want to see if this place is as haunted as it looks,” Sabrina added.
After that night, the apartment becomes home.
We’re happy here.
Parth and Sabrina come over once a week for dinner, and even though we’re alleged Real Adults, sometimes they sleep over on the couch and air mattress, and in the morning we get diner breakfast before heading to our separate programs or, in Wyn’s case, down to the bookstore.
And it doesn’t get boring, just the two of us. Every bit of Wyn he gives me is something to treasure, to examine from every angle.