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I’ll take it.
“West?”
“Is … is that a yes?”
Her shoulders lift and fall with another plastic crinkle. “Do I ever tell you no?”
“You did once. ”
She smiles—her smile like the pink and orange at the horizon when I walk out of the bakery into the alley and get surprised by the morning.
I’ve been in the dark. I’ve been solitary, single-minded in pursuit of a life that felt like it might be enough—until she walked into it and it wasn’t.
Deeper or nothing. My new motto.
“I didn’t tell you no,” she says. “I told you to make up your fucking mind. And look!” She waves the flowers in my face. “It worked. Now I’m being wooed. ”
“That’s what you wanted, huh?” I smile. “Some good old-fashioned wooing?”
“Maybe it’s some of what I wanted. ”
I lean in, on solid ground at last. “I’ll woo you until you can’t walk, sweetheart. ”
“Promises, promises. ”
She closes her eyes when I kiss her, but I keep mine open.
I want to watch the sun rise.
I think it’s supposed to be awkward—walking to her car, the night cold enough to freeze my balls off. Driving to my apartment with the heat blasting and quiet all around us.
We go up the fire escape, leave our shoes by the door, pass through the common area into my bedroom. I hang my coat over my desk chair and sit down on the bed, legs stretched out, back against the wall.
She considers for a moment, then does the same thing.
We’re side by side on my bed, and I keep waiting for it to go wrong, to feel wrong, but all I can feel is relief, if relief feels like walking with nothing dragging behind you after you’ve been towing a trailer of misery around for most of your life.
I turn a little so I can look at her.
Her hair’s still all screwed up. She’s got crud at the inside corner of one eye, and her bottom lip has a raised elliptical pad on it like you get when your lips are too dry because of the weather or because you’ve been biting them.
Which she does, while I watch. She catches her lip between her teeth, sucks it into her mouth, releases it with grooved white lines that pink up as I watch.
I want to devour her.
I’m pretty sure it’s not time yet.
“You have to tell me what you need me to do now,” I say. “I mean, you want to talk, but I’m not sure … I’m complete shit at this. ”
It’s another kind of relief, it turns out. To be shit at it, and to just be able to say so.
“This being, what? Girls?” She’s smiling.
“Yeah, you’d love for me to admit that. ”
“It would make me pretty happy to hear you say you’re shit with girls, yeah. ”
“You didn’t used to have any complaints about my skills. ”
