I don't look back. I don't need to look back. I know exactly what I'd see — her against the brick, flushed and furious and working through the fact that she kissed me back, cataloging the exact moment she stopped managing the thing between us and let it happen.
I know because I'm cataloging the same thing.
She is a problem I came to contain, a liability I came to assess.
She is a woman whose name sounds different in my mouth than other names, whose stubbornness I find more compelling than most people's compliance, whose pulse under my lips told me more truth in three seconds than six days of watching her from a distance. She is a woman who kissed me back in an alley and is going to spend the walk home furious about it, and I am going to spend the drive back thinking about the sound she made when I pressed my mouth to her neck, and neither of us is going to say so, and that is fine.
That is, in fact, exactly where I want us.
I put my hands in my jacket pockets and walk out into the grey November afternoon and let myself want what I want without examining it too closely, which is a thing I almost never allow, and which feels, in this particular moment, entirely worth it.
Chapter Seven
Alex
The apartment smells like something good when I push through the door, which means Mr. Roberts has been cooking again, which means Evie asked him to, which means she was hungry before I got home and didn't want to say so when I called.
They're at the counter when I come in — Mr. Roberts on the stool side, Evie across from him with her elbows on the surface and her chin in her hands, deep in whatever conversation they were having before the door opened. She looks up when she hears my keys.
"You're late," she says.
"I'm twelve minutes late," I say.
"Mr. Roberts made soup."
"I can smell it." I drop my bag on the hook and look at him. "You didn't have to do that."
"I was making it anyway." He waves a hand. "Too much for one person. Evie kept me company." He slides off the stool with the careful deliberateness of a man who has learned to negotiate his knees without comment. "I'll leave you to it. There's enough for tomorrow if you want it."
"Stay," Evie says immediately, in the tone she uses when she's decided something and is informing the room of it. "Alex is going to make pasta anyway. You can have both."
Mr. Roberts looks at me. I look at him. "She's not wrong," I say. "Stay."
He stays.
I am elbow deep in the pasta situation — water on, salt in, the specific argument Evie and I have every time about whether the water is boiling enough before the pasta goes in, when I open the fridge for the milk.
No milk.
I stand in front of the open fridge and look at the shelf where the milk is supposed to be and confirm, with the particular exhaustion of a person who has had an extremely full day, that I forgot it at the grocery store this morning. I was distracted this morning. I was distracted because of the feeling at the back ofmy chest that has been there for six days, and that has a name I'm not using.
"Bad word," Evie says from the counter.
"I didn't say anything."
"You said it very quietly," she says. "Under your breath. I have excellent hearing."
"You have inconvenient hearing."
"Same thing in this apartment." She props her chin back in her hand. "What's wrong?"
"I forgot the milk."
She sighs with the comprehensive world-weariness of someone who has seen this before. "You always forget one thing."
"I do not always?—"
"Last week it was the butter," Mr. Roberts offers, pleasantly, from his stool.
