I can’t remember a time that we’ve been together this long without her talking. Titus’ comment about me not being open comes to me as the silence stretches. I’m not used to having to ask what’s on her mind, but maybe I should do more of that. “What’s on your mind, Sin?”
“What?” She turns the music down. “Sorry, I was a million miles away. What’d did you say?”
“I asked what was on your mind.”
“Hmmmm,” she says on a long, heavy sigh. “We’re both living double lives.”
It’s not what I was expecting to hear and even though she’s not wrong, my first reaction is to reject it. I feel exposed and judged. “I see…” I force my hands to relax their grip on the steering wheel.
“I mean, I don’t want to speak for you, but from what I can tell, you’ve got a rich family or a trust fund and friends and interests that you’ve been very deliberate to keep hidden from me.”
“It wasn’t—”
She puts a hand on my wrist and strokes the back of my hand with her thumb. “It’s okay. You’re allowed to have your secrets. Lord knows I have my own.”
I slide my eyes to her. “You do?”
“Doesn’t everyone? Like, I can’t tell you what I’m really working on. Or how old I was when I lost my virginity. It’s okay, and I don’t want you to tell me things you’re not ready to share. I know what that feels like.”
I let out a deep sigh. “Thank you for understanding. I’m not keeping secrets…per se. Just not sharing things that don’t seem relevant.”
“That’s why I called you Superman. Tonight, you look like a different man. More like the man you were the night we met. You’ve been showing up to my parents’ looking like Clark Kent and tonight, I saw you and realized I wasn’t sure which one is the disguise and which one is skin you’re most comfortable in.”
She’s not asking me for an answer and I couldn’t give one if she was. I don’t know.
“I don’t think of it as double life. I wasn’t hiding. I just wasn’t talking.” I glance over and see she’s staring out of the window again.
“Where are we?” she asks as we pull into the parking lot of the small park.
“Theodore Roosevelt Island. This is the best view in DC. At leastIthink so.”
“Are we allowed to be here this time of night?”
“I hope so.” I put the seats down in the back of the SUV and open the tailgate so we can sit facing the river. We spread out a blanket and sit down and grab our hotdogs.
“I can’t believe I lived here all these years and never realized it was open to the public.”
“We used to drive up here when I was a teenager,” I tell her.
“You went to high school near here?”
“No, I went to a boarding school in New York, but I spent some of my summers here.”
“Wow.” Her mouth is full of food, and she holds up a hand while she chews and swallows. “So, you’ve been rich yourwholelife?”
I stiffen, still not sure what to say and how. “Yeah. Sin, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“No, I already told you. You don’t have to tell me anything until you want to. I just don’t want to be lied to. No matter what kind of relationship we have. If you tell me something, tell the truth. Okay?”
My heart is beating a hundred miles an hour. “That sounds extremely fair.”
She nods. “I’m very good at brokering solutions. At least for other people.” She laughs and steals my breath. Jesus, I don’t know if it’s pheromones or what but everything about her excites me. She intrigues me and makes me think. And lets me be myself.
She balls up the napkin she spread on her dress to catch crumbs and tosses it over her shoulder. “Okay, so how about this? We introduce the Kwame and Sin that we’d like each other to know. No questions. We do this for as long as it feels good. No expectations. Just friends who also have sex.”
Her expression is so earnest, and the tension I’ve been holding since the Sunday everything started to unravel finally starts to ease.
“I’d like that.”
