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“Yeah.” She held a beer stein in one hand, and now she lifted it to her lips and drank deeply. He watched her throat move. She’d taken off her sweater, and beneath it she wore a black T-shirt that hugged her breasts and highlighted the curve of her waist. He thought that if he touched her, her skin would be deliciously warm, the heat amplified by the sun soaking into dark cotton. “I think you were right.”
“About what?”
“I was doing it wrong,” she said. Her voice was low and beer-mellow. “I like New York.”
“What do you like about it?”
The question shouldn’t have felt so fraught. He shouldn’t have been so jittery all of a sudden.
May tipped her head back to look at the sky. “I think I wanted it to be … a destination. The endpoint I’d been trying to force myself to reach with Dan, where we could finally choose to live together, and that would fix everything that was wrong with our relationship. I wanted to move here—or, not here, but to New Jersey—and feel totally triumphant and complete.” She turned to look at him. “Does that make any sense?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s not like that. I mean, the whole Dan thing aside, you could never live here and feel done with it, like you know everything there is to know. It’s so stuffed full of people and stories and life, I could never see more than a small part of it. I think … I think it’s like an attic. My attic back home isn’t very big, and I’ve only been in my house a few years, so all I’ve got up there is, like, eight plastic totes full of Christmas decorations and pants that don’t fit me. But New York is like an attic from the movies, huge and badly lit. You go in, and your clothes get streaked with dust, looking around. Your nose starts to tickle from all the accumulated smells and mess. But there’s so much to see. So many stories in that attic, just waiting for you to find them. And they don’t all make sense right away. You open a trunk, and it’s full of … I don’t know, dolls’ heads, or lightbulbs, or dishes you’ve never seen before. But that’s part of the fun. Figuring it out.”
“Discovering the stories.”
“Yeah. And discovering which boxes are meaningless junk to you, and which ones are full of treasures in disguise.”
He thought about that. Whether he’d shown her any treasures. Whether he’d discovered any.
“I haven’t fed you any honey yet,” he said. “Speaking of treasures in disguise.”
“For thirty-five bucks, it better be a treasure.”
“It is.”
The saucy lift of her lips echoed the cocky smile he could feel on his own. “I’ll bet.”
He lifted the pitcher, topped off his glass, and leaned sideways to fill hers. Then he lifted his stein. “To New York,” he said. His smile felt lopsided, but that fit. She’d knocked him off-kilter, and when she smiled back, it only got worse.
“To New York.” She clinked her stein against his. “And to the future. Let’s not fuck it up as badly as we’ve fucked up the past.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
So they did. The afternoon slid away along with the beam of light she sat in, traveling down the bench and then falling to the ground, working its way across the yard. They ate pickles and potato pancakes, finished their pitcher, and swapped stories from back home. The best games they’d seen at Lambeau. Terrible dates. Disastrous
proms. He turned around eventually and put his arm over her shoulder, and she leaned into his chest, tipping her head back now and then to meet his eyes.
He kissed her upside down.
“Can I take you home now?”
“Please,” she said. And she smiled.
Tomorrow, she would leave. But tonight, she belonged to him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
His phone rang as they mounted the interminable steps to his apartment. Ben didn’t recognize the number, so he handed it to May. “For you?”
She looked. “Probably.” She answered the call. “Hello?” Then a pause, and she shrieked, “Allie!”
Her sister. Ben nudged past her and hustled up the last flight of stairs so he could have the door open before she reached the top. She was tired. On the subway, she’d looked like she might fall asleep.
She came in behind him as he was dropping his jacket over the arm of the couch. He cracked the window, waved her into a seat, and fixed a couple glasses of ice water, sitting one on the coffee table in front of her as she reassured her sister that she was fine, and she’d sort out her ID quandary tomorrow morning.
It was difficult to avoid listening in. The apartment was small, and she was talking about him.
