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He skirted the couch and sat down beside her, pulling the laptop from her grip and sitting it on top of the coffee table. He wanted to see her eyes when she answered him.
He grabbed her hands and asked again. “Do you want to?”
She looked at his fingers intertwined with hers. Her thumb brushed over the back of his hand in a gentle sweep. Back and forth.
He saw the smile before she lifted her face. The apples of her cheeks rose. The bridge of her nose wrinkled. And then her eyes came up, full of dark amusement and delight.
“Two more days? Of course I want to.”
Of course she wanted to.
Of course she
was smiling at him, squeezing his fingers.
She was May.
Of course.
CHAPTER THIRTY
May learned a hundred things about Ben in the next two days.
That he had so few personal possessions, there was room to spare in the backseat of the van after they loaded it up, but he had an obscene amount of bee-keeping equipment stored in the rooftop shed at his friends’ restaurant.
That he kept his chef’s knives in a metal toolbox that he packed into the space behind the driver’s seat, and when he locked the van, he did it with his eyes on that toolbox, as if he were assuring himself it would stay put.
She learned that he navigated easily through city traffic but preferred empty stretches of highway, where he liked to drive with one arm out the window, his fingers tapping along to the music, his shoulders relaxed and his mouth quick to smile.
She learned that he liked beef jerky, root beer, and—when they stopped for lunch—chicken stew with dumplings. That he liked it when she sang along with the radio, but he refused to join in.
She learned how the sunset light could make his profile glow, as if he’d been drawn with a sparkler against a saturated backdrop of pink and orange and red.
She learned the feel of his chest hair against her cheek and lips and nipples, the jumping contractions of his stomach muscles as she tongued a path down his body. How hard his fingers could dig in when she made him frantic. The rough jerk of his hips after a long day of innuendo and building heat.
By some silent, mutual agreement, they didn’t talk about anything important. She didn’t ask him what he thought he’d do with the money his ex had given him or why he didn’t seem to be doing anything with it at all. He didn’t ask her when she planned to call Dan or what she would say to him.
They talked instead about childhood Saturday morning cartoon rituals. They discussed organic farming and argued over Disney movies. She told him about some of her favorite assignments in the job with the Packers that she’d left behind, and he gave her a detailed description of the best way to make pasta. That was when she learned that the sound of Ben talking about food in a foreign language was just about the most arousing thing she’d ever heard.
They got in an argument about politics, and when she lit into him for never voting—actually lit into him, without thinking about it, as if she were the kind of person who upbraided other people for anything, ever—he snapped at her and then immediately apologized. They passed through ten miles of silence, during which she amazed herself by not worrying about it. He’ll get over that, she thought. And he did. He pulled into a rest area, unbuckled her seat belt, and tugged her into his lap to rest his forehead against hers. I’m sorry, he said. I suck.
You do suck, she agreed. But you have potential.
Making out in a van became her new favorite way of resolving an argument.
Sometimes they drove in silence that she felt no pressure to fill. Through the softly undulating landscape of Pennsylvania, the industrial sprawl of Gary, Chicago, and Milwaukee, she rode high above the highway in Ben’s Astro minivan—an impeccably clean twenty-five-year-old vehicle that smelled of beeswax. She shelled pistachios and passed them to him to eat as he drove, kissed him under the awning of a gas station and accepted his gifts of glazed doughnuts and Funyuns.
She joked with him and punched him playfully in the shoulder when he said something too disgusting to be permitted.
She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper into her body, deeper into her heart, deeper into her life.
But over and over again, mile after mile, she kept reminding herself, This is temporary. You are driving toward the end.
And then they reached it, and she still wasn’t ready.
* * *
When they turned onto her street, it was past nine o’clock.
