AllFreeNovel
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Non-future-focused. Non-confusing. Non-Allie-can’t-handle-this-right-now.
“What do you want to do?” she asked. Bea texted that she had “some intel” and wanted everyone to come to her coffeehouse during her shift so they could “talk strategy.” Everyone, apparently, meant Bea, Allie, and Winston, Nev and Cath, May, and Winston’s assistant, a woman named Chasity. It had all been arranged before Allie even learned about it from Winston.
It made her feel both pleased and overtaken.
“I’m not sure,” Winston said. “We could walk, perhaps? It’s a lovely day.”
The temperature had climbed. It was sweltering and humid. “Is it a British thing to always call the weather lovely unless it could actually kill you?”
He brushed lint off the pocket of his suit coat. “I suppose it is, yes. My mother—you should meet my mother, I think she’d enjoy you—she used to take us on holiday to Wales. We’d rent a small cottage and visit sheep farms, watch them make cheese, that sort of thing. She felt it was good for us to explore our heritage. Always, there would be at least one day when we went bathing, and the water would be cold enough to freeze your bollocks off, but you weren’t to say. You were to put up an umbrella, and a windbreak, spread out your towels on this gray shoreline with these absolutely frightful waves tumbling in, and say to each other, ‘Isn’t this perfectly lovely?’?”
“This is not dissimilar to what it’s like to jump into a lake in northern Michigan in June.”
“Something you’ve done a good deal of?”
“My family has a cabin in the U.P.” At his questioning look, she explained, “The Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s north of Wisconsin. Up by Canada.” Allie stood and stuck out her elbow. “Let’s walk.”
They didn’t, though—not right away. Winston decided there was somewhere in particular he wanted to take her, so he called Jean, and half an hour later they’d been deposited at a familiar location.
“This is your office.” She pointed to a familiar hot dog vendor. “There, that’s your hot dog stand.”
“You know, I’ve never purchased one of his hot dogs.”
“I had three with Jean. They are fucking delish. Where are we walking?”
“It’s this way.”
He led her southward, to Battery Park, and then they wandered its paths in a westerly direction. Winston looked around a lot, semicasually, but she didn’t ask whether he knew where they were going. It didn’t matter.
“Would you hold my hand?” she asked.
“Of course.”
He extended his, and she clasped their palms together. He was hot, too, probably overheating in his suit, his palm slightly damp in hers, but pleasant.
There were other couples strolling, too, young people and old people, a busy restaurant spilling waiting customers onto the sidewalk. The sun hit the water and the buildings at an angle, casting bright light into their eyes.
“This was on the list.” He said it with only mild curiosity, a cue she could pick up and run with or drop.
“It was.”
“You put it on.”
“I did.”
“?‘Walk, holding hands.’ Not so terribly racy as some of the other items.”
“No.”
“Yet you put it on. In the midst of thinking of racy things you wanted, you thought of this as well.”
“Yeah. Matt wasn’t…The thing is, everybody always told me how much he adored me. ‘Matt loves you so much,’ friends would tell me, or even strangers, and I’d tell myself, too, you know, ‘This guy loves you so much, don’t fuck it up.’?”
All those months and years she’d spent with Matt, the whole time certain that he loved her more than she loved him. The whole time worried that she needed to figure out how to love him more, to be more open and more generous, more demonstrative.
It wasn’t until after she’d moved out, and found herself living in May’s empty house, alone, without her dogs, without Matt, that she started to wonder, if he loved her so much, why didn’t he ever touch her? Why didn’t he seem more proud of the things she’d actually accomplished?
“When we first met,” she said, “he seemed really into me, like the way I dressed, like he was proud of all of me—but I think he was only attracted to those things as long as he didn’t feel responsible for them. Once I belonged to him, I was his, and he would tell people how much he loved me, but he didn’t do stuff that made me feel loved.”
