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I walk my hands up his chest and wrap them around his neck. The knife’s edge he’s treading feels closer than it has for hours, within sighting distance. So I swallow my questions.
“I’m grateful you trusted me with it, Anthony.”
He reaches up and cups my cheek, eyes inscrutable. It’s not the first time I can’t read him.
I doubt it will be the last.
“Thanks for listening,” he murmurs. Kisses me again, and like so many times before, it derails my thoughts entirely.
I’m breathing hard when I lift my head. “So?” I ask. “What happens when we get back to New York?”
He groans. “Is it crazy that I wish we could just stay here? For the first time ever, I quite like the privacy of this house.”
I push a lock of half-dried hair from his forehead. “I have couples to set up. Matches to make. Love to create and sparks to fly.”
“Right. You have to shoot Cupid’s bow.”
“Exactly. Hey, doesthis,you and me, mean I technically won the bet? Because you did go on a date with me too, you know. I remember.”
“Mmm, so do I. We saved some rainforest together.”
“You saved it. Well, contributed to saving it.”
“You were valuable moral support,” he says.
“I accept,” I say. “Now, does it or does it not mean that I was right? About Opate Match?”
Anthony grins, and it’s a full-fledged smile, wide and true and dazzling. It takes my breath away. “Don’t gloat, Summer,” he says, but the way he kisses me is a clear yes.
19
Anthony
Summer’s small bed is wedged in the corner of her too-small bedroom, and the linens are always rumpled. They smell like her, though. Of shampoo and perfume and warm woman.
The cups in her kitchen are mismatched. Her bowls are handmade, courtesy of a course in ceramics she took with her mother one summer.
And, as I’ve learned over the week since we got back from Montauk, she isn’t all sunshine. No, she’s not human until she has her first cup of coffee in the morning. Discovering that had been a balm to my own inadequacies, despite the mountain they represent next to her speedbump.
We’re lying on her couch, her back pressed to my front, a discarded pizza box on the floor from her favorite restaurant. I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of her hair.
I’ve never thought I had an addictive personality, but clearly, I’d just never tried the right drug. Because Summer is all I crave. Here, in this small, eclectic apartment, the rest of the world doesn’t exist. All the shit I don’t like to deal with—the shit I ignore—can’t touch us here.
Here, I have fun.
I’m alive.
The bitter contrast to my own dark and empty townhouse was enough to drive me straight to bed yesterday, curtains drawn.
“Oh, listen to this,” Summer says. She’s reading the paper and has been entertaining me over the past half an hour by reading things aloud that she finds interesting.
She finds a lot of things interesting.
I find critiquing her findings interesting.
It’s a solid combo.
“The city is hiring street artists to paint murals of famous birds in five different subway stations,” she says. “Isn’t that nice?”
