More laughter.
“It’s about the hardships and sorrows of the universal human experience, Jonathan.”
He nibbles on my ear a little too hard. “Still better than 2001, Elsie.”
“Obviously.” Something occurs to me. “By the way, is Millicent okay?”
“Yup. Why do you ask?”
“It’s Sunday. Shouldn’t she be calling you with a vital emergency? Isn’t the newspaper boy tossing the Times into her rosebushes or something?”
“Pretty sure newspaper delivery hasn’t worked like that since the early 2000s. And she did her weekend routine yesterday. Sent a photo of an alligator coming out of a toilet in a Florida gas station. Claimed it was happening in her en suite.”
“She knows how to send pictures?”
“Impressive, right?” He drums his fingers against my stomach. “I stopped by for lunch. Gave her the novel. Got scolded for not taking you.”
“Oh.” I flush. With . . . pleasure?
“Can’t remember the last time she liked someone. Not that she’d admit to liking you.”
I laugh. Then, after a few seconds, I hazard, “She told me she liked your mom.”
There is a change in Jack, but not for the worse. He doesn’t stiffen, just seems less relaxed, a little more on guard when he says, “I think so.”
I’m encouraged. “She was a physicist, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Theoretical?”
He lets out a deep, overacted sigh that lifts me up and down. “Unfortunately.” I pinch his forearm in retaliation. Rudely, he doesn’t notice.
I’m tempted to bring up the article. Find out how he could do something like that to his mother—to all of us—and demand that he take ownership of its consequences. But I also don’t want to disrupt this . . . fragile, new, radiant thing we have. And after a bit of arm wrestling, the latter pull wins, and what I ask is “Do you have memories of her?”
I feel him shake his head. “She died too early.”
“Did she”—I roll around till I’m facedown on top of him—“look like you?”
“There aren’t many pictures. My family mostly scrubbed the house clean of them.”
If he’s bitter about it, I cannot tell. “When did you take her last name?”
He laughs softly. “That was Millicent’s decision, actually. She had me legally change it when I was ten. I think she felt uncharacteristically guilty.” He pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. “I do know that she was Swedish. Blond. Her eyes had the same weird . . .”
“Heterochromia?”
“Yeah. She was taller than my father. And kept some detailed diaries about her work. Millicent gave them to me when I started becoming obsessed with physics.”
“Did she have any publications?”
His jaw works. “Just two. She got married halfway through her doctorate and didn’t go back to work after she had me. Her diagnosis came quickly after.” His tone is wary, like he’s choosing his words carefully.
“Why didn’t she go back?”
He exhales. “There were . . . issues. With the lead researcher of her group.”
“Why?”
“They had some . . . disagreement over their joint research. He was intensely controlling. She refused to abide. You can imagine the rest.” His face is blank. “Her diaries are . . . She wasn’t well when she found out that she wouldn’t be allowed back.”
“That’s bullshit. How dare he cut her out of her own research group?”
Jack doesn’t respond. His pause feels a little longer than normal. “Her work was on semiconductors.”
My eyes widen. It’s not my field, but I know a bit about it, because it’s one of the topics my mentor works on. I wonder if I read Jack’s mom’s papers years ago without even realizing it. An invisible string, tying us together. “Good stuff?”
“Very solid, yes.”
“I bet she was great. I mean, she was a theoretical physicist.”
“True. On the other hand, she did marry my dad.”
“Good point. Maybe he used to be more . . . engaged with his surroundings?”
“Maybe. Maybe she needed a green card? Or the Smith money.”
“She was a grad student. It’s a move I can respect.”
“For sure.” His smile is fond. And has me asking, “Do you miss her?”
A long pause. “I don’t think you can miss someone you’ve never met, but . . .” He organizes his thoughts. Orders his feelings. “It’s easy to look at how dysfunctional my family is and laugh it off now that I have my own life. But when I was in my teens, there were times when things got really bad at home. And I’d read her diaries and think that maybe if she’d been around, everything could have been . . .” His throat works. “But she wasn’t.”
I’ve felt out of place my entire life, and nothing anyone ever said made me feel any less so. So I stay silent and just lean forward, hide my face in Jack’s throat, press a kiss to his Adam’s apple right as it moves. His hand comes up to cup my head, keep it there, and I feel him turn to the screen again. Bella’s pregnancy complications are getting alien-like, and he groans into my hair.
“Elsie. I can’t watch this.”
“But it’s the best part. The emotional roller coaster of her transformation. The inappropriate Jacob plotline. Her face when she drinks blood.”
“No way.”
“Fine. You may amuse yourself otherwise. But stay close, because you’re a space heater disguised as an organic life-form.”
“Perfect.” He lifts me like I’m a pliant little thing, flips us around, braces himself over me. I can only watch him in confusion while he lowers himself down my body with a concentrated frown between his brows and then lifts my hoodie as though . . .
Is he . . .
He’s not . . .
Is he actually?
“What are you doing?”
“You told me to amuse myself.”
I sit up on my elbows. “I meant take another nap, or do today’s Wordle—”
“Just watch your movie, Elsie.”
“But—”
He takes my hips within his hands and holds me like I’m a precious artifact, at once firm and gentle. His kisses between my legs are long, savoring, messy, slow licks that have me arching up against the couch and trembling into his mouth. There is something shameless about this—the way he enjoys it, the sounds he makes, the fact that he seems to go away at moments, like he does this for his pleasure more than for my own.
“Oh,” I say, clawing my nails into his scalp. His arms wrap around my thighs, palms holding my knees open, and for a while I manage to swallow down the begging, moaning sounds in my throat. Then no more. “Oh. Oh, Jack” and I come once, then once again, then some more, and then his shirt is off and he’s above and inside me, patient thrusts as he kisses me endlessly and tells me how beautiful I am, how much he loves this. Breathless laughter against my gasps as he reminds me of when I was afraid that this wouldn’t be good between us—that this resplendent, life-altering, unearthly sort of pleasure might not be enough.
“It was cute,” he rasps in my ear, “how you thought that fucking you once would make me want to fuck you less.”
I cling to the sweaty muscles of his back, feel my entire body shake, and when he orders, “Eyes on me,” my lids flutter open and we both come. The pressure in my belly and chest is heavy, overwhelming, delicious, and my nails sink into his shoulders as the evening becomes night.
“Second time we do this with Twilight in the background,” he says.
“I can’t believe we missed the part when Bella beats up Jacob.”
“Jesus, Elsie, what is this movie?”
The room is pitch black except for the glow of the TV. I laugh into Jack’s skin, and it feels just like coming home.
* * *
? ? ?
He won’t let me leave. Though, to be fair, I’m not trying very hard.
“I have class at eight a.m. tomorrow.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“At Boston University.”
“Still doesn’t matter.”
“I need to get to my place, get dressed, pick up my stuff, take the bus—”
“I’ll drive you.”
“Drive me where?”
“Anywhere.”
I’m sitting on the counter while he chops carrots for the soup I’m craving. The recipe is pulled up on his phone, a bright-red ad for a couples’ cooking class blinking at us from the counter. “You’d have to wake up at, like, six. I cannot ask you to do that.”
He sets down the knife and comes to stand between my legs. Even like this, he’s taller than me. I’m trying to resent him for that, but my heart has grown a million sizes in the span of the last seven days. It’s about to float away into the sky.
“You don’t have to ask.” He kisses the tip of my nose, then my mouth, then my nose again. “Because I’m offering.”
My heart swells some more. I’m running out of space. “What if I say no?”
“Don’t do that. Okay?” I break into a smile, and his hand slides under my hoodie and up my waist.
I love this. Just as much as I thought I hated him. And Jack’s right: this is going fast—too fast, maybe. But I wonder if certain relationships are living proof of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: their position and their velocity simply cannot both be measured at the same time, not even in theory. And right now I’m too busy savoring where we are to consider anything else.
“What?” he asks.