*
Now, just inside my apartment, Tom pushed me into the wall and kissed me hard in the dark. His hands found my shoulders and peeled off my leather jacket and dropped it to the floor with a jangle of zippers and loose change, and I hooked my thumbs into his belt loops and pulled him close to me so there wasn’t even the suggestion of space between us. He smelled good, like fresh air and pine, and his mouth was soft and hungry. “I want you right here,” he whispered, his voice equal parts intensity and restraint. Our respective carryout dinners were forgotten.
“I have a bed,” I whispered between kisses. Everything about the day was beginning to recede from my mind like a tide.
“I want you there too,” he said.
He pulled my hands away from his hips and pressed them against the wall at my sides, slowly sliding my arms up over my head so he could hold both of my wrists in one hand. My breath caught in my throat. This was what I liked most, the way he wasn’t careful with me. He could be rough and tender at all the right times and he was different in private—assured and almost playful, unlike the reserved way he carried himself the rest of the time. He slipped his other hand under the hem of my shirt, his fingers at once hot and cold on my bare skin as he undid the button on my jeans and slid the zipper down so slowly I couldn’t stand it. Then he parted my legs with his knee. I arched toward him, my whole body humming.
Afterward we lay on my bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, left over from the previous tenant like the paint colors. Tom was gently brushing the inside of my wrist with his thumb. It was like we were camping, gazing at the real night sky. We hadn’t bothered with most of our clothes. “I needed you,” he said, “after the last few weeks I’ve had.”
I wanted to be annoyed at him for saying that, but I wasn’t. “Do you want to tell me about it?” I said instead.
He tipped his head toward me. Out of the corner of my eye it looked like he was about to launch into something. But then his features relaxed. “Nah,” he said. “Just the usual bureaucratic bullshit. A million miles away right now.”
“Good.” I liked him like this, relaxed and open. The night of the funeral had been a protest fuck, an act of defiance. But we’d seen each other quite a few times in the nine months since. There was nothing to it, just stress relief, pain relief, all of the above. But I still needed those things. I turned toward him and put my head on his shoulder. He slid his arm underneath me and made a soft noise in his throat and I played with the buttons on his plaid shirt. “I like this. It’s nice and worn.”
“It should be, it’s twenty years old,” he said. “I’m into dark territory in the closet. Alice in Chains T-shirts are next. Everything else fits like a windsail.”
“And it just makes you furious,” I said.
“Stark raving mad,” he said. “It just kills me, the things people say to me sometimes lately, like, I’m thrilled they want me to know I look better now that I’m depressed.”
I rested my chin on my arm and looked him in the eye. He was doing better than he had been during the spring and summer, but I knew what he meant. “But just so you know, I always thought you were a stud,” I said.
Tom laughed in a way that seemed to take him by surprise. Then he cupped his hand around the back of my head and pulled me in for a kiss, and it said everything.
Maybe it said too much.
SIX
I walked to the patisserie on Oak Street for breakfast and drank a cup of tea and ordered the white African sweet potato tart, which was not a breakfast food, so I got it to go in a little paper box in order to pretend it was for later. The neighborhood was caught in midgentrification right now, and though I approved of the introduction of exotic pastries, I hoped Olde Towne wasn’t going to get much nicer. I walked back home in the bright, cold morning air and tried to imagine who I might be appear to be: a rich lady buying a dessert tart for a Tuesday-night dinner party and checking items off a to-do list, instead of a slightly hungover detective inordinately proud of herself for being out and about before eleven o’clock and planning to eat half—no, most—of the dessert tart while driving. But when I got back over to Bryden Road, I saw a slim figure in a vintage-looking green wool coat in the doorway of my building between the two brick-enclosed porches, writing something on a large manila envelope. It was Catherine. I was glad I hadn’t started eating the tart as I walked.
“Have sketch, will travel?” I said as I approached her from behind.
“Hi,” she said as she turned around. Her long blond hair was twisted away from her face in wavy sections. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of oversize sunglasses with white frames. She looked, as always, like she had stepped from the pages of an Anthropologie catalogue.
“That was fast,” I said.
“Well,” Catherine said. “Danielle called me not ten minutes after I talked to you, so I thought I should get it to you quickly.”
“Do you want to come in?”
“I can’t,” she said.
We looked at each other. Or, she looked at me while I looked at my reflection in the lenses of her sunglasses. “Let me see your eyes,” I said.
She didn’t smile but she pushed the sunglasses into her hair. Her eyes were lovely, pale green and sparkling. “Hi,” she said again.
“Hello.”
I hoped she wouldn’t ask how I was holding up or if I was seeing anyone or say that I looked great or that I looked awful, and she didn’t. Instead she handed me the envelope and flipped her sunglasses back down, nodding at the grease-spotted box I was carrying. “What’ve you got in there?”
“It’s not breakfast, I swear,” I said, and she finally smiled. “Come in so I can pay you, and we can share.”
Catherine lifted the sunglasses again. “I really have to go,” she said. “And you don’t have to pay me, it only took an hour.”
“I’ll get dinner then,” I said, “the next time we have dinner.”
“We’re not going to have dinner, Roxane. You know I can’t see you right now.”
I did know, though this knowledge was somewhat confounded by the fact that she was standing here. She could have sent the sketch with Danielle, but she hadn’t.
I placed the tart on the brick ledge formed by the wall of my porch and pried up the edges of the metal brad that secured the envelope. Then I pulled a thick sheet of paper out of the envelope and took in Catherine’s work. As usual, it looked effortless and yet eerily realistic, a charcoal sketch depicting a woman with sad eyes and a spray of freckles across her nose. Her face was fuller than in the yearbook photo, her mouth more pulled in at the corners. But it resembled Sarah Cook, at least a little.
“It’s very good,” I said. “Which I’m sure you know. Thanks.”
“I hope it helps.”
“Me too.”