My neck turned a hotter red. I felt it blistering the back of my shirt.
Taking a deep breath, I circled around the back of the car. At the passenger door, he turned me quickly and kissed me, and then an animal grew between us and I could not kiss him deeply enough, could not cling to him with enough force. It was the kiss we had experienced in the fencing studio all over again. He bent me back until I worried I would snap in half, and I nearly did. I put my hand out and braced myself against his chest, and suddenly nothing in the world mattered very much except Jack’s kiss, his body, his smell of wood and mud and rivers.
Then we kissed some more. And it took me a few more minutes to realize my back wasn’t snapping after all, but that the Ben and Jerry’s pint had pushed against my skin along my beltline and turned it cold.
22
I looked down and watched the speedometer push above 137 kilometers per hour. Jack sat in the passenger seat, the spoon he had brought digging down into the Chocolate Fudge Brownie.
“Oh, this is a good bite,” he said. “A really good bite. When I was a kid, we used to call a really good bite a Sing-Sing. This is a Sing-Sing for sure.”
And he fed me a bite. A Sing-Sing, whatever the hell that was.
I pushed the accelerator and brought the car up to 145.
“I’m going faster,” I said.
He nodded and went back to digging me another spoonful, digging for more Sing-Sings.
*
Somewhere around 161 kph in an open car, you feel the corners of your mouth push back. It’s one hundred miles an hour, and the car is a bullet and you are simply riding it.
You also realize that anything, anything at all, could flip you and kill you and you don’t care. You wait with your mouth open, the gorgeous taste of chocolate coming to you now and then like a divine explosion on your tongue, and you push more out of the car, give it gas, and you glance over and see that Jack, lovely Jack, does not cling to the hand rest or show any signs of nervousness. He is happy to go this fast, and he patiently doles out dabs of chocolate until you can’t help it, you scream out in some weird caterwaul, and you wonder how you have never thought to go this fast, to rent a Mercedes for a day in Germany, or have a man feed you ice cream while the countryside passes by like a blur.
*
I topped out at 172 kph.
It was enough.
Jack nodded as I brought the speed back to a normal range.
It felt like falling to come back into the world.
“How did that feel?” Jack asked, giving me the last spoonful of Ben and Jerry’s.
“Amazing.”
“You looked beautiful driving that fast. You looked possessed.”
“I felt possessed.”
“I didn’t like being apart from you, Heather. It didn’t feel right.”
I took a deep breath. I wanted to be clear. My body still tingled from the speed.
“New York is not a prison I am building for myself. It’s the start of my professional life. I am going to work, and I am going to travel, and I am going to surround myself with good human beings, and I am going to try to do charity work and be kind to puppies, and what the hell is so wrong with that, Jack? Why does that constitute a prison?”
“It doesn’t. And if I went with you, it couldn’t be prison, could it? We’d be in it together.”
“You want to go with me?”
“You’re not going to say we’ve only just met? That we need time?”
“You didn’t answer if you want to go with me.”
“Would you have me?”
“You still haven’t answered.”
“I would go with you. Yes. Maybe, probably. Yes.”
I nodded. I couldn’t help it. I had no idea if we had come to some sort of an understanding. I opened my mouth to ask for clarification, but then I shut it. For once in my life I didn’t have to make everything tidy. It did not seem fair to go a hundred miles per hour and then worry about precision in language. Not in the same interval.
He took my hand and held it. He only let it go when I needed to shift.
*
I checked in with nothing. No bag, no suitcase, no clothes carrier. Nothing. I wore my hair in a ponytail, and I smelled of sweat. At a hostel, it would not have been much of an issue. But this was not a hostel. Not by a long shot.
It was the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, a five-star hotel on Unter den Linden with a killer view of the Brandenburg Gate. A killer view. It was a place my parents might have stayed. It was big and stylish with royal-purple lobby chairs and potted plants as tall as Christmas trees. An enormous check-in desk took up one side of the hotel lobby, and a flurry of bellboys and luggage handlers zipped around wearing determined looks. The stone floor let out an occasional squeak, but otherwise the hotel had a decorous silence—a good silence, not an uncomfortable one, that promised the staff had not been distracted by the usual electronic nonsense that infiltrated most modern establishments. The hotel felt elegant without being old, serene without being library-like.
“A room for two,” Jack said. “I phoned for a reservation.”
“Yes, sir.”
I liked this side of Jack. I liked his manner with the desk clerk; I liked that he felt comfortable in this environment. I suspected he could be comfortable on a Vermont farm, too, or in a lovely hotel, and I had to give him points for that. I also liked that he took for granted that we would stay together, that we would ride up in an elevator and take up residence in one of the rooms. It wasn’t a particularly feminist stance, but I admired that he took some responsibility for our comfort. I had years of dating in high school and college when boys looked nervously around themselves and tried to figure out what was required of them. Jack provided a different experience. Clearly he had traveled enough to navigate exchanges like these.
“Before we go up, I think we should buy you a dress,” he said when he finished with the desk clerk. “We can go up to our room in a while.”
“A dress?”
“For dinner. We need to eat dinner, don’t we? By reputation, they have a pretty great dining room.”
“Jack, the expense—”
He leaned over and kissed me. He had it covered, I guessed. I knew I sure didn’t.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s a splurge.”
He took my hand and led me back through the lobby toward a small row of boutiques just outside the hotel. I felt a little upside down. I had planned for a brief workout, then maybe a salad for lunch, but within the course of a few hours, I had taken a car over one hundred miles per hour, eaten a bunch of Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream, and checked into the nicest hotel I had ever visited. Strangely, I also felt my stomach calm, as if being with Jack was something it knew I needed even if my mind did not. We had just the beginning, just the start, of the familiarity a man and woman can gain when they are left to their own devices. Nevertheless, it felt as if we had crossed an important line.