“They’re fine.” I ruffle her hair.
“No walking on the trails.”
I stretch a long strand of her hair above her head, rubbing the silky tress. When she looks up at me with her wide, Marley eyes, I pull her to her feet and kiss her temple. “I’m fine, Marley. Thank you for the fixing up.”
She wraps an arm around my waist. “You’re welcome.”
“I’ve gotta to grab some cleaner clothes. Meet you out front in a minute?”
“Sure.”
With boxer-briefs pressed in front of myself, for when I walk in front of the small, ruby-toned foyer windows, I head upstairs to the green room and put on different boxer-briefs, a ragged out pair of jeans, an off-white sweater my editor gave me last Christmas, some thick socks, and some loafter-ish type shoes that are more casual than loafers. More like low-top boots, I guess.
I look down at myself, and I hear Marley’s soft sound. She’s standing in the doorway, smirking at me.
“What?” I give her a mock outraged look.
“This is your room?” She looks around. I can’t deny it, because this place is fucking messy.
“Not the cleanest,” I say.
“Is that your computer?” She walks over toward it.
“Marley, Marley…”
“I forgot. You’re super private, aren’t you?”
“No,” I murmur, taking her hand. “I’m just ready to get going.”
She turns back toward the door, and I can see her eyes catch on the table: one that’s covered in pictures of Gen.
“You can look,” I tell her gruffly.
She walks slowly over, picks a frame up. “Gabe, she’s beautiful,” she whispers.
I watch as she stands there with her head bowed, studying the only other girl I’ve ever really loved. Been able to. I really tried with Madeline. I cared for her. Sometimes I wonder if the reason it never progressed was because she was always seeing Oliver behind my back.
“It was more like very close friends with her mother,” I whisper. I’m not sure why I do, because Marley didn’t ask. I feel the need to make her understand, though. “We met after I left Iowa—I went to college there for just a little while, but didn’t like it. Madeline and I were part of the same writers’ group.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know.” I step beside her and squeeze her hand, hoping that she’ll listen. She nods. “After you…I wanted different things. I knew why…I lost you,” I manage. “Not just drinking.”
Marley’s eyes on mine are soft…forgiving. So I swallow and continue. “I had the sense that I had wasted all this. All that time we lived together. I would always leave you waiting for me. I’d be out doing those fight nights, or locked in the room writing. The fucked up thing about it is, I think I liked it. I liked knowing you were…there waiting. It made me feel…calm.”
“It made you feel secure.” She slides her fingers between mine. “So you wanted to really get involved with someone after. Right?”
I nod. “And Madeline—when I met her, she was on the rebound. From this guy. The one who…”
When I don’t finish—I can’t fucking say it—Mar nods slowly.
“She pursued me. By the time her interest in me tapered off, she’d moved into my place.” I rub my head, which suddenly is aching. “From then on, I took care of…” I shake my head.
I took care of both of them. When Madeline had Gen eleven weeks early, she was on a deadline for a script. So it was me who sat in the NICU most days. “I always thought she looked like me.” I want to reach out and touch one of the pictures of my girl. I want it to be me she looks like.
Instead, I squeeze Marley’s hand, and we walk downstairs. I can’t tell who’s leading who. Outside, she goes behind the house to get her bike and meets me at the sidewalk with a smile. “You ready?”
“Yes ma’am.”
It’s only 7:40, but the night is cool and dark. The air bending around me sinks into my skin and gives our ride a charged feeling. Downtown Fate glides by, and I fix my gaze on Marley’s amazing ass. The streetlights cast a gold glow on her between long, dark streaks of shadow. We pass people going into restaurants, stepping out of bookstores, standing beside street lights. I coast down the hill toward the water, speeding up a notch to ride by Marley as the sidewalk widens.
I wonder, as I pedal, why she hung the swing. Why did I find her there when I got back to the house? I wanted her so fucking much, and there she was.
Then we’re at the boardwalk, surrounded by people, vendors, lights… It’s a quiet night, but this stone walkway by the lake is always busy.
Marley locks our bikes and takes my hand and finds a burger booth for us.
“The whole shebang?” she asks me.
I smile slightly. “Mayo and cheese for you?”
She nods. “Always.”
I order and pay—because dammit, I’m not handing in my man card quite yet—and we drift toward a row of wooden benches tucked between blazing red trees, the ground around them covered in a crimson carpet.
“This is perfect,” Marley murmurs. She drinks her Dr. Pepper, and I start into my burger.
“Damn, that’s fucking good.”
“I think it’s venison,” she says, inhaling near hers with a dreamy face.
We eat in mostly silence. Marley smiles when a girl maybe ten or twelve bumps over the stone pathway on a hot pink skateboard, but she frowns when she shifts her eyes to me.
“Everything makes you think about her, doesn’t it?”
I don’t know what to say, so I just shrug.
Mar settles back against the bench, and then I feel her forehead lean against my upper arm.
“I hope you know there’s no strings here,” she says, so soft I almost don’t hear. “I’m in a pretty good place. I’ve got a lot of good friends, and I’m surprised to find this—this thing we’re doing—isn’t even really stressing me.”
That makes me bark a laugh. “Well that sounds like a ringing endorsement.”
She laughs, too. “Really, though. I just wanted to spend time with you. I can be your friend, Gabe.”
I turn to her, and there’s only one thought in my head. “A friend you fuck, who puts your Band-Aids on and remembers how you like your burgers twelve years later? Mar, that’s not a friend.”
Her eyes close as she tilts her head just slightly. “Maybe not.”
I lean in and kiss her lips, gently, the way I wish I had back then. And when I pull away, she’s beaming.
“You’re good for the ego,” I say as I lean over to toss my wrapper in a garbage can.
She hops up, too, and tosses hers, and looks down the stone pathway.
“I don’t want to go back over that way toward the dock,” she says, nodding behind us. “Let’s walk toward the beach.”
*
Marley
I’m holding his hand as we walk onto the beach. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Gabe is solemn—his hand big and warm around mine, his face beautiful and still. It’s as if no time has passed between that night when we held hands and wandered down The Strip. What’s between us is a dark pull, more strange than sweet, more like need and less like want, more like fate and less like choice.