“I didn’t ask you when. I asked you why.”
He’s quiet for so long, I wonder how bad his answer is going to be even though this doesn’t feel like any time to be honest—or maybe his silence says everything I need to know, that there is no real why. I could be any body.
“The red,” he says. “I don’t know. Just something about it made you…” He trails off when I want him to finish. Made me what? “I just thought, God, introduce me to that girl.”
He brings his hands lightly to my hips, asking me to face him and if I do, I know he’ll kiss me. I swallow, my mouth desert dry. This is it, isn’t it? This moment won’t pass. It has to happen. I turn and when I see him, he’s beautiful and I want that and it scares me and I kiss him and he kisses me back and I get so lost in it, I have to open my eyes to remind myself whose mouth is against mine.
The pressure of his lips is intense, gentle. I press against him and we take awkward, shuffling steps back. I put my hands against his cheeks. His skin is warm against my palms. He takes a breath and pulls me closer even though there’s no space between us as it is, and his touch is hungry, searching, like however much of me he has isn’t enough. We reach the bed. He sits and I put myself between his legs and he puts his arms around me and we fall onto the mattress. I’m dizzy with how he guides my body to it, like he doesn’t have to think about it at all, he just understands. And then I’m underneath him. Leon.
He brings his mouth close to my neck, and then runs his tongue against it and my skin tingles, everywhere. He’s hard. Against me.
Leon.
This is Leon.
I meet his lips with my own. And then his fingers tease the edge of my shirt, tugging at it, his hands trying to find a way under it and that’s when I still. His hand, my shirt. Close my eyes.
“Stop,” I whisper.
He—stops.
I open my eyes. He moves off me slowly, carefully, and blinks, dazed, like he was gone from his body or too far in it. He runs his hand over his face.
“Why’d you stop?” I ask.
He stares at me funny. “You want to…” His voice cracks. He exhales and tries again. “How about we get you something to eat.”
He stands and holds his hand out. I stare at it.
He doesn’t think I’m sober.
He doesn’t think I’m sober and he’s taking me out of the room with the bed in it.
We go back outside to the table full of food. He secures a paper plate in my hand and asks me what I like, tells me what he thinks I should try. Caro is there and she looks at Leon and then she looks at me and she smiles like she knows exactly what we were up to.
Later, after he drops me off at home, it feels like the world has shifted a little. It’s just different enough that when I look at the girl reflected in the mirror in my room, it’s like meeting someone new.
todd stands at the screen door and frowns at the layer of dust that’s been coating the New Yorker since we went to the Barn and has only gotten worse after he took the back roads out to Andrew Ryan’s house to see about the engine. Ryan is a prematurely retired mechanic who got pushed out of his seventy-year-old family business by Grebe Auto Supplies. Only trustworthy mechanic in town, Todd says, but he could be a crook, really—only thing that matters is he’s not a Turner. The engine’s good now, but the car’s black finish is mottled with dirt. It fits more with its surroundings than it doesn’t, but it’s driving Todd crazy.
“No rain,” he murmurs. “Wind’s not blowing it off.”
“You’re going to have to do something about it then,” Mom says.
“I know. I’m trying to decide if a wash and polish is worth the hurt.”
Todd ends the night and starts his morning with pills so his pain never really catches up to him, but he’s still got to pick and choose what he does carefully. He’s only good for about an hour in the car, behind the wheel. When it’s someone else driving, maybe an hour more, and that’s pushing it. Any heavy lifting is always someone else’s job. Todd knows what people say about him, that he’s lazy, good for nothing. But he does what he can when he can, whether or not they see, and fuck them for not seeing it. I offer to help him wash it.
The smile Mom gives me when I do goes all the way to her eyes because our being together in this house, air not thick with drama or tension—she’s wanted something this easy for so long and this is what having it looks like on her face. I think I’d kill the person who tried to take it away from her.
“That’d be great,” Todd says.
He heads upstairs and Mom goes to the sink and fills an old bucket with soapy water. When he comes back down, he’s shirtless and he’s got a ratty old undershirt in his hands. He pulls it over his head and Mom watches. I notice the way her eyes linger on his chest, his arms. She blushes. I swear I can see the skip of her heart.
I can’t remember her looking at my dad like that but she must have.
“This’ll go twice as fast with you,” Todd says. He goes into the hall for his shoes, reappears with them on a minute later. He never wears shoes with laces. Too hard to bend down and tie. “I appreciate it. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do on a Sunday afternoon.”
“Not really.”
Mom hands him some rags and a bucket. “A late lunch awaits you both.”
I follow Todd to the New Yorker, a mess. He makes me go around the house for the hose, and we start there, giving it a rinse. We could probably stop there if we wanted—looks good enough to anyone passing by—but Todd wants to prove he can make it gleam, so we keep going, working up a sweat.
“Wake Lake this Friday, huh?” he asks after a while and now I know Wake Lake is this Friday. “Andrew was talking about it. Figured it’d be soon.”
“You ever go?” I ask. “When it was your turn?”
“I did.” He squeezes some soapy water over the windshield. “You going?”