Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  May was leaving, and he was quietly flipping out.

  Time had gone funny on him, moving in lurches and gasps. The seconds had ticked by slow as anything in bed this morning. In the dim light that snuck through the half-open bedroom door, he’d watched her face when he clasped her hands and lifted them above her head. He’d sunk inside her, captivated by her short, harsh breaths and the way her pleasure so closely resembled pain. Drawing it out, he’d kept his thrusts slow and controlled through her orgasm, then rolled onto his back and guided her hips in a rocking rhythm that kept him just shy of where he needed to be.

  He’d stayed there with her for an eternity. A lifetime of May rising and falling over him, her soft skin beneath his hands, his mouth on her nipples, his fingers tracing the shapes of their joined bodies.

  But afterward, time sped up. She got out of the bed, and he was somehow dressed, choosing produce at the market while she showered. He was behind the counter in the tiny kitchen, mixing dough while she talked on the phone. Chopping shallots while she bent over his laptop a few feet away.

  And then time buckled again, and they were eating, side by side, his hair wet from the shower while the pans he’d used to make way too much food soaked in soapy water in the sink.

  He couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t stupid.

  Thanks for staying with me.

  The sex was incredible.

  I’ll miss you.

  He’d miss her. Did she know that? He hoped she did, but he had no intention of telling her. He shoveled potatoes into his mouth.

  “I need to talk to Dan,” she said.

  Ben swallowed wrong and started to cough. It bent him over the counter, streaks of pain in his chest making his eyes water. For the span of a few seconds, he felt wretched everywhere, deep inside his bones where the marrow hid, blood-dark and unfixable.

  “Ben? Are you choking? Stand up and let me see your face. You’re scaring me.”

  He straightened, wiping his eyes, and she looked at him. Looked into his eyes and saw too much.

  “I’m fine,” he wheezed. He grabbed his water glass and forced air into his lungs, holding his breath as his diaphragm convulsed. When he drank, his chest calmed, and he was able to say, “Just swallowed funny. Why do you need to talk to him?”

  The lines around her mouth deepened. “I was going to buy a ticket, but at the last minute like this, it’s more than I should spend. I have to ask Dan if he can change the original one. That’s only a hundred and fifty dollars. But I think he’s flying today, so I’ll probably have to leave a message and wait … I don’t know. Maybe I should just buy it.”

  Ben turned back to his food. Put something in his mouth. Chewed it. He couldn’t say what it was—fruit or meat or bread. Nothing tasted right. His ears buzzed with the sound of swarming bees.

  “I’ll buy you the ticket.”

  “You can’t. It’s too much. I think this is, like, a business travel fare, or something—it’s more than a thousand bucks, and the website says there’s only a few seats left at that price.”

  “So you’d better lock it in quick.”

  “It’s better if I call Dan. I’d be able to pay you back, but I don’t want to spend that much.”

  “I don’t mean I’ll loan you the money, I mean I’ll buy it. You shouldn’t have to talk to him after … not so soon. Not if you don’t want to. And it’s too complicated anyway. Easier to go ahead and buy the goddamn ticket.”

  “I couldn’t take that much from you. Not when you’re …” She made a looping gesture with her hand that meant nothing.

  “I have the money. Let me.”

  She stared into her coffee cup. She wasn’t eating much. He wondered if she felt as sick as he did.

  “I have to see him anyway. He’s good friends with Matt. He’ll be at the wedding.” She tried to smile. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll call him, and that’s better, right? It’s more grown up. So nobody feels uncomfortable or anything.”

  Ben imagined May making nice with a good-looking Viking in a tux who’d as much as told the whole world there was something wrong with her. A man who’d proposed to her with words so offensive that she’d stabbed him for it.

  He tried to set his fork down, but it hit the plate with a clatter, skittered along the countertop, and landed on the floor.

  Don’t be like that, he wanted to say. Be the way you are with me.

  He had no right to tell her how to be. Nothing but the feeblest kind of hold over her. He just couldn’t stand the idea of releasing it. Not if she would go back to a life so circumscribed and not-May.

  And yet he knew there was no way he could hold her. They’d agreed that this was a break for her, a vacation from reality, and even if they wanted to make it real—if May wanted to leave her life with Dan and make a life with him, somehow—he couldn’t imagine what that would look like.

  He had to focus on his goals. Find an apartment. Calm himself down, put himself back together so he could be ready for that restaurant and maybe, someday, for May. Or for someone like her.

  Even though there wasn’t anybody like May.

  “Ben?”

  Her eyes were soft with concern, unhurt by the sudden stiffness in his posture. Unafraid of falling forks or his flailing feelings.

  He wanted her with him for a few days longer. This May. This one without fear, who told him what she wanted. This May who’d put her soft pink mouth around his cock when he was still knocked flat from their first round of sex last night. Who’d driven him crazy with her fingers and her tongue and her gentle, teasing questions.

  Like this, Ben? Here?

  He wanted her. He wanted that her.

  The words emerged from his mouth at almost the same instant the idea came to him. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “You …” May blinked. “What?”

  “If I drive you, you don’t even have to worry about the plane ticket.”

  “You have to move out, right? Isn’t Alec coming back?”

  He looked around the apartment. He’d forgotten. “Most of this is Alec’s. If you give me a few hours, I can pack, and we can put my stuff in the van, or in the storage at Figs if there’s too much. Cecily won’t care.”

  “It’s—it’s far,” she said. She hadn’t stopped frowning. “It’s a long drive.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. Let me check.”

  She crossed to the couch and grabbed the open laptop. Her fingers clattered over the keyboard, and then she leaned in to read. “Sixteen hours?”

  “Two days.”

  Her face came up from the screen, and she met his eyes. “Four days, for you. There and back. I can’t ask you to—”

  “You didn’t ask. I offered.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got the bees and the garden. Plus, don’t you kind of hate Wisconsin? You said—”

  “The garden will be fine, and the bees can survive on their own for a lot longer than four days.” He stepped closer. “I can handle a few hours inside the borders of Wisconsin. And anyway, you don’t need to think about whether I really want to drive you or why I’m offering. All you need to decide is whether you want to spend two more days with me.”

  As soon as he’d said the words, he regretted them. Because what if she didn’t? She could hardly say no now without being rude.

  He skirted the couch and sat down beside her, pulling the laptop from her grip and sitting it on top of the coffee table. He wanted to see her eyes when she answered him.

  He grabbed her hands and asked again. “Do you want to?”

  She looked at his fingers intertwined with hers. Her thumb brushed over the back of his hand in a gentle sweep. Back and forth.

  He saw the smile before she lifted her face. The apples of her cheeks rose. The bridge of her nose wrinkled. And then her eyes came up, full of dark amusement and delight.

  “Two more days? Of course I want to.”

  Of course she wanted to.

  Of course she
was smiling at him, squeezing his fingers.

  She was May.

  Of course.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  May learned a hundred things about Ben in the next two days.

  That he had so few personal possessions, there was room to spare in the backseat of the van after they loaded it up, but he had an obscene amount of bee-keeping equipment stored in the rooftop shed at his friends’ restaurant.

  That he kept his chef’s knives in a metal toolbox that he packed into the space behind the driver’s seat, and when he locked the van, he did it with his eyes on that toolbox, as if he were assuring himself it would stay put.

  She learned that he navigated easily through city traffic but preferred empty stretches of highway, where he liked to drive with one arm out the window, his fingers tapping along to the music, his shoulders relaxed and his mouth quick to smile.

  She learned that he liked beef jerky, root beer, and—when they stopped for lunch—chicken stew with dumplings. That he liked it when she sang along with the radio, but he refused to join in.

  She learned how the sunset light could make his profile glow, as if he’d been drawn with a sparkler against a saturated backdrop of pink and orange and red.

  She learned the feel of his chest hair against her cheek and lips and nipples, the jumping contractions of his stomach muscles as she tongued a path down his body. How hard his fingers could dig in when she made him frantic. The rough jerk of his hips after a long day of innuendo and building heat.

  By some silent, mutual agreement, they didn’t talk about anything important. She didn’t ask him what he thought he’d do with the money his ex had given him or why he didn’t seem to be doing anything with it at all. He didn’t ask her when she planned to call Dan or what she would say to him.

  They talked instead about childhood Saturday morning cartoon rituals. They discussed organic farming and argued over Disney movies. She told him about some of her favorite assignments in the job with the Packers that she’d left behind, and he gave her a detailed description of the best way to make pasta. That was when she learned that the sound of Ben talking about food in a foreign language was just about the most arousing thing she’d ever heard.

  They got in an argument about politics, and when she lit into him for never voting—actually lit into him, without thinking about it, as if she were the kind of person who upbraided other people for anything, ever—he snapped at her and then immediately apologized. They passed through ten miles of silence, during which she amazed herself by not worrying about it. He’ll get over that, she thought. And he did. He pulled into a rest area, unbuckled her seat belt, and tugged her into his lap to rest his forehead against hers. I’m sorry, he said. I suck.

  You do suck, she agreed. But you have potential.

  Making out in a van became her new favorite way of resolving an argument.

  Sometimes they drove in silence that she felt no pressure to fill. Through the softly undulating landscape of Pennsylvania, the industrial sprawl of Gary, Chicago, and Milwaukee, she rode high above the highway in Ben’s Astro minivan—an impeccably clean twenty-five-year-old vehicle that smelled of beeswax. She shelled pistachios and passed them to him to eat as he drove, kissed him under the awning of a gas station and accepted his gifts of glazed doughnuts and Funyuns.

  She joked with him and punched him playfully in the shoulder when he said something too disgusting to be permitted.

  She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper into her body, deeper into her heart, deeper into her life.

  But over and over again, mile after mile, she kept reminding herself, This is temporary. You are driving toward the end.

  And then they reached it, and she still wasn’t ready.

  * * *

  When they turned onto her street, it was past nine o’clock.

  She’d called both her mother and her sister from somewhere north of Chicago to tell them she’d be in late and would drive over to her parents’ place in the morning. Allie said Dan wanted to know where to reach her. He’d left a message on Ben’s phone and on her Facebook page. His mom had even called the house once.

  If he calls, tell him I’ll be in touch. Soon. Tell him good luck in the game tomorrow.

  Ben must have heard her end of the conversation, but he hadn’t said anything.

  Once they’d crossed the state line, he’d gone quiet. They’d had to stop around Kenosha, so he’d pulled over at Mars Cheese Castle and bought her a Taste of Wisconsin box, complete with a cheese in the shape of the state’s outline. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a joke or a treat or what, but when she kissed him to say thank you, he pinned her against the side of the van and kept her there until her knees started to buckle.

  “Stay the night,” she’d said, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. It felt dangerous, exposing even that much eagerness when he was so closed off.

  But he said, “Okay.”

  Now he cut the engine and they sat in the driveway, pinioned in the beam of the security light mounted on her garage.

  “Home sweet home,” she said.

  She tried to see it the way he would, but it just looked like her house—a squat one-story ranch with beige siding, a two-and-a-half-car garage, and a bright red front door that she’d painted herself.

  It didn’t have a lot of personality—a fact that seemed even more apparent now, with the sights of Bed-Stuy and Park Slope and Hell’s Kitchen still imprinted in her imagination. Her neighborhood wasn’t a neighborhood so much as it was a collection of almost identical boxes plopped down without regard to beauty or utility in the middle of what had once been a farm field. The trees were all spindly little babies, the roads broad and flat and perfectly paved.

  Orderly, she’d always thought, but it must look pathetically unfinished to him.

  “What do you think?” she asked brightly.

  Please don’t hate my house.

  He opened the van door. “Show me the inside.”

  She tucked her cheese box under one arm and went to retrieve the spare key from under the doormat, where her mother had left it hours ago. The front door stuck a little, and she had to jiggle the key to get it unlocked—the movement still automatic, almost unconscious.

  “You don’t use a deadbolt?” he asked.

  “I do. But Allie lost her key to it. Then she lost mine.”

  “And you didn’t get another one made because …”

  “This is Manitowoc.” She pushed the door open. “Well, technically my house is right over the line into Two Rivers.”

  “Trivers?”

  “Twoooo Riiiiivers.” She said it slowly, exaggerating each word. “But if you say it like that around here, people will look at you funny.”

  “God forbid.”

  She flipped on the lights and dropped her purse and the cheese box on the table by the door.

  Ben walked in a few steps, studying the room as though the choice and arrangement of objects had meaning. As though he’d learn something about her, just by looking.

  She studied it, too, for clues to who she was.

  There was the brown corduroy couch she’d bought because she really wanted the red one, but red was impractical. There was her collection of candles in glass jars, all of them gifts she’d been given and felt obligated to use, though scented candles made her nose feel strange. It seemed the more she had, the more people bought them for her. She was afraid she’d developed a reputation now as a candle person.

  The carpet was a dull shade of oatmealish gray that she’d talked herself into buying because she’d feared that if she settled on any of the choices that grabbed her—the arrangement of skinny orange and teal rectangles from the online company that sold carpet in tiles, or the brightly colored spiral rug she’d seen in a magazine—she would find, after a year or two, that she regretted making such a bold choice. Whereas she’d regretted the oatmeal-gray Berber carpet before the crew had even finished installing it.

  Everythin
g looked the same as when she’d left seven weeks ago, but nothing looked like her.

  And it was full of Dan. Their picture on the mantel. The bowl on the table where he threw his keys when he used to make the drive down from Green Bay after practice and spend the night. The way he always looked on his favorite corner of the couch, his sock-clad feet resting on the coffee table, the TV tuned to ESPN but muted so they could talk.

  Was it wrong that she felt a sweet ache of nostalgia for Dan on her couch? There had been a simplicity to that life—an ease to behaving the way people expected her to. If she’d married him, she might have found it stifling, but stifling was what she’d been used to. Stifling had been comfortable until that moment onstage when she’d listened to Dan’s proposal and felt her fingers tighten around the shrimp fork, her whole body saying no, no, no.

  She became aware of the silence, and of Ben watching her. Waiting.

  “You want to see the bedroom?”

  It was the only room she’d allowed herself to decorate exactly how she wanted. The walls were four different shades of green, and the bed was “too modern,” according to her mother—a “mashup,” Allie said, because May had opted for the clean lines of a Scandinavian platform bed and then purchased a big fluffy pillow-top mattress for it that rose over the edges like a delicious soft muffin.

  It felt like that, too. Like sleeping on a muffin.

  Ben must have misinterpreted her highly misinterpretable statement, because he dropped the bags and stalked toward her until her butt was pressed against the couch and her hands were pressed against his chest.

  “It’s the best room,” she clarified. Her voice came out funny. His eyes were making her short of breath. Those hungry eyes.

  “I’ll bet.”

  She laughed, but the sound was more like a sob. She didn’t know for certain if she wanted him to kiss her or leave her alone to find her way back to this place again.

  Maybe she’d done the wrong thing, letting him drive her here. Maybe she’d ruined it—a decision as bad as drawing him would have been, only worse, because now she’d have memories of Ben all over her house. In her bed. She’d have to remember him and mourn him in this same space, crowded up against her memories of Dan and the knowledge of her decorating disasters. She’d have to find her feet again alone, here.