by Ruthie Knox
Allie ran out of breath. She stopped to inhale. Somewhere in there, Winston had stopped glaring at her with his hands on his hips and come around the bricks and taken her in his arms, which was better, because she couldn’t be in charge of this anymore.
She couldn’t be in charge of one more person.
“Shh.” She was crying, getting tears on his bespoke shirt, which felt really nice against her cheek with his chest underneath it and everything.
“May hates me,” she said, her voice cracked and broken.
“I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.”
“She said I’m the worst and walked out.”
“She’s angry.”
“She’s so mad at me.” Then more tears, and Winston’s soft shushing, and his low voice telling her that Neville hadn’t spoken to him for an exceedingly long time after he tried to blackmail him, but these things had a way of mending themselves, and also she was going to die, but she wasn’t dead yet, which meant she had some time.
“When Matt called? He left a voicemail, and in the background I could hear my dogs barking.”
“What are they called?”
“Roscoe, she’s the sheepdog, and Donnie the Dachshund, he’s just a little wiener dog and he eats carpet if you don’t watch him.”
Winston put his finger under her chin and lifted her face. He wiped her tears away with the side of his hand.
“Roscoe and Donnie.” His accent made the dogs sound dignified, weighty, in a way they only were in her heart.
“I gave them to Matt.”
“Tell me why.”
“I don’t even know now. I was moving out, moving into May’s old place, and Matt was going to stay where we’d lived together, and that’s what the dogs were used to, but it wasn’t even that, just…every time I tried to split something with him, or ask for it for myself, it would be like, ‘I’m not sure how well that will fit in May’s living room,’ or ‘I really like how that looks on the bookshelf, though,’ or ‘I use this spatula for pancakes, maybe you could take the other one?’ And I was afraid of what would happen if I insisted—knowing how bad it was to have broken up with him, how much worse would it be if I made it difficult for him, insisted on taking some of the furniture, or insisted I wanted some stupid spatula. I didn’t want to make it worse, so finally I just gave him everything. Like, actually everything. The house, and our friends, and most of the furniture, and pretty much all the stuff we’d bought together since college, and the dogs.”
Winston kissed her forehead. “I know this happens. It’s happened to others I’ve known, after long relationships or divorce.”
“The first thing Elvira told me when she found out about the wedding was not to give Matt anything that was mine. The first thing. She sees it all the time, she said, and you have to insist on getting what’s yours out of the breakup, because if you don’t…”
“If you don’t, you find yourself in New York City, besieged with text messages and missing your dogs.”
“I guess, you find yourself in exactly the same situation you were afraid you’d end up in—the worst of the worst kind of breakup—except also, you don’t have anything that might help it feel better. Like a sofa.”
“Or a dog.”
“Or friends.”
He rubbed her back. She liked the way his hand felt through her clothes. She liked the way his shirt felt under her cheek, and the smell of him, the solidity of him, in the night, on the rooftop.
Her phone buzzed again, and he drew it out of her hand and peered at it. He had to hold it a bit away from his face, and then closer, as though he couldn’t quite focus on the letters in the fading daylight.
Then he slid the phone back into her hand.
“If I may make a suggestion.”
“Sure.”
“Boundaries. Matt requires boundaries. Most of us do.”
“Divorced men?”
“Humans. Rosemary used to talk about boundaries with Beatrice. That she couldn’t grow up to be a strong and independent woman if she didn’t understand what it meant to both make boundaries and respect other people’s. Your Matt—”
“Not my Matt.”
“This Matt, here, who turned on the closet light instead of asking you for sex, has some problems with boundaries, I think.”
“Yeah.” When he put it that way, it seemed obvious.
“I’ve run into problems with boundaries myself. Most famously with my brother. And what I’ve observed, from both making boundaries and having them imposed on me, is that the nice thing about them is it’s never too late. Whenever you make a boundary that’s needed, or respect one that someone else needs, things improve.”
“I can make boundaries with Matt.” She tried to sound sure of this.
“You can. And he’ll probably be hurt, or angry, or both, but that’s not your problem. Your problem is only deciding what boundary you need, and making it.”
Her phone buzzed.
Winston kissed her softly and tapped the back of her hand. “Now would be a good time to start.”
He turned at the top of the stairs. “Oh, and Allie? There’s a film about zombies I’m meant to be watching, only they’re very fast-moving zombies, and quite terrifying. Bea says it’s a London movie, and I’ll like it. If you’re interested, I’ll wait up.”
Chapter 15
Allie came into his bedroom, her sweatshirt off one shoulder, tossed her phone onto the bedside table, and collapsed spread-eagled on the bed.
“Hoo.”
“You were up there a long time.”
“Yeah. Did you start without me?”
“Another film from my queue, not the zombies.”
“Oh, it’s The Devil Wears Prada. I like this one.”
“Meryl Streep is delightful, and this young woman, this…” He couldn’t remember her name from the description, but she had lovely eyes, and energy that reminded him of Allie.
“Anne Hathaway.”
“Yes. I like her.”
Allie smiled and kissed his temple. “Do you want to pause your movie so you don’t miss the end?”
“No, that’s all right. I think I’ve got the gist of how it all comes out. Tell me about this ‘hoo.’ ”
She turned onto her side to face him, her head propped in one hand, her hair spreading out over her shoulders. “Well, I had to say the same things about a hundred times. I kept using the words ‘healthy boundary,’ and ‘time and space.’ ”
“How did he react?”
“He was really hurt, at first, just, like, shocked there was any problem at all. And then super defensive and angry, especially when I told him I want the dogs back. Even though he would keep circling around to how much trouble they are, and how much downtime he loses walking them, and stuff.” She dropped her hand and laid her head on the pillow. “I kind of feel like shit now.”
“You were very brave.”
“Thanks. We’ll see if it changes anything.”
“What else did he say about your dogs? Will you for certain be able to get them back?”
“Yes. I mean, he said yes, but the gist of it was more like, you know, ‘Fine, if you’re going to be like that,’ so it’s hard to feel like it was much of a victory.”
“It will feel like a victory when you’re home again with your dogs by your feet.”
He’d meant to paint her a pleasant picture, but the thought of her home gave him a pang of…something. Regret.
He wouldn’t be there when that moment came, to see Allie reunited with her dogs, and he found that he wanted to be. If someone were to be driving the car while she sat in the back, her dogs in her lap, he wanted that person to be him.
He wanted to bring her a drink on her sofa, settle in to watch a film with her, scratching behind the ears of Donnie the Dachshund.
He’d had a dachshund as a boy. He liked them and their ridiculous puffed-out chests. He liked Allie.
Allie let out a long sigh. “Tomorrow, I’m going to have to call
my property manager and my tenant to make sure they aren’t upset and they know I didn’t authorize him to speak for me, and send an email to Elvira to thank her for the heads-up. Plus, I need to check the guest list for the party and decide whether to postpone or if it can wait a little longer, and I have to talk to the party planning place, Scheels, so they’re on standby for the possibility I’ll need to change the date.” Her forehead furrowed. “Oh, and also I got a text from Ben. He wants to talk to me. So I wrote back and said fine, and now that’s kind of looming and scary.”
“He wants to talk to you because of what happened with your sister?”
“Yeah, I think so. It was kind of epic, Win.”
Win. He hadn’t ever had a nickname. He felt his chest puff out, dachshundlike. “Tell me.”
She propped herself up against the headboard, sitting cross-legged, and told him as he lay beside her, stroking her knee, watching her face.
He’d only known this woman a short while, but already she’d told him many stories, and looked a lot of different ways. Tonight, her hands worried with the hem of her top, her wrists winding in the space between her thighs. In the light of the television, her skin looked fragile, bruised beneath her eyes. The bit of collarbone revealed by her top was so bare, it made him feel frustrated that she wasn’t larger, that she didn’t have more resources to deal with all of the things she was trying to manage.
Allie took care of so many people and worked so hard to make everything okay.
Tonight, she’d bravely made a phone call she didn’t want to have to make—a hard thing, and one that resulted in her having to cope with Matt’s overwhelming responses.
This morning she’d sat across the table from the sister she desperately loved and told her the truth at last, only to receive in return her sister’s pain and harsh words.
She seemed to him a person who tried very hard to be brave and do right. Even as she made mistakes, or followed impulses that turned out not to be helpful, she tried, and that was a rare and important quality.
But she didn’t see what was most admirable in herself.
“So, yeah,” she said. “Tomorrow I’m going to go back to Ben’s apartment and talk to him, and then we’ll see if he can broker some kind of peace talks or something.”
“Would you like me to come along?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No, that’s okay. Ben’s kind of…I don’t know. It’s better if it’s just me, I think, and anyway you have all your stuff to do, with your brother here. I’m sorry I ruined your thing tonight, by the way.”
“You didn’t ruin anything.”
She put her hand over his. “I did, though, kind of. Not on purpose, but I did. I’m sorry. I think it’s probably better, anyway, if I deal with my shit tomorrow and you deal with yours.”
That was the shape of it. Allie in New York for her own reasons, with her own life to live, and Winston in New York for his own, with his own. Within a few days she would be gone.
He moved to sit beside her, offering her his arm. She tucked in to his side, resting her head in the crook of his neck.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Would you like to see the zombie film?”
Her finger found its way inside the gap at the throat of his shirt and traced circles on his bare skin. “Maybe later.”
“You’ll have to tell me, then. What you want.”
She lifted her face to his. “Let me see the list.”
Winston extracted it from his wallet, and they both bent over it. He’d drawn lines through all the things they’d done already—the hugging, the neck fondling that had led to kissing in the grass, the hour of necking, “everything but,” and the fifth item, which was a memory of Allie telling him in explicit detail how to give her pleasure.
Number six said, simply, Toys.
“I purchased a few things today.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “What things?”
“One thing, really. I could show you. It’s…I was limited to the selection at the drugstore.”
“You bought a drugstore sex toy?”
“It seemed—I wanted to be prepared, but if you’re not interested. There’s a vibrator. With attachments.”
She rose to her knees, took his face in her hands, and kissed him, so slowly and thoroughly that he sank down into his body, the list forgotten, the day dropping away. Only Allie, his hands at her hips urging her to straddle him, and then in her hair, tugging her head to angle the kiss where he wanted it.
She broke away. “I don’t think I want to do number six tonight.”
“That’s fine.”
What he had to say. But it disappointed him. He wanted her—the comfort of her body, the excitement of her presence and attention.
“I was thinking maybe number seven?” she said.
Number seven. Mutual masturbation. “That one was yours.”
“Yes. I put it down because…” She buried her face against his chest. “I never did it in front of Matt, but especially the last couple years I did it a lot. I wondered if he did it, too, but I didn’t ask him, and he didn’t ask me, and it just seemed like it should be something, you know. Something people tell each other.”
He understood. Though she hadn’t written down that they should tell each other about masturbation. She’d written they should watch each other do it—a notion he’d found astonishing when he first saw the words, and more exciting every time he’d considered it since.
“Do you want to?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
She still hadn’t lifted her head. She pushed her forehead back and forth against his chest, apparently agonized with embarrassment. “I’m sure. I’m not confident that you’re sure.”
She made a noise, a sort of eep, and burrowed her hands beneath his back.
“Would you like me to lower the lights?”
“They’re already low.”
“I could turn off the television.”
“Maybe. I don’t think I want Anne Hathaway to see this.”
He found the remote and turned off the set, leaving them breathing together in the dark.
“What do you do, usually?” she asked.
He couldn’t imagine how to begin to answer the question. “What do you do?”
“I just…I use my hand. With my clothes on. Usually just wherever I’m at, sitting or lying down. I like to be on my stomach.”
“I do the same. In the shower, most of the time. Or on my back, in bed.”
It surprised him how incredibly difficult it was to say aloud, even knowing that everything they’d put on the list thus far had been like this—a dare to be vulnerable with a stranger. A desire to have something they’d missed out on.
Allie was no longer a stranger. She was a soft weight along the length of his body, a familiar brush of frizzy hair against his chin.
They’d made a list of ways for two people to belong to each other, and so he belonged to her a little more tonight than he had yesterday, and the day before. Just as she belonged to him.
“Let’s try,” he said.
“Okay.” She rolled away to her side of the bed. “Should we get naked?”
“I’m going to take off my shirt.”
He did, and as he worked his way down the buttons, he felt her sit up beside him, felt the movement of her arms as she skinned off her top and tossed it aside.
He unbuckled his belt.
“Are you doing it?” she asked.
“I’m beginning.” He slid his hand inside his pants. He was partially erect, and he fisted himself, starting up the sliding rhythm he’d learned as an adolescent and never varied.
Allie shifted beside him, making the mattress bounce. “Me, too.”
And then there were quiet movements from her side of the bed, breeze from the ceiling fan, his hand finding a rhythm as he came fully erect. He listened hard into the darkness for the sound of her.
“Tel
l me what you’re doing,” she said softly.
“I’m—I’m stroking myself.”
“Does it feel good?”
It felt…not wrong, precisely. But not correct, either. It felt rather lonely, and he didn’t know what to reach for, whether to open the storeroom of images and experiences in his head that usually inspired him to completion or to reach out, in the dark, with his mind, for Allie, and this shared experience.
“It’s hard to feel that we’re doing this together.”
She stilled. The mattress shifted as she turned again, resituating herself. “I know what you mean.” Her hand groped over his chest, his arm. “We could hold hands?”
He offered his hand, and she grasped it in hers. “You’ve turned onto your stomach.”
“Yeah. I thought I’d try it like this, but I don’t know.” She gave a nervous laugh. “I feel kind of stupid.”
“Don’t feel stupid. There’s nothing stupid about it.”
She squeezed his fingers.
Then more silence.
The bed made noise for them—quiet squeaks and moans. He listened to her breathe, imagined his hand was her hand, Allie fisting him tight, jerking him. It made him harder to think of her that way, so he thought about it more, thought about finding her alone in his bed on her belly, her hand in her knickers, her ass in the air. The way she might moan, undiscovered.
His breath became labored, his hand slick.
Allie let out a sigh. “I don’t think I can.”
More shifting and repositioning.
