After the Kiss

by Lauren Layne

  “Actually,” he said, his deep voice sounding slightly hollow in the thick of the woods, “I’m glad I ran into you. I need to ask you for a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?” she responded warily.

  “I’m planning a safety demonstration at the Spring Fair. I was hoping that you’d join us, as Star Harbor’s doctor-in-residence, to give a run-down on some basic medical care. I’ve got the Kingsport EMTs already lined up as your demonstration team. It would mean a lot if you’d agree to participate.”

  The man seemed serious. “When is it?”

  “The third weekend in April, same as always.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it. For Star Harbor.”

  “For me,” Cole underscored, softly.

  “I’m happy to help out with your project,” Julie informed him. “In fact, I think it’s a great idea. But let me be clear: I am not doing this for you.” They had reached the front steps of her house. Julie gracefully vaulted up them and removed his jacket. “Here.” She turned around on the stoop, jacket in hand, with Cole right behind her, one step down. Even down five inches, he was still slightly taller, and she was staring right into his piercing eyes.

  She was about to tell him to get lost, but he curled one hand around her upper arm as his other hand covered her hand holding the jacket. His hands were hot where they touched her skin.

  “Why don’t you want to do this just for me?” She caught a whiff of his scent—all male and amazingly good. Like sea and spice and musk. Her pulse rate skyrocketed.

  “You know why,” she managed to get out.

  “Yeah.” His voice was husky. “Yeah, I know.” He slid his hand up her arm to her face and stroked her temple, pushing back a stray strand of hair, his eyes locked on hers. A low, dark shiver started in the base of her spine and jolted upward. “You’re not going to slap me again, are you?”

  He remembers. “I’m thinking about it,” she murmured, unable to tear her gaze away.

  Cole didn’t smile. “Then you’d better go inside before I give you a real reason to.”

  It took her only a fraction of a second to realize what he meant and when she got his drift, she swallowed. Hard.

  Cole stared at her for just a moment more. Then, smoothly, he released her, grabbed his jacket, and walked down the steps. There, he waited patiently while she reached into the tiny pocket of her leggings and took out her house key. It was only when she’d let herself into the welcome comfort of her childhood home and flicked on the hall light that he gave her a nod before turning and disappearing into the darkness.

  Read on for an excerpt from Mary Ann Rivers’s

  The Story Guy

  Tuesday, 4 a.m.

  I scroll back down through the photos and description again, looking for a reason to avoid contacting the seller, but there isn’t one. Blond, beautifully made, and I can tell, even though the pictures were taken under bad lighting with a shaky hand. I nearly convince myself that this mid-century dresser is exactly what I want, but I don’t click the link to the seller’s email. It’s true that in the very worst case, I drive somewhere unfamiliar and stand awkwardly in someone’s entryway or garage or shed while I struggle to find a polite way to refuse. It’s imagining that potential moment, thick with polite embarrassment, that prompts me to close the listing. The solemn main menu of the MetroLink homepage blinks back.

  My cell phone lights up the corner of my bed where it’s slipped under the sheets. There’s only one person who would call me at this hour.

  “I think you keep me as a friend so you have someone to talk to when you’re with the goats.”

  Shelley laughs. “You’re not wrong. The ladies rarely have much to say, and Will won’t talk to me until he’s had more coffee.”

  I stretch out on the bed and watch a moth settle itself into the shadows gathered on the ceiling. I can hear the muffled and mysterious noises of Shelley’s task, a bleat from one of her little milking goats. “I might have been asleep this time, you know.”

  “Carrie.” Shelley laughs, sounding a little far away since I’m probably on speaker. “I know you.”

  “You do.” She does.

  “Yesterday was hard,” she says, her voice gentle. It was hard. I am sleepless at an unreasonable hour fit only for happy women and happy men tending their spoiled goats.

  “I’m not sure what was so hard about it, exactly.”

  “Did you call your parents?” she asks.

  “I did.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Not much. They were disappointed, naturally, but understand. As always. In half a minute they started re-planning the trip as a second honeymoon for themselves.”

  “Haven’t they already had, like, four second honeymoons?”

  “Six, actually.”

  Shelley laughs. “I love that. Your parents are like the patron saints of happy marriages.”

  “You’re not doing so bad yourself.”

  “Hey Will, didja hear that? We’re happy!” Shelley laughs again, and I hear Will grunt, but then there is also a suspicious little bit of breathy quiet coming over the line.

  “Guys! That better be the goats kissing. Jesus.”

  “Sorry. Hey, Carrie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Of course. People have breakdowns at work over nothing all the time.”

  “Stop that. It’s not nothing.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Shelley is my colleague at the Metropolitan Library, where I’m happy, where I love the kingdom of teen collections over which I reign, except today, when in the middle of everything, I wasn’t. Shelley was reconciling my circulation report. Like always. Like every Tuesday. We were talking about me taking vacation time.

  “I mean, sure. That sounds nice.” Shelley enlarged my circulation report and corrected a cell in the spreadsheet with an efficiency that reminded me of wren tucking grass into a nest.

  “Nice?” My thumb painfully picked up a sliver of wood from the teen collections desk, where I was gripping the edge too hard. That must be why my voice had been so hard.

  “Yeah, nice. I’ve never vacationed with my parents, but you like yours, right?”

  I do like them, actually, but something felt a little numb around the edges of my thoughts. Why? “Yes.”

  “Awesome. Block out the days. Go, cruise, take pictures of Alaskan icebergs—”

  “Glaciers. Not icebergs. Glaciers.” The sliver was deep and drove deeper as I tried to work it free. I’m certain that’s why there were tears in my eyes. I felt Shelley push in close to me, saw her dark fall of hair in my periphery. But I continued to work the sliver, because I knew if I looked at her, I’d break apart, right there in teen collections, for no good reason I could understand.

  “Hey,” she whispered.

  I shook my head. Pushed the sliver in farther.

  “Carrie. Look at me. Come on.”

  “Can’t.”

  She laughed, just a little. Because Shelley is happy. Because what else is there to do when you recognize the signs of an inexplicable breakdown? “Carrie. Seriously. Also, there isn’t anyone here right now. It’s okay.”

  When I met the obvious sympathy in her gaze, it’s how familiar she looked that unfastened the sob from my throat. Or at least that’s what I told myself, swiping the tears away. “Fuck.”

  “Oh, Carrie.” She gently lifted my glasses away, making it worse. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Is something going on with your parents?”

  “No. I just talked to them. They’re great, as usual. Looking forward to the trip.”

  “Here? Is it something here at the library—work stuff?”

  “No. It’s awesome here.” I stuttered over another sob. “I love it here.”

  “It’s my fuckup with the glaciers, right? What’s the difference, anyway? Are icebergs little glaciers, like baby glaciers that will be big glaciers somed
ay but have to heave up on a continent or something?”

  My confusion momentarily eased up my breathing. “What?”

  She passed me a tissue. “You don’t want to cruise with your parents, do you?”

  I looked at my sliver, but couldn’t see it because my thumb was now so mangled and sore. The numb-around-the-edges feeling had spread out over everything. “No,” I whispered. “I don’t think I do.” I looked back at Shelley, who was leaning against the counter, head in hand.

  “Finally.”

  I sat down on a stool, suddenly exhausted. “What do you mean?”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  And I’m still not entirely certain what she meant, except that I couldn’t go with my parents on a cruise to Alaska. Now, I listen to the little sounds raining through the line from Will and Shelley’s tiny milking barn.

  “Carrie?”

  “I’ll be okay, Shelley. It’s a funk, that’s all. Lady of a Certain Age funk.”

  “Hmm. There are certain … cures for such a thing, you know.”

  “Oh, I know you know, Shelley,” I say, hearing Will laugh in the background, “but I think we’ll save that talk for another time.”

  “Try to sleep, Carrie. Really, even just a little before work.”

  “See you in a few hours.”

  I slide the phone away and try to focus on finding the moth, but it’s hidden itself too well.

  All I can hear through my open windows is the hum from the streetlights. The bar anchoring the apartments next door had last call more than an hour ago. It won’t be long before my next-door neighbor, a third-shift nurse, stumbles into her apartment and cranks on her shower, the hot water banging its way up from the basement.

  The computer on which I was browsing for furniture I have no room or use for has made my lap hot and my eyes tired, but I just drape my body into a new position over the duvet and adjust my glasses. The breeze is just cool enough to feel good combing through my short curls, luffing the T-shirt I’ve worn to bed.

  I hover my arrow over another menu item on MetroLink. Other than “Furniture for Sale,” it’s the only option contrast-shaded purple, proving I’ve visited it before. “Men Seeking Women.”

  I love MetroLink personals, but not the way my friends do, as a source of entertainment at the expense of the lovelorn who can’t afford or won’t subscribe to a “real” online dating site. I read only the men’s personals, and I read them the way I might ritually eat a favorite candy bar. I start with the Casual Encounters section and all of the horny out-of-town businessmen and drunk college boys posting dick pictures and rough invitations.

  Then, I read the dozens seeking a “BBW,” who are sometimes so achingly poetic in their desire to take tender care of some mythical and kind full-figured woman. I can’t help but think they must be the ancestors of the prehistoric men who carved those pendulous, round-bellied goddesses from cave stones.

  I usually skip those of the seniors, who seem to mainly post long and unparagraphed essays filled with ellipses and metaphors about spoiling a mistreated and much younger woman. Even worse are the painfully short single-sentence pleas that manage to cut open the loneliness of widowerhood or divorce after a long life with one woman.

  For last, I save those of men my age, thirty to forty-five.

  Once, at the urging of friends, I spent a year managing my profile on a dating site that had achieved some kind of epic popularity among friends and co-workers for its edgy, personality quiz–laden approach. To build your profile you answered questions about music, sex, kinks, commercial jingles, underpants preferences, harmless phobias.

  I was never asked to answer a single question about what I was actually looking for in a man, or anything more pressing about myself than my favorite breakfast cereal. The site sent me matches, presumably based on my answers to all of these quizzes.

  My matches’ profiles were always so well considered and slick that it made me wonder if my entire generation worked in marketing. The beautiful men’s pictures looked professionally taken at candid events, and every white grin and eye crinkle was perfectly captured in SLR detail. Those less lovely had seductive written pitches accompanied by middle-distance action photography to illustrate their personalities, and I felt to date one of these men was to purchase a new and amazing lifestyle, as if from a catalog.

  After days of charming emails and texts exchanged with one of my “matches,” we would meet for coffee, or if one of us had written something a little dirty to the other, drinks. Often, it was one coffee or one drink, less than an hour. Sometimes a few hours would float into a kiss I barely tasted. Always, I didn’t hear from them ever again.

  MetroLink lists its posts under every category in real time, so your ad may fall off the end of the white page in an hour or two on a busy night. Everyone gets the same blank white space to write in, the same four-picture limit.

  The men here speak in voices I don’t hear from men anywhere else. In my work as a librarian and its associated schooling, I’ve become familiar with men who carefully discuss their ideas and feelings from well-supported liberal positions. These are the same men from the singles website I tried, men who built pithy profiles with slide shows of slick pictures.

  On the other end of the spectrum, my dad, his brothers, my cousins—they are all sort of expansive and rigidly masculine and sound like whoever it is they work with, other men who are electricians or firefighters or salesmen.

  But MetroLink men have an entirely different accent, and it cuts into me. It’s what I imagine men might really be thinking and never say. They yell and cry and woo and break themselves open before their post slips off the page.

  Tired of the lies, one of tonight’s reads, l@@king for honest woman H/W unimportant who doesn’t care about looks or money. I wish I could stop smoking, but for now that’s not possible, 2 much drama in my life, lol. So smokers OK. Age, race unimportant. Must know how to love imperfect men.

  Another loves women who are fun. So many women don’t let themselves have a good time. Don’t spend hours getting ready to go out with me, just run out the door and we’ll have adventures. I can be discreet. I understand.

  My favorite tonight, this morning, is a post in list form, a rage against his life in all its top-ten sources of misery. He is tired, so tired of his 3) bills I have no hope of paying and 5) children who get everything they ask for and still hate me. He wants a woman who doesn’t like to talk. A woman who will hold hands with him on the couch, watching the news without comment at the end of every day. A woman he can share a pizza with and then go to bed with. A woman, he writes, who is exactly like my ex-wife but won’t divorce me just because the economy sucks.

  Some of them have pictures, but most often they tell me your picture gets mine. They use their four-picture limit to post images of women from porn so that I will know their “type.” Pictures of themselves always seem blurry, or are taken in a mirror splattered with toothpaste with the flash still on so that their faces are obscured by a glowing constellation.

  I’m so tired, my thumb and my heart sore and bothered by their slivers, but I can’t stop compulsively scrutinizing ads for—what? A reason to answer? I clear my throat, my heart, because I refuse to cry again. My peripheral vision catches the flutter of the moth as it suddenly reveals itself and finds a breeze to follow out the window, into the wee morning light.

  As I scroll through the post titles from the last hour, one catches my eye—Wednesdays. When I click on it, I’m surprised to find a clear and high-definition picture. It’s a candid of a man with very short dark hair, sitting in three-quarters view at a conference table. His dress shirt is pushed up at the elbows, his legs are crossed at the knee. He’s holding an elbow with an opposite hand, his body language completely closed, but he’s so long-limbed he almost seems loose. He’s grinning at someone offcamera, and it’s his grin, the dimple it sinks into his cheek, that arrests me after reading so many lamenting personals.

  The
photo doesn’t hide anything about what he looks like, but it tells the viewer almost nothing about him. If he weren’t hugging himself so tightly, I would think he was modeling menswear in a Sunday circular. Blandly handsome.

  Except the knuckles of his long fingers are white from the grip on his elbow. The stubble on his sharp jaw is a little too dark and long for a business meeting.

  I will meet you on Wednesdays at noon in Celebration Park. Kissing only. I won’t touch you below the shoulders. You can touch me anywhere. No dating, no hookups. I will meet with you for as long as you meet me, so if you miss a Wednesday we part as strangers. No picture necessary, we can settle details via IM. Reply back with “Wednesdays Only” in the subject line.

  I read the ad multiple times and the flush doesn’t go away from my cheeks. I look at his picture for so long, I hear my neighbor’s shower squeal to life. Kissing only. Celebration Park is right behind my library’s campus. When the weather is nice, like it has been, I take my lunch there to eat.

  You can touch me anywhere. I shudder, and goose bumps break over my hot neck. I click on the picture and my browser opens it in its own window, nearly as big as my screen. He’s in his thirties, likely near my age. With the picture so large, I can see that he has glasses hooked over his pocket and that his ring finger doesn’t seem to have a trace of a wedding band. His forearms are beautiful, the hair very dark against his pale skin.

  I move back over to the ad.

  He must have dozens of replies.

  My Wednesdays are long; they start an hour early for a meeting with my staff in Teen Collections and end an hour late to accommodate a tutoring program. What if right in the middle of that long Wednesday I sat with this man in the park, kissing and touching him like a living fantasy?

  If I didn’t like it, if I didn’t like him, if he turned out to be crazy, or awful, or a bad kisser, or a creep, I would just miss a single Wednesday and he would be gone. Part as strangers. Celebration Park is bustling at lunch hour with downtown traffic, particularly during this mild, dry fall. We wouldn’t really be alone.