by Ruthie Knox
“Huh.” She settled her Macy’s bags around and in front of her feet. They didn’t have kosher vegetarian Eastern European diners back home. Actually, they didn’t have diners with any of those adjectives.
One of the two men behind the counter handed her a menu. Scanning it only made her feel more out of place. What did one order at a restaurant that served omelets, wheat-grass juice, and latkes? Not to mention that behind the counter, a bunch of neon-colored laminated signs announced the availability of salmon croquettes, split-pea soup, and egg creams.
“Harriet the Spy always drank egg creams,” she told Ben. “I thought it was very New York.”
“Don’t get an egg cream here.” He plucked the menu out of her hand. “Here, you get the borscht, and we’ll share some pierogis.”
“I’ve never had borscht.”
“Good.”
He put their order in, and May watched him, amused. She supposed she should take offense at the way he kept telling her what to eat and even what to do. Get your ass in a cab, May-Belle wasn’t exactly the nicest thing anybody had ever said to her. But it wasn’t as though she had a better plan to offer. She certainly never would have come into this place on her own. It looked like a dive, and she wasn’t accustomed to sitting so close to the people making her food. There was a bug-under-the-microscope aspect to the experience that she would have avoided.
With Ben, though, it was fine. Even kind of entertaining. The cook-waiter seemed to know a lot of the people who came in, and he’d ask them how their families were doing, how their days were going. He’d greeted Ben like an old friend but had been too busy to talk when they came in.
He dropped off small paper plates containing half slices of thick bread and tiny plastic tubs of butter, along with a plastic knife. The presentation left something to be desired.
The bread didn’t.
“Ogmuf muh gahh, whabgt iss this?” May asked after she’d taken her first, inadvertently huge bite.
Ben smiled. “Challah.”
She swallowed and forced herself to pause for a sip of water before she shoved the entire piece of bread in her mouth. All that shopping had made her hungry, and the bread was eggy and exactly the right balance of dense and light, chewy and fluffy. “Is it made from ground-up baby angels?”
He shook his head, smiling. “Never let it be said that you’re not a weirdo.”
“Takes one to know one, bee man.”
“Speaking of, it’s really good with honey.” He handed her a bottle. “Drizzle it on the butter.”
May did. And tried it. And died of happiness.
Once she had bread in her stomach, she started to get used to the B&H experience and to forgive it some of its chaotic miscellaneousness. A woman came in and ordered a shot of wheat-grass juice. The waiter leaned way down and brought up a plastic tray of grass from a shelf beneath the cash register, cut off a big handful, and put it through a juicer. It was decidedly odd, but impressive in its efficiency.
It was also the kind of thing that May’s mother would have turned into a story—and not a flattering one. Whereas her father would have found it quietly amusing.
May found it quite entertaining.
Little glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice joined their bread plates. Someone ordered an apple cheddar omelet, and the waiter grabbed an apple from a box beneath the counter, sliced it in half, chopped it into pieces, and handed it to the grill guy, who cooked it with onions and eggs while talking to a customer.
The clientele were interesting, too—wrinkled old people and hip students, families and singles, a uniformed policeman who ate three gigantic blintzes. The B&H didn’t seem to serve a particular demographic. It was simply here, and so were all these people.
Their soup arrived, steaming and alarmingly pink.
“Wow.”
Ben smiled. “Dig in.”
“It looks radioactive.”
“That’s the beets. Just try it.”
“What if I don’t like beets?”
A lifted eyebrow. “Do you?”
“I don’t honestly know.”
“I guess you’d better find out.”
There was no way to try the borscht tentatively—the soup was too chunky, full of big pieces of beets, cabbage, potatoes, and some white beans. May dipped her spoon, closed her eyes, and gave it a go. It tasted earthy and sweet, with a vinegar tang and some other flavor it took her a minute to identify. “Dill?”
Ben nodded, his mouth full. May quit analyzing the soup and ate it. Delicious.
The pierogis arrived next—monster pierogis. Baseball-size filled dumplings, some containing spinach, others mashed potatoes, still others a mushroom-sauerkraut combination that should have been disgusting but actually made her moan with happiness. She tried not to eat too many and failed miserably.
“What do you think?” Ben asked when the pierogis were almost gone. May was embarrassed to realize she’d said almost nothing since the food came, too busy shoveling it in and watching all the action around them to remember the necessity of polite conversation.
“I think I could hug you for giving me the last sauerkraut one,” she said. “And also that I can’t believe what you’ve done to me.”
A crooked grin. “What have I done?”
“You’ve made me fall in love. With sauerkraut.”
Ben laughed, and she felt it move through her, wonderfully aware, for a moment, of everything—the sound of his happiness, the weight of excellent food in her stomach, the pleasure of novel experiences, the pressure of the jeans at her hips and the heels of boots so new they weren’t even scuffed yet resting on the dirt-seamed linoleum floor.
She felt remade. Reborn.
“I never eat sauerkraut at home,” she said. “I always thought it smelled disgusting.”
“But you’re not at home. In New York, you love sauerkraut. Who knew?”
“Who knew?” She winked at him. Must have picked that up from Celestine.
Ben’s dimple-creases deepened in response, which made her want to put her hand on his thigh and lean in and breathe at the nook of his neck and shoulder. Put her lips there.
Cray-zee.
Crazy felt pretty good.
The waiter came over and smiled at them both. “Everything okay?” He slid the check between them.
“It’s wonderful,” she said.
“Glad to hear it.”
“Great, as always,” Ben said.
“Good to see you here,” the waiter replied. “It’s been a while.”
“Yeah, I’ve been all over the place.”
The waiter wiped his hands on the rag at his waist, and Ben put his last bite of pierogi in his mouth, apparently thinking the conversation was over.
“How’s Sandy doing?” the waiter asked.
The pause while Ben finished chewing his last bite of pierogi stretched out uncomfortably. A man bumped into May on his way along the aisle, and the world shrank back to its normal size, the diner too small, full of strange smells and strange people.
Ben reached for his glass and took a sip of water. “She’s fine.”
“Good.” The waiter spotted a diner hailing him from down the counter. “I’d better get back to it. Tell her I said hi, will you?”
“Sure.”
May tried to be subtle as she glanced at Ben’s left hand. It was just as bare as it had been before. If he had a wife, he was hiding her well. If he had a girlfriend …
Sandy could be anybody. His sister. The dog from Annie.
And even if she was his girlfriend, Ben was allowed to have a girlfriend. They hadn’t made any kind of declarations to each other, except the one where he’d told her he didn’t want to get in her pants.
Somehow, she’d nearly managed to erase that one from her memory.
“Sandy’s my ex-wife,” he said.
So much for subtlety.
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“No problem.”
/> She picked at the edge of the countertop, unsure what came next.
“Let’s go,” he said abruptly, and stood.
She nodded. Ben put some money on top of the check and gathered all her packages. She followed him. They hurried out the door, into the twilight.
“I can carry those,” she offered.
“It’s fine.”
He walked so fast, she had trouble keeping up, and she didn’t especially want to.
Because of course it was a problem, even if it shouldn’t have been. His refusal to talk about Sandy—whoever she was, whatever had happened—reminded May that she didn’t know him. His past could contain anything. Violence. Cruelty.
He could be anyone at all.
Her feet slowed, and she drifted to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk.
Ben reached the corner and turned, then kept turning when he didn’t find her right behind him. He spotted her half a block back and barked, “What is it?”
May shook her head. She wouldn’t shout down the street. She couldn’t speak. Her sinuses were full, eyes stinging, and she didn’t want to cry.
She hated this—hated drama and anger, disapproval, any kind of tension. Whatever Dan’s faults, he was thoroughly good-natured, and she’d always known what to expect with him.
Ben stalked back along the sidewalk, packages swinging, shoulders hunched. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I’m … not sure.”
“What’s the problem?”
What could she say—I don’t like you like this? I just realized I don’t know a single thing of importance about you, and I’m starting to scare myself?
“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
Ben lowered his head, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk. He plowed one hand through his hair and exhaled, long and slow. “Because I’m being a jerk.”
At least he was self-aware.
His eyes found hers. “It’s been more than a year, but it still pisses me off,” he said.
“I noticed.”
“I hate talking about it.”
“Okay.”
“I keep expecting you to ask me, and it’s making me tense.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you anything.”
Now it was her turn to stare at the sidewalk. There was a lump of paper by her toe, sodden and disintegrating. Ugly.
Its ugliness offended her. Infected her.
She heard the rustling impact of paper against concrete as he set down her packages. His fingers gripped her shoulder. “May?”
“What?”
“Look at me.”
She did. He’d come up close, and his voice was low when he spoke. “If you have to know, I’ll tell you. But it doesn’t—” He closed his eyes and exhaled again, softer this time. “I don’t think it matters.”
She studied his face, known and unknown. The deep V between his heavy eyebrows that never completely disappeared, even when he wasn’t scowling. His hooded eyes, open now, but so difficult to read. The downturned corners of his mouth.
Anybody could see that it mattered.
Back home, if she crossed paths on the sidewalk with a man this intense, she would avert her eyes and hold her breath until he was gone and everything was okay again.
Part of her wanted to do that.
Most of her wanted to do that. Her stomach hurt, her hands were shaking, and her instincts urged her to walk away fast. To get somewhere safe and familiar and stay there.
Not because she was afraid of him, but because she wasn’t, and she should be.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
He didn’t answer. Their eyes were perfectly level. Locked. She couldn’t read the mysteries of his soul in his, because they were just eyes, and she was just May. She didn’t have her sister’s ability to look at an injured animal and figure out what it needed.
Until he dipped his head and pressed his mouth to hers, she didn’t have the slightest idea that he was about to kiss her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The thing was, he couldn’t stop himself.
Her laughter had been pulling at him all afternoon, the shapes of her face—the attraction only amplified by the way her legs looked in the new jeans she’d bought and her smile in the restaurant. By the way she ate and the way she peered at him sideways, beneath lowered eyelashes. By the obvious delight she took in the diner and all the pierogis she’d packed away.
That wasn’t why he kissed her, though. It was the look in her eyes.
Even thinking about the divorce had his hackles up, made him bitter and far too sharp with her, and he hated that he’d made her wrap her arms around her waist in defense.
But even though he’d done that, her eyes didn’t reflect any of his blackest feelings back at him. She just stood there, looking. Waiting for him to figure out what came next—as if he knew. As if he were capable of pulling out of this nose dive he’d put himself in.
Reflected back at himself in her wide, brown eyes, he wanted to be good enough.
So of course he did exactly the wrong thing.
Her mouth was soft, though, as soft as he’d known it would be. She tasted warm and sweet, sharp with vinegar. Borscht. He licked along her plump bottom lip.
She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. Probably not a good sign, but his other hand rose anyway, cupping her head, his fingers rooting in her hair.
Let me in.
She sucked a deep, unsteady breath through her nose. Her lips parted.
Relief flooded him, so close to pleasure that his cock hardened painfully. Ben dropped one hand to her waist and tugged her tight against him. He wanted her to know. He wanted inside her, to be consumed in his own stupidity, erased for however many blissful, empty minutes it took.
This wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing with her, but he didn’t care. She tasted amazing, and he was good at this. He could make sure he gave her as much as he planned to take.
When he tilted her head and swept his tongue into her mouth, she stiffened in surprise. As if she didn’t know the tongue part came next, after the mouth-opening.
He pulled back, forcing himself to be soft. Coaxing instead of demanding. Light kisses on her lips. Her chin. Beneath her jaw. He breathed beside her ear, and she shivered. “Let me kiss you.”
He could feel the rush of her pulse in her neck when he moved his lips downward. He wanted to lick there, where the blood moved through her. “Let me take you to bed.”
She became even more rigid, forcing her torso away from him. When he looked up, she said, “Let go.”
He dropped his hands, and she used that whip on him again—the sour mouth, the angry flash in her eyes. She bent down to gather her bags from the sidewalk, and his conscience took up residence on his right shoulder and punched him in the temple, hard.
“Let me take you to bed?” You miserable piece of shit.
She started walking toward the corner. He chased after her. “May.”
“Don’t.”
Two days. Two days since she’d left her boyfriend, and Ben had just propositioned her after a twenty-second kiss. Ten seconds of which she’d participated in.
Beyond low, Hausman. Worse than a worm. You’re a fucking leech.
“Where are you going?” he called.
She didn’t answer. She walked faster.
“You can’t leave, May.”
“Isn’t this the way to the subway?”
The WALK sign illuminated, and she crossed the road. He hurried to catch up. “The subway to where?”
“Your apartment. That was the plan, wasn’t it? Back to your place, bees, laundry.”
“Yeah. But you can’t—” He couldn’t see her face, and he had no idea if she was taking him up on his offer or—he had no idea. Her voice was flat, her stride so long he was having trouble keeping up. “Don’t we need to talk about …”
She turned her head, eyebrows lifted, and wow was she ever mad. But the amazing thing was that n
one of the anger in her eyes made it into her tone. “About what?”
“What just happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
And then she was walking again, fast, and his heart was racing, his blood pounding in his ears. He started to feel light-headed.
Deep breath. Calm.
Think of the lake, think of the roof of the chicken house, calm the fuck down.
This was what he got for kissing a woman who bottled things up. Now she was bottling up her reaction, shoving it away where he didn’t have access to it, and he was feeling too much.
He had to fix this. Put them back where they’d been before, where he was being nice and she was safe and easy to be around. Because when he felt the way he felt right now—nothing good ever came of this. He got too overwrought, and then he fucked up even worse, and people did what May was doing.
He caught her at a jog and grabbed her arm, but she pulled it out of his grip.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I was angry.”
“I noticed.”
“I wanted you to—”
To what?
To make it go away.
Oh fuck. He’d used her. He’d tried to pop her like a pill, medicate away all the negative shit in his head with the closest convenient body.
You don’t do that anymore, asshole.
Except apparently he did.
Still no reaction from May. Not a word, and she wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t stop walking, wouldn’t tell him a goddamn thing. “I promise I won’t do it again.”
Her frown deepened.
“It wasn’t about you.”
She rocked to a stop, whirling on him, and for a moment, he saw everything she was feeling on her face. Surprise and anger and pain. Severe, gut-wrenching disappointment.
Then it was gone. All the energy and feeling that had been propelling her down the street evaporated. She sank to the curb between two parked cars and wrapped her arms around her knees.
After a moment’s pause in which he couldn’t figure out what to say or do, she turned her face away, and he heard her sniffle. She lifted a hand to wipe her face.
Crying.
He’d made her cry.
God, he was an ass.