by Ruthie Knox
Everybody did. Nancy looked a little shell-shocked, whereas Allie had gotten some color back in her face. May’s father paused with one foot into the living room.
“I’m moving to New York,” she said.
Then the smoke alarm went off.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It took a few minutes to get everything sorted out. May pushed her mom out of the kitchen into a seat at the table, where her dad had resumed his customary chair. Allie shoved the bacon away from the burner and turned off the stove. Ben, being the tallest, reached up to unscrew the smoke alarm and pull the battery out.
His reaching exposed a slice of bare skin right above the waistband of his jeans, and May had to admit to herself, she loved that particular slice of skin. And the battered hand that wrapped around the smoke alarm—she loved that, too.
And that he had come back for her.
She didn’t love much else about the man at the moment, though. He had a previously undiscovered talent for creating chaos in her family.
She poured her mother a cup of coffee, added the usual gigantic dollop of vanilla-hazelnut creamer, and delivered it to the table. Then, with a fork, she extracted the overcooked waffle from the waffle maker and poured in fresh batter.
“Ben, you want some orange juice?” she asked.
His response was an inarticulate half syllable, from which she surmised that he didn’t know whether he wanted orange juice or not. She poured him a glass and shoved it into his hand.
“Allie, go sit down,” she said. “And take off your sunglasses. Your head can’t possibly hurt more than mine does.”
“But you’re stronger,” Allie said feebly.
“I’ll fortify you with a fresh waffle.”
Allie slumped into a chair and dropped her sunglasses on the table. Ben leaned against the wall by the fridge and watched as May put on a second pot of coffee, pulled the finished waffle from the maker, spread it with peanut butter, and drizzled maple and chocolate syrup on top. She handed it to Allie.
“You are my favorite.”
“You should have seen the French toast Ben made me at his apartment.”
“He makes French toast?”
“With sautéed apples. And he whipped the cream by hand.”
Allie made an oooh mouth at Ben. “I’m impressed.”
“May?” her father said.
“Yeah. Okay.” She crossed her arms. “Honestly, I don’t know how this all got so complicated. Dan proposed. I attacked him with a fork and broke up with him. I left his place to go to the airport, and this guy who I thought was a security guard stole my purse. I couldn’t fly home, so I went to a bar in Greenwich Village that has a big following of Packers fans. I thought I might meet some kindly Packers person from Wisconsin who could help me out, and I did. I met Ben.”
Ben raised an eyebrow at that, which almost made her smile, except she was still mad at him.
But he was kindly, even if he didn’t think so. Even if he’d caused her pain, he’d given her so much joy, too. And she hadn’t exactly been Little Miss Perfect. She’d been an idiot and a coward, and it was lucky he’d come back so she wasn’t forced to track him down in New York and campaign for another chance.
He seemed to think he was the one who needed to do the campaigning. Maybe they could both cut the campaign phase short.
“After a few hours of mutual suspicious circling, plus dinner, he invited me to stay on his couch, and I took him up on it. The next morning, I tried to fly home a second time, but the airline wouldn’t let me check in without ID. I went back to Ben. He asked me if I wanted to hang out with him for a few days, and I knew you guys were all at the cabin—I didn’t realize Dan was there—so I said yes. Because I wanted to hide, and because … because I liked him.”
She uncrossed her arms and leaned against the counter, momentarily distracted by Mom and Allie’s matching expressions of avidity and her father’s completely blank, stoic facade.
“He liked her, too,” Ben said.
It did something to her, hearing that—something that felt like a tiny little pebble of weight lifting off her heart.
He likes me. He loves me.
That wasn’t a fantasy. That was their reality. They’d both been idiots, but maybe they could do better.
“And I showed you all around the city,” he said.
“Right. We had fun. And …” She spun her finger in the air and said quickly, “… one thing led to another, yadda yadda, you don’t want to hear about any of that. Then I was going to fly home, but he offered to drive me, and Allie had already told Mom he was Dan’s agent’s PA, because that seemed simpler and she didn’t realize he was going to show up. I went along with it because I didn’t want him to leave yet.”
“And I went along with it because I didn’t want to leave, either.”
“And then Dan called and Ben left, but now he’s back.”
Coffee burbled into the pot. The waffle maker made the series of odd ticking noises that preceded the preheating green light. May opened the lid and poured in the rest of the batter, scraping the bowl with a spatula.
“You overfilled that,” Allie said. “It’s going to splooge out the side.”
“Don’t say splooge,” their mother corrected.
Her father asked, “When’s the part about your moving to New York?”
“She’s not moving,” her mother said. She crossed her arms. “It’s much too soon for that. I’m sorry, sweetie, but you have to admit, you’re at a very delicate time right now. You and Dan—”
“—broke up,” May supplied.
“Well, yes, but even if that is what you want, in the long run, I don’t think now is the time to be making decisions that will affect the rest of your life. Especially when you’re talking about a man we don’t even know well.”
“I know him,” May said. “I know him better than I ever knew Dan.”
“But be reasonable,” Nancy said. “It’s your nature to think the best of people, but you have to acknowledge”—here she speared a look at Ben—“that this man lied to us.”
“To you,” Allie said mildly.
“And if you met him at a bar, of all places …” Nancy sighed. “You can’t move to New York to be with him. You just can’t. This kind of thing happens in the movies, or to movie stars. It doesn’t happen to people like us.”
May looked down to see that both lights on the waffle maker were on. Once it got warmed up, it made waffles supernaturally fast. She lifted the lid and removed the waffle to a plate, then unplugged the machine.
She kept waiting for her mother’s doubt to transmit itself to her. At the bare minimum, she expected to discover some buried lode of conservatism. A deep vein of previously unacknowledged concern.
Instead, she heard that ugly phrase. People like us.
People who weren’t beautiful or exotic, her mother meant. Practical, solid, salt-of-the-earth people like them.
May put the batter bowl in the sink, squirted in soap, and turned on the water. Soap bubbles foamed from the surface to form an unstable tower. A small cluster detached and floated into the sunlight coming through the kitchen window. A little iridescent clan of refugees from the ordinary.
“Yes,” she said to the bubbles. “It does happen.” She turned to look at her mother. “This kind of thing happens to us. And it’s not a fairy tale, or a fantasy, or any kind of crazy magic. It’s just the way life happened, this time, to me. So stop trying to tell me that it didn’t, or that I don’t know what I want, because I do. I know exactly what I want. And honestly, it’s about fucking time.”
Her mother’s mouth pooched into a frown.
May looked at Ben. His eyebrows were way up by his hairline.
“What?” she asked.
“Welcome back,” he said.
She shook her head, smiling even though she still kind of wanted to shove him.
He would never be perfect. He would disappoint her, snap at her, try to push her away. She would do it
, too, in fits and bursts of stupidity. But she loved all his flaws as much as she loved his strengths. She loved his broken smile and his generous heart and his warped idea of himself.
She loved how he made her feel—whole and good and alive.
She loved him the way he really was.
Her mother fiddled with the chain at her neck. “Was this your idea?” she asked Ben.
His eyebrows dropped into their habitual V-shape. “Not exactly. But if May wants to move to New York, I’m pro. Very much pro.”
“He didn’t even know about it, Mom,” Allie said. “He just got here. We’re all backwards anyway. He and May need to make up, still.”
“May’s not a New York City kind of person,” Nancy announced. Her voice wavered with genuine distress.
“May’s amazing,” Ben said. “She’s smart and interesting and funny. I don’t know who it is you think lives in New York, but I haven’t met anybody I liked better than May yet.” He paused, then added, “I’m pretty sure I’m not ever going to meet anybody I like better than May.”
Her father stood, his usual benign expression not quite managing to conceal the amusement in his eyes.
“Where do you think you’re going, Bill?” Mom asked.
“Football’s on in five minutes.”
“But we’re having a family crisis.”
“I already like him more than Dan,” he said. “And I don’t see anybody making this my business.” He looked at May. “You’ll tell me if you need something, right, Scooter?”
May’s heart nearly burst. “Yeah. You can go watch the game, Dad.”
He nodded. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Ben’s expression was unmistakably envious as he traced Bill’s progress from the room.
“Biiiill,” her mother moaned at his back.
“Let her go, Nancy,” he said without turning around. “She’s a big girl.”
“But she’s not … That is, May isn’t really …”
Allie scooted over and put her arm around their mother’s shoulders. She laid their heads together, squishing her baseball cap into Mom’s hair football. “I feel you, Mama,” she said. “I spent most of the week saying the exact same thing inside my head. But it turns out May’s maybe got a little more Wild Amazon Jungle-Conquering Turbobabe in her than we all thought. I’m going to take a guess and say she got it from Dad.”
Their mother whimpered, but May had to smile. “Definitely from Dad,” she said. “And if it makes you feel any better—though I can’t imagine it will—I was going to move to New York whether Ben came back or not.”
Allie nodded her agreement. “So even if it’s a reckless, immature, spur-of-the-moment decision, at least it’s not penis-based.”
Nancy buried her face in her hands, either laughing or crying—or, as was so often the case when Allie got involved, a little bit of both.
“Can I talk to you somewhere?” Ben asked. “In private?”
May wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Let’s go to the porch.”
He spun off the wall and led the way, and she found, as she followed him through the living room, that she was barely even angry anymore. That she kind of just wanted to tackle-hug him, pushing her hands into the pockets of his familiar gray hoodie to cover his fists and rubbing her face against the back of his neck.
I love him, she thought. He loves me. Why not?
So she gave it a whirl. She missed his pockets completely, and their legs tangled together badly enough that they both fell down. Ben rolled to take the brunt of it, then rolled again until he was braced above her.
“You all right?” he asked, breathless.
“Yes.” She’d missed his face. At the reception, she’d drawn it on a napkin. She’d have to find it and give it to him. Fulfill her promise to make him a picture. “That didn’t work the way I thought it would.”
“You were trying to kill me?”
“I was trying to hug you.”
The smile lines around his eyes deepened. “Oh,” he said. “Carry on, then.”
May hooked a leg around his hip and pressed her face into his throat and pulled him down closer. “Don’t do that again. Don’t leave.”
“I won’t.” His voice got muffled against her hair.
“If you ever do, I’ll find your knives and steal them and cover them with nail polish.”
“What an awful thing to say.”
“Then I’ll grind the blades on a rock.”
“Technically we already do that when we sharpen them, but I get the point.”
“And then I’ll buy you new knives from Ikea.”
Ben fake-shuddered and let more of his weight sink onto her, lowering his head until he was breathing in her ear. “I promise,” he whispered. “I promise I won’t.”
May guessed, from the way that the last little pile of pebbles rolled off her heart and clattered uselessly to the floor, that those had been the words she needed to hear.
She smiled, and she kissed him.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
They sat side by side on the front porch swing and took turns being the motor, rocking slowly from toe tip to heel cusp and back again—first May’s pajama-pant-clad leg and slippered foot, then his own leg in jeans and sneaker.
The weather was perfect—sunny, the temperature somewhere in the sixties—but he was sweating through his T-shirt. When he wiped his hands on his thighs, indigo lint stuck in the grooves of his palms.
“So,” he said. Because they had to start this conversation somewhere, even if they’d kind of done an end-run around it on the living room floor. “New York.”
“It’s not because of you,” she said quickly. “It’s because I like it there.” She let a moment pass, considering. “And sure, that’s because of you. But I like it independently of you. The main thing, though, is that I want to find out who I am, and New York seems like the best place to do it.”
He waited for that to feel like too much, too fast, but it didn’t. It felt excellent. Big, but excellent.
“I think it’s a great plan.”
She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. The sun lit one side of her face, and her smile lit everything.
“New York likes you a lot,” he said.
“New York really hurt me.”
“That wasn’t New York, May. That was me.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am, too. I should have called Dan right away, and I should have stood up for you. I was being a people-pleasing weenie-coward.”
“Weenie-coward?”
“It’s a thing. I invented it. But I’m done with that now.”
“Good to know.”
“If you catch me backsliding, stop me, okay? Call me a weenie-coward.”
“I’ll try to remember, but it’s not a very manly phrase.”
“Fine. You don’t have to use the phrase, so long as you’ve got my back.”
“I’ve got your back.”
They rocked. Her slippers scuffed over the boards of the porch.
“What made you come here?” She turned more fully toward him. “Because if you tell me that it’s only because you forgot your knives—”
“There was nowhere I wanted to be but with you.”
She looked away. Ben stroked his hand over her temple. Her neck. He ran his palm down her shoulder and over her arm, and she said, suddenly, “Don’t. My mom’s right, it’s really quick. I don’t need you to say it if you don’t really mean it.”
“I mean it.” He took a chance and turned her face toward his. Then he took another chance and leaned close to kiss her. A different sort of kiss this time—one that was more about his sweaty palms and all the trouble he was having stringing words together than it was about lust and reunions and night after night of hot, sweaty sex. “I love you.”
“You do.”
“I do.”
“Because you just met me. We had kind of a weird week. I don’t really expect—”
Ben kissed her again, more insistently this time. Hot and deep, until her fingers found the hair at the back of his neck and pushed hard against his scalp.
“That’s so good,” she said after a minute. She kissed his chin and his neck and his jaw. She kissed his mouth again. “Why is that so good?”
“I always thought it was you.”
She laughed with a soft exhale of breath through her nose. “Did I hear you say in the kitchen that you went home?”
“Not home. To the farm.”
She studied his expression. “That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Why did you go?”
“Because … because I didn’t trust that I could be any good for you.”
“Something about us scares you.”
He didn’t want to admit that. He wanted to tell her he was totally confident. That he had the future all mapped out, and his palms weren’t sweating.
But he wanted her with him more, and assuming she stayed close, she’d figure out all his secrets soon enough.
“Yeah,” he said. “Because I feel too much. I don’t trust it—that passion or whatever it is that makes me fly off the handle or get so excited about something I give my whole life over to it. I can feel it happening, and I want it, but it’s hard for me not to worry that it’s … I don’t know. Something I need to cut out before it gets too big.”
“Before you lose it, or before it hurts you?”
“Does it have to be one or the other?”
She shook her head.
“Both, then,” he said. “Jesus. I think both. And before it hurts you, too.”
“So you ran.”
“I tried to. But the farm, when I saw my dad … He’s a miserable old man. His kids are terrified of him. They were scared of me, too, and I hated that. I hated that they saw him when they looked at me, but even worse—it wasn’t even that I saw myself when I looked at them. It was like I was them. Only from the outside, so I could see clearly that they hadn’t done anything to deserve it.”
He took a deep breath, gazing across the porch and over the yard. “They’re only kids,” he said.
“So were you.”
He would have agreed with her, but the lump in his throat took a minute to ease up, and by then, he thought it was more important to tell her something else. “I decided I’m not going to be like him. Or like my mother, either. Life isn’t some zero-sum game where you have to be either the aggressor or the victim, right? So I don’t have to keep attacking what I love just because I’m afraid if I don’t, I’ll get hurt. It’s not a genius strategy.”