Love Lettering

by Kate Clayborn

  All of it had gone a long way to establishing some way through for those awkward, sometimes charged moments in the early morning as we both woke and took turns showering and dressing in the incomplete privacy of the small space. When I’d emerged from my room, my hair still damp, the ends darkening the shoulders of my simple, gray cotton dress, Reid had looked up from where he waited for me on the couch, the stitched cut bisecting his brow, his jawline tight and shaded with scruff, his shoulders a few inches too broad for that borrowed T-shirt.

  I thought if I let him look at me that way for too long, our Tomorrow promise to each other wouldn’t involve all that much talking. It would involve that couch and Reid’s scruff and the smell of my shampoo and our mouths and our hands and also, under the Saturday morning circumstances, Sibby probably walking in at a very inconvenient time.

  I’d reached for my jacket and Reid had stood and reached for his own, and we’d made our way outside into the crisp, clear morning, the back of my hand still tingling from the feel of his lips on my skin.

  “It’s nice out today,” Reid says, shifting his weight on the bench we sat on to finish our breakfasts—bagels from my favorite shop, coffee for me, tea for him, both of our to-go cups set carefully by our feet, as though they’re weapons we’ve laid down. It’s early enough still that the park is pretty quiet, no one else on the benches around us, most passersby either biking or jogging or on the kind of determined, headphone-accompanied walk that takes no interest in its surroundings.

  “That’s my line,” I say, and he smiles softly.

  “Meg, listen, I—”

  “No, wait,” I interrupt, because in between those tiptoed walks to check on him last night, I’d thought a lot about this morning, about how to finish this fight. I’d thought about everything Lachelle had said to me, and I’d thought about the things I have to say to make it so that Reid and I both try to stay. I practiced.

  “I want to go first.”

  He nods, but I see the way he sets his jaw, a bulwark against what I think is some lingering embarrassment. I take a deep breath.

  “The most important thing is that I’m sorry about last week. About the fight we had, and about how mad I got. What I said to you—it was really unfair.”

  “It wasn’t unfair. It’s like I said last night”—he clears his throat, lowering his eyes—“I’m well aware of my faults, especially the one you mentioned.”

  “It’s not a fault,” I say quickly, and he gives me a look I’ve never seen on his face, a cock of his head that looks a lot like sarcasm—a look that somehow telegraphs all the small moments where Reid’s bluntness got the best of him: calling me a shopgirl. Scolding me for not having an umbrella. Asking me about my health insurance.

  You know it is, that look says.

  “Or at least it’s no worse a fault than my own, which is . . . well, I guess it’s one you already know about.”

  Reid waits, and for a couple of seconds, I do, too. I think about my parents and about Sibby, about how my fight with Reid pressed up against everything about my life that hurt before I came to New York, and about everything that hurts about it now.

  “I hide things. My feelings about things in my life, or in the lives of people I care about. I hide them in my letters, and I hide them when I’m talking about the weather or Frisbee or whatever other thing I fill up the space with—”

  “I like everything you talk about.”

  You know you don’t, my look back to him says, and then I take a breath before I speak again.

  “Last week,” I begin, “I was really . . . I was trying so hard to hide, I guess. I was upset about this thing at work, and some things from my past it reminded me of, but instead of telling you that, I tried to distract you.” I swallow. “That’s something I’m realizing I do too much, to keep me—”

  “I never meant you to feel unprotected,” Reid says, his eyes full of regret. “I wouldn’t ever want to make you feel that way.”

  “You punched a guy in the face for me last night,” I say, my mouth curving into a teasing smile. “I feel pretty protected.”

  Reid ducks his head, his hair falling forward, skimming his stitched-up brow. “I only wanted you to—”

  “Be honest,” I finish for him. “Say what I mean.”

  His lips press together, which I take to mean agreement.

  “I want to try that,” I say. “Being honest. Talking about the things that are difficult. When I hide them—they seem to come out in other ways, anyway.”

  He moves, his body turning on the bench so we’re facing each other more. He looks between us, where my hands have been idly toying with the strap of my bag.

  And then he reaches out and takes one, pressing our palms together and linking our fingers, the same as he did last night. I close my eyes at the feel of it.

  He’ll protect you.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “I have three points.” I wince at how it sounds, this first attempt at saying what I mean. A little loud and slightly stiff, as though I’m about to start up a slideshow titled “Difficult Relationship Factors We Need to Address.” Practicing for this in the mirror wouldn’t have been the worst thing, if only six-foot-something of the man I’m trying to talk to hadn’t been sleeping on my couch all night.

  Reid smiles crookedly. “Three, huh?”

  I smile back. “Three. This is a numbers game, Sutherland.”

  “Oh,” he says softly, still smiling that swoonsh. “My specialty.”

  My specialty today. I’ve thought and thought about them, as if they were letters on a page: the order in which I’d say them. How I could make them strong enough, special enough, straightforward enough for Reid.

  “One,” I say, knowing his smile is about to disappear. “What you said last night, about your skin—”

  He tries to preempt me. “I’m not embarrassed by it. I’ve had it for a long time. Obviously I’d prefer if I didn’t, and I’d certainly prefer if you didn’t find it un—”

  “I don’t find it anything except part of you. It’s only number one because you said it gets worse when you’re stressed, and your job—it always seems stressful to you. I see how you get, whenever it comes up. And if that’s part of why things were so off with us last week, then I want to know about it.”

  Reid looks up from where our hands are joined, his eyes out on the wide expanse of park green as he answers me.

  “My work is . . . stressful. Especially lately. When I came to see you last week, I’d had a particularly terrible day. When I looked back at it, afterward . . . I realized I should’ve passed on your invitation, gone home alone.” He looks back at me, rubs his thumb over the back of my hand in a way that makes me shift on the bench, an inconvenient pulse of feeling between my legs.

  “But I wanted to be around you. You’re the only person here who doesn’t treat me like I’m a calculator. When I’m around you, I don’t think about numbers. It’s a relief.”

  “And here I am with my numbers game,” I tease, but I also use my own thumb to stroke his hand back, sorry for the stress he feels about his job. Honored that I’m as much a relief to him as he’s been for me.

  He smiles down at our hands. “I don’t mind this one. What’s two?”

  Two is a hard one. I swallow.

  “Two is—Avery. You, and Avery, and the wedding program.” I watch his face, search for some grimace or sadness, something that’ll give me an indication of how this one will go. “If you still hold it against me, Reid, it doesn’t matter how much you may like me now. It doesn’t matter how much we like each other. If you don’t forgive me for those letters, and if you still have feelings for her—”

  “I don’t. I mean that I don’t hold it against you. And I don’t still have feelings for her. Please, let me make this clear to you.”

  “Okay,” I say, because that is not going to be enough. I remember the way he’s looked, sometimes, when she comes up. I remember the way he’d said she was beautiful, and powe
rful. “Make it clear.”

  He clears his throat. “Avery’s father arranged for us to meet after she had been through a difficult time. A breakup with someone she’d been with since college, who had some problems with . . . ah, substances.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think he thought I’d be a good choice. Stable. Boring, probably.” Reid gives a lift of one shoulder. “I thought being with her would help me find my way here, in some way. And I think she thought being with me would be easier. Undemanding, and . . . calm. But we were a terrible match, and we both knew it. For much longer than either of us was willing to admit.”

  “But you bought her that ring,” I say, which is ridiculous. But it’s the first time since he came back to the shop that Reid and I have had any meaningful conversation about him and Avery, about what happened between them. My memories of her, of them together, are shaped by that ring, by what it represented.

  “That was not the ring I bought her, actually.”

  “What?”

  “A week after we got engaged she came to a dinner we had planned with the new one. A gift for the two of us, from her father. An upgrade.”

  “Ouch,” I say, grimacing, and he chuckles softly.

  “She’s a good person. I care about her, as a friend. But she’s from another world, I guess. I thought, for a while, that I might try to fit into it, but we weren’t for each other. You knew it as well as we both did.” He pauses, strokes my hand, takes a breath. “As for your letters . . . well. Maybe I am glad to hear you’re reconsidering the things you sometimes hide, but my frustration last week, it was not about you. It was about—”

  “New York,” I finish for him. “That’s three.”

  He looks down at our joined hands. “New York,” he repeats. For the first time in this numbers game, Reid looks well and truly unsure. I’m leaving New York, he’d said to me once, and I don’t think all the games in the world could make him stay.

  “This is home for me. This is where I built a life. And you’re leaving.”

  There’s a long pause, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t holding my breath. I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t dip in disappointment at what he says when he speaks again.

  “I’m here now.”

  It’s an incomplete answer, a thing that won’t be fully resolved between us—not today, and probably not ever. He may be here now, but what he means is that he’s leaving later.

  “I don’t want to stop seeing you,” he adds. “I’d see you any way you wanted. Only the walks, if that’s all I can have.”

  It’s not all you can have. The thought is immediate, but I say nothing, not yet. This will hurt, after all; I can tell already. I can have gone through all this work to make it so both of us stay—last night, this morning, anything that happens from this moment on—but in the end, he’ll still leave.

  “It’ll probably never work,” I say quietly, but I also desperately, desperately want him to convince me. “We’re total opposites.”

  The hand that’s not holding mine reaches out, and Reid sets a gentle finger to one of the buttons on my jacket.

  “Letters, numbers,” he says, a familiar beat to the words, as though he’s saying po-tay-to, po-tah-to. “They’re not so different.”

  I raise my eyes to his, and I’m not sure when we managed to get so close. Close enough that I can see the red-blond stubble along his jaw, close enough that I can smell my soap on his skin.

  “Both codes,” he adds. Then he moves his finger, tucking it under the edge of the button, tugging gently. The movement exerts no pressure, but I still lean closer to him.

  “That’s true,” I whisper, and when I raise my eyes to his I can see the heat there. I want that heat. I want it, and right now, it doesn’t matter to me if it’ll hurt someday soon. It doesn’t matter if this ends up being the fight of my life.

  “We could do it on the count of three,” I say, and he smiles, close-up and perfect and so, so sexy.

  “This is your game.” He leans in, but he doesn’t kiss me. He puts his mouth right against my temple. “Picture it,” he says, and somehow, I know exactly what he means. A code between us, the way we first talked to each other, even before we knew each other. My letters, and his ability to read them.

  “One,” he says.

  And I see it, o-n-e, the o shaped in that space of skin between my hairline and the outer edge of my eyebrow, a looping, upward curve connection to the script n I’m imagining over the arch of that brow, which is where the feather-light touch of Reid’s lips has moved. The e at the bridge of my nose, a slim, delicate, terminal curve that fades away rather than ending.

  My breath shudders between my parted lips.

  “Two.”

  He shifts, lets his lips rest softly against my cheekbone, and instead of pressing them there, he rubs them back and forth once, as light as a strand of my own hair in the wind, and I see that word, too, drawn in the same pink that’s the color of my natural blush, the pink I turn when I’m warm or embarrassed or aroused. The t, the w, the o, all of them a heavily sloped italic. All of them on the way to somewhere.

  “Reid,” I whisper, and he moves his head back, traces his eyes over the spots where he kissed before looking into mine.

  “May I?” he whispers back, and I let my eyes slide closed at this—the mannered, magnetic, Masterpiece Theatre perfection of it.

  I nod.

  “Three,” he says, but I don’t see any of those letters. I only feel the press of Reid’s perfect lips against mine, and as soon as it happens, I know. I know that I could have my eyes closed this way and I’d still know Reid’s kiss anywhere, because Reid’s kiss is everything I like about Reid—firm and direct, with a sweetness you have to know to truly recognize. He sets one of his big, warm hands to the side of my neck, his palm pressing against the network of veins where the blood rushes to the surface for him, but with his thumb he lightly strokes the line of my jaw. His lips on mine tell me he wants more than a chaste, closemouthed kiss, but he waits until my tongue slips over his bottom lip to give me his own, and once he does, he makes that soft groan I’ve heard him make before, but this, this is the perfect version of it, the one I’ll hear in my dreams for days and days.

  I scoot toward him, moving to wrap my arms around his neck, and I’m barely thinking—barely thinking that we’re in the park, that we’re in public, that at any second some disgruntled jogger might shout a well-deserved Get a room! I kiss him and kiss him, my body growing desperate to get closer to him.

  “This is the best game,” I breathe between kisses, my chest rising and falling quickly. I’m practically panting out here, but I don’t care. I want to keep his lips on mine; I want our tongues tangling; I want to press my whole self against him, and—unlike last night—I want to really feel it this time.

  “Meg,” he says, his forehead resting against mine, his own breaths coming faster now. “I have a number four.”

  I stiffen, worried we’ll have to stop now, worried there’s something I’ve forgotten.

  But Reid keeps me close, kisses me once before he speaks again.

  “Come home with me.”

  Chapter 13

  No self-respecting New Yorker PDAs on the subway, and Reid and I manage—barely, it feels to me—to stay self-respecting.

  But as soon as we’re up the steps from the Herald Square station, Reid touches me again, taking my hand and keeping me close to his side as we navigate the not-yet-crowded sidewalks all the way to his apartment building, a nondescript brick mid-rise in Murray Hill, somewhat tired on the outside but updated with bland, modern renovations in the lobby. On any other morning, on any other day, I’d ask more than twenty questions about it all: How’d you pick this? Do you know your neighbors? How long does it take you to get to work? Where’s your dry cleaner? This morning, though, my head is full of that kiss, my hand is full of Reid’s, and all I want is to finish what we started.

  As soon as the door to his apartment is closing behin
d us, I let him know it, turning to face him, tipping my head up for another kiss, and the best thing is that he doesn’t leave any doubt that he’s been wanting it, too, that he stood beside me on that train and felt every single passing touch of my body against his. He bends, his hands in my hair, releasing all the still-fresh shampoo scent he missed so much, and the noise that comes from his chest as he kisses me is guttural, impatient.

  Hot.

  “You don’t want the tour?” he says when he pulls his lips from mine to take a breath, his chin ducking immediately to put his lips somewhere new, on the soft skin of my neck.

  “Later I want the tour.” I gasp at the way he’s tasting me, his tongue tracing up that long column. “I’ll ask you so many questions,” I warn him.

  “It’s quite boring,” he warns, kissing the corner of my mouth first, before he gives me his lips, his tongue.

  “God, say that again,” I say, almost a moan, and then realize I don’t want to explain the quite thing, not when I could keep my mouth busy in other ways. “Never mind,” I murmur hastily. “Nothing about you is boring.”

  He presses me against the wall by his front door, his hands at my waist and his mouth hungry on mine. We stay that way for so long, long enough that I push his jacket off his shoulders, long enough that he does the same to me, long enough that we both toe off our shoes, kicking them sloppily out of the way.

  “Meg.” His voice is gruff, and all of a sudden I realize I’ve gripped the firm, ropy length of his forearms; I’m squeezing there to hold myself steady while we devour each other, and for the first time I feel a rough texture beneath one of my palms.

  “Oh,” I say, pulling my hand away. “I’m sorry.”

  “No.” He takes my hands in his and squeezes gently. “Touch me. Anywhere you want.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  He shakes his head. “Not right now.” He leans in, breathes against the skin of my neck. “Nothing hurts right now. I was going to ask if you wanted to go—