Silk

by Heidi McLaughlin

  I’d carefully selected New York. It was really the only place that I could think of where a person didn’t need an excuse not to drive. My dad had resisted. He pushed for Boston instead. It was smaller. He had a sister there. But I hadn’t given in. I wanted to get lost in the largest city in the U.S. Finally, my dad relented on the condition that I would never take the subway. In return, he would always provide cab fare. It seemed like a small price to pay for complete anonymity.

  I’d been in Manhattan for nine years now, and even though I now took care of my own cab fare, I’d yet to set foot on a train. It set me apart from the real New Yorkers, but I’d made a promise.

  I was reluctant, but nodded anyway. Lizzie would get a kick out of this. She was constantly giving me a hard time over the subway thing. Plus, she was going to have a field day with my bringing Adam along today. Maybe watching me ride the subway for the first time would distract her from the teasing that she was going to give me over my ‘boyfriend.’

  “Okay, but you are going to have to play Julie, cruise director,” I said with a sheepish smile.

  “Sure,” he said, looking at me kind of funny. “So where are we headed?”

  “Our first stop is in Harlem, 121st street between 2nd and 3rd,” I answered. I looked at him expectantly.

  “On second thought, maybe we should cab it,” he said.

  I started to step toward the curb to hail a cab, but he pulled me back.

  “I was just kidding. You realize that the subway station is practically in your backyard, right? Can you walk around the block in those shoes?” he asked teasingly, gesturing to my designer ballet flats. I poked him in the side with my elbow and led him toward the subway station that I’d passed a million times, but never ventured into.

  It was summer in New York. The air was hot and stifling. By the time we got to the steps leading to the unknown, I was so hot that I was actually looking forward to going underground. We walked downstairs into the only slightly cooler corridor. At the turnstile, Adam stuck his MetroCard into the slot, and it clicked loudly. He walked through and turned back to me.

  My eyes shot back and forth between the turnstile and Adam. Finally, pointing over my shoulder at the vending machines, I said, “I need to get one of those.”

  “You don’t have a MetroCard? Or yours ran out?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Don’t have one.” He looked at me like I’d just grown horns right before his eyes. Rather than let him see me squirm, I glared at him, daring him to make fun of me. “I’ve never needed one before.”

  His mouth gaped. “You’ve never needed one. You’ve never been on the subway. At all?” His voice had risen. I looked around to see if people were staring, but no one seemed to be paying us any attention. That was the great thing about Manhattan. There were freak shows around every corner. You couldn’t possibly pay attention to every single one.

  Shaking his head with a smirk on his face, Adam walked back to where I was standing. He leaned over the bar and slid his card into the machine for the second time. When the lock clicked, he bowed slightly and gestured for me to pass. “This way, my little taxi princess.”

  I rolled my eyes at him and huffed past. I looked up at the signs identifying different hallways for different subway lines. I was an educated woman. Surely, I could read the signs well enough to figure out how to get to Harlem. Unfortunately, though, none of the signs said East Harlem. Adam had said we needed to take the green line, but there were three. The four, five, and six trains were all green. Ugh. I had no idea. I threw my hands up in the air. I could hear Adam chuckle behind me. Just then, a dirty man in tattered clothing ran straight toward me. He got right in my face and said, “You’re pretty!” Then he flipped me off with both hands. I gasped in surprise. I guess some freak shows did demand your attention.

  Adam was laughing hard now. He grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the grimy homeless man leering at me. He was still laughing as he led me through a tunnel and up an escalator. When we stepped onto the platform, a train was pulling in. I didn’t see whether it was a four, five, or six, but it had to be one of them. I didn’t even know if it mattered. The doors opened, and Adam pulled me inside. It wasn’t particularly crowded though all of the seats were already taken. Adam grabbed the bar overhead and motioned to the pole next to me. “You might want to hang on.”

  A ding rang out, and then we were in motion. The sudden change caused me to stumble into Adam. He didn’t budge, but chuckled. At each station, the start and stop of the train would cause me to jostle into Adam, and each time I would nestle in a little closer. By the sixth stop, I’d decided that riding the subway wasn’t so bad. I would take any excuse to get closer to him. In fact, I might invest in a 30-day pass.

  Finally, when I was so close that he was practically wearing me, he wrapped his free arm around my waist and kissed my cheek. With his arm securing me against him, I didn’t move at all when the train took off the next time.

  “I would have done that sooner, but I was enjoying you rubbing against me too much,” he said. “So how is it that you’ve never been on the subway? You’ve lived here, what, nine years, you said?”

  I shrugged. “When I moved here, my dad made me promise to always take cabs.”

  A dark cloud seemed to pass over his face. “Of course, he did,” he muttered.

  “Huh?” I asked, perplexed.

  But the storm passed as fast as it had hit. The easy smile returned to his face. “I just meant that any dad would be protective of his daughter ... if he could afford to be. So, of course, your dad didn’t want you to take the subway. It can be shady down here, but really mostly only late at night. It’s actually pretty safe.”

  “He can be very protective. Only child and all,” I said. Overprotective didn’t even begin to describe my dad’s attitude toward me.

  Just then the train dinged and the somewhat androgynous voice announced that we were at 110th Street.

  “This is our stop,” Adam said.

  The walk from the train station to Lizzie’s apartment was only a few blocks. As we approached her building, I looked at Adam, expecting him to be confused or, at the very least, curious. He looked neither. In fact, it was almost like he already knew where we were going. I couldn’t tell who was guiding who. I realized then that he hadn’t even asked who he was meeting today.

  I stopped in the dark, dingy hallway and turned toward him. “Aren’t you even curious why we are here?”

  “Sure,” he said simply.

  “We are here to pick up a friend of mine. I’m a big sister ... you know with Big Brothers/Big Sisters. My little sis, Lizzie, lives here.” I hesitated before going on. “Listen, she’s going through some things right now. Some hard things. I just want to take her out today, and I want her to have a good time. I’ve been wanting you to meet her, and I knew you could help today ... you know, with the good time part. And the distracting part.”

  He stepped toward me. He placed his hands on either side of my face and brushed my cheek with his thumb. “Am I distracting?” he asked.

  “Incredibly,” I breathed.

  “I find you to be somewhat distracting as well. And sometimes – when I least expect it – amazing, too.”

  “I’m not amazing,” I said, blushing. “I get as much out of it as she does. Probably more.”

  “It is amazing. That you give up your free time to do this when you don’t have that much of it to begin with.” He leaned in and kissed me. It wasn’t his usual panty-dropping kiss. It was a sweet kiss. The kind that I found to be incredibly distracting.

  Even as innocent as it was, a fire ignited and burned through me. I wrapped my arms around his waist and pulled him closer. I lost myself in him for a few seconds, or maybe minutes, before I remembered where we were. I pulled back and smiled at him.

  Brushing my cheek one last time, he said, “Let’s go get your girl.”

  When Lizzie opened the door to her apartment, the glum expression on her face was a
lmost more than I could bear. I may have been able to step away from her problems for a few days, but they were with her all the time. The dark circles under her eyes told me that she hadn’t been sleeping well. “Hey,” she said blandly. Then she noticed Adam behind me, and her lips twisted up into a grin. “Ohhh, hey,” she said again with a new lilt in her voice.

  I made the introductions and then asked if her mom was home. I figured that the proper thing to do was to introduce her mom to Adam since Lizzie would be spending the afternoon with him. However, since she wasn’t home, propriety was out the window. I asked Lizzie all the regular questions. Did she have her key? Did she write her mom a note? We’d learned the hard way that it was a good idea to leave a note even if she’d told her mom where she was going. Her mom didn’t always remember everything Lizzie told her. Each time Lizzie answered, she would look at me, but then her eyes would dart toward Adam. She actually batted her eyelashes at him.

  When we stepped outside, Lizzie looked around for the cab that was usually waiting for us. I shrugged at her and said, “We’re taking the subway today.”

  She looked toward Adam and smirked, but just said, “Oh, wow.”

  When we got back to the subway station, Adam left us alone for a few minutes while he bought each of us our own MetroCard. Lizzie turned to me and whispered in a sing-song voice, “Is he your boyfriend? Are you going to marry him?”

  I didn’t want to have a discussion with Lizzie about what Adam and I were and weren’t. I still didn’t know myself. So I kept my answer simple. “No. He’s just a friend.”

  “Oh, my God, Alexis. He is so hot!” she said conspiratorially. “Do all of your friends look like that?”

  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this. Of course, she would think he was hot. Any teenage girl would think he was hot. Hell, he’d give an 80-year-old woman hot flashes.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to address the issue of Adam’s hotness with her, because he returned then. He handed us each a MetroCard. I was glad that he’d bought her one. She probably already had one, but I didn’t like for her to pay for anything when we went out together. She needed to keep her money for other things.

  He pointed a finger at me. “Be careful with this, taxi princess. Don’t let it go to your head.”

  Lizzie laughed. “She takes a cab everywhere. It’s hilarious, isn’t it?”

  “Alexis believes in safety first,” he said. They were ganging up on me. I didn’t care though because for some reason seeing these two people together made me happy.

  Even though Lizzie was probably able to navigate the subway system just fine by herself, Adam took over. We took the green train back down to Lexington station where he expertly transitioned us to the blue line. We got off the train at the 23rd Street stop. From there, we walked over to Chelsea Piers.

  We spent the afternoon ice skating and bowling. Adam was a much better skater than I was. In fact, he was even able to skate backwards in front of us while Lizzie and I struggled just to stay upright. When I asked where he got his mad skills, he admitted to playing ice hockey in high school. I still didn’t know much about his past other than that he had grown up in Houston. Houston seemed like a pretty hot climate for ice hockey though I supposed that most big cities had indoor ice rinks. After all, Dallas had two that I knew of, and the weather in Dallas was certainly not much cooler than Houston.

  Lizzie really seemed to enjoy being around Adam. She’d seemed lighter than air all afternoon, like she didn’t have a worry in the world, which was exactly what I’d hoped for today. And, surprisingly, Adam had a way with Lizzie, too. In fact, he was so good with her that it seemed a shame that he didn’t want kids of his own some day. Of course, since he had a little sister, he was probably used to being around girls Lizzie’s age. When the announcer at the rink had announced a couples skate, he’d skated right past me and held his elbow out to Lizzie. I’d skated off the ice and hung over the railing as they went around and around, arm in arm.

  After skating, we walked from Pier 61 to Pier 60. The bowling alley was dark and modern with black lights and glowing bowling balls. I was a better bowler than skater, but somehow still managed to finish in last place. An arcade was attached to the bowling alley, and Adam played a basketball game while Lizzie and I played skeeball. Eventually, we won enough tickets between the three of us to trade for a small stuffed animal. Adam chose a tie-dyed lizard, saying that it was meant to go home with Lizzie.

  Even though we were all getting hungry, we only had time to grab a quick snack before we had to be at the Field House Rock Climbing Center. I’d made an appointment for Lizzie to have a 45-minute climbing session with an instructor. Adam and I wouldn’t be able to climb with her since the wall was for kids only, but we were able to watch.

  Lizzie was timid at first. She waited for instruction before she adjusted her foothold or grip. Eventually, though, she got the hang of it. As her confidence built, she started making more moves on her own. After she finished her descent, she bounded over to us and clapped her hands together. “That was great!” she exclaimed. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I knew that our activities this afternoon could not have been better chosen.

  When we walked out of the Field House, we were all famished. I hadn’t been sure about how Lizzie would feel about sharing our special pizza place with Adam, but when I mentioned it to her, she was all for it. As much as I’d enjoyed the adventure of the subway earlier that afternoon, I headed straight for the line of taxis sitting outside the building. I was so hungry that I just wanted to get from point A to point B as fast as possible.

  When we got to the restaurant, they sat us in a booth. Adam gestured for Lizzie and me to sit together, and then he slid into the seat across from us. We ordered our usual Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza even though Adam wrinkled his nose and called it ‘chick pizza.’ I told him that the pineapple made it ‘healthy pizza.’ When the pizza arrived, he started handing out slices, and it didn’t escape my attention that he made sure that Lizzie’s plate was full before he filled his own.

  While we ate, Lizzie gushed about how much fun she’d had this afternoon. Rock climbing had definitely been her favorite. “I can’t wait to go back and do it again,” she said. Her face fell then. “Oh, I guess, I’m probably not supposed to be doing stuff like that any more, huh?”

  I looked at her sharply since Adam didn’t know she was pregnant. I didn’t really think that she’d want to share something so monumental with someone that she’d just met. She surprised me, though. She looked Adam dead in the eye. Her voice didn’t waver at all when she said, “Yeah, so I’m pregnant, and Alexis is helping me to figure some things out.”

  It occurred to me that she probably hadn’t told her secret to anyone who wasn’t currently sitting at this table. By telling Adam, she might be trying the words out. Soon enough, she would need to tell her mom. She might also need to tell a guidance counselor at school. I didn’t know what proper teenage pregnancy protocol was.

  Adam didn’t miss a beat. His eyes were soft and sympathetic. “In that case, maybe we should find something a little less death defying to do next weekend.” He looked to me and smiled. His eyebrows were raised as if he was asking my permission to tag along again. His hand brushed my knee under the table, and my heart tore apart.

  There was nothing I wanted more than to share this with him. Maybe ... just maybe ... if we did this together, I would have the strength to stand by Lizzie. Maybe I would be able to help her find the path that was right for her rather than the path that I wanted her to take. I wasn’t sure if those two things weren’t the same. They might very well be. But, in case they weren’t, having Adam by my side might help me do right by her.

  Adam had seamlessly moved the conversation away from the sensitive subject of Lizzie’s pregnancy. Without making a big deal about it, he suggested activities that wouldn’t put her in any danger. His first suggestion was an action movie that would be releasing next weekend. Lizzie suggested a chick fl
ick instead, and Adam groaned that there was no way she would be dragging him to see that. They finally settled on miniature golf. I wasn’t sure where a miniature golf course was, but maybe Adam had a handle on that.

  As I watched them laughing, I considered again how good he was with her. He was a natural. I’d staked my very happiness on his proclamation that he never wanted to have kids of his own. But, suddenly, I couldn’t imagine Adam going through life without having children. There would be nothing more precious than a miniature Adam. He deserved picket fences and baby strollers if that’s what he decided that he wanted one day. He deserved to love a woman who could give him a whole baseball team of little Adams.

  I needed to tell him soon that I couldn’t offer him any of that. Even if it ended me, I needed to give him the opportunity to walk away.

  CHAPTER 17

  Adam

  I was in trouble. Until this point, I’d been able to convince myself that it was all just a game ... that I could walk away at any time. Even when I’d decided not to upload that naked picture of Allie, it was only because I just barely didn’t hate her anymore. What I was feeling right now, though, was a long way from not hating her.

  Watching her with Lizzie ... the terrified look in her eye when the train took off the first time ... reaching for me to steady herself ... the way that sundress hitched up over her cute little ass when she threw the bowling ball ... it was too fucking much.

  I stopped before going down the steps into the subway tunnel where I wouldn’t have any cell service. I scrolled through my contacts until I found the number I was looking for and made the call.

  “Hey,” I started. “About that party. I’m all in.” I was past pretending that I didn’t care about her. In fact, I wished now that the party had been my idea to begin with.

  “Okay, well, her birthday is on Thursday, but her parents are taking her to dinner,” Carly gushed, practically beaming through the phone.