by Ruthie Knox
“Ladies first,” he said.
Ngh.
“Ooohkay.” She wished, suddenly, for a drink in her hand—something to swing around as she worked herself up to being as brave as she wanted to be.
But fuck it. She was already brave enough to have made it here, to have said the things she’d said tonight, to have initiated the whole project.
“I want a thirty-second hug,” she said.
His pen hovered over the paper, but only for a moment. He wrote it down.
Thirty-second hug.
“I read this article online,” she explained, “that was all about how good for us it is to hug, but how we have to hold the hug for at least thirty seconds to release all this oxytocin in our systems. And you know, oxytocin is the same thing that gets released when you…you know.”
“I do.”
He was going to kill her with two-word sentences and dead-face seriousness that made her want to squirm in her chair, just to put some pressure where she needed it.
“Now you, mister.”
Winston set down his pen at the top of the pad and looked into the same blind window she had. He looked there for so long that she had plenty of time to imagine all the things he might be thinking of. She felt like she was sitting on a giant, pulsing…she didn’t even know. Horny. Whatever she was sitting on, it was horny.
He started writing without saying anything.
“What does that say?” What does it say, Jesus Christ.
“It says…neck.”
“Neck.”
“I…sometimes. Occasionally, you see, I’ve.”
“You’ve.”
“Shivers, you know. When.”
“When you’ve?”
“At the…salon. They…”
“My God, Winston. What kind of salon do you go to?”
“No, Jesus, Allie. Typical salon. In every way, ordinary salon…place.”
“You have to just get this out, man. These are only the first two things on our list. If one of us has to explain anal in any kind of detail we’ll burst into actual flames.”
“They razor one’s neckline, and then sometimes, after they’ve brushed the hair away, sometimes, they’ve, I’m sure unconsciously, well…blown away the…stray hairs. It’s just…it’s occurred to me that I may be rather sensitive there. On my neck.”
“You think?”
“I do, yes.”
“One. Hug. Two. Neck. Maybe we work our way down?” She tapped the paper near the bottom. “Just go ahead and write, ‘Ten. Anal.’ And get it over with.”
His eyes snapped to hers. “Are you serious?”
“First rule of the list—I never joke about the list. Write it.”
She watched him write the numeral ten, with one of those European number ones that looked like an upside down V. He didn’t write anything after, but he did ink in a three, and then brought his other hand up to hide what he wrote there.
“Gimme.”
“Hmm?”
“The list, gimme the list.”
He slid it over like it was a shot at last call.
3. Spend an hour kissing, keeping one’s hands over clothing.
Oh, fuck, fuck, fuckity.
She added her number four: Everything but. By the look on Winston’s face, he knew exactly what she meant.
His number five made her finish her cold tea in a big gulp.
Then he wrote his six right after, and she stood up.
Not because she had anywhere to go, or a plan, or one single thought in her head. She just couldn’t quite account for how much of her brain space was now being taken up by pounding—between her legs, but in a variety of other places, too, more of a full-body pounding that crowded out thought and, apparently, inhibition, because she snatched the paper and pen from Winston, inked in a seven and an eight before her better sense could catch up and stop her, and then leaned over, shoving the paper back in front of him, and blew out a long, slow breath across the back of his neck.
She watched goose bumps rise up along that vulnerable bit where his hair was cut close and sharp. His shoulders went tense, and the quiet got thick.
“I had been wanting…I mean.” His words were slow, strangely unaffected sounding, otherwise, which turned Allie on even more. “This list. It’s meant for us? To—”
“Check off. Yes. I think so. You don’t have to.” He had to.
“Together. I just want it to be perfectly clear. We’re to do these things together. To…each other.”
“Or, according to seven, to ourselves, while the other one watches.”
“Right.” He took up his pen and bent over the paper, scribbled something, and then lifted it up and blew on the letters, folded it, and tucked it into his trousers pocket. “All right, then.”
“I feel like we should shake hands,” she joked. Because his distant face, and his confiscation of the list—she was pretty sure this was just how Winston got when his feelings were big. And she was pretty sure, too, from everything that had happened, that he wouldn’t turn her down. Hadn’t just turned her down.
But not one-hundred-percent sure.
He stood up. Her heart stopped.
“It’s late, and I think you’ve had a big day, and may have an even bigger one tomorrow.”
She nodded.
He turned his forearm over and lifted the catch on his thick gold watch. He placed it on the counter, laying the links out just so.
“Thirty seconds?”
She nodded again. “At least thirty. To get the maximum benefit.”
He took a step toward her, and she took one toward him.
They’d been in a bar, drank too much whiskey, walked several blocks, stuttered through their personal histories, but somehow he smelled good. She imagined mysterious European toiletries as he pulled her in close—French deodorant bars that could only be ordered from two-hundred-year-old shops on cobblestoned streets in ancient shopping districts. Colognes mixed by perfumers whose ancestors had served the kings and queens of England. Clove-oil tooth powders. When his arms met behind her, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, smiling.
She liked that she knew some of his worst things, which were ordinary sorts of worst things. She liked that she didn’t know everything about him yet. And even more, that he felt like someone she could know without the things that made him Winston infringing on anything that made her Allie.
The top of her head came up to his chin. She rested her cheek against his chest. He felt solid in her arms, warm but not too hot, his embrace comfortable but not too much.
She glanced at his watch on the countertop. Ten seconds in.
Ten seconds was longer than most hugs lasted. Something in her had tensed, a signal laid down by her amygdala telling her, Let go.
She tightened her grip and felt him exhale against her hair.
“This is nice,” she said.
“Mmm.”
Her body released, just a little, floating on the deep warm sound of his mmm, on the feel of his hands spanning her lower back. He adjusted his stance, and her thigh brushed over his, making her aware of all the places they touched. His thigh, the ridge of belt at his waist, her breasts against her soft shirt pushing into his shirt and behind it the bare skin of his chest.
She opened her eyes to the sight of his top shirt button, his collar gaping, the flushed skin of his throat.
She wasn’t sure what it felt like precisely for oxytocin to flood through her system, but she suspected it might be linked to the lazy, loose rush of her pulse and the wobbling uncertainty in her legs that made her lean into him and smile at the expensive fabric of his shirt.
He slid one of his arms tighter around her body so that it felt like his forearm was pressing against her upper spine. It meant one of his buttons was biting her cheekbone, but it also meant that she could hear his heart.
He adjusted again, and she felt his lips on her hair, warm on some little place on her scalp. It made her imagine being in bed with him. Not having sex
, not even naked. Just legs wrapped comfortably around legs, reading sleepily in the pink light of bedside tables. She imagined him wearing reading glasses and slipping them off his nose when he started to snore.
Hugging was clearly extremely dangerous.
She knew that the thin golden wire of the second hand on his watch had already slipped past their time, but she didn’t let go. Neither did he.
“I find I don’t want to let go.” His voice vibrated against her face.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever really hugged anyone. Maybe Beatrice.”
“How do you feel about hand holding?”
He tipped away, a bit, and she loosened her arms around him, slid her hands down his sides. His hands were right there to meet hers. It should have been awkward to meet his eyes.
“Well, hand holding wasn’t on the list.” He squeezed her fingers.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but quite a few things aren’t on that list.”
“Anal, for one.”
She laughed, choked. She would never get over, in a million years, the way anal sounded in his terribly posh accent.
“Let the record show that we can work off-list.”
He did that eyebrow thing again, and they broke apart. “I don’t want to keep you up,” he said. “If you’d like to turn in, I’m happy to leave. But if you find you’d like to sit up awhile, I thought perhaps…do you like movies?”
“Winston, everyone likes movies.”
“Right, well. I have a sort of project, with my Netflix queue. Movies I’ve missed. If you’d like to watch a movie with me, and investigate this hand-holding business a bit further.”
“I’d like that.” She couldn’t remember, actually, the last time she’d watched a movie all the way through. She wasn’t sure she had ever watched a movie with a man, or a boy even, and held hands.
She was so off-list, it was a teeny bit scary.
She thought his daughter was a very fortunate girl.
—
In the morning, after a night’s sleep that was much better than it should have been given she didn’t know where her mother was, didn’t know how her dad was doing, wasn’t sure how to call her sister and tell her she was in town, Allie found a little white card made of thick paper on the breakfast bar with an embossed phone number on the front. On the back was a note from Winston. He must have left it there just before he hugged her good night and left.
I’m so sorry I can’t help you more, but I can make sure you don’t get lost. This is the number for my driver, Jean. Please feel free to use his services towards your cause while you’re in town.
W.R.C.
He’d printed his own number beneath his initials.
They’d watched Goonies. She cried happy tears at the end, and Winston speculated whether the jewels the children had kept were valuable enough to save their houses. He’d worried about it, talking diamond and gem markets, as he held her hand all the way through the credits.
Chapter 6
He couldn’t get used to her hair.
His daughter worked behind the counter at a crowded university-adjacent coffeehouse. The work required her to be constantly in motion, smiling and talking, and Winston liked when she demanded that he meet her here because she always misjudged when her shift would be over, and he often ended up seated at a table with a newspaper, ostensibly reading but in fact watching Beatrice.
As a girl, her hair had been a prim English blond like her mother’s, long and perfectly straight, with a fringe.
Now, it was a waterfall of color held off her face by a thick printed scarf, and the blond had been transformed into shades of blue and mermaid green, vibrant pink and lilac. He didn’t know if it was all the color he couldn’t get used to or how much this tangled rainbow suited her.
She plunked an espresso down in front of him. “I’m going to be, like, ten more minutes probably. But I’ve got to be uptown in half an hour for dance class, so we might have to walk and talk.”
“Bea! I need you to reset the toddy and figure out what crawled up the steamer and clogged it all to fuck.” A child with dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail and an improbable curled moustache beckoned, and she went.
He tried to remember a time when he hadn’t felt like she was constantly rushing away from him, and couldn’t. One school year in New York and even her accent was running away, a clip here, a flattened vowel there. When she was younger, he could never decide if her childhood of riding lessons and piano, a proper school with Latin, made him proud or a little uneasy. Now he couldn’t decide if this vibrant, brash New Yorker was really the end point of Rosemary’s parenting or if he was meant to step in before Rosemary phoned to tell him he’d cocked up.
“Shit,” she said, her eyes on the clock as she dumped his cup and saucer into a gray plastic bin. “We’ve got to jet.”
He trailed in her wake down the sidewalk, his calves burning, every third word that she threw over her shoulder lost in the crowd so that he found his end of the conversation consisted largely of the words “Pardon?” and “Come again?”
He could already sense that they would arrive at her building or a friend’s building, or maybe the courtyard of one of her classrooms, and she would make an excuse for why dance class couldn’t be missed or why they couldn’t enjoy a meal that didn’t involve leaning against a high-top table dripping pizza grease.
She’d always been willing to go to high tea at Brown’s with Rosemary, or for an afternoon’s shopping. He’d come home from work countless nights to find them chattering in the kitchen, Bea spilling the details of her day, telling her secrets to her mother.
She told him nothing.
“I had a date last night.” He made sure to use his boardroom voice.
Beatrice halted, an eddy of people flowing around her, and turned around. He stopped so short he nearly knocked her over, and so guided her out of the middle of the sidewalk to stand near a stoop.
“What.”
“I had a date last night. With a woman. I went into a bar, a basement bar, an American basement bar, and a woman picked me up, and we watched a movie.”
“What.”
“She’s American, as well, and doesn’t work in finance. I hadn’t even met her before last night. She resides in the state of Wisconsin, but is here on…business.”
“She resides in the state of Wisconsin?”
“I believe it’s in the Midwest.”
“Holy shit, Dad.”
“Yes, well. This is a thing that happened. To me. Your dad.”
“You should’ve told me sooner—now I have to go to my class and I want to know everything. What’d you do? Where’d you go? What movie did you see? Come on, we have to walk.” She grabbed his elbow, pulling him back into the stream of pedestrians, but now she walked alongside him.
“Goonies. It’s a treasure-hunting adventure movie. I think it’s for children, actually, but Netflix recommended it after I watched that terrible Nicolas Cage film. I liked it very much. And the woman. I liked her, too. Her name’s Allie Fredericks. She’s in town looking for her mother, but it’s complicated.”
“I could get you such a good gig writing movie reviews, swear to God. Okay, so, it’s complicated. What’s that mean?” She still had her hand on his arm. It made him feel fatherly.
“Her mother is involved with someone, someone who lives here in New York, but I get the impression only Allie knows about it. Her mother lives in the state of Wisconsin also, with Allie’s father, of course. Her sister lives here in New York.”
“Okay. Hold up. Sometimes I can barely understand a word you’re saying. So her mother lives here, but used to live in Wisconsin, and this Allie has been looking for her?”
“No. Her mother’s run away from Wisconsin to take up with a man who’s not Allie’s father, well, not exactly, and Allie is trying to stop it, I believe before her parents’ wedding anniversary party.”
“And you’re sure this Allie is, like, reas
onably sane? Because this sounds more than ‘complicated.’ ”
“Quite sane. Though she is a terrible spy, despite looking lovely in a trench coat.”
Beatrice stopped in the sidewalk again and grabbed his hand, pulling him to the side. “I am officially skipping dance class. There’s this hamburger place that makes amazing omelets around the corner. Let’s eat there.”
“I won’t tell you this story for less than a place with tablecloths and decent tea.” It was, he felt, a proper fatherly offer, which would remind her of the importance of table manners and formal dining.
Beatrice narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her nose. “Fine. But it has to be within a six-block radius, because I have a thing in two hours.”
“Excellent. We’ll have to go on foot at any rate. I gave Jean to Allie for the day.”
Beatrice started dragging him across the street by his hand, and Winston grinned.
—
“Oh my God.” Beatrice, despite recent claims that “only street food” was worth eating, was doing a good job of her brioche French toast and capered poached eggs. Her table manners, Winston observed, were as pristine as ever.
“Yes, well.”
“Justice. Fuck. You never told me he was your client.”
“You never asked.”
“He’s like the great white whale. I know this guy who’s taking that documentary film class I couldn’t get into, you remember I told you about it, and he said the professor’s been trying to get Justice on camera for, like, fifteen years. And you regularly meet him for beers.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘regularly.’ I’ve met him several times.”
She polished off the last bite of French toast. When the waiter filled her water glass, she thanked him. Sometimes she reminded him so much of Rosemary it took his breath away. “Sure, but you could arrange a meeting.”
“For your professor? I think—”
“For Allie. I mean, you like her, right? And this guy’s her dad.”
“Her birth father.”
“Right. So you were the exact right person for her to meet. She comes to New York, follows her mom to a bar, and there you are. It’s like karma or something. I wonder if you knew each other in a past life.”