by Ruthie Knox
Winston’s expression betrayed his curiosity. “You sell vintage clothing, then?”
“I sell vintage everything, but yeah, a lot of clothes and jewelry. I have a website for that stuff that’s been around about…eight years? Ish? So it’s got a pretty good reputation, and then I’ve got the Etsy shop, eBay, my Instagram, all that.”
They passed what must have been a factory building once, its glass panes gleaming in the setting sunlight. They walked slowly, caught between a young family in front of them with a toddler and a group of teenagers behind them, but the pace felt right for the night—less like walking and more like the promenade she’d read about Italians doing, where they went outside after their long afternoon naps and strolled around, the cooling air on their skin, greeting their neighbors, voices twining together to welcome the night.
He took her bare Popsicle stick and tossed it with his own into a trash can. “How did you settle on that?”
“I didn’t really settle on it, it just sort of happened. When I was a kid, I loved this big antique shop out by the interstate, Sal’s. Sal was the old guy who owned it, and I’d pester my dad into driving me there on weekends so I could spend, like, some whole afternoon poking through jars of buttons or letterpress type or wax records. Sal was a hoarder, and it was kind of a huge space. I liked it so much there.”
“What about it?”
He reached out and took her hand in his. It felt natural, even as she couldn’t not notice it. He’s holding my hand.
“Um, I’m not sure, the smell of it, for one thing. You know that antique shop smell, like old crumbling books and dust and clothes and a little bit of mothballs? I liked that smell so much. Still do. And I guess, for me, there’s some kind of romance to the things that survive, because everything has a story, even if we don’t know what it is. I loved making the stories up, like, who used to have this toy rolling pin, what she looked like, what her mom was like, if she had any pets. May thought it was the most boring place in the world, but Sal understood me.”
“You were friends.”
“Yeah. It’s kind of sad, actually, because he died when I was in college, and it wasn’t until I came home on break that I found out he was gone. No one had thought to tell me. I was so angry. Terribly, terribly hurt, that I’d missed having a chance to say goodbye to him, and that I’d missed…I don’t know. Knowing he was my friend, for real. And everything about the end.”
Winston squeezed her hand. “Let’s rest a bit.” He steered her toward a small lawn, thick grass the color of his tie, and found them a place among the couples and families and singles reading books or absorbed in their phones.
Allie laid back in the grass, arms above her head, so she could look at the sky. Her heart always got heavy thinking of Sal—what he’d given her, what she’d learned from him.
“He didn’t have any kids, just this kind of terrible bunch of nieces and nephews and second cousins, none of whom ever came to visit. And I got a call from his lawyer’s office asking me to come in, and it turned out he’d left me all his stuff. Not the property his antique mall was on, which had been in his family forever, used to be their farm, but all the antiques in his shop and a four-story stone building downtown that used to be a department store but had sat empty for years. It turned out he’d bought it for me years earlier. I was twenty when he died.”
“That must have been overwhelming.”
“Yeah, but it was great, too. I can still remember the first time I went to an estate sale on my own, after Sal had died. We’d been to so many, but it was always him telling me what was worth buying, what a good price was, and I was just this kid who didn’t belong there. Once the bidding started, that was when I realized how much I knew—and that was the best feeling, I think maybe one of the best days I’ve ever had.”
She sat up, wanting to see his face. She felt tender talking about her work. It wasn’t something her family asked questions about or understood particularly well, and she’d learned to keep it to herself if she wanted to avoid getting a lecture from her mother about how much steadier it would be to have a job with insurance and a salary.
With Matt, it had been the opposite problem—too many questions, too many opinions. His ownership of her work had made her want to hide it away.
“My dad helped me a lot getting the building into shape, organizing, thinking about how to build a business. I got a certification as an estate appraiser after I finished college, and became an estate agent, so I sometimes value estates and run the auctions for a commission. I’ve got, you know, tenants now, a floor of apartments and a first-floor restaurant that’s pretty popular, and some office rentals, and I have the antiques on the top floor, which I photograph and list online and ship out when they sell. I’ve got a few other properties, pretty diverse, too, that my friend Elvira told me to buy. She’s a financial advisor.”
He knocked his knee against hers, and when she looked at him, he was grinning. “You, madam, are rich.”
There was nothing in his voice but delight, and nothing in his face but respect. Other than her dad, he was the only person who had ever guessed how well she did, had done, especially so young, especially with her history. People didn’t talk about money in Wisconsin—especially not young people, and definitely not girls, and absolutely never young girl entrepreneurs. Pretty much everyone she knew, including her mom, May, her casual circle of friends, assumed she could pay her rent but was basically “junk rich,” as Matt had once put it.
Her first impulse was to join Winston’s laughter and brush away his observation. Except, he was the mailman. And he wasn’t dumb. He had been through a lot—hard things. She bet he’d been underestimated once or twice himself.
“Yes, actually. I am rich. Manitowoc-rich, not New York rich, but you know, Wisconsin has a lot of secret ridiculously rich people, and let’s just say I wouldn’t be kicked off their picnic blanket.”
It felt good. She felt the full measure of her accomplishments, maybe for the first time.
“I admit, I am having a very hard time not demanding that you come back to my office, right now,” he said, “so I can see what you have in your portfolio that I might offer to clients.”
“You can demand all you want, but I’m not slutty with my portfolio. It’s got its knees pressed pretty tight together.” Although she thought she’d let him see it, if he asked. It might be fun. Money-nerd fun.
“I should’ve guessed right off when you complained about paying seven dollars for a Popsicle.”
“Ah, the old ‘rich are tight’ stereotype.”
“My experience, yes. You did say that you intended on selling the very outfit you’re wearing.”
“Not the shoes. I love these shoes. And they cost, like, twelve dollars at the Designer Shoe Warehouse, so it’s not as if anyone would want them.” She knocked her knee against his. “Can I ask you an intrusive personal question?”
“I suppose you can.”
“Was the money part of things really bad when you got divorced? Because when Matt and I were going to get married, the money was a big part of why I didn’t pull the trigger. I never told anyone, not even my sister, but I’d been to see Elvira, and Wisconsin is the kind of marital property state where half of everything you have is assumed to belong to your spouse unless you have a prenup.” She shrugged, not quite sure why it seemed important to ask him. “Did you guys have one, or something like that?”
He looked out over the tops of the buildings, then back at her. “No. My family’s well off, but I didn’t have any personal wealth to speak of when we married, and neither did Rosemary. She’d spent all those years restoring our house and taking care of Beatrice. I didn’t begrudge her whatever it was she decided to ask from me. What she asked was to sell the house and keep all the proceeds for herself, and for me to pay Bea’s way going forward. So she has the settlement she wants, and whatever she brings in through her own efforts, which I know Rosemary well enough to suspect are lucrative. We’re both comfort
able enough.”
“It must have been some house.”
“It was a manor house in the country—too big for us, and too expensive, and halfway to falling down when we purchased it. She spent an enormous amount of time and effort managing the restoration, and it sold for a small fortune. But I think in hindsight, buying that house was the worst decision I ever made for our marriage.”
“How come?”
“It wasn’t what Rosemary wanted. I wanted it because I wanted us to…to be properly settled, in a proper house, and me in my proper job. I think I understood it to be what was expected of me. I expected it of Rosemary.”
“Expectations, man.”
“Yes. Well. She’s quite given up on them now. Did I tell you she climbs mountains? She’s gearing up for an attempt on Everest.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
She smiled at what his accent did to crass words. “That’s pretty badass of her.”
“It is. It’s…good. The Rosemary I met at university wanted nothing more than to climb mountains and write about it. It reassures me that nothing I did, or that we did together—that she wasn’t ruined by it. Only delayed.”
She’d watched Matt for similar signs, and looked for them in herself—signs that she was still here, delayed from living the life she might have pursued without Matt, but not damaged by her years with him. Not ruined.
Allie picked up Winston’s coat from where it lay on the grass between them. She laid it over her lap, admiring the light, expensive wool. He spent his money on very beautiful things, and she had a weakness for that.
She had a weakness for Winston.
It scared her on some level, but not nearly as much as everything else in her life did. Compared to how she felt when she thought about her parents, her sister, or Matt, Winston was a balm.
That was what it meant, she supposed, to be authentic with the mailman. He listened, and he cared, and he made you feel safe enough to take risks. Maybe even the risk of being authentic with someone closer, who mattered more.
She smoothed her hand over the breast pocket of his jacket, then the front pockets, one by one.
“What are you searching for?” he asked.
“The list. Where are you keeping it?”
“It’s in my wallet.”
“Get it out.”
He shifted his weight onto his right hip and extracted his wallet from his back pocket. The list was folded in half, wrapped around his cash.
“Give it here.”
She pulled it from his grip, opened it, greedy for the hit of enjoyment it gave her—the thick paper, the dark fountain-pen ink, all to memorialize this shocking parade of things she’d never done, or he’d never done, or they both imagined they wanted.
Winston peered over her shoulder, his breath in her ear, and they studied it in silence. It was the first time she’d seen what he wrote for number ten. “Holy crackers.”
His knee pushed against her thigh, his breath at her ear. Casual touches, but the list charged each point of contact with active possibility.
And that was the whole point. They had a door they could open anytime she or Winston wanted an entry point to the intimacy they’d located last night.
Allie wanted. If she was being honest with herself, she’d wanted this all day.
She located a taller bit of grass that had grown small, feathery seeds, and plucked it.
Winston folded and refolded the paper into a fat square. “Bea wants to travel after college,” he said. “She has a list of all the places she’d like to go. Rosemary has her mountains. Nev and Cath—that’s my brother and his partner—”
“I remember.”
“—they have a bucket list they wrote up together with more than a hundred items. Jean’s got a five-year and a ten-year plan.”
Winston held the square up, pinched between fingers and thumb. “This is the first list I’ve ever had.”
“Face the other way.”
When he obligingly turned his back, she rose to her knees for a better perspective.
Neck, he’d written. An open invitation.
She ran the grass along the precise line where his hair ended and his nape began. His shoulders lifted, then dropped as she swirled a small star galaxy behind his ear. He let out a long breath.
“I have a hard time with lists, normally,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many times somebody’s wanted me to write a bucket list, or asked where I wanted to travel or what my long-term goals are. I’ve always hated those kinds of questions, the same as I hated people wanting to know what I wanted to be when I grew up.”
She swept the grass up the outside line of his ear to the top and inward, brushing over the scant gap at his hairline, and watched with satisfaction as his skin changed texture and color. “You should close your eyes.”
“I already have.”
She scooted closer to his back and put both her legs alongside his, her dress too short to straddle him from behind. “Lean into me, if you want.” He dropped more of his weight into his hands, and she put an arm around his shoulder and her hand in the middle of his chest, under his tie. His body was warm.
She replaced the stalk of grass with her lips, but tried to touch so softly he wouldn’t be sure what was brushing against his skin. She wiggled her fingers into the gap between the two buttons on his shirt. He wasn’t wearing an undershirt, so she could trace a couple square inches of his bare chest skin.
He cleared his throat, and she felt him melt a bit against her body.
Kissing his neck was such a pleasure. She didn’t have to look at him, so she felt like she could explore the entire range of neck kissing. Scraping the spot behind his ear with her teeth, sucking a bit under his collar, soft and slow kisses on the bump where his spine started. It was really warm up on the High Line, but he shivered a few times. She felt him make some soft noise, like a vibration against her mouth, more than once.
She realized that she was kissing and kissing, and well. Sort of undulating her upper body on his.
It wasn’t a surprise when he turned, and she adjusted, and then it was her hands on his neck, his hands on her face, and their mouths together. They bumped noses, chins, but it didn’t feel like the reason was about awkward first kisses. It was urgency. He moved his hands to hold her in place, like he didn’t trust she wouldn’t deepen the kiss too far unless he held her back.
He was right.
Allie had never done the PDA thing. Even the few parties she went to with Matt, where other couples were twisted around each other, tongues rubbing lewdly, he never did more than put his hand on her back. She’d kind of decided, at some point, for some reason, that she wasn’t the PDA type.
Nothing in her body agreed with this assessment. Her body loved PDA. Her body thought about all the people walking by, sneaking a little look at the couple in the grass kissing soft and slow, and she got all vibrating and hot. Her nipples were reaching out, all on their own, to Winston’s chest, and every time she wiggled or he tried to hold her still, there was sparking, intense brushing of those nipples, and then she wiggled even more and he held her even tighter and the kiss got even more hot, but restrained, and one of them would make some private noise of torture, and oh my God.
From now on, she would only kiss in full view of the public, except that she wouldn’t, because she would spend a fortune on underpants and vibrators.
“Hey, Winston?”
She was delighted to see how flustered and red he’d become. She didn’t remember rubbing her fingers through his hair, loosening his tie, or subjecting him to hurricane-force winds, but he looked very much as though all of those things had happened to him since he hauled her tight against him.
Which meant she was the hurricane—a thought that pleased her unduly.
“Hm?” His eyebrows rose with the question at the end of the sound he made, but instead of making him look proper, he looked half mad.
“Want to go back to your place and do nu
mber three?”
“I—” He cleared his throat. “I would. Yes. Very much.”
“Let’s do that, then. Like, right now.”
She stood, surprised by the unseaworthiness of her thighs, the wobble in her step as she picked her way off the grass in her platforms. When he came right up behind her, it took all her mental discipline to keep from turning, winding her arms around his neck, and diving right back into the kiss. She pushed her hand out behind her. He clasped it, his hard palm familiar.
“Which way?”
“Back the way we came, I should think.”
She took two unsteady steps.
“It was the other way,” he said.
“Nope.”
“You’re sure?”
She spun, tumbling into his arms to press her lips against his again, her hands on his chest. “I’m sure. We’re just a minute from where we bought those Popsicles. Text Jean to pick us up.”
He did, and as soon as his eyes were off her, she took her phone from her purse for a quick check, but there was nothing from May.
Nothing from her mom.
Chapter 10
Allie couldn’t think.
She couldn’t think.
She’d tried, but she was too drunk on kissing, completely stoned on Winston’s mouth, lips and tongue and teeth, his body spread out beneath her and the jut of his hip, breathing on her throat, his hands in her hair, over her breasts, over her thighs, over her ass.
She kissed him. She sucked and licked, swept her tongue over the smooth slickness of his teeth, ground herself against whatever part of him, her skirt belled around her and her wet panties branding pinstripes with how much she wanted.
He said her name.
She bit his lip.
She couldn’t think. She just wanted and wanted and wanted.
His hands moved over her ass. “Allie.” Down the backs of her thighs, where her dress didn’t reach, and back up underneath. He wasn’t supposed to, was supposed to be following the rules, sixty minutes of kissing with hands over their clothes, but she didn’t care.