by Ruthie Knox
The rules were an arbitrary obstacle keeping her from getting what she wanted.
She arched into his palms, offering him more, offering him underneath and inside as she licked and kissed a line from his ear to his chin, tested her teeth there where his skin scraped, and then beneath, toward his throat.
“Allie.” He took her head in his hands and held her still. “The timer’s gone.”
“ ’Kay.” Her fingers fumbled with his shirt buttons, wanting him naked now that it was an option.
He smoothed his hands over her back, and immediately, even in the state she was in, she could sense the small shift of energy in his touch. She eased away, and he eased up. She sat crisscross-applesauce between his knees, the backs of her thighs against the soft, pale gray leather of his sofa, her whole self oriented on his warm eyes and smile, his Winston-ness.
“Was that what you wanted?” she asked. “From number three?”
“That was everything I wanted and quite a bit more than I expected.”
He didn’t say it like a line. He sounded…humbled. The thing was, in addition to horny, she was humbled, too. Making out with Winston had been some delicious combination of hot and held back, fast and slow. He watched her, he touched her like he really felt every bit of her, not some woman-shaped person. He kept his hands away from the good bits except in these maddening, glancing, soft touches. He was a rule follower, but a rule follower who was mindful and thinking about and, well, wondering about fucking with the rules. All the time.
All the time, he was some kind of perfect, perfect bit of self-imposed virtue who was also always contemplating being awfully, completely bad.
Fucks McFuckity, was it the hotness.
She leaned forward into his arms and reached into his back pocket to pull out his wallet, then the now-erotic cotton rag paper. She unfolded it and looked at him over its edge.
“Four.”
“Yes.”
“Everything but.”
“Everything is everything, correct?”
“What, specifically, are you asking about?”
“Everything you’re wearing, you…won’t be?”
“I will not. As long as you let me finish off the rest of your buttons and zippers and fasteners and kit. Valet-style.”
“Yes.”
Then his jacket, draped over the mirrorlike finish of the burl coffee table, started buzzing and buzzing.
He kissed her, just a little, just enough. She closed her eyes and felt herself warming up again.
Bzz. Bzz. Bzzzzzt.
Winston backed away from the kiss, only a teeny bit, but Allie was so hyped up on the anxiety of expecting a call that his getting a call made it impossible to concentrate.
“You can check it.”
“I’ll just turn it off. Whatever it is can wait if I’ve managed five years.”
He leaned over and fished out his phone, but as he went to turn it off, his attention was noticeably arrested. He froze in his awkward, leaned-over position, thumbing through some series of messages.
“Everything okay?”
He didn’t reply, just kept reading.
“Allie.” He finally sat up and looked at her. “I did something today, not strictly on the up and up, but not against the rules, either. There isn’t anything that says that I shouldn’t…check on a client. Particularly if I have any reason to worry about his portfolio. A woman identifying herself as his daughter would be a good reason to look. Of course. Entirely correct.”
“What is it?” She felt queasy, all the syrupy kissing energy dissolved.
“I found something, or my assistant did. It’s best if I don’t tell you how I found it, but it isn’t important at any rate—what’s important is that what I found, what my assistant, Chasity, found, led to our finding out something else that might actually help.”
Normally, she found his roundabout way of explaining things adorable. Not so much, at the moment. “Tell me. Please.”
“Justice is planning something very big. Someone we have reason to believe is his associate has purchased permits to use the Brooklyn Bridge—the kind of permits you need to redirect traffic, and for filming, and to pay for additional police.”
“So he’s doing some kind of art thing on the bridge.”
“One of his pop-up installations, we believe. Chasity had to dig around quite a bit to learn about the permits. He didn’t go through a standard process to get them. He has help keeping this secret, and he’s got a four-day window to hold his event. Starting tomorrow.”
“So we know he’s doing something at the bridge sometime in the next four days.”
It was nice of Winston to try to help. She didn’t want him to know she felt deflated. What was she supposed to do, camp out with a lawn chair? Picket Justice’s art thing with a sign that read: GIVE ME BACK MY MOM.
She felt herself floating up out of her body, distressed, headachy, and sick.
Winston grabbed her hand. “Stay with me, Allie. It’s not quite so open-ended as that, and I need you to understand everything Chasity figured out.”
She held his hand, hard.
“I know Justice, which is an advantage. Chasity had to work to find out this information, but the point is, it was findable. This much planning, this big of an event, it can’t actually stay quiet, and this is the point. As private and enigmatic as Justice is, remember that it is a persona, that Justice is as important to his art as his art is to Justice. He knew there would start to be leaks as soon as he filed this paperwork, and he needs those leaks. It’s no good to have a truly surprise pop-up event on the Brooklyn Bridge—then it would only be you, instead of you and thousands of friends.”
What he said meant she could breathe a little. He was probably very good at this money guy thing. His sensible demeanor and bland approach reminded Allie of Elvira when she was explaining to her why she should spend some extremely large amount of money on something.
“But how do we make sense of the leaks? There’s going to be all kinds of rumors. I mean, I’m no stranger to gossip. The way people talk, you’d think I was the first runaway bride Manitowoc ever had. But this is New York City. Eight million people’s worth of gossip.”
Winston smiled. “Chasity pointed out I have a pretty good mole—Bea, my daughter. She’s a film student, and she hangs out with artists and others who are very interested in Justice, and are…connected.”
She started to ask what he meant, but he finished before she could say anything. “Social media. They’ll be on top of the leaks. The fact of it is that Beatrice will be quite glad to hear I’m helping you. We had a terrible row about it. Possibly it’s why I asked for Chasity’s help.”
Allie was having a hard time staying present, keeping her eyes on Winston’s face and thinking. She desperately wanted to get to her phone, text her mother again, run to her dad for help, get May drunk and tell her everything. She’d come here on a wing and a prayer, her whole plan not to think, just to act, but that kind of strategy would only stretch so far and she was flying apart at the seams now, with no idea what to do next.
“There’s something else that may be more difficult.” His voice had found an even gentler, blander register, and Allie thought she might actually scream.
“We didn’t see it this morning, because the information was on a different part of his accounts than we were looking at, but Justice transferred some money recently, and this is entirely confidential, though honestly I’ll have to accept whatever consequences there may be at this point.”
“Transferred it where? To…who?” Allie gave up and slid off the sofa far enough to grab her bag and yank out her phone. She thumbed out the twentieth message she’d typed in the last two days to her mom.
I know you’re with Justin, my birth dad. I know you’re in the city. Call me, Mom. Please.
It slipped into the messages screen and landed with delivered. She would pay any amount of money, do anything, for that delivered to transform into read.
She stared at the message. Winston started talking again.
“It was a forty-three-thousand-dollar transfer to Harry Winston.”
It took her a minute to put it together. Harry Winston. Jewelry. Infidelity, a bauble or engagement ring, even.
Impending divorce.
It only took her a few seconds after that to clamber back up onto the sofa and into his arms.
She had forgotten, even from yesterday, how good at hugging he was. His fancy shirt was really good at cooling her hot cheeks, also, as she swallowed and swallowed to keep herself from giving up.
“I want to go home,” she finally managed.
“I understand. I know. I’ve felt this way myself. You want to go home, but it isn’t even that you want to go home to your own bed, to walk down your own street. You want everything to be as it was, as it felt, when you think of what it means to be home. For me, it was the curry chips from the pub at the end of the lane where our country house was. I’d get off the train from London, walk to that pub, and get an order, sometimes, to carry home to Bea, but all of us would end up snagging them, spoiling our dinner. Home.”
“You can’t get back your home.”
“Maybe not. But curry chip takeaway wasn’t always my home. It snuck up on me. Some home is probably sneaking up on you right now.”
Allie kept her cheek against Winston’s chest but snuck her arm out to look at her phone. Delivered.
“Would you like dinner? I actually know the way, and never get lost, to a very charming Mediterranean deli.”
She made herself really check in with her body. If she ignored hunger, she would feel worse later.
She shook her head against Winston’s chest.
“If you’re a bit homesick, in the way that I was trying to explain, we could get a drink at Pulvermacher’s.”
She didn’t want a drink. Not at all. She snuggled closer, and he obliged by wrapping his arms fully around her.
“Listen, there are always jobs, and perhaps, even, it’s not as dire as that. I could call my father, who’s the controlling partner of the firm in London, and explain the situation such that I could call Justice. That would get us to your mother more efficiently.”
At first her heart stopped, a bit of hope in it. She wanted to nod, Yes, let’s do this. But even if it was true, and Winston could be protected from any professional fallout, it didn’t feel right to haul her mother in like that.
Allie remembered how May, last year, felt like she had run out of choices in her own life, was tied up tight to a role. No one really listened to her, no one ever really gave her the chance she deserved, and she ended up stabbing her boyfriend with a shrimp fork when he proposed, then road-tripping with a chef and moving to New York and trying to do her art. May would never have started living her authentic life if she hadn’t been apart from her family to make her own choice. To really think about the role they had all given her.
Allie didn’t understand, had never understood, why her mom left. Or why she came back. She did know that her mom had always returned on her own.
Maybe this wasn’t the time to make her mother come back—maybe making her come home wasn’t the way for her to fix her family. Maybe this was the time, after all these years of waiting in silence in Wisconsin, afraid, to be right here for her mother when she made whatever decision she had to make: to stay in New York once and for all, if maybe this Justice person had figured out how to make her happy—or to go home, if Manitowoc and Allie’s father really were her home.
Allie didn’t know what her mom’s curry fries were. She had never asked. Just like they had never asked May.
But she wanted to see her mother, desperately. She wanted to hug her and smell her Jean Naté. She wanted to sit in a dark booth with her in Pulvermacher’s and figure this out, and then call May and order a huge basket of fried cheese curds.
She just didn’t know if she was going to get to do any of that.
It made so much hurt, really hurt, where before all those places had only ached.
“I don’t want to go to Pulvermacher’s. At least, I don’t want to go with you.”
“No?”
“I think, right now, the only thing I want to do is number four.”
“Are you certain?”
Certainty, maybe, was for people who weren’t right in the middle of having their lives turned upside down.
The only thing she knew, right now, was that she’d shown Winston nothing but herself. That when he talked to her, looked at her, touched her, she felt like herself. She had no script for that, no practice with any kind of a relationship with a man who just authentically liked her.
Which was terrible, actually, to realize.
She wondered which of her mom’s two lives made her feel this way—elated and terrified at the same time? And if she wanted to feel that way for the rest of her life, or if it scared her so much that she kept running from it, over and over again.
Maybe she was the daughter of her mother’s elation and fear. A child of risk, flight, and indecision. But she could just as easily be someone else. She didn’t know.
There were so many things she didn’t understand about her own family. Too many. And so many things she didn’t understand about herself that she needed to figure out if she was going to do her job and bring everyone back together again.
The only thing she knew, tonight, was that she wanted Winston.
Chapter 11
“So tell me about this one.” Winston tapped the list, which he’d laid on the counterpane between them. “This ‘everything but.’ ”
The laurel crown had long since fallen from her head, and without it her hair had been getting progressively more expansive, so that now, backlit by the bedside lamp, it formed a dynamic ball around her head, haloed at the edges.
“What do you want to know?”
“Why did you put this down, specifically?”
It had occurred to him today, in one of the idle moments he was meant to have been working, that everything he’d written on the list was there for a reason. Not simple, bucket-list, I’ve-never-done-this-before reasons, but deeper ones that had to do with how he’d been hurt in his marriage, or how he’d hurt his wife.
It seemed to him if they were going to unpack their boxes of hurt together physically, it would be prudent to know what was there psychically first.
Allie traced the stitching of the counterpane with her fingernail. She glanced at him briefly. “You know how you’re with someone for a long time, and you fall into routines. Like, sexual routines.”
“Yes.”
“So you know how to get them off, and they know how to get you off. There’s some simple way to go straight from A to B to C to bam!” She smacked the bed, setting the list askew, and looked right into his eyes. “Matt and I got together in college. I didn’t have a lot of experience with anybody else, and neither did he. We found those routines, and we just stuck there. Like, we stuck there.”
“I could say the same for Rosemary and I.”
“Yeah?”
“Not in the first years, but after Bea came along…after we bought the house.”
She nodded, her eyes back on the stitching. “I think it happens a lot. And it’s not so terrible, you know, to have those routines. You get off, he gets off, afterward you feel like you did something that was about the two of you, to bind you together. Unless you decide, sometime along the way…I don’t know. That the routine is good enough. That you don’t really need to think about doing anything else, because it’s for other people.”
She met his eyes again. “It never stopped bothering me, especially after we got engaged. I kept thinking we were going to do this one kind of sex, forever.”
“Did you ever try to change that?”
Rosemary had. He remembered the anniversary when she’d booked a night in a theme hotel for married couples. Their room had been decorated as a cave, with an enormous bearskin rug by the fire and three bottles of his favorite wine awaiting t
heir arrival. A room for wild, uninhibited sex.
Winston simply hadn’t been able to access, anymore, the version of himself who’d once been wild and uninhibited.
It pained him to remember Rosemary’s disappointment with his response. She’d cried quietly in the toilet, and he pretended not to know.
“A few times,” Allie said. “But it was hard to get the courage up, and he always had so many reasons not to be interested in things. He negged the sex toys I showed him online, or lectured me on how porn is degrading. Like there was something wrong with wanting to try stuff and find out if it felt degrading.”
Head bent, she traced the shape of a flower on the counterpane. Her shoulder strap was a thin strand of glittering ice against her skin, and he reached for it, traced the line from the knob of her shoulder to the point where the two halves of the top came together between her small breasts.
“I started to dread sex. Especially because…the routine didn’t have a lot of foreplay? Just the closet light, and he’d be in bed without any clothes on, so I’d get in bed without my clothes on, in the dark, kind of braced. I’d try not to be so rigid, you know, because it was important that we have this. But it was hard being…He was always on top. Kissing me, and touching me, and I’d try to make myself relax and give into it so I could enjoy it.” Winston hooked his finger inside the fabric and slid it back across the path he’d traveled, glancing over the top of her breast, beside her collarbone. She looked at him, then away. “I like sex. It was always possible, eventually, to make myself be ready for him to be inside me. But that part when I had to talk myself into it inside my head, while it was already happening.”
“It sounds completely horrid in every way.”
“I always felt so much better about things after, though.”
He knew this feeling, too. Thought of Rosemary in the white cotton nightgowns she favored during the hot months. Reading beside each other in bed. The nights he would turn off his lamp early, before she’d fallen asleep with a book on her chest, and roll to his side to look at her face. The acceptance he would see in her eyes, or the pinch to her mouth that forecast the excuse she was about to make.