Madly

by Ruthie Knox

  He got back down between her legs. He held her thighs down, hard. Feeling her muscles strain, he pushed them down more firmly. He shoved his face where she was pink and he licked her, slow, hard. And she did try to scoot away, and he just held her more severely. He felt himself get hard, and harder, his thoughts drifting away as he licked her, sucked her, and her breathing got short, her hands in his hair pulled tight.

  Then he wanted to come, so he kept one hand hard on her thigh and rose up on his knees, looking down at her, spread and flushed, and he jerked himself, firm and slow, closed his eyes when he started coming, listening to her breath and how it begged him to touch her while she watched him.

  When he finished her, it was with a slick hand and absolute focus. She came and came, crying and moaning, and trying to push up as he held her down.

  After they caught their breath, it was easy to hold her, turn her to face him, kiss her on her forehead.

  He listened to her talk about Victorian mourning rings, how to grade garnets, how to check for moth damage.

  Felt himself falling asleep, rather happy.

  Chapter 12

  “Fuck.”

  Allie pulled the towel more securely around her body so the sharp edge of Winston’s slipper tub wouldn’t dig into her bare ass. She squinted at the bright phone in the dark bathroom to try to figure out what time her mom had texted.

  Nine fifty-five.

  Of course. Even if her midwestern mother was the kind who ran off with New York City concept artists the week before her anniversary party, she was still a midwestern mother and would never bother someone on the phone after ten P.M.

  Allie had been dozing next to Winston, and some corner of her brain eventually decided to tell her that her phone had alerted a text ages ago. She’d slithered out of bed in the dark, dragging her purse with her as she crawled across the bedroom floor into the bathroom, hoping she wouldn’t wake Winston, who looked much too relaxed and content to bother.

  It took her ten years to find a towel in Winston’s enormous bathroom. Talking to her mother naked was out of the question.

  She took a deep breath and looked godward before dialing. The bathroom had one of those pyramid-shaped skylights she had only seen in movies. She could just see there were some plants, or maybe even a garden, on the roof.

  “Allie, it’s late.”

  Her mother was whisper-talking. Allie hoped it was out of the habit of sleeping next to someone, and not because her mother actually was sleeping next to someone.

  “I’ve called eleventy billion times during business hours, and this is the first time you’ve answered.”

  Her mom was silent for so long, Allie couldn’t stand it. “Come on, Mom. Please don’t hang up.”

  “I can’t really talk right now. I don’t know why you’re so worried. Dad has all my information.”

  “Are you coming to your anniversary party?” Her heart was pounding in her throat, and it made whispering hurt. She held the phone so tightly against her face, it was starting to get too hot.

  “I need to stay here until Saturday morning. There’s an event going on this week I’m obligated to attend.”

  “The party’s on Sunday. Are you flying back Saturday afternoon?”

  “Allie, I’m not sure why you came to New York. May called me and was quite upset you hadn’t told her and weren’t working on the party, and said something about moving it. I—”

  “Stop.” Allie felt a burn and a lump on top of the pounding in her throat. Angry. That was anger. “You’ve talked to May.”

  Her mother went quiet again.

  “You know why I’m here. You know I know who you’re with. You know that I just want to talk to you, in person, make sure you’re okay, find out what’s going on. Guess what?” Allie didn’t wait for her mother to respond, but kept going, the immense anger pushing everything up and out in Winston’s dark bathroom, the perfect unfamiliar backdrop to take it all in. “I know that you’re staying around for whatever stupid art thing Justin is planning. You’ve been lying to May, lying to me, I have no fucking clue what you’ve been telling Dad. May’s upset I didn’t tell her exactly what’s going on, yet. Big fucking deal. How do you think she’s going to feel when I tell her everything?”

  Allie started pacing the length of the bathroom, unable to keep still. The cold penny tiles felt good on her feet.

  “You of all people, Allie, should be able to respect a woman when she needs a little space.”

  Allie ignored everything except woman. “You’re my mother.”

  “When you started acting strangely before your wedding, I didn’t say a thing. I just helped and signed checks. When you got right up to the very day and didn’t say anything to anyone until the last possible moment, when there were flowers in the venue and guests in town, I simply cleaned it all up and gave you your space.”

  Signed checks, cleaned up, and said nothing? What about all the comments and remarks she had been forced to put up with in every single conversation in the last year? What about all the pancake breakfasts and Packer parties her mom had invited Matt to, without consulting her, that she’d had to smile her way through? How was that space?

  “What are you telling me I’m supposed to do, then—go home and wait around to see if you come back? Is that what Dad’s doing? That’s what your space is for, so you can decide if you’re ever coming home without having your big decision fucked with by your children?”

  Her mom sighed. “I knew you’d be like this.”

  Allie’s anger at that made it actually impossible to speak for a minute. And something more than anger, because what was she supposed to be, exactly, for this woman? What was she supposed to do to fix this situation when whatever she did was wrong? When she did what she was supposed to, she got fear and lies, silence and lack of consideration, a role she didn’t want to play anymore.

  So she’d done something different, flown to New York, badgered her mom, and now was being told that she was doing exactly what she always did.

  Impulsive, flighty, outrageous, unpredictable, untrustworthy, unwanted. It was her job to be all of that, or to try really hard not to be all of that while everyone knew that deep down, beneath her trying, was her true nature. Known to the whole family. Predictable.

  There was nothing she could do that would be right. Actually nothing.

  “You have no idea,” she told her mother. “You have no real idea how I feel, or what I’ve been doing, or who I am. You don’t want to know. You never did.”

  Her mom was silent, and Allie held the phone in her lap, but she couldn’t bring herself to hang it up.

  She didn’t want to hang up. She wanted her mother. Winston was absolutely right—it wasn’t so much that she wanted to rescue her family from bad decisions as secrets so much as that she wanted her family to be her family, hers, for her, and to know in her heart that they were hers, and always would be.

  She brought the phone back to her ear.

  She could hear her mother breathing.

  It didn’t sound like regular breathing. It was upset breathing. Her mom was upset, too. But hadn’t hung up, either.

  Her mom had talked to May. Had given her information, whatever information she’d been willing to share, to Dad.

  Maybe she was trying to leave, but she hadn’t left yet. And realizing that made it easier for Allie to know what to say next. “Here’s the thing, Mom.” She ran one finger along the smooth edge of the tub. “I love you, May loves you, I know Dad loves you. And maybe…maybe that’s not enough anymore. Maybe it’s not what you want. I know I can’t tell you, you know, what you want, the same as there wasn’t anybody who could tell me coming up on my wedding exactly what to do. There wasn’t anything you could’ve done, or said. May tried. I remember. It was impossible.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Allie swallowed. Her mother was trying to dismiss the conversation, just as Allie had always known she would if she tried to break through this barri
er.

  In the tub, in the dark, wearing Winston’s towel, which was oversized and had tassels and felt like it had to be a Turkish towel with silk in the blend, she tried to gather her thoughts. This might be her only chance to say what she needed to say.

  “I think if there was one thing I wanted to hear, that it would have helped me to hear, Mom? It’s that I didn’t have to understand why I felt how I felt or wanted what I wanted. I didn’t need some reason. If I felt like I didn’t want to marry Matt, and couldn’t marry him, then that was because I didn’t want to, and I couldn’t, and the reasons came later.”

  Her mom sniffled. Crying, maybe.

  “Some of the reasons took me a year to figure out. Some of them I’m still figuring out. But I knew what I wanted, Mom, a long time before I knew why I wanted it. And I guess, you know, it would’ve helped…”

  Allie sighed. She didn’t want to say this, but she was pretty sure she had to.

  “It would’ve helped if someone had told me that whatever I decided was the right thing. So that’s…that’s what I’m saying to you. I love you. We all love you. And you’re going to make the right decision, because you’re going to make the decision you have to make. If you don’t, this will just keep coming around again, over and over, until you finally do.”

  Allie suddenly realized she was holding one of the towel’s tassels in her hand. She was so worked up, her grip had wrenched it off. “It’s just…even if you can’t tell me everything, or don’t even know everything, couldn’t I see you? Have lunch with me and May, Mom. Let me go ahead and move the anniversary party and take some of the pressure off everyone. Please.”

  Allie listened to her mother’s silence, and another sniffle. “You’re so much like him,” her mom said.

  Then she hung up.

  Allie didn’t know what him she even meant.

  She unwound the towel and spread it out on the floor. She laid down on it, curled up on her side, and toggled to her messages thread with May.

  See me today, please, May?

  Three little waving dots bounced up, right away.

  Of course. Let’s have breakfast at Ben’s restaurant.

  After she typed her K, she could finally breathe.

  She breathed in and out, curled around herself, until she felt calm enough to sleep.

  —

  “We can take our coffee out on the patio, if you like.”

  Allie accepted her cup and saucer. “You have a patio?”

  “It’s just through there.” He indicated the direction with his own saucer. “Would you like to?”

  “I at least want to see it. This apartment is insane. Like, actually insane. You have the quintessential New York apartment—it’s like a Platonic ideal of a New York apartment. You know that Plato thing about the table, and how we have the word ‘table,’ but also there’s an ideal of a table?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s what this apartment is like. It makes me want to cry.”

  “Here we are.”

  Winston led her onto the bricked-in patio. Surrounded by stone wall topped by a tall hedge, it was a pleasant and quiet space, particularly in the early morning when the light was diffuse and the traffic noise easy to ignore.

  “This is so nice. This is like one of those outdoor living rooms on the design shows, like on HGTV? Have you seen those?” She glanced at him, but her eyes skipped away quickly. “I don’t know if you guys are into the design reality TV in England like we are. But I love them. These kinds of outdoor spaces are really popular. You need a pergola, though. They always have a pergola.” She settled into a chair with her coffee and sipped it. “This is delicious. Thank you.”

  She’d been like this since he found her in the kitchen this morning—talking too quickly, saying too much, skating the conversation around any subject of significance, skipping her eyes over his face.

  She’d spoken to her mother in the night. She’d accidentally torn a tassel off one of his towels, for which she’d apologized.

  “I’ve sent Jean for your things,” he said. “So you can get cleaned up and change before you’re off to see your sister.”

  “Oh,” she said brightly. “That’s really nice of you.”

  “It was no trouble. With my brother arriving today…”

  “Shit, it’s Tuesday. I forgot.” She smacked her hand into her forehead with a violence that startled him. “I was supposed to clear out, and you had to send your driver to eject me.”

  “You’re welcome to stay here. With me. For as long as you’re…”

  He couldn’t seem to finish a sentence. He was hovering over Allie, his coffee going cold.

  “I’d like that. Would you sit down, maybe?” She patted the cushion beside her.

  Winston sat.

  Her eyes were rimmed with red, the skin beneath them the color of liver, her hair enormous, but she looked achingly lovely in his robe in the morning light of the patio.

  He’d awakened in the darkness of the bedroom, naked, alone, feeling as though someone had put an enormous hook through the wall of his chest, dug it in deep, and pulled him apart.

  He’d had a shower so hot, he felt he might weep, and it had taken him twenty minutes under the spray to locate the name for the sensation: vulnerability.

  “So you’re not in love with your apartment.”

  “It’s perfectly adequate.”

  She touched his arm. “It has hardwood throughout, medieval-castle arched doorways, vaulted ceilings, built-ins, fireplaces with actual pirate chests to hold the wood, a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows with an incredible view, stone walls, and one of those stoops like they had on Sesame Street. ‘Adequate’ is the last word anyone in the entire universe would use to describe your apartment.”

  Winston shrugged.

  The apartment was adequate. Perfectly adequate.

  “What I wondered, though, when I was wandering around like a raging insomniac in the middle of the night, was where your stuff is at.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, this cup and saucer are white, and completely plain, and possibly you bought them at Ikea.”

  “I can’t remember where I bought them. Not Ikea.”

  “And the big painting opposite the kitchen, with the swirling leaf things? I would bet anything you didn’t spend actual money on that painting.”

  “It was here when I arrived.”

  “You leased this place furnished?”

  He nodded.

  “So where’s all your stuff? Where are you, here?”

  The hedge atop the stone wall was thin and poorly maintained. He’d spoken with the property manager about it twice.

  “At home, the hedges are so dense that if you misjudge a narrow lane, you’ll scrape the finish off your car. Bea did that, in fact. Shortly after she began to drive.”

  At home.

  The words sat there, an admission he hadn’t particularly wanted to make to this woman from a town in Wisconsin whose name he could not spell, whose rural lanes and hedges he couldn’t begin to imagine.

  “You don’t really live here.”

  “Beatrice needed a parent close by.”

  His use of the past tense didn’t escape him. He wondered if Allie had noticed.

  They drank their coffee in silence. Winston tried to remember what had made him think it wise to make a list with this woman, to check off one emotional and sexual dare after another until he reached this terrifically vulnerable moment of understanding what he’d done.

  He hadn’t thought it wise. He hadn’t thought.

  He didn’t live here, and neither did Allie. Whatever happened next, whether he helped her or not, she would leave, and he would be left to muddle through this bit of his life as he’d been doing. Only now he’d know exactly what it meant to be doing it alone.

  “I own a bowling alley,” she said. “In Manitowoc.”

  “Is it profitable?”

  “It closed down. I haven’t reopened it yet. I’
m trying to decide what to do with it, but it was so cheap, and no one else wanted it. I also own an empty grocery store, a minimall—that actually has tenants in it, and makes pretty good money—a couple of farms. A big empty office building that used to belong to the nuclear power plant. And—” She counted on her fingers, one, two, three, four, five, six. “—seven different storefronts on the same block as mine. Some of them have apartments above.”

  “That’s a significant amount of property for a young woman.”

  It was Allie’s turn to shrug. “The first time it was kind of an accident—I just heard this storefront was for sale, and I knew I had enough money saved up to buy it, so I asked my dad if he thought I should and then just went for it. But after I owned a few, people started coming to me when they had something to sell, and I like it.”

  She turned, hiking a knee up onto the seat and laying her shinbone across the cushion, her foot dangling over the edge. “I buy a lot of stuff—antiques, artifacts, clothes—and I buy a lot of property, and some of it ends up in my house, on my walls, on my own body. Some of it I find new homes for. Or I figure out something to do with it that’s different, like turning a bowling alley into a roller rink that’s also a community center where people can rent out rooms for meetings and parties.”

  “Every place needs someone with that sort of vision. Wisconsin is lucky to have you.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think I was ever doing any of it for them. I’m starting to think I was just planting flags, you know, so they couldn’t make me leave. Like, ‘This one is mine,’ and ‘This one is mine,’ and ‘This one is mine, too, motherfuckers.’ ”

  Winston thought of London.

  He’d love to show it to Allie. His flat. His favorite restaurant and coffeehouse, his office, the train he took to the house in the countryside where he’d been raised.

  He couldn’t show her, because he wasn’t there anymore. He was nowhere.

  “Why would they make you leave?”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “You said that you bought all of these properties so that they couldn’t make you leave.”

  He felt a little bad, because asking her meant that she looked as vulnerable as he was feeling.