by Ruthie Knox
She might as well begin doing that right away. Right away meaning tonight, or in the morning at the latest.
She’d given up.
The sun had slipped behind the skyscrapers, leaving the light diffuse, leaching some of the heat from the air, setting the frizz around her hair aglow.
She would leave. He’d known this, although he’d thought they had two more days. Instead, she was already beginning to go. He could feel the goodbye in her arm where it pushed against him, in her fingers lacing over top of his. He could hear it in her voice.
It made him angry.
Allie had given up, and he wanted to shake her.
“I know you’re discouraged, but I want you to believe me when I tell you everything you’ve described sounds perfectly reasonable. These sound like the kinds of reactions one can expect in this sort of situation.”
“Then I didn’t tell it right. You weren’t there, Winston, you didn’t see my dad, or Ben’s face, or May. Even if you had, you don’t know them.”
“I’m an outsider. My views are irrelevant, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, I mean—” She shook her head, her shoulders dropping. “I can’t explain it right.”
“You didn’t respond to my messages.”
“I turned my phone off, sorry.”
“I phoned to ask if you’d like to go to the theater. Neville and Cath and Beatrice have tickets, and invited us to join them.”
“Oh.” She picked at her toenail. “You can go if you want.”
“It’s too late. They’ve already left.”
She sighed. “I borked it.”
“You’ve not borked anything.”
Yet. She would, though—he could feel the energy coming off her, self-destructive, self-pitying, and a habit of caution told him to leave it. Avoid whatever conflict was in front of him.
But she would go back to Wisconsin sometime—tonight, tomorrow, the day after—and it made him unaccountably irritated to think it might end like this.
“Enough.” He laced his hand through Allie’s and hauled her to her feet. “Come with me.”
“What for?”
“Just come with me.”
He led her down the stairs to his bed. “Stay here a moment.” In the kitchen, he retrieved some items from the cabinet where he’d hidden them and returned to find her lying down, staring at the ceiling with her arms laced behind her head.
He dropped the bag in the middle of the bed, stepped out of his shoes, removed his cuff links and his shirt, and climbed atop the mattress beside her.
“You’re not going anywhere until we finish the list.” He glanced at her face. “Unless you want to. Obviously, I wouldn’t force you to. But this is my proposal. Number six and number ten.”
“We can’t do number ten.”
He crawled across the bed, planted his hands on either side of her face and looked into her eyes. “Can’t we?”
He wanted to make her see him. He wanted to force her to acknowledge it, if not aloud, then to acknowledge it between them, implicitly: the contract they’d made with each other and everything it meant. Everything she wanted to abandon.
“You’ve not done a single heedless thing since you arrived in New York,” he told her. “But if you walk out of here tonight and take your father home, that will be your heedless decision.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Stay.” He dumped the contents of the bags onto the bed and threw the empty plastic on the floor. “Be with me. Finish this list. Talk to me. Figure out what comes next for us.”
“Fine.”
Her eyes shone bright in the dim room, and she’d squared off her face, clenching her jaw. When he shifted to his side to take her face in his hand and kissed her, she let him, but she didn’t yield.
Beatrice had told him to help this woman. That it was his duty to help her.
He no longer wanted to help her. He wanted to force her to come to her senses, to trick her if he had to. He wanted to cage and imprison and keep her.
But he’d already done that to Rosemary, and it hadn’t made him happy.
He kissed her again, carefully, pushing away the anger and fear that had inspired his worst decisions, reminding himself why it was Allie who made him feel so much.
Allie, with her wild hair, her interesting clothes, her mad schemes.
Allie, with her big heart, her fascination with the world, her arms flung wide to take in everything she possibly could.
Allie, who was lost.
When he kissed her again, she let out a sigh, and he urged her onto her side to locate the tie that held her dress together. There was only one bow. When he pulled it out, the dress fell apart. Beneath, she wore a breeze of crinoline, which he pushed down into a ball at her feet.
He kissed her again, deeper, longer, until she twined her arms around his neck and arched her back to draw him closer. “Tell me you want to,” he said.
“I want to.”
“Number six.”
“Yes.”
“And number ten.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes, though she nodded.
Not good enough.
He undressed the rest of the way, cleared the bed of clothes, and extracted a condom from the box. The bullet vibrator from the drugstore was enclosed in so much packaging, he despaired of ever freeing it from its prison.
Allie took it from his hand and tore it open with her teeth. The attachments scattered over her bare chest, the batteries rolling off her to fall on the bed. Winston found and installed them as she stroked her hand up and down his thigh.
“Have you used one of these?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Show me.”
He handed it to her, and she twisted it to turn it on.
“Let me see the bells and whistles.”
The vibrator was the size of a lipstick, with a rounded tip. The attachments fit over top of it, one bulbous and black, another like the head of a penis, but smaller, and bright pink. A third had nodules all over it. He had no idea what any of them were for.
Allie fit the small penislike attachment over the vibrator, spread her legs, and inserted it inside herself. She laid the shaft along her sex and hissed out a breath. “Dang.”
“Strong?”
“It might burn my clit off.”
“Is that bad?”
She smiled. “Probably not bad. C’mere and kiss me.”
And so Winston kissed her. The dampened vibration between her legs transferred to his thigh and hip as he moved over her, but it didn’t feel like a cheap trick, it only felt like Allie, alive and moving against him, tossing her head, pressing the vibrator where she wanted it.
“Is it good?”
“Yeah.” Breathless. “Touch me.”
He stroked her arms and shoulders, her flanks, over her breasts, across her stomach. She’d broken out in a sweat and she was restless, her knees rising and falling with her breath, her hands finding him, petting him, dropping to the mattress.
“Do you want to come on it?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
He moved down the bed, kissed her stomach, pushed the vibrator away and licked her, slow and deep. Found where she’d been pressing the bulb of the vibrator against her G-spot and pressed instead with his fingers until she was bucking and breathless, and then he moved over her and made her look at him. “Tell me what number ten is.”
“Sex like in the movies.”
“Not just.”
“You wrote it.”
“You read it. What did it say?”
“Passionate, no-holds-barred sex with someone you love, like in the movies, and you made a note that said I didn’t have to do it with you, only that you wanted to do it someday, and never had.”
“Did you think you’d do it with me?”
“No. Did you?”
“No.”
She pulled him up over her, put her hands on his face, kissed him deeply and long, begging w
ith her body. “Please, Winston.”
“Tell me you feel it, too.”
She whimpered and rearranged herself, sliding over him, a wet provocation.
“Allie.”
“I feel it. I do, I want you, Winston, please.”
He handed her the condom and rolled to his back, inviting her to take charge. She did, but not in the way he’d intended—she took him in her hand, swirled her tongue around the head and licked him quite thoroughly. “Put it on.”
“All right, all right.”
Then there was a maddening interval of positioning and wet latex, Allie peering at his penis to make sure she’d done it properly before she positioned herself above him and guided him inside her body.
“Fuck.” He held her hips. “Fuck, don’t move an inch.”
She rose and fell a bare inch, letting down her hair as she did so, her body exposed and her elbows high. He wanted to remember her like this until he died. Preferably, when he was very old and surrounded by his loving grandchildren, he would breathe his last breath thinking of Allie in just this position.
“I thought you guys were on the metric system.” She rocked back and forth.
He grunted. “Imperial. We invented your fucking system of measurement, don’t move, love, Christ.”
But she moved. She moved beautifully, the cast-off toy buzzing on the bed beside him, his senses filled with Allie, lovely Allie, only Allie.
He wanted her never to stop moving her body over him, looking at him this way, her skin flushed and her nipples hard and her sex wet, her pupils blown with pleasure.
He loved her.
He wanted to hold the love tight to himself, protect it from harm, but he knew better now. That wasn’t how love worked. You found it, if you were lucky, and you gave it away, and you took whatever came back to you, the good and the bad together.
He would love her right now, and for as long as she let him, and take the consequences.
Winston drew her down and kissed her. She tasted of sex, latex, heat. She tasted familiar and divine, and he lost the track, lost himself in her, let her movements pull him along. “Oh,” she said at one point, looking at his face. “Jeez.”
He stroked her body, held her hips, let her set the pace.
It was everything he’d wanted it to be, and nothing he could have anticipated. It was simply Allie, his Allie, and what they’d had between them from that first night, from that moment of meeting in the bar when she’d drawn him close, murmured against his mouth, and licked his lip, frank and sexual.
“You on top,” she said.
“That’s what you need.”
“Yes, you on top, now.”
They rolled, an awkward maneuver that made her laugh when one of her legs fell off the bed, until he hooked his hand behind her knee and pulled it to his hip, and then she moaned.
After that, he lost whatever control he’d had, but she didn’t seem to mind. She helped him find his pace, dug her nails into his shoulders as he sped up, wrapped her arms around him when his bollocks drew tight and he came inside her in one long, shuddering thrust.
He panted against her neck. “Next time, that will go on for considerably longer.”
“Don’t worry about it.” One starfish hand shot out and closed around the still-buzzing vibrator. She stripped off its sheath and wiggled it between them. “Stay exactly where you are.”
He did as she’d instructed, holding his weight on his elbows and watching as she lifted her hips into him, scrunched up her face, her eyes closed, her free hand clutching at his back, raking over his skin until she clenched hard, everywhere, pulsing and making the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.
Perhaps that, instead. For his dying memory.
“Now you can never move,” she said, patting his back. “I hope you’re comfortable.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“But this time I really mean it.”
Winston located the base of the condom and pulled out while Allie smacked him, wincing. “Asshat.”
“Back in a moment, love.”
He flushed it and used the toilet, splashing water on his face, examining himself in the mirror to see whether he looked different.
He fancied he did, at least a bit.
She’d curled onto her side when he returned, the bumpy chain of her spine the first thing he saw when he came back into the room. He curved around her back, peering over to see what she was doing with her hands.
She was on her phone.
“It’s May. I guess they can’t get the sofa bed to work. It broke when they tried to set it up.”
His stomach balled itself tight.
Allie sat up against the headboard, crossed her legs, and blew out a long breath. “I think I should go. I think I should pick up my dad and take him to a hotel.”
“Surely your sister can take care of it.”
“She’s asking me to.”
He sat across from her, took her phone from her hand and placed it on the bed, held her fingers between his. “Then what?”
She looked away. “I don’t know.”
“You take him home?”
“If that’s what he wants.”
“What about us?”
She glanced at his face, but she couldn’t hold his gaze. “I don’t know.”
“You make it sound as though it’s not up to you, up to us, but it is. It’s entirely in our power to decide.”
“I’m going back to Manitowoc.”
“It’s not the moon. It’s Wisconsin.”
“You’ve never been there.”
“I’d be on the first plane if you invited me.”
She took her hands back, folding her legs up, wrapping her arms around herself. “Winston, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, or Saturday morning, or afterward. I don’t know what’s going to happen at all. But I think…I think I’ve got to go through it myself, and not keep using you as a…this mailman thing was supposed to be temporary, but I think I’ve turned it into a crutch. If I keep running to you to solve all my problems, and take you home with me, then how am I going to feel about myself when this is all over?”
“Love isn’t a crutch.”
She blinked.
“Allie, I—”
She covered his mouth with her hand. “Don’t, okay? I know. I mean, you’ve already as good as said, but just…don’t.”
She stood and stepped into her crinoline. Tied on her dress. She located pins on the counterpane and the floor and smoothed her hair up into its arrangement, all without looking at him.
“I’m sorry I fucked this up so bad,” she said.
“You didn’t fuck anything up.”
She took her phone from the bed. Thumbed over the screen and tapped out a message. “It’s nice of you to say. Can I get a ride from Jean?”
“Sure.”
It only took her ten minutes to pack her bag and erase every trace of herself from his apartment.
It took him an hour to stop watching the street after she’d left, his heart full of the vain hope that she’d change her mind and come back to him.
Chapter 22
“I really am sorry about the room,” Allie said for the fifth time. “I thought it would be more normal.”
“The room is fine.”
Her father sat on the bed near the window, looking out over the pit where the Twin Towers had once been. It felt like they were six hundred stories up from the street. He’d turned green in the elevator. The bathroom had a shower with no door or curtain—not even a lip of tile to separate it from the toilet area. When she’d used it, she flooded the floor and had to employ all the provided towels to mop it up, which surely wasn’t how it was meant to work.
They had to sit on the beds because there was literally nothing in the room but mattresses and windows and the bathroom.
Allie had paid enough for this room to fund a palatial suite at the American Club in Kohler back home, but it was just a last minute rack rate in
New York. What she’d wanted was to check them into some Holiday Inn Express equivalent, where her father would feel familiar and not besieged by unfamiliar metropolitan fanciness.
No dice.
“You think you can tour the memorial?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The 9/11 Memorial.”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’d like to.”
Pacing the narrow aisle between the window and the bathroom, she looked it up on her phone. “There’s guided tours of the museum and the memorial at forty bucks a pop. We can get in at…eleven, one, or four.”
“See if your sister wants to come.”
She glanced at him, uncertain. Tomorrow was Friday. She’d thought that by tomorrow afternoon, at the latest, they’d be on a plane home, or confronting her mother. Not visiting the 9/11 museum.
But she sent May a text. Dad wants us to go to the 9/11 memorial tomorrow. Guided tours at 11, 1, 4. Says to see if you want to come.
May replied, Sure. 11’s fine.
Both of you?
Yeah.
Allie bought four tickets.
Four tickets, not five. No ticket for Winston.
“Sit. You’re making me nervous.”
Allie tossed her phone onto the mattress and followed it down. She needed a plan. Not a rescue plan or anything, but some idea of the next step would be useful.
It was just hard to keep going with such a giant black ache in the center of her chest.
She crossed her hands behind her head. The ceiling tiles were ordinary ceiling tiles, white and speckled with holes. One familiar thing among so many unfamiliar ones.
Her father was at least ten percent a stranger tonight. She kept looking at him, surprised by the fact of him in Manhattan.
Bill Fredericks had white hair, short on the sides and at the back, long enough to part and comb on top. It had never thinned or receded, and apparently never would. He’d worked most of his adult life as an engineer at the nuclear power plant in Two Rivers, but the plant was getting decommissioned, so the past few years he’d been involved with that, and this year he’d gone down to part-time.
The day after tomorrow would be his thirtieth wedding anniversary.
He was a big man, but the kind of big like May was, the kind that was just bones and height and breadth. A German body that packed heavy muscle on top of bone like that was its whole job, automatic and without regard to weight.