He sat up, then. She shivered, hard. She hadn’t realized how much heat their bodies were holding together.
He reach up and moved her hair back around her shoulders. “But you are.”
“I’m what?”
“Or we are. I don’t know.”
“This is how they ask girls out in Wales, right? By saying confusing things after cuddling them?”
His eyebrows wrinkled and he huffed one of those laughs into his chest. “That’s the thing.”
“So … Dinner?”
“I’m going back to Wales.”
She let herself be confused, let everything about the moment mix up in her head until she could feel herself protectively float away from her body. “Or we could have breakfast, on the weekend. Pancakes at pancake time.”
“This contract at the library, when it’s over, I’m going back. Helping out my parents a bit, for a while. After that, I’m headed to Beijing to reconnect with a group I worked with there, on an internship sometime ago, and get serious about my consulting work.”
She looked at the lake. “How long?”
“We have about eight weeks left on the library restoration. Then, I’ll go.”
Des turned away from him, counted twenty white horses jumping from their little waves on the lake. “I don’t have any plans for the next couple of months,” she heard herself say. He was squinting at her again. “Do you?”
Chapter Seven
Hefin stopped on the landing on the thirtieth floor of the Carter Tower and leaned against the peregrine falcon observation window while he regulated his breath, used the hem of his tee to wipe sweat from his eyes.
Thirty flights of stairs, and he still heard her voice—I don’t have any plans. Do you? Thirty flights of stairs and he still tasted her on his tongue. Thirty flights of stairs and he couldn’t sweat off the feel of her hand on his ribs, her lips on his neck. Thirty flights of stairs and he still wasn’t breathing harder than he did sitting at a picnic table and telling Destiny Burnside that he had wanted to kiss her.
I don’t have any plans. Do you?
He started on the thirty-first flight. He hadn’t made plans for years, actually. Not since the plans he made with a laughing woman in a twee hotel room in the village of his birth.
You’re coming with me, she had said, her warm brown limbs akimbo over the white duvet, shining and rich.
No you are, he had answered, filling his hands with her perfumed skin, his mouth with all the tender places of her body.
To push the hours back, to push the question back, until they had finally sated themselves enough that making plans were all they had left.
He got on a plane. He convinced himself it wasn’t going the wrong direction every time he kissed Jessica.
Then, when there wasn’t anything here for him but her, just like there hadn’t been anything there for her but him, he convinced himself the kisses were enough.
He pushed the question back until Jessica was the question.
Then he pushed her back.
I don’t have any plans. Do you?
He pounded his trainers into the travertine stairs. He wanted to jar his back teeth against themselves. He wanted to feel the bones bang into their sockets. He wanted to shake loose the great vessels of his heart until they emptied and spilled into this great numb sack he had been left.
He had been planning every hour of his mornings for the last weeks so that he had the best chance of watching Destiny walk through the atrium, of timing his glances to catch her staring.
Once, about three weeks after she started coming in, she had been in the reserves section, directly diagonal from the panel restoration. He watched her weave in and out through the shelves with her reserves tag until she spotted her book. It was on a top shelf, and she reached for it. The loose waist of her jeans had knocked off her hip bones as she reached, and they slid under the sacral dimples guarding her arse. Under the pink elastic of her panties. Less than a moment of skin before she had her book and her sweater settled back over her middle and she hiked up her jeans.
That night, he had a dream he was on his knees before her. She was naked. There had been almost no light, but her skin glowed, stealing the bit of light available.
In the dream, he had both hands full with the flesh of her bottom, and his tongue was playing over the top of her thigh.
In his dream, it’s all he wanted—to taste the lean belly of her thigh muscle, to rest his forehead against the bone of her hip, to press his fingers into the soft skin of her bottom. It wasn’t tender, in his dream. His touch was a kind of animal comfort where he was permitted to take his own needs from her body.
When he woke up, every bone in his body had felt aligned, and heated. His erection, when he palmed it, didn’t ache urgently. Stroking it had filled him with more of the leftover warmth from the dream, had sent him back to an untroubled sleep.
On the enclosed observation deck, he slumped onto a bench and watched the light play on the lake. On his own, he would never have left Jessica. It had made so much sense, when they had finally made plans, for him to emigrate.
He had desirable and transferable skills. In Beijing, where his internship was ending, even in London, it would take him as many years as it would anywhere else to do the work he wanted to do. There was the promise of interest in green large-scale commercial projects, his specialization, in the States.
Jessica was an attorney. Her license was married to the state of Ohio.
So he married her. It made so much sense, a bit of tidiness to cap off the fantastic messiness of their Welsh affair, of her windblown and unexpectedly romantic vacation.
The night she came home and poured them wine and told him that he resented her, and she couldn’t live with his resentment anymore, he started to say no, of course he didn’t, his failure to find work in his new country was his own, his temper and his moods were his own, or were his shame that he hadn’t provided for her, for them—and then he was choked by his own tears.
He cried like a child, noisy and stormy and wet, and she held him against her.
The grief was impossible.
To understand that he spent his days poisoning himself against the woman he was supposed to love, to understand that he had broken their home, that she lived her life with the knowledge that the man she was meant to depend on for support and common marital worship and long Sundays in bed had turned into a snarling source of daily pain was gutting.
He snapped at her for nothing, he canceled plans for little reason, he took long showers where he blindly pulled himself into release, then turned away from her in the dark.
He did. All of it.
He watched the water. He didn’t spectacularly fuck up. He didn’t sleep with another woman, couldn’t imagine that sort of infidelity. He was grumpy, but their day-to-day life was civil. Among their friends, he always felt compelled to talk her up, boast of her accomplishments at work and the funny things she said.
His failing was of the sort of a very ordinary and common fuckup. The sort that is a collection of the small ends of miserable days that hook themselves roughly together until there is a whole stretch of time that is quietly miserable.
Fucked.
He remembered how small the bones of Des’s wrist and shoulder had felt in his hands when he held them during their erotic grappling at the park. How her gray eyes caught the light as easily as her hair—both shifting in color and luminescence.
He watched a little eight-footer negotiate the swift cross breeze on the lake. From up here, like watching a tiny pillow feather blow across a quilt.
He missed the sea.
He missed people who’d known him before he’d made such a mess of things, who only knew him as full of certainty.
He realized even if home was nothing more than carving in his dad’s shop and working his mum’s garden, his life here had been so reduced that such a change felt like moving forward. Spending evenings with his parents had taken on some small weight of di
gnity.
Such fragile dignity, then, would have to armor him for his return to his old team in Beijing, buoy him so that he could take on a meaningful life again and regrow himself from the grafts of his previous life before Ohio.
Safe from fuckups, spectacular or otherwise.
He realized the sun had nearly moved to the right spot. He watched the angle of light over the lake, how the rough surface of the water reflected back the midday light. Then he looked at the long, low warehouse building that was a short quarter mile from the lake and caught the same angle of sun.
Rather, should catch the same angle. The building’s roof was covered with solar panels in a traditionally fixed array. But when Hefin visually compared the reflection of light on the lake to any play of light on the banks of dark panel cells, it was clear the array was missing out on the longest and most powerful hours of sunshine.
In Beijing, he had worked on a project developing what his team had called “sunflower panels.” Using photosensitive robotic motors as mounts they called “stems,” smaller solar panels were arrayed to the stems. The panels followed the sun throughout the day, like a field of sunflowers. The arrays were lighter, and a large building like the warehouse would need fewer of them because they collected energy so efficiently. In their own way, too, they were … pretty. Pretty for robotic solar panels, anyway. Hefin had privately found them rather poetic.
He couldn’t help estimate how many sunflowers the warehouse would need, where to plant the stems.
He let himself calculate until the angle of sun changed again.
He let himself think of the long nights in his team’s favorite bar in the Wudaoying Hutong zone in the Dongchen District, making design sketches on cocktail napkins and downing cold butter-pale ale against the humid evenings.
He’d run stairs in Beijing, too, climbed skyscrapers so new and ambitious sometimes he’d reach a floor where smog-free air was whistling in through plastic over a missing pane of glass.
He’d been up over the clouds, his physical state matched to his spirit.
He had believed that his drive and creativity were a part of him.
He had believed he could take passion and talent and the absorption of good work with him anywhere. Jessica had met a man with that fire, and something caught between the both of them, oxygenated by the sea air of his visit home and his own self-importance.
It had all been nothing more than hot stones, fired briefly to keep a body warm between a pile of quilts, then cold and dull by morning.
“What were we doing just now?” Destiny had asked. Looking at the lake after he had kissed her neck.
He had shaken his head, looked at the lake, too.
He didn’t know.
“This lunch, this counts as taking a girl out. I mean, it’s been a while, but I think it still works this way. And, you asked me after you’d already seen me ugly cry. I told you things. Human things, private things, about myself.”
She had presented to him two sides.
Hopelessness and faith.
The sweat had cooled from his body, leaning against the cold window of Carter Tower, and his heartbeat had gone steady.
He huffed a fog on the window and traced an outline of the warehouse building, dividing the roof into quadrants, planting sunflowers based on his calculations.
He watched his drawing fade, thinking how the flowers would catch the sun just right. He heard the ghost of laughter and heated discussions through the din of a hot outdoor bar in Wudaoying.
He rubbed his chest and felt the traces of how his sobs against his ex-wife’s soft shoulder had pulled and burned.
Enough.
He huffed over the glass again. Drew on the glass with his finger. Her profile was easy to find the line of, how her jaw bent back soft and sat over the curve of her neck. He watched her fade, then fogged a long breath and brought her up. The sparkles from the lake shined through the lines he made on the glass, making it seem as though her ephemeral portrait was moving.
He was alone, so he put his lips against the glass.
The glass was cold. Nothing like what her neck had been—hot from the sun, the pulse seesawing in time with the one at her wrist.
He had meant just to kiss, but she had smelled so good, so much better than he had anticipated just being close to her. As soon as he breathed in, he had opened his mouth over her.
His entire body had ached, warmly. Painfully. Like pulling his body from a too-tight space and stretching, feeling the ease come back to every joint after an initial bolt of pain.
“You’re right,” he’d finally said, looking at her profile after she dressed him down so neatly.
“I am.”
He’d laughed. She had looked over at him then and shocked him by reaching up and raking her fingers through the wiry curls at his temple, making soft circles with her fingertips. He hadn’t even known he’d closed his eyes until she brushed her thumb over his eyelid.
“But you can’t want to have some fling, Des. You’re a long-term woman, for sure.”
She’d smiled. “That’s the thing. I have no idea what kind of woman I am.”
“That’s a tremendous risk you’re taking with yourself. I’m ready, you see. To go back. To be with my folks and settle in with my thoughts about what the next part of all this might be. To do the work I was trained for with people I loved to work with, all that time ago. I can’t stay for someone, not again. I can’t live for someone else again. I can’t ask—” He hadn’t been able to say it. Even suggest it.
“I can’t hurt someone, Des. Not again. I need to start over a little blank, I think.”
“What do you know about the risk I’m taking on?”
Her color had gone up in her cheeks, right near her eyes. He tried to face the determination, the near anger in that expression, but looked away. “You’ve been through it. You just lost your dad. You’ve just found work after a long, hard time looking. This isn’t the time—”
“What perspective are you speaking from?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem to be speaking from mine, and yeah, I shared a lot with you, and I know enough to want to sit in a park and ask you to kiss me, but you don’t know enough about me to tell me what time it is. Speak from your perspective, from where you sit.”
He could suddenly see himself like she must see him. Windblown, stuttering. Bossy, even. When she had looked so gorgeous like that, sitting straight with her perfect posture and her color washing through her freckles, roses on her throat, he hadn’t wanted to look like that. “Do they have you working on Saturdays, then?”
“No.”
“Do you know where the Southend fields are?”
“That big soccer-and-baseball complex by the interchange?”
“That’s the one. Are you able to meet me there Saturday afternoon, around two, perhaps. Do you have transportation? I could—”
She had grinned, just as the wind picked up again, pulling her hair away from where it had been tucked behind her ears. “Yeah, I have transportation In fact, let me pick you up.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Oh, I want to.”
“All right then.”
She had pushed her lunch back toward him. “Write where you live.”
“From where?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want directions from here or from some other address?”
She’d laughed. “You could also just write your address. Lived here my whole life, remember? I’d figure it out.”
“From right here, then.”
He’d pulled a drawing pencil from his back pocket, and surprised himself with the compulsion to show off a bit—as if he were a too-skinny teenager, again, drawing little comics for a girl he fancied. Which, he guessed, was what he was doing. He finished and handed her the bag. The wind wasn’t enough to pull the blush off his neck.
“Oh.” She traced the corner where he’d drawn a suggestion of a co
uple on a bench on a knoll of conifers, and he watched her finger follow the simple map to the other corner, where he’d sketched a caricature of himself waving in front of a bank of condos with his number address. Silly. Her smile was so worth it, his heart stopped, and he pressed his arm hard against it to start it again. “I love this. I mean, I’ve watched you draw, and seen the carvings, but—”
“Just a little sketch. You can find me then?”
He would know if she could, in just a couple of hours. He pushed away from the window. The wind that was chopping the lake below had given a subtle rock to the building. He closed his eyes, mentally recalling the skeleton of an old building like this, how it connected to the earth below it, how it took on wind.
He started down the stairs. Counting backward to the beginning.
Chapter Eight
A few hours before she was supposed to pick up Hefin, Sarah had called and sounded completely out of it, slurring, breathing hard, not making sense. Des burst into frustrated tears trying to use her phone to call Sam until she remembered her phone was a piece of shit and she had to run to Betty’s house next door to use hers.
Des watched Sam slowly push the Narcan through the IV port that Lacey had placed in Sarah’s arm. Two paramedics from the fire department were waiting for Sam to give them instructions.
Sam and Lacey had been working on their clinic plans and were the first to reach Sarah’s apartment.
“How will you know it works, Sam?” Des worked to keep her voice as steady and smooth as Sam’s had been. Lacey and Sam had been so competent, they worked together so smoothly it seemed like slow motion.
“It will work, Des. Her respirs just got a bit low and shallow. She was started on a fentanyl patch today for her pain, and I think she was just a little too small to tolerate it.”
The paramedics kept calling him “Dr. Burnside” and even though that sounded so strange to Des, to hear Sam called that even though he’d been a doctor for years, she was glad, so fucking glad, they were calling him that, now.
Lacey was in regular clothes, her short choppy hair falling in her face. Lacey held Sarah’s wrist against her waist and was continuously taking her pulse.
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