His skin still held a trace of its ski tan from when he’d flown to Aspen in January, that weathered brown skin across his nose and cheeks; was that possible, even, more than two months later? He was leaving for Florida on Sunday, she knew.
“You made it. Cool,” he said. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, feeling the cold beginning to eat through her mother’s boots. “Oh, right, yeah. Come on in. No one’s home.”
“Perfect,” she said, but he’d already turned away from her. She’d known already that the house would be empty; of course this was why she was here, on the first full day of their spring break. She hadn’t heard from him in so long that she’d already begun to think of him in the past tense until he’d started texting her this week. There’d been the attention over winter break, the late-night phone calls, a text he sent her at seventeen minutes past midnight on New Year’s Eve. February, and the necessity of Valentine’s Day, the way it sucked her attention away from anything else for weeks—early February was when he’d gone completely quiet.
And then, of course, more than a month later—a month during which she’d been so careful not to say his name in front of Zoë or Allie—his name popped up one night on the screen of her BlackBerry.
“D’Amico,” he said. “Where you been?”
As if nothing had happened. As if his life swirled past so quickly that he couldn’t be expected to observe the reactions of the people who’d been caught up in its wake. Valentine’s Day was never mentioned, like something they’d have had to choose to acknowledge together, as a team, if it were to exist. And now here she was, at his house, agreeing not to mention it.
She followed him inside.
The foyer opened directly onto an enormous, open living room, every surface jammed with photographs. Madison longed for a pocket of time to explore them, to look at the younger Chip decked out in the studied casual uniform of coordinated denim that had been so popular for family photographs in the midnineties.
“Do you want something to eat?” Chip tossed back over his shoulder. He led her down a hallway that ended in a kitchen with paneled hardwood floors, yellow curtains, a dripping faucet.
“Or, we can probably sneak two beers from my dad’s fridge in the garage.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”
“Because we’ve got a few hours at least before they come home.”
“Whatever you want.” She wanted to snatch the words back immediately, because hearing them out loud made her see how true they were.
“I was thinking we could watch a movie,” he said. “Have a beer. My dad has all the Oscar screeners.”
“That’s so cool,” she said. Could this possibly be the same boy who had followed her into a dark hallway on Halloween? Were they the same two people who had bantered back and forth, successfully, she was pretty sure, so many times?
She waited in the kitchen until he came back with the two beers and opened them on his kitchen counter. They ended up eventually in a second, more casual den, a room that had clearly been colonized, over the years, by the Abbott men. There were half-eaten bags of Doritos left at intervals throughout the room. Three different game systems and their accompanying power cords lay vanquished on the bottom level of a large, multitiered piece of furniture that held, among other things, a flat-screen television. Another wall was taken up by another built-in bookshelf, one entire section of which held DVDs.
“My dad’s a big movie guy,” Chip offered, as he walked over and began rifling through loose cases in search of something. “My mom says in another few years no one’s going to watch DVDs, and we won’t even be able to give these away.”
“You never know,” Madison said. “The things they’re always telling you will disappear next are never the ones that actually do.”
Chip didn’t look up.
“We’ve got this one,” he said, shaking one DVD in her general direction. “It’s supposed to be pretty depressing.”
“Way to sell it, Abbott,” she said, lifting her beer bottle to her lips. “Who could resist that pitch?”
And finally, he looked up and smiled at her. His eyes moved over her body as if he’d just noticed that she was in the room.
“This one it is,” he said. He crossed to the television and she curled up at one end of the couch. There was a nubbly chenille blanket balled there and she took it, spread it out over her knees, and burrowed deeper into the side of the sofa. She should have let him sit first, she realized then. He might have chosen the middle. He might have wanted to force their bodies closer together.
The movie began, dominated throughout by a steady ebb and flow of mournful piano music. As far as she could tell, the movie’s main thesis seemed to be that marriage would slowly kill you. That it would sap your physical capacity for any joy, metaphysical or otherwise. There was one fairly tame, if awkwardly violent, sex scene. She began to wonder why neither one of them had realized this might be an uncomfortable thing for them to watch together, side by side, in silence. Her beer bottle was sweating into her palm.
When they’d seen movies together at the theater, Chip had whispered almost continuously, tickling her during quiet scenes, putting his finger to his lips and admonishing her loudly when other moviegoers urged them to be quiet. But that had been a while ago, now. Months.
About thirty minutes in, he stood up and left the room, returning with two more beers after a suspiciously long absence. He sat down on the couch, right next to her, and opened the bottles on the scuffed edge of the wooden coffee table. He passed one bottle to her without taking his eyes off the screen. Then he leaned back and stretched his right arm out across the back of the sofa.
“I didn’t know you could open beer like that,” she said.
He took a swig from his beer and carefully set the bottle down on the floor before turning back to her.
“I can do it with my teeth, too,” he said. “But it’s really bad for them. Your teeth.”
She reached out with one hand to trace his bottom lip, letting her fingertip hover near his two front teeth, and waited.
He turned off the movie, tossing the remote onto an armchair.
“Come here,” he said, lying back and pulling her toward him so that her chin rested on his chest. He took her beer from her hand and placed it on the floor, beside his. Then he put both hands to her waist, just above her hips, and hoisted her up, so that their noses were touching. It took a moment of fumbling, but she dug her knees into the couch and pinned him beneath her. He reached up, letting his hands sift through her hair, fitting her jaw snugly into his palm, and pulled her down to him.
It took, she was pretty sure, a long time for him to do anything more than that. But once he had decided to, suddenly, it was all happening quickly. She felt his fingers scuttling at her hip bones and then her shirt was off, his fingertips were nicking at the clasp of her bra, he’d picked her up again by the waist and flipped her onto her back and he had her jeans down and off, over her ankles. And then she was aware that she could feel his erection through his sweats, that it was pushing between her legs in rhythmic thrusts. Eventually, a few minutes after that had already started to seem silly to her, he stopped and twisted his body so that he was lying next to her, turned onto his side, which pushed her into a perilous position on the very edge of the couch. He put both hands on her shoulders and pressed down on them; she’d liked it better when his hands were in her hair or on her face, but this was fine. But then the pressure continued, strong enough so that she actually had to square her shoulder muscles to keep from buckling under the weight of his hands, and she realized what was happening. Just to test it, she stopped resisting. And he was pushing her down, quite clearly, toward his groin.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t, I don’t think—”
He stopped kissing her and torqued his neck at an awkward angle so that they could see each other’s faces.
“Oh, I just thought,” he said. “Or, I’ve got a condom, too.”
She fro
ze, faithfully certain that if she refused to move any part of her face or body, then time, too, might not move forward, might give her a chance to find the combination of words to dissolve this situation.
“I’m just not,” she tried, willing him to meet her somewhere in the now-clouded middle. He was still moving every few seconds, pushing against her and then retreating. But he didn’t say anything. He let his neck droop, a little, so that his face fell into her hair, spilled out across the cushion. Sweat had gathered at the back of her neck. And then he turned his head toward her and kissed her hair, kissed her on the temple, beneath all her hair. She closed her eyes.
“I can’t,” she said.
“I would do stuff to you,” he said. “I would do stuff, too.”
“Oh,” she said, struggling to conceal her breathless panic. “I can’t.”
His voice had been soft, thick with the preceding fifteen minutes of silence and clotted with the fact of their kissing, the inhaling through his nose and the quickened breath and the tamped-down excitement. But now it turned, somehow. He sighed, and not in the way he’d sighed into her hair only moments earlier.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, do you want to totally stop?”
Yes, she thought, yes, isn’t that obvious, but then she realized she did not want to stop, she just wanted to hold still, to remain where they were. Or to put her bra back on and maybe at least take off his shirt so that she wasn’t basically naked while he was fully clothed. And then stay where they were. She wanted to just kiss him for another hour or two or however many hours they still had. Couldn’t they agree, decide on this together? Just make out? Kissing him was like being caught in free fall in amber; nothing changed, no surface ever interrupted your delicious flight. It was the absolute freedom of no other choice.
Chip bent to kiss her again, and for a moment it seemed like exactly what she wanted to happen would happen. He took her hand in his, and pulled it down toward his pants, which was fine. And a moment later, she felt warm skin that she knew, without having to look, wasn’t the skin of his stomach, and she understood what was happening. That this was a bargain she’d made; that this was, technically, as close to winning as she would get this afternoon.
After another few seconds, he stopped kissing her. He reached up above them to the accent table that ran behind the length of the couch, and produced a bottle of lotion—from where? He took her hand without asking and squeezed some lotion into her palm. It smelled overwhelmingly of gardenias, which seemed absurd, but you didn’t need boys’ and boys’ worth of experience to know that you weren’t allowed to laugh, not at this particular moment.
He rolled away from her and turned his head into the back of the couch, his hand cupping her shoulder, squeezing it periodically.
Before it was over he said, hoarse, “There are Kleenex over on the bookshelf, can you go get some?”
And then she had to stand up, naked, because as it had gone on he had pawed a few times at her underwear and she’d understood she was to use her free hand to wiggle out of her thong, which she’d abandoned to the floor. So she had to walk naked across the room, and pluck a few Kleenex—how many would she even need for this?—from their box on the bookshelf, and then turn and walk back to the sofa where he lay splayed, his shirt still on and his sweats only pulled down a tug beneath his hip bones, almost none of his skin exposed. He was looking not at her but down, his mouth set in concentration, his jaw working, and as she lowered herself to the couch again he put his hand out and touched her hip, not far from her belly button, and said, “Wait, would you stay there? Sit up like that. Yeah.”
And so she sat at his side, as if he were a patient and she were his nurse, until it was finished, then gave him the Kleenex. She didn’t know if he’d wanted her to do something with it but it made more sense to let him take care of it, he understood the situation better, surely, than she did. Then she lay down next to him again because that way they didn’t have to look at each other’s faces. She figured if she were him, she’d be embarrassed, that the other person had just seen his face, in that moment. He didn’t seem embarrassed.
She thought about whether she was allowed to turn to her side, to press her body against him, or kiss the part of his neck just where it became his shoulder. Eventually he put his hand to her bare thigh and squeezed, once, then pushed up, past her, pulling at his sweats.
“We should probably get up,” he said, gathering the beer bottles from the floor. He frowned at hers, which was practically full. “They might be home soon.”
“I thought you said they’d be gone for a while.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what a while means,” he said, and it was this sentence more than anything else that made her want to cry. “They might get back soon. Do you need a ride?”
She hadn’t made any plan. She had lied to Lily, said she was meeting Zoë for dinner on the Avenue. Getting here to be with him: that had seemed like it would be such an achievement that no further planning was needed. She had just assumed that elation would dissolve the pesky roadblocks of logistics, obligations.
“Yeah,” she said. “I need a ride.” She snatched her clothes from the floor and pushed past him, unwilling to look at his face.
She got dressed in the bathroom, then ran the water and pressed a perfumed washcloth to her squeezed-shut eyes. She wanted to look untouched by the time she left this room.
The front door opened and closed. She heard Chip’s voice, loud and performed, and she heard what could only be his mother’s voice, too.
She had no choice but to leave the bathroom.
“Oh,” his mother said when Madison came into the living room. “I see. I didn’t realize we had company.”
Madison ran one hand through her hair and stepped forward.
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Madison D’Amico.”
The woman’s lips parted and she took a reflexive step back, as if to consider Madison more fully, but she caught herself quickly and extended a hand in return.
“Of course,” she said, “Madison. I can’t believe we’ve never met—well, we must have, but years ago. Your mom and I used to play tennis together sometimes. When I could keep up with her.”
“She played in college,” Madison said. “You’re not the only one. I’m impressed you could play with her at all.”
“I’m Lacey,” Chip’s mother reminded her. They shook hands. His mother had Chip’s face, almost, but everything that was sharply defined in him—his jaw, his smile, his brow line—was somehow more casual on her, gummier, more lopsided. When she smiled it seemed to touch the very edges of her face, and tiny fans of wrinkles appeared at the corners of her eyes. Her wavy blond hair was cut short, to her chin, in an indifferent, untouched sort of bob.
“Well, I’m just getting home with groceries,” Lacey said. “We weren’t planning anything special, because we all still have to pack for Florida, but Chip’s dad will be back from the city in another hour or two. Do you want to stay for dinner?” She looked at Chip, without turning her head away from Madison. He was standing several steps away from them, disavowing the conversation. “It would be fun—we could get to know each other.”
Madison scanned, quickly, what she knew about Chip’s father. He was, she was pretty sure, a lawyer. And not in-house counsel anywhere; she was almost certain he had no ties to anywhere that mattered. But it was irrelevant, anyway. Chip cleared his throat.
“She’s got to get home,” he said. “I was just going to drive her.”
“Oh,” Lacey said. “It’s looking like rain, honey. Why don’t you stay here? Madison, I’ll run you home. Are you guys still up in that same place? Off Baldwin Farms?”
“Yes,” Madison said, and she couldn’t keep her fear from her voice, even though she tried. “Of course we are.”
“I just haven’t been up there in years,” Lacey said, her voice dipping to acknowledge and dispense with Madison’s curt reply. “Your mom hosted the Silent Auction a few times, when you guys were
still in elementary school.”
Madison breathed again. She nodded her head furiously, eager to agree.
“Sure, I remember that.”
“All right, well,” Lacey said. “Chip, I’ll be back in twenty.”
He nodded, and then turned to Madison and stiffened his hand, touching it to his temple. He was saluting her good-bye. Their bodies had not touched since they’d been lying on the couch.
“Have a good spring,” Madison said to him, looking away so quickly that she couldn’t see whether or not he flinched, if he even understood. Or if he just wanted her gone, out of the house.
LACEY LOWERED HERSELF slowly into the Mercedes, checking her mirrors and her purse methodically, as if they were embarking on a cross-country road trip. Madison glanced over her shoulder and saw a pair of cleats tucked tidily beneath the driver’s-side seat. She felt her blood in a rush, pooling behind her eyes, and she faced forward.
“So, what are your plans for the break? I assume you aren’t traveling.”
Here was the opening salvo, and Madison met it midarc, almost enjoyed catching it right away. She tossed her head, lifted her chin. She was developing a routine, an actual series of steps in response to rude, veiled questions about her parents. But as she opened her mouth and looked over at Lacey, her eyebrows raised as she watched the road, the vestiges of a smile on her face, she realized this woman might just be asking the question itself.
“No,” she said. “We had thought about going out to Shelter Island for a week, but my mom just wanted to stay here.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you guys had spent time on Shelter. One of the partners at Nick’s firm—Chip’s dad—has an old family place out there. It’s quite gorgeous.”
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