“Sounds like college.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Except with better food and no beer. And no freshman orientation. The first week here was hell. Still now, every day, some serious shit comes out in the morning meetings.”
His honesty was unnerving. She resisted the urge to take his arm or press her cheek against his biceps. It wasn’t her place anymore.
“And guess what?” he said, with a gravelly little laugh. “It turns out that it’s not normal for a father meeting his son for the first time in twelve years to shove him on the first bus leaving town.”
Her breath hitched.
“And it turns out,” he continued, “that it’s not normal for a twelve-year-old to be drying cannabis on the back porch, or smoking it at fourteen.”
She couldn’t help herself. She brushed his shoulder briefly, before veering away. He noticed. His step slowed as they plunged into the cool shadow of the pinewoods. Paint on the trees marked a confluence of three different trails, and without looking up, Cole led the way down the one designated white.
“Thanks,” he murmured, “for not saying ‘I told you so.’”
“Cole, I didn’t even know what was wrong.” She’d always been fascinated by his upbringing, and had even envied his no-structure-no-rules lifestyle, too blinded at first to notice the destruction that kind of freedom had wreaked upon him. “I flailed about, looking for reasons for the vodka bottles under the bed, and then brought up the very things you didn’t want to talk about.”
“Yeah, well, you figured it out. Long before I did.”
He gave her a rueful little smile. Oh, there he was suddenly, the warm guy she’d had a terrible crush on in college, the lanky, long-haired hippie with the easy ways that seemed to coax her—come close, come near, I won’t hurt you.
Dhara focused on the path before her to steady herself from a sense of dizziness. Fresh from Wendy’s bachelorette party—and a little woozy from lack of sleep—she thought she’d be better prepared to face Cole today. She’d spent a good part of the weekend quizzing her friends for advice. Only Wendy had any to give, and it wasn’t something she didn’t know already: there was no easy way to break a man’s heart.
And yet, she had to. While Cole had been a patient in her hospital, he’d had the grace not to ask for any promises. But among old lovers and even older friends, some promises were made without speaking, and some expectations grew out of a simple request for a game of online poker.
Layers of brown needles crinkled under her feet, and Dhara breathed in the scent of resin. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you’re doing well, Cole. I’ve always wished the best for you—”
“Don’t.”
His voice was low and sure. All his humor was gone. He’d hooked his hands behind his back, as if forcibly holding them still.
“I know that speech.” A muscle danced near his jaw. “I don’t want—I don’t need—” He stopped. Then he craned his neck as if seeking a nest up the straight trunks of the white pines. “Dhara, I already know that I’ve lost you.”
Dhara stumbled, one foot catching on a stone hidden under the pine needles. She righted herself as Cole continued forward, rounding a curve to a little wooden bench. He flung himself on it. He gazed through the thinning trees to a narrow valley and, beyond, the slate blue outline of the mountains.
Dhara slipped onto the other end of the bench feeling unmoored. Around them, the cicadas sang, their buzzing music rising in the trees.
“It’s the clothes.” He crossed his arms, tucking his fingers beneath his biceps. “I knew the minute I saw you coming down the path in your shalwar kameez that you’d chosen the Hindu way.”
She choked down the urge to object. She could say she’d worn the outfit for comfort, but it really didn’t matter. It had been so long since she’d dealt with the sober Cole that she’d forgotten how perceptive he could be.
She found herself remembering all the years she’d resisted him, before they became lovers. In college, she’d convinced herself it was impossible. During medical school, they were physically apart but kept in contact. Even after she returned to New York for her residency and certifications, she’d told herself that it wouldn’t work. All those years, she’d gently discouraged him. Yet he always came around, just when she wanted to see him most. Just when she was most susceptible. He understood on some deep level her reticence. He kept her close—but not too close.
Now, more than ever, she understood his behavior. Ironically, the very freedom of spirit that she admired in him was the one thing that drove them apart. And the very strong sense of loyalty and family that he admired in her was the one part of her he couldn’t handle.
“There’s this thing,” he said. “It’s one of the twelve steps to recovery, they tell me. I have to apologize for all the damage I’ve done.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me.”
“Yes, I do. You more than anyone. It’s why I wanted to see you today. Why I was glad you actually showed up.”
“Of course I—”
“No,” he interrupted. “No, Dhara. There’s no ‘of course.’ Not after some of the things I said to you. You put up with more crap than any human should. You stuck with me years longer than any sane person would have. Had you not left me, who knows how long it would have continued? We might still be caught in that same cycle of dysfunction.”
She closed off the memories. She tried not to think of the terrible words he’d said to her in his drunkenness. She didn’t want to remember his unpredictable anger, the slurs he made against her family, and the hateful words he used denying his addiction.
“That’s the worst part, you know.” His knee started to bob, and then he slapped his hand on it to keep it still. “All the apologies in the world aren’t going to erase those bad memories. I can’t…make it good. Good like it used to be, even when we were just friends. What I did, in the end, will always taint what we had.”
“You’re already forgiven.”
He made a half laugh, a sound of easy disbelief, as he shook his head. “You’re making it too easy.”
“This is easy?”
He looked at her with a face full of regret. The light fell on his cheek, and she saw the constellation of freckles there, a faint cluster of Pleiades. She used to trace them beneath his wispy sideburns.
Dhara reached for his hand. His palm was cold, his muscles stiff, and it took a few minutes before he let his fingers relax.
“Do you remember,” she whispered, “the first night we spent in Cape May?”
His pulse jumped. She squeezed his hand harder.
“Do you remember,” she continued, “that first moment, after we arrived at our room, and you closed the door behind us?”
Dhara could still hear the crash of the sea and the cries of sea birds through the open window. A breeze billowed the sheer curtains and washed over the bed that filled the room. It was a four-poster with a blue spread, looking to her innocent eyes impossibly decadent. The door had clicked shut, and she’d turned to see the man she loved standing before it. Bathed in the late afternoon light. Looking tall and dangerous.
Her heart had leaped in her breast.
He said softly, “I remember.”
It had been their first time. They’d talked about it, planned it, and anticipated it for so very long. Twelve years of friendship fueled the moment, and, during the car ride down, they’d spent three aching hours holding hands and imagining.
“I was so nervous.” She laughed. “I couldn’t manage the buttons on your shirt. They kept slipping out of my hands like little peas.”
“Lost two of them,” he said. “Never bothered looking for them after.”
She could still summon the creaking sound of Cole’s footfalls on the old boards as he crossed the space that separated them. She could still summon the feel of his hands as he seized her waist, as he dragged her shirt up over her ribs. She remembered how he’d pulled the band out of her ponytail to let her hair tum
ble down her naked back. He’d sifted his fingers through it, over and over, as she struggled to shimmy out of her jeans. Her whole body had ached, and her skin was fevered, as bits of medical knowledge about respiratory rates and racing pulses and human physiological responses skittered through her mind.
Now, with the cicadas singing around them in the pinewoods, Dhara buried herself in the memory—in all of it, from the silly way he’d tripped as he dragged her, laughing, toward the bed, to the sudden shyness she’d felt, exposed under his hungry eyes, to the sublime sensation of his fingers touching her where no man had ever touched her before.
This is how a bride feels, she remembered thinking, when the goddess Rati stirs within her.
Then, as now, she looked up into Cole’s flushed face and saw him blinking, his hazel eyes suspiciously bright.
“Someday, I’ll be as shriveled and gray as Auntie Bhuvi, Cole. But I can promise you this.” She pressed his hand against her cheek. “Whenever I think of you, what I’ll remember is that night we shared in Cape May.”
chapter nineteen
Kelly hunched down in the passenger seat of Dhara’s rental car as Dhara took a right turn onto Fifty-sixth Street and drove up between the rows of parked cars toward Kelly’s apartment building.
“Tell me he’s not sitting there anymore.” Kelly crushed her knees against the dashboard. “Tell me he gave up and left.”
Dhara’s expression told her the bad news before she even spoke. “This is the third time around the block. He’s going to recognize either me or the fact that this car has come around three times, Kelly. You need to make a decision.”
Kelly closed her eyes and groaned. She was exhausted from lack of sleep and from overindulgence in socializing. The weekend at Wendy’s cabin had felt like a time slip to their college days, but that amount of intimate interaction, even with her best friends, tended to overload her social processing system. After that, and all those weeks with Cole on her couch, she’d been looking forward to an evening alone, preferably with a bowl of cereal on her lap and a Bollywood movie on TV.
“You might as well pull over.” Kelly pushed herself up to a sitting position, jerking her floral skirt from under her. “Wendy must have told Trey about when we were going to arrive. I’m going to have a few words with her for that.”
“Go easy on the girl, she’s reeling.” Dhara glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled the car as close to the side as she could without clipping any mirrors. “Anyway, Wendy probably thought she was doing a good karmic deed.”
“But why did he have to come here at all? It’s so over. I couldn’t have made it any clearer on the yacht.” It didn’t help that it was so typical for him to arrive like this—with no call, no text, no warning. It made her hackles rise. Kelly yanked her messenger bag onto her lap, swinging the strap over her head. “I’m trying so very hard to just let it go, to preserve the good memories, you know?”
“Oh, yes,” Dhara said quietly. “Yes, I get that.”
Kelly slung an arm around Dhara’s neck. Her body folded into her as Kelly tightened her grip.
Kelly murmured, “You take care, okay?”
“Sure you don’t want me to circle the block a few more times, just in case?”
“No, I’ll be fine.” She squeezed out the door while Dhara pulled her overstuffed weekend tote out of the backseat and handed it to her across the passenger seat. “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”
As Dhara drove away, Kelly strode through the parked cars to face the man on her front stoop. Trey had the grace to look sheepish. Sheepish in the way of a puppy dog, facing his owner knowing he’d made a doo-doo on the living room carpet. That was quite a feat for a man six foot three, who’d apparently been jogging, dressed as he was in a loose T-shirt and running pants, his sweaty hair clinging to his temples.
“I know.” He avoided her eye as he rolled his thumb around his iPod. “I should have called.”
“I’m tired, Trey.” She dropped her bags on the sidewalk and flipped open the flap of her messenger bag to search for her apartment keys. “All I want to do is go inside, change into my pajamas, and go to sleep.”
“Must have been a good weekend.” He clipped the iPod back onto the strap around his biceps. “Is Wendy okay?”
She paused, wondering how much Wendy had told him.
“I found out through Parker.” He planted his elbows on his knees and then clasped his hands in between. “Parker’s a mess, but he didn’t want to talk about it. When I called Wendy, she didn’t want to talk about it either. Meanwhile, at the club, everyone is talking about it.”
Kelly searched blindly among her wallet, cell phone, pens, and sanitizer for the familiar shape of her Starship Enterprise key chain. She didn’t quite know what to say. She had never liked being caught between Wendy and Trey, even when she was indulging in an affair, and this felt…well, she couldn’t say anything. Wendy deserved her privacy.
“That’s a real problem in my family,” Trey said, “that reluctance to really talk about things.”
“Clearly.”
“I remember a time when my uncle Tad had an accident a few days before Christmas. It was his second DUI. So my aunt arrives at my house. ‘So sorry Tad can’t be here,’ she says. ‘He’s taking some time upstate.’ And without missing a beat my mother says, ‘Terribly sorry to hear that, Boop. Would you like your scotch straight, or on the rocks?’”
Kelly searched Trey’s face, downcast, taking a deep interest in his own intertwined fingers.
“You see,” he said, his voice deep, “in my family, it doesn’t matter what’s really going on. As long as you avoid an awkward social moment.”
“Trey, I think you’re trying to say something, but my powers of interpreting subtext are sorely depleted.”
“I’m telling you I should have decked James on the yacht.” He shuffled his sneakers on the stoop. “I didn’t, because I was working off muscle memory. I was trying to avoid an ugly public argument.”
Kelly had a sudden image of her father one summer during a good fishing season, screaming with all the salty language a sailing man could muster at two greenhorns he’d hired to help on the boat. Her father ripped them up—right in front of her—when they tangled the ropes. Yet a week later, when her father finally gave one of those greenhorns a faint nod of approval, that boy puffed up like a rooster. A single nod from her dad became the equivalent to clanging bells of praise.
Sometimes it astonished her, the fundamentally different ways she and Trey had been raised.
“You disappointed me, Trey.”
“Join the club. In fact, if you were to put all the people I’ve disappointed into a room, their sheer mass would probably warp space-time.”
She paused, giving him a grudging nod, as she lifted her weekend bag from the ground. “That’s pretty good.”
“See? There’s more to me than just dumb good looks.”
“So, do you ever think you should stop disappointing people?”
“All the fucking time. I’d like to start by not disappointing you.”
Too late.
She tightened her grip on her keys. She’d flushed her system of Trey on the yacht. She’d let him know in one magnificently awkward moment that she didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. And then she’d moved on. On Tuesday, she was seeing the premier of an independent sci-fi movie with Lee Zhao.
Yet looking at Trey now, in all his sweaty glory, she couldn’t deny she was still attracted to him. She didn’t think she’d ever forget the knee-melting thrill she’d had when she’d first seen him standing outside her building in the rain, that reckless smile spreading across his face. She missed walking with him through the streets of New York City, her heart in her chest like a warm toaster. And the sex—oh, she missed the sex—digging her fingers into those strong shoulders while his breathing kept pace with hers.
But Good Lord, how she’d built him up as some sort of golden prince. When she looked at him now,
she saw only the shadow of that imaginary royalty. Trey was handsome; Trey was charming; Trey was deeply flawed.
Trey was, in effect, an ordinary man.
A man she could no longer trust with her heart.
“It’s starting to rain.” Drops splattered on the sidewalk around her. She rattled the keys in her hand and looked pointedly at him, sitting on the stoop blocking access to her building.
He placed his hands on his knees and pushed off, lumbering to his full height. He jogged the three steps to the sidewalk, giving her a wide berth. She was up the stairs with the key in the door when he called her name.
“I want you to know that I’m training right now.” He stood by a signpost, shaking out one leg, then another. “I’m planning on running a marathon.”
“That’s really great, Trey.”
She turned the bolt and then searched for the key for the second lock, anxious for this confrontation to be over.
“It’s the New York City Marathon. I’ve got only four months to prepare. But hell, I’ve never done a marathon before. Never completed one, anyway. I thought I’d set my mind on it. See if I could finally see something through, beginning to end.”
She paused, pushing the front door open, sensing more to this confession than an awkward way to say good-bye. “Isn’t a marathon more than twenty-six miles?”
“Yeah.”
“You do, what, six miles a day now?”
“Yeah, it’s a reach.” He shrugged. “But running is one of the few things I actually like to do. You once told me to find a passion. Maybe this is it.”
Kelly thought of the fifteen-hour days she had spent in the summers, her fingers numb with cold as she sorted fish, her mother dulling the edge of her high school anxiety by saying she smelled like a mermaid. She remembered the day she’d fallen asleep on a test in graduate school in bleary-eyed exhaustion from working at a greasy spoon so she could pay the rent, split four ways, for a two-bedroom, roach-infested apartment.
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