Midtown Masters

by Cara McKenna

  “I know. I just can’t imagine a hard-bitten detective living in a house with wainscoting, can you?”

  She laughed again, accepting the glass he handed her. “Thanks.”

  “You’re very welcome.” He sat down across from her with his own glass. Because it was his home, he managed a feat he’d never have in a restaurant—he hunkered down with his elbows on the wood, nearly relaxed. “Any clues as to the reason for your surprise visit?”

  “I wanted to see you,” she said, seeming a touch coy, and sipped her wine. “This is very nice.”

  John’s wine tasted sour and a little foul, the fault of the toothpaste. “Credit goes to my mother or sister—I can’t recall who brought that bottle. Have you eaten?”

  “No, but that’s okay. I hate to be presumptuous, but I figured if I stayed a while we could order in or something.”

  “Sure. Or I’ve got plenty of groceries. I’m not a terrible cook.”

  “And I do love being cooked for,” she said slyly, framing the base of her glass with her thumbs and forefingers. “There’s something about a man who knows his way around a kitchen. It seems to correlate nicely with a man knowing his way around other places.”

  He blushed anew. “I may be the exception to the rule, then.”

  She rolled her eyes, smiling. “I can personally vouch that you’re being modest.”

  They fell quiet now, and John couldn’t help but pry. “Any clues?” he asked. “Any little scrap of a hint as to what’s brought you all this way? I’m not half as good at deduction as the man I invented.”

  “There’s news. Neither bad nor good, merely inevitable.”

  She’s marrying Meyer. The thought hit him like an apple falling off its tree, blunt and silly. “Okay.”

  “We’re shutting down the site. Hanging up our camming cleats, as it were.”

  “Oh.” He blinked, mind blank.

  “No more Mr. and Mrs. Parks.”

  “I wondered for a moment if you were going to announce you were becoming Mrs. . . . whatever Meyer’s last name is.”

  She laughed. “Oh God, no. No, no, no.” She needed a long moment to ride the giggles out. “Nooo. Meyer’s not the marrying kind, and I can’t say if I am, either. And we’re certainly not ever marrying each other, though our reception would be a-may-zing. But no.”

  “Well, I’m sad to know I’ll never enjoy a live performance of yours again, but as long as it’s a positive decision . . . ?”

  “Yeah. And mutual. Well, actually, it wasn’t mutual at first—Meyer sprung it on me. But we talked, and I thought a lot about it, and decided he was right. This was the right time.”

  “Was there a catalyst, if I may ask?”

  “There was.” She spun her glass around on the table, watching her fingers, then looked up, holding his stare. “You.”

  He blinked. “Me?” Dear God, had he single-handedly ruined their good time with his soppy fumblings? “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She laughed again, then took a sip of wine. “Don’t be. Like I said, it was time. We’re ending it before it got stale, or started to feel like work. This is good.”

  “Forgive the self-absorption, but may I ask what I did to bring this on?” It had been Meyer’s idea, so . . . Had he missed being with men that much?

  Suzy smiled, the gesture mysterious. She studied his face, his hands, his face once more. She pursed her lips, and if he wasn’t mistaken her cheeks turned faintly pink.

  “I want to make sure I don’t word this in a way that sounds psycho or presumptuous . . .” She gathered her thoughts. “Basically, Meyer thought it was time to close up shop, because of you and me. He thinks we have something going on. A bond, or a connection, or something. Something that’s bigger than the camming.” She paused, those few seconds filled with the sound of John’s heart thumping, surely loud enough for her to hear as well. Hell, for all the neighbors to hear.

  “I’m not wording this well,” she went on, “which is sad, since I had three hundred miles to phrase it.”

  John himself had nothing—a professional writer without a single word at his disposal, it would seem.

  Suzy huffed, cheeks definitely pink now. “He and I got into this because it made sense for both of us. We didn’t want to date anymore, but we didn’t have feelings for other people, either. We said we’d only do it for as long as it was fun and it wasn’t standing in the way of either of us pursuing whatever we might want to. And Meyer felt it might be . . . Well, not standing in the way, necessarily, but cluttering things up, when maybe you and I . . . Fuck, I’m totally messing this up. And I’ve been talking for like, five minutes, haven’t I?”

  “Are you asking me out?” he blurted.

  “I don’t know. We live in different cities. But he’s right—I feel something for you that’s deeper than I’ve felt for anybody in the past few years. When we cam for other clients, I wish it was you on the other side of the screen. I wish they said the things that you would, asked for the things you would. When the sex is romantic, I imagine it’s you there, not Meyer. So he’s right. I am curious if there’s something more here.”

  She took a deep breath, and John waited patiently for her to go on. He had nothing to say, anyhow—his brain remained a fuzzy blank, an old-fashioned TV hissing with static.

  “This is all beside the point if you’re not into me, obviously,” Suzy said, composing herself some. “Or if we totally misread it and it’s actually Meyer you’re attached to. If you’re attached to anybody. I have no idea. But at any rate, I’m attached to you, so here I am, wondering if you want to do anything about that.”

  He cleared his throat, and in that tiny moment Suzy’s hopeful, nervous expression slumped.

  “Oh,” he said, startled. “I don’t know what my face is doing, but don’t look sad. I was going to say yes, I would. I would like to do something about that, about us. Very much.”

  A nervous smile returned to one corner of her lips. “Yeah?”

  “Yes. Of course. I . . . I’m rather hopeless for you, actually. Could you not tell?”

  “I didn’t want to assume. But Meyer, he told me to go back and read through our old conversations, messages between me and the mysterious Lindsay, and then the ones once I knew you as John, and later our texts. And what he said was true. There’s something there, isn’t there? Beyond audience and performer, and makeshift sex therapist and client, and even just friends.”

  He nodded. “I’d like to think so. Though meaningful relationships aren’t exactly in my wheelhouse.”

  A smirk. “Well, trust me. It’s special.”

  “Good. I was hoping as much.” Understatement of the century.

  “I guess that only leaves the question of, what shape does this experiment take?”

  He frowned. “Did you want . . . Gosh, you’re so much more worldly and modern than I am. Are we talking about dating? Long-distance? Like, just you and me, or keeping it more casual . . . ?”

  “I was hoping just you and me,” she said quietly.

  “Oh. Well.” His mind went blank as his middle filled with a curious warmth, as though he’d just drunk a gallon of cocoa. “That’s rather remarkable.”

  “I know we probably won’t get to see each other more than once every week or two, but I feel like maybe it’s worth the deprivation, at least to give it a go.”

  “I’d like that. I mean, I still have a lot to learn. About sex, as you’re well aware, but also about dating in general. It wouldn’t just be a lot of driving; it’d be a lot of hand-holding.”

  She fake-cracked her knuckles. “I think I’m up for it.”

  He laughed. “Okay then . . . I suppose on the plus side, my job’s highly mobile, so even if the journey takes several hours, I’m free to be away from home for days at a time.”

  “Me too, for now. I’ve got money saved up,
but eventually I’ll need to start cobbling my professional life together.”

  In Pittsburgh or Philadelphia? he wanted to ask, but he was getting far, far ahead of himself, there. What he ought to be asking was, “You’re spending the night, right?”

  “I sure was hoping to, John.”

  “That’s good to hear. In fact, that’s literally the best thing I could imagine hearing anyone saying.”

  She smiled. “I guess I’ll grab my bag, then.”

  “Please do.” So long as you promise never to pack it again, and stay here forever. “Perhaps then another drink? This feels toast-worthy.”

  “A toast, then a pizza, I think. I’m starving.”

  “We can do that.”

  “Back in a sec,” she said, heading for the hall. “Pour me a huge one.”

  “Will do.”

  And for a long, long moment, John stood in the middle of his kitchen, wine bottle cold and slick in his hand, his eyes on the window, unfocused.

  It was one thing when a dream you’d plotted came true. He’d known what to do with himself when he’d sold his first short story, when he’d landed an agent and then a major contract, when he’d hit the best-seller list—he’d worked toward those goals and fantasized about celebrating them. But this he’d never seen coming. This he’d never expected.

  That’s the difference between a dream and a goal, he supposed. The difference between finishing a marathon and winning the lottery. This was blind luck, a bolt of lightning.

  All there was to do, he imagined, was to pour those refills and get busy accepting that today was, apparently, inexplicably, impossibly, the best day of his life.

  For once, there simply weren’t enough adverbs.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Later that year

  “Oh my God, quit peering out the window,” Suzy said, voice warm and on the verge of laughing. “You look like you’re expecting the grim reaper.”

  She’d caught him. John had thought she was in the kitchen, minding the simmering soup, but when he turned he found her at the den’s threshold.

  “Just watching the snow,” he fibbed, letting the curtain fall back into place.

  “Sure you were.”

  He stepped away, strode to the fireplace and opened the screen. It didn’t really need an extra log, but he couldn’t sit still.

  “It’s getting nasty,” he said. “I hope he doesn’t have any trouble getting here.”

  Suzy came close, put her hand over his—the one holding the tongs—and gently guided it back. He surrendered them and replaced the screen, then turned to face her.

  “I’m sure Philadelphia taxi drivers are very, very used to dealing with a bit of snow,” she said.

  “You can tell I’m terrified, can’t you?”

  She smiled. Nodded. “Oh yes.”

  “No use pretending, then.”

  “None whatsoever.” She did that thing with her fingers, making her hands into greedy, grabby spiders or crabs, scuttling them around his waist to pull him into a hug. He’d felt this embrace many times in the past six months, yet it never ceased to thrill him. The strength of those slender arms, and the way her mouth rested at the base of his throat. He waited until he felt her breath warming his skin, and marveled as the tension bled from his body, leaving him softer, calmer.

  “Come to the kitchen,” she said, words muffled against his collar. “Keep me company. Meyer’s not going to be here for twenty minutes at least. His flight only landed five minutes ago.”

  John supposed that was true. “Very well.”

  “You do still want this, right?” she asked, walking just ahead of him down the hall.

  “Yes, I do.” More than he could say, Or, rather, more than he could say, sober and fully clothed. When they were in bed and perhaps there was a glass of Scotch heating his muscles and loosening his tongue, John wasn’t so useless at expressing how much he wanted this. Wanted Meyer, as they’d been back in the early summer. Just now, though, with the man’s arrival imminent . . . ?

  Reading his mind, Suzy pushed his shoulders, plopping him onto a chair at the already-set table, and crossed the kitchen to the fridge, grabbing the white wine bottle from the door. She’d been sipping from her own glass as she’d been preparing dinner, so he knew the one she filled now was for him.

  “Thanks,” he said, accepting it.

  She sat beside him, small enough to tuck her heels up against her butt on the chair and hug her knees. Endlessly charming. How bizarre that he got to call her his.

  “I think it’s adorable that you’re terrified,” she informed him.

  He took a deep drink. “Thanks very much.”

  She rubbed his thigh. “Be as scared as you want—just remember, the second he walks in you won’t even be thinking about that. Meyer fills up a space like a gas leak. Wait, that didn’t sound right. He fills up a space like . . . Like something that seeps in and fills it up. Fuck, I don’t know. You’re the writer.”

  “A gas leak’s not far off. He does make me woozy, in a way.”

  “Well, there you go. Whatever the simile, he’s going to sweep in here and his filthy charisma is going to make you twice as high as that wine, and we’ll eat, and shoot the shit for an hour, then who knows.”

  “Who knows,” John echoed. He certainly didn’t. Things would be different this time. Not only because he and Suzy were together, but because he wasn’t the man he’d been, the last time he and Meyer had been together. He was a sexual person, now. An actively sexual person, that was, one whose bed now held memories that put to shame all those cinematic love scenes he’d once taken for erotic.

  He and Suzy had dated long-distance through October, seeing each other every weekend, with two exceptions. One was the week when John had been furiously finishing his last book. The other was the one Suzy had spent researching her options for pursuing postgraduate training as a sex therapist in the greater Philadelphia area, as well as giving the entire proposition some serious thought. She’d found a program she was positively drooling over and applied in November, though she wouldn’t hear back until early March. That was torture for Suzy, though John had no doubt she’d be accepted. Her application letter had been exceptional and her passion was unmistakable. If she got an invitation for a face-to-face interview, she’d be home free.

  Once she’d fallen hard for the program and, by proxy, Philadelphia, there’d been nothing standing between her and John and what came next. They spent a few visits chasing apartments for her on Craigslist, but to no avail. If a place hadn’t been rented by the time she reached the landlord, it was bound to be a shit hole, or in a sketchy neighborhood, or next door to a construction zone. Then she came for a long weekend at the end of October, wanting to see what Halloween was like on John’s block, and that night, once the last of the candy had been surrendered and the curtains drawn, he’d told her, “Just move in here.”

  “Here? With you? Isn’t it too soon?”

  “Probably. On paper. But nothing about this has ever followed the proper script, has it?”

  “True. Very true.”

  He certainly had the room, after all, and he was far happier when she was here than when she wasn’t. It was almost as though he’d been living in a home with only dim, yellowy reading-lamp bulbs, and when she was visiting her very presence flung every window open and filled the old place with sunshine. He lived for the meals they cooked and the lazy weekend mornings spent draped across the couch, he lost in the paper and she on her laptop.

  At first the cohabitation was only going to be temporary, until she found her own place, but of course that never happened. He quietly watched her searches become less frequent and less enthusiastic, all the while rooting for her to simply stay. After a month of that charade she’d said, “This is right, isn’t it?”

  He’d nodded, smiling.

  “Fast,
but right,” she’d concurred.

  And it had been.

  Now it was late December, less than a week until Christmas; seven weeks or so into the experiment, and neither had a complaint. John would have assumed that after fifteen years of living on his own he’d have become a fussy curmudgeon in some way or other, but the transition had been the easiest thing in the world. He left books and papers lying around, she left clothes here and there. He abandoned mugs of half-drunk tea in strange places, and she did the same with her phone, but he felt that snatching a pair of her underwear off the bedroom floor was a nonissue, as prices of admission went. Particularly if he’d been the one to fling the item to the ground.

  In short, he was happy. As happy as he’d ever been.

  Suzy was nervous about her future, but she kept busy in ways that seemed to feed her soul. She’d begun volunteering at food banks straightaway and had made some connections already, and she was interviewing for a job as a social worker just after New Year’s. Not her dream gig, but something to keep her challenged and to keep dust from gathering on her degree, as she put it. Something to keep her from going crazy while she waited on her application.

  Her hand was a warm, sweet weight on his leg. He looked up and caught her gaze, smiling. “You make me very happy, you know.”

  She pursed her lips, as though the grin they held in was too big to bear. “Do I?”

  “Yes. Every single day.” Things were still new, still felt too good to be true, so he was always careful to temper such statements. He could appreciate she was in a loaded position, and wanted to make sure she felt cherished, not pressured. “My life was full before,” he said. “Satisfying in many ways. But lonely, too. Kind of like this house. Fundamentally fine, but really only half-full.”

  She grinned. “I love dating a writer. I want to copy down everything you say and get it printed on a bedsheet and roll around on it all day.”

  John laughed. “Now, I wish I’d written that. Though to be fair, the critics would only accuse Jacob of going soft.”