by Roxie Noir
“No to the second, but maybe to the first,” I say, and look down at my shoes. “I think they’d look good on me. Maybe we can get matching pairs.”
He gives me a quick up-and-down look. I hope the sweat between my boobs hasn’t visibly soaked through my dress.
“Matching cowboy boots seems like a third date discussion, Bird,” he teases. “I thought we were taking it slow?”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of commitment.”
“I’m afraid of rhinestones.”
“What did they ever do to you?” I ask, taking a deep breath and releasing my hair. It sticks to my neck again, but not as badly this time.
“To start with, they’re damned liars,” he says as we walk from the dance floor. His hand finds the small of my back as we move. I wonder if it’s sweaty. If it is, it doesn’t seem like Seth notices.
I step past a hay bale and give him a what are you talking about look.
“Pretending to be diamonds, but what are they, just bits of glass? Plastic?” he goes on. “It’s all trickery and falsehoods.”
“I had no idea you felt so strongly about rhinestones,” I tell him.
“Neither did I,” he admits.
It takes us another ten minutes to leave, because small town square dancing isn’t the sort of event you can simply walk out of unless your house is on fire. Small talk is mandatory, and I think it might actually be a crime in these parts to leave an event without saying goodbye to everyone else in attendance.
Finally, we make it to the coat rack. Seth holds mine while I put it on, dons his own, takes my hand.
Pulls me in the opposite direction of the main door, toward the back of the barn.
“C’mon,” he says, walking toward a door that says EMPLOYEES ONLY. “I want to see your mural.”
“I thought you’d seen it.”
“I didn’t know you’d painted it.”
“Does it matter now that you know?”
Seth nods to the bartender, then pushes open the EMPLOYEES ONLY DOOR and leads me through into a dark room, lit only by a bright green EXIT light.
“And now are we doing espionage?” I ask, blinking in the near dark.
“No, I’ve seen a storage room before,” he says.
We go through the other door, and then we’re out in the cold. I take a deep breath and enjoy it, my coat open and my scarf loose around my neck.
We walk over to the side of the barn, frozen dead grass snapping softly under our feet, cold breeze blowing through my hair, tugging at my skirt. Still casually holding hands even though we’d be warmer if they were in our pockets.
“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asks, after a moment.
“I’m busy,” I say.
“How busy?”
“Quite.”
“With what?” he asks, looking over at me. He’s frowning slightly, mock-offended.
“I have plans,” I tease. “They don’t concern you.”
“All right, but are they better plans than going to Snowfest in Grotonsville?” he asks.
The last Saturday of every month, the next town over has a wintertime street fair. All the restaurants and shops stay open. There are hot chocolate stands, pie carts, soup vendors, and horse-drawn carriage rides.
“They’re more inescapable,” I tell him, still walking through the grass. “Olivia and Michael are having my whole family over for dinner so they can announce that she’s pregnant.”
“In that case, sounds like you can skip it,” he says.
“But then she’ll never make me the godmother,” I say. “She might even bar me from the baby shower planning committee.”
Seth stops, my hand still in his, and gives me a one-eyebrow-raised look.
“Just kidding, there’s no way she’ll let me off the hook for that,” I say. “What, the four of you didn’t throw an elaborate baby shower for Daniel?”
“We had a party and bought them baby stuff,” he says. “Though Charlie made us promise not to have games or make her open presents in front of everyone.”
I just sigh.
“I like her,” I say.
“How about Sunday?” Seth asks.
“I could make Sunday work.”
“And Monday?”
“You’ve never read a self-help book, have you?” I tease.
We’re on a slight rise, off to the side of the barn, the mural of a frog jumping onto apples lit by floodlights.
“Are you implying that my self needs help?” Seth asks.
“I’m implying that all the books about dating tell you to wait some number of days before asking for another date,” I say. “You don’t want to be too eager. Then your date might think you like them.”
I read a handful of those books early in my detox. I didn’t think much of them.
Seth just snorts.
“Fuck that,” he says. “I like you and I’m eager to go on another date. Tell me about the mural.”
I have absolutely no idea what to say, other than it’s a mural and Marcy commissioned it, and I feel like I’m twenty again and trying my way through art school, feeling like everyone around me had a deep explanation for their abstract triangles that were actually representative of their struggles to come out to their family, and I was over there painting rainbow guinea pigs because I thought they looked nice.
I clear my throat.
“Well,” I begin, pointing at the side of the barn. “That’s a frog, and it’s jumping into that basket of apples. Probably because it likes apples.”
“Sure, but what do the apples represent?”
“They represent apples,” I say. “I don’t know, I failed out of art school twice.”
“You went again?”
“And failed out again,” I say, and look up at him. “Ta-da, double art school dropout, right here.”
I give a small curtsey, and Seth rolls his eyes.
“They fucked up and this is great,” he says.
“This mural took twice as long and cost twice as much as it was supposed to,” I admit. “I had to paint over a week’s worth of work because I had no idea what I was doing and when I actually looked at it, it was absolutely awful. I still have no idea why Marcy didn’t fire me on the spot.”
“Probably because you were willing to paint over the thing and start again,” Seth says. “I think a lot of people would have just kept on with the ugly frog and acted like it was supposed to be that way.”
The metaphor doesn’t escape me.
“How do you paint something that big?” he asks, after a moment.
“I used a grid,” I say, waving my other hand at the side of the barn. “First I drew it on a piece of paper with the same dimensions, but a grid on that, and transposed it square by square to the side of the barn. It was very methodical. Sort of like a spreadsheet for art, you’d like it.”
“I can appreciate art without spreadsheets, thanks,” he says.
“But do you appreciate it more with them?”
“No comment.”
We stand there for another moment: frog, apple, sunset, trees. I lean my head against his shoulder, the wool of his coat slightly rough against my cheek.
“What’s it like to get things right on the first try?” I finally ask.
“What do you mean?”
I mean that his life seems charmed to me: he went to college and graduated, came back to his hometown, started a business with his brother. One, two, three, done.
“I mean you didn’t fail out of art school twice,” I say.
“I probably would have if I’d attended art school.”
“Come on.”
He pauses a moment, adjusts his hand in mine.
“In college I almost got a degree in literature, but talked myself out of it because what use is that?” he asks.
It’s a rhetorical question. I don’t answer it.
“I started an application to study abroad in London for a semester, but never sent it in,” he says. “I graduated with a deg
ree in economics, moved back to my hometown, took a job like I was supposed to overseeing the finances of a small mining company, and I hated every minute of it but they paid me well enough so I stayed. Because that’s what happens, right? Hate your job and make a living?”
I nearly say you never told me you wanted to study abroad, but change it at the last second.
“I didn’t know you wanted to go to London,” I say.
Seth’s quiet for a moment, his fingers flexing against mine.
“I decided I didn’t want to be that far from my girlfriend,” he says, after a long pause.
I think of all the things that I could say, but I don’t say any of them. I want to tell him that I’d have wanted him to go, experience the world, then come back to me, but I know that’s not what I’d have done.
At twenty, I’d have talked him out of it and into staying in Virginia. I’d have been afraid that he’d leave and find someone better than me, because I was insecure and selfish and felt like I was flailing my way through life.
I just watch his face from the side, but he doesn’t look at me. As Seth talks he’s just looking at the mural, his eyes drifting over it like he’s committing it to memory.
“And after college, Levi was off, in the woods, doing his mountain man thing,” he goes on. “Eli moved away for ten years, and we’d get phone calls from Thailand and postcards from Australia. Daniel found out one day that he had a ten-month-old daughter, and a month later he had full custody. Caleb followed his dream and went to grad school. And I was the stable one.”
I don’t know this man.
Standing there, in the cold, by the barn, the weight of that realization settles on me like snowfall: that all these years I’ve spent thinking I know Seth, I’ve been wrong. All I’ve gotten since we broke up when we were twenty-two has been glimpses into him, skewed snapshots of his life at any given time, like taking a picture of a funhouse mirror.
To me he was wild, reckless, intense. He was the man who’d answer my calls at any time of night, who’d drive hours for a booty call. He was the man who’d call me, voice rough, ask if I could be at some motel by sundown.
He talked dirty, fucked hard, broke my heart more than once, and I had no idea what the rest of his life was like.
“And the brewery came so damn close to failing,” he says, sounding more amused than anything. “Actually, the first time I called y—"
He looks down at me, narrows his eyes.
“I called an ex when I thought it had failed,” he says, circumspectly.
“She show you a good time?” I ask, feeling dangerous.
I remember that rendezvous. A year or so after our first. I’d just gotten to the end of my post-divorce bad girl phase, and the garter tattoos were pretty new. Seth liked them then, too.
We fucked. We fought. I cried all the way home, convinced I was an idiot for doing it again.
“Mostly,” he says, and I laugh.
“I’d ask what the good parts were, but we’ve never even kissed,” I say, leaning into his side a little more, trying to push the memory of that particular meeting from my mind.
“I don’t want to start painting before I’m finished drawing the grid,” he says, and grins.
“Are you trying to impress me with an art metaphor?” I ask.
“Are you impressed?”
I shift my stance so I’m now half-facing him, half-facing the mural, and I look over at it.
“There are plenty of muralists who just paint away with no guidance at all, and it looks fine,” I point out, tilting my head. “They just barrel on straight ahead as the spirit moves them.”
He turns toward me, lifts our joined hands, spins them so they’re upright and palm-to-palm.
“Anything I’ve ever done right was with careful planning and strict adherence to regulations,” he says, a teasing little half-smile on his face. “Sometimes the rules are there for a reason.”
I step closer to him so that we’re nearly touching. Carefully, without breaking eye contact, I kiss the closest knuckle of his index finger, his skin cool against my lips.
“Tell me the rules,” I say.
“Don’t you already know them?”
“I want to make sure I’m crystal clear.”
Seth swallows. His fingers tighten in mine. His eyes go to my lips, linger, come back up.
“No past,” he says.
I kiss another knuckle.
“No fucking,” he says, and now he’s smiling.
I put my lips to a third knuckle, hold my eyes on his.
“Is that it?” I ask, softly. “Only two rules?”
“Are you asking for more?” he teases, voice low and rough, trickling down my spine.
“Just surprised that’s it,” I say. “For all your talk of careful planning and adherence to regulations.”
“I can come up with more,” he says, and one eyebrow twitches, and his smile deepens into one that opens a maelstrom in my chest. “No fuck-me looks. No wearing purple leopard print robes when I’m around. No dresses that make you look like a sweet society princess when I know you’re covered in tattoos an inch below your neckline. No naming raccoons or laughing at my jokes. No telling me you’re busy tomorrow night and can’t see me until Sunday.”
“Go on,” I laugh.
“No enjoying yourself at square dancing,” he says, and pulls me in. His other hand goes to my neck, his thumb on my cheek, his fingers in my hair. “No asking me for the rules. And don’t you dare kiss me back.”
Then his lips are on mine, warm as anything, and I forget the cold. I forget art school and London and I forget all the rules and I kiss him back as hard as I can.
He opens his mouth against mine, teases my lip with his tongue. Pulls back, his mouth millimeters from mine. Pauses. Kisses me again and this time it’s urgent, needy, his other hand underneath my coat and pressing against my back and I find his tongue with mine and God, I want to drown in him.
This is why I keep coming back, again and again. This is what makes me cast everything else aside and throw judgment to the wolves, the reason I’ve never been able to stop myself.
Nothing else makes me feel like I’m a match, held to sandpaper. Like I’m a firework with a lit fuse, counting down the moments. With Seth, I always feel one second away from igniting.
It’s a long time before we finally pull apart. We’re both breathing hard, both wanted the other more than we needed air, and he rests his forehead against mine, thumb on my jaw.
“I missed you too, Bird,” he finally says.
I don’t answer. Just kiss him again, softly.
We kiss until the lights on the mural go out and we’re plunged into moonlit darkness. We kiss as someone closes the barn door, gets into a pickup truck, leaves. We kiss until we can see perfectly in the dark, until we’re both shivering, until we finally stop and I tuck myself against him, eyes closed, his chin atop my head.
Maybe this will work, I think, his arms around me.
Please.
Then, we walk to his car and leave.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Seth
We go out again Sunday night: dinner and milkshakes at a cheesy diner, one of those ones with a jukebox at the table. I play her I Want to Hold Your Hand and she rolls her eyes at me, but she’s smiling.
Then she plays me the Beach Boys song Wouldn’t It Be Nice, because she’s making fun of me, so I play Season of the Witch.
Black Magic Woman. I Put A Spell on You. Delilah runs out of quarters, so she has to borrow one from me to play me Hound Dog.
Afterward, we walk along the river path hand in hand and talk about whether a boat could make it all the way here from the sea, and what kind of boat, whether anyone would want to. We walk for two hours without meaning to, down the river and back through town, until we’re at the diner again and it’s nearly ten o’clock at night.
Two nights later, we meet after work at the new gastropub downtown, and we drink beer and eat burgers and don
’t realize the time until the staff tells us they close in fifteen minutes. I kiss her by her car, out on the sidewalk, and I kiss her so long and hard that a pedestrian clears her throat at us.
We see movies together and share popcorn. We go wine tasting in the hills. Visit historical sites we’ve never heard of before and take audio tours. One beautiful Saturday we wake up early and hike to the top of Bareback Peak, have a picnic, and manage not to bring up the name until we’re in the car, heading back to town.
We hold hands. I open doors for her and she rests her head on my shoulder when it gets late. We casually kiss hello and less-casually kiss goodbye. We text each other goodnight and good morning like total dipshits, but I smile every time.
And we make out like teenagers, sometimes in public: in movie theaters, in parks, in the front seat of my car or hers. I try to abide by the rules we set ourselves but it’s impossible not to slip past them sometimes, like when she straddles me on her couch and I grind her hips against mine until I’m on the brink. When I reach for her waist and brush a nipple instead and before I know it I’m pinching them both as she moans into my mouth and God I want her right there, right then, up against the wall but somehow I stop.
We never spend the night.
After a few weeks, she brings me to dinner with Lainey and Beau. They’re suspicious at first but by the end of the meal I’m telling Beau about the time we had to throw out an entire batch of beer because a chipmunk somehow got in and drowned, and he’s giving me a rundown of the top ten kinds of squirrel trap. We agree that they’re all varmints.
Daniel and Charlie have us over for dinner, where Delilah agrees to design Rusty’s first tattoo for her and then Thomas has a blowout while she’s holding him, but she washes the poop off her arm and laughs.
We tour a distillery with Eli and Violet. I can tell Eli is skeptical. I would be, too, but by the end of our double date Delilah and Violet have sampled the whiskey and Delilah is telling Violet that I once called stemmed wine glasses an ‘inefficient use of space,’ and Violet is laughing and telling Delilah that Eli has such an exacting system for his spice organization that she’s not allowed to touch it.