"Twenty-six," she said. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-four," I said.
She shrugged, sloughing away thisthingwhere she was twenty-fucking-six and working on her second doctorate and too magnificent for me to do anything but stare.
She started humming along with the song—"Stubborn Love" by The Lumineers—and her right hand was moving with the beat, rolling like the crest and crash of waves. Her hands were small. Dainty, even. If she ever grew tired of mining the planet for answers, those hands were perfect for heart surgery.
She smiled as she mouthed the words. Something about bringing me to my knees, andcome the fuck on, lovely. I was already there.
"You're making it hard to think," I said.
"What?" she asked, glancing up at me with her beer frozen halfway to her mouth.
"Nothing," I murmured, and my fingers continued drawing circles along her arm.
"No," she said, her eyes dropping to my mouth. "Say that again. There can be no secrets among runaways."
I cleared my throat because if her eyes were on my mouth, her mind was there, too. "Your chromosomes have coupled quite remarkably. It's all I can think about right now."
I tipped my beer back for a long swallow and ran my hand from her shoulder to her elbow. It was dangerous touching her like this. Dangerous because it made me hungry for more. Really dangerous because she was edging closer andgivingmore.
"You have Doctor McDreamy hair," she said, dragging her nails over my scalp. I didn't think it was possible to orgasm from head scratching alone, but we were close to testing the theorem. "Speaking of McDreamy, I need you to tell me thatGrey's Anatomyis a completely authentic depiction of hospital life."
"Can't comment," I said, shrugging. I couldn't think about the hospital right now. "Haven't seen it."
Erin sipped her beer and narrowed her eyes, not at all believing my response. "Do you have intensely deep relationships with your colleagues? Have you slept with the majority of them? Do you hear or deliver at least one self-righteous soliloquy per day? Do people show up in the emergency room impaled on unicorns?"
"Not quite," I said.
"That's disappointing," she murmured.
I tugged her closer, breathing in her scent while my lips brushed her ear. "Tell me how to fix it, lovely. I don't want you disappointed."
She waved away my words and looked around the bar. It was late, and the remaining patrons were focused on the flat screen television broadcasting the Red Sox game against the Orioles. It wasn't looking good for the home team.
"I slept on the red-eye from Rome, but I should've stayed up. Now I'm stuck on GMT. I'm…I'll be a mess tomorrow."
I was about to tell her that I knew several ways to tire her right out, but she shoved her sleeves to her elbows and reached for her beer. As I followed the movement, her wrist caught my attention. Most people probably noticed the compass tattoo, but it was what the fine lines of the tattoo hid that sent a bolt of adrenaline through my system.
Reaching out, I drew my thumb over the scars.
Three cuts, straight across, deep enough to be deadly.
"Were you trying to die?" I asked.
She stared at her beer bottle for a heavy moment.
Tell me it's not what I think. Tell me it was an accident. Tell me you're okay.
"I thought so," she said eventually, and my chest lurched at her admission. I didn't want that kind of despair for her. "At the time."
My arms went around her. It wasn't a choice. I had to hold her close. "But now?" I asked into her hair.
She shook her head. "No, not at all. But I think about life and death a lot, at least as it pertains"—she tapped her necklace—"to everything that's happened before me, and everything that will happen after. There's time and time and time, so much that I can barely wrap my head around it. Maybe that's the trick, right? You get these years, these completely inadequate years, and that's all the time you're granted to understand the secrets and the mysteries and the miracles. And it's crazy, you know, because there's so much time but there really isn't."
I dragged my hand up and down her spine, but the comfort probably served me more than her. Her words, they took me apart. In my mind, I saw Erin separating out my constituent parts, looking them over as she explained what they were, where they came from, why they mattered.
And just that quick, a drowsy bar on the Outer Cape was the wrong place for this. For us. For all the emotions that were rising up like a rogue wave. I slipped some bills under my beer bottle and waved to the bartender. "Come on, lovely," I said, my lips pressed to the crown of her head.
