She couldn’t start sleeping next to him again when she didn’t know how to stop sleeping next to him.
So here was the compromise she thought she could live with: she slid her hand onto Tom’s arm to stop him from leaving, letting her fingers trail up the taut swell of muscle. It took him a moment to realize what was happening, but the flash of gratification on his face was flattering. He flipped the top twolayers of blankets so they were doubled over her body, then sat back down next to her with hesitation and expectation warring for top billing on his face.
Rose closed her eyes before she kissed him.
She’d thought about this ever since he asked her what she wanted back on the boat, and she’d worried even as she’d wanted him. She didn’t know whether it would be the same or different to kiss him again, and she didn’t know which she was afraid of. If it was the same, would it take her back to who she’d been at twenty-two? Desperately unhappy, trapped, lonely? But what if it was different, or she was bad at it now, and it only proved that she had no business kissing someone like Tom?
She shouldn’t have worried. It was a little awkward because of the angle and the pile of covers, and Rose couldn’t smell or taste anything but the sweetener the manufacturer put in the albuterol to cover the bitterness of the medication. But first kisses were often awkward, and Rose had known that even before she met Tom. It felt like a first kiss: sweet and uncertain and promising. They feinted a bit, hands opening to find spots to press themselves, lips parting and retreating as they explored familiar contours on the other. Then Tom threw himself into it as much as he ever had, planting his forearms on either side of her head and rolling over her so that he could capture her whole mouth against his own. His weight was anchoring, but his heart pounded against hers. He was nervous too.
He would have deepened it if she’d let him. He would have stayed and wrapped that beautiful, warm body around hers all night long. But instead, she pulled away after a hundred unsteady heartbeats. Tom hadn’t been her first kiss. She’d neverknow if he would be her last kiss. Maybe she could live with that—some days he would be in her life, and some nights she’d kiss him, and she wouldn’t plan on either.
Tom lingered over her with his eyes closed and a blissful expression on his face until she peeled off the top blanket and pushed it against his chest. This much she could live with.
“Thank you,” she said. “Good night, Tom.”
14
Rose was a little surprised that Tom was gone when she woke up the next morning. Not disappointed, no, because that would have been a ridiculous way to feel after she’d made him sleep on the love seats.
Even if she’d kissed him too.
She took the last cup of coffee out of the pot he’d left on the burner, nudged his dirty clothes into a pile by his suitcase, and checked her phone for messages. Before the pool incident the day before, she’d sent pictures of the wallpaper samples to the family group chat, but all she had in response were two pity thumbs-ups from her mother and Max, and the conversation had moved on to the Pats game that afternoon. She supposed the birds were in without objection, but that was almost disappointing too.
She nearly missed the note Tom had left in the fridge with a peeled orange on a plate.
Off to do construction things & look good doing it. Don’t worry about anything. Take it easy today. Tom
There were work vans parked across the street at the inn. Rose caught a tiny flutter of hope warming her heart from the note and the evidence of repairs to come and paused to savor the feeling. Maybe she could do this. Maybetheycould do this. She’d never thought life with Tom was going to be free from the occasional disaster. She’d thought it was going to be an adventure. She’d thought they were going to be in it together.
Rose had to pick her way through piles of melting snow and ice to get across the road to the inn, and thus she nearly stumbled into two young women stationed at the end of the driveway. The girls—teenagers, or maybe twenty-year-olds—gave her twin looks of appraisal from her red snow boots up past her black parka and the French braid she’d corralled her hair into. They then dismissed her, turning back to the inn with their phones in hand. They were waiting for something.
“Can I help you?” Rose asked politely.
“We’re allowed to be here. This is a public easement,” said the first, a mousy blonde with her long hair flat-ironed within an inch of its life. Her confident statement had not necessarily addressed Rose’s question.
“It’s…a driveway,” Rose corrected them.
“Tom Wilczewski made us leave the property,” explained the second lurker, a South Asian girl with a faint British accent. She nervously shifted her transparent plastic retainer over her top teeth as she spoke. “But he can’t make us get off the pavement.”
Rose looked at them in confusion.
“Why are you here though?” she asked.
“Boyd Kellagher,” said the blonde at the same time the dark-haired girl said, “Don’ttellher if she doesn’t know, Snowy.”
Oh. A couple of Boyd’s fans. Rose eyed them with new interest. They didn’t look like her idea of Internet weirdos, though she didn’t know what she’d expected them to look like. And she didn’t know why Tom wouldn’t let them on the property. As long as they weren’t trying to, like, nonconsensually drain Boyd’s bodily fluids, she would have been inclined to let them in to meet him, assuming Boyd was still there.
After dripping all over the man’s expensive shoes the previous day, Rose could see the advantage of bringing some distraction with her if they were reintroduced today.
“Who are you two exactly?” Rose asked.
After silent communion with each other, the blonde introduced herself as Snow Wolf. The brunette, without a trace of hesitation, proclaimed herself the Great Puffin.
“Your parents really wrote that on your birth certificates?” Rose asked skeptically, because the girls were well dressed and glossy in an upper-middle-class way, and they were probably called things like Amy and Sita.
“You can’t use your real name in fandom,” the Great Puffin scornfully informed Rose, although she was notin fandombut, rather, on Rose’s driveway.
“Yeah. I run the Tomboy Updates accounts. That’s, like, thirty thousand people following me. I can’t use my real name, obviously,” said Snow Wolf.
