“For someone like you.” He shakes his head. “It’s been a year, and I just—can’t.”
Open the door. Tell me everything. Let me save you.
It’s as though he reads my mind, because he stands aside to let me in. I step inside his house and I’m surrounded by his world. High ceilings, immaculate hardwood floors, black leather couches surrounding an ornate marble fireplace that’s been remodeled into a bookshelf. Paperback novels are squeezed against DIY handbooks, a Spanish-to-English dictionary, and a half dozen albums from one of those services that turns your Instagram photos into a book.
That shelf is the only indication that anyone actually lives here. The rest of the place is immaculate enough to have been staged by a real estate agent—other than the three bottles of Jack Daniel’s on the coffee table in varying degrees of emptiness. There’s a lone shot glass among them, shimmering with amber droplets.
He walks to the couch like a man defeated and falls into the leather recliner. “How much time do you have?”
I walk into the kitchen. As I pour a glass of water for him at the sink, I count ten plants—hanging from the ceiling, resting on the counter, and a three-foot lemon tree on the bay window. I return aminute later with a glass of ice water and a damp dish towel. When I bring him these things, he looks up at me like I’m a guardian angel.
“I’ve got all night,” I say softly. I sit on the edge of the coffee table, obscuring his view of the bottles so that he can see only me. “Here.” I fold the damp towel and drape it around the back of his neck so that it will cool his flushed skin.
He takes a tentative sip of the water and stares down at the ice cubes. “Her name was Sheila,” he says. “We were both in recovery. She was five years sober and I was almost three.”
Romance novels on the shelves. The lace-trimmed decorative hand towel draped over the oven handle. Sheila.
“Her car broke down on the interstate. It’s a dead zone on that stretch, and she must have been walking to find some reception. Some kids were speeding, not paying attention, and they veered right into the shoulder and—” His voice chokes off, but he makes himself say it. “Killed her.”
I put my hand over his. He’s shaking. “Oh, Edison. I’m so sorry.”
“I stayed sober through all of it,” he goes on. “Every second of the day, it felt like someone from that church was coming by to check on me. AA meetings and Bible study, week after week, fifty-two weeks in a fucking year.”
I smile at this hint of the real Edison. He’s in there, and I’m slowly coaxing him toward me. The Edison that only comes out when he’s alone. Not so polished and sweet and eager to please. Not smiling from across a picnic table or sending me polite texts. I squeeze his hand, and he brings it to his cheek, letting me feel the rough stubble. I smell the Jack and the tears, and he’s giving it all to me, only me. Not the shining church girls or motherly Jeannie, or any of his perfect neighbors in their Spanish-style houses.
I’m in his world, in his mind, up against his skin.
“Last week was the first anniversary of her death,” he says. “I thought I’d gotten through it, but—four years of sobriety, gone.”
“It’s all right,” I say.
“No.” He shakes his head. “I fucked up.”
He’s still holding on to my hand, and I bring two fingers to his lips. They’re warm and impossibly soft. Through the drunken sheen in his eyes, he gives me the most desperate look. He’s mine, he’s telling me. He’s trusting me with all the little pieces, broken and whole.
“Everyone fucks up,” I say. “I do it all the time.”
He laughs through his nostrils, and his breath on my skin sends chills roiling through my blood. He’s around me, in me.
“No,” he says. “You’re perfect.”
He sets the water down, and his hand is still cold from the ice when he brings it to my cheek. His knuckles are rough, his touch light, his palm almost broad enough to eclipse the side of my face. “You’re so beautiful,” he tells me. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” His eyes are dark and full. I breathe in his scent and it fills me up and makes my skin go hot.
Before I can exhale, he’s holding my face and he’s kissing me. At my gasp, his fingers rake through my hair, giving it the lightest tug as he draws me closer.
He pushes forward, fingers raining down my arms, my hips, the small of my back. He sets my nerves on fire and I breathe hard against his open mouth. Jack Daniel’s and salt and a smell like suntan oil and warm sand.
I let him push me back against the couch, his hands eclipsing mine up over my head. My body rises against him when he trails kisses up my neck and behind my ear.
“I want you,” he rasps, a hungry sound that reminds me of the firsttime I heard him speak. Deep and smooth. He’s been waiting to show me this side of himself, and I realize now that this is what I felt that day at the diner. All those moments flashing through my head. His life, his energy, flooding me with so much force that for a second I couldn’t breathe.
A cry comes out of me because I want him too. I’ve always wanted him. As my sisters cycled through lovers, I watched and waited for the one who would call to me. But state after state, all I saw was gray, all the voices blurred to a meaningless thrum.
Edison is all color, an explosion of gasps and kisses. He can’t keep his hands off me, and my skin flares to life wherever his open palms land. I make another sound, and his mouth captures it in a kiss.
One day, this will have to end. I’ll wring the last breaths out of him, and I’ll do it without my sisters because I don’t want them to see how deeply I’ll mourn him. I’ll do all my crying before I set about disposing of his remains. I’ll move on, and he will always be with me wherever I go.
But for now, he’s alive and I’m alive. I sweep my hands under his shirt, feeling the solid muscle that ripples in the dunes of his skin.
