“You’ll learn,” I say, but I don’t really mean it, because I don’t intend to do much other than hold her body close to mine, just so I can feel her arms around me, her breasts pressed against my chest.
“Your mother’s probably going to come by and ask whether we’ve left room for Jesus between us,” she says.
I laugh, drawing the attention of a few of the other couples around us.“She won’t.” In fact, my mother and Richard are with Dad and Sharon, everyone chatting and seeming to be at perfect ease. But it doesn’t chafe the way it normally does, not right now. I realize that for a lot of years, what I wanted was someone to complain to about Mom, about Richard, but my dad had been doing the right thing in always staying above the fray about the divorce. He’d made it possible for us to even have this kind of night, where we’re all together. Now, though, to have Kit—it feels as if I have that someone, someone who gives you that little room to complain in, but doesn’t hold it against you later.
I have a vision, fleeting, of sitting beside her in my mother’s dining room, of getting through a family night with Kit as my partner, of going home with her at night after. Ofbeinghere, and not for a visit. It’s a domino effect in my head, then—what if I was here and saw my mother more? What if I could keep an eye on Dad, on the salvage yard, work with him on some of the harder stuff? What if I could stay in River’s life? What if in between—every morning, every night—I had Kit next to me?
Something must change in the way I’m holding myself, or maybe it’s in the way I’m holding her, because she leans back a little, enough to look at me.“You okay?”
“Sure,” I say, pulling her back to me, breaking the eye contact. But I keep my cheek pressed to her temple, because all of a sudden I feel—I don’t know what. I don’t want distance between Kit and me. I want her to know me. I want tosaysomething to her, say something so she’ll know why this night made me tense, so she’ll know how fucking freaked out I am about leaving her next week. But because Kit always brings it out in me, some reckless looseness in the way I speak and act, what I end up saying to her is—neither of those things.
“Kit. I’m in love with you.”Holy fuck, I think, as soon as it’s out of my mouth.What did I just say?It’s too soon for this, or if it’s not too soon it’s the wrong place, here at this party, where I can’t distract her with sex or something else. But even as I’m thinking these things, I also know that I’ve said something true. Something I wouldn’t take back. I think I’ve loved Kit from the minute she showed me that microscope. Definitely from the minute I found her with wallpaper stuck to her hair.
So, yeah—not taking it back.
Even if Kit has gone still in my arms. Even if she hasn’t said anything.
“Hey,” I whisper, running my fingertips up her spine.“It’s not…”
She leans back again, meets my eyes with her own, huge and wet. She’s wearing contacts tonight, so my view of them is unobstructed, nothing to keep me from seeing those big tears gathering at the corners.“Don’t say it’s not a big deal.”
“All right.”
“Ben,” she says, those tears—happy tears, I hope,God, I hope—threatening to brim over.“Take me home.”
Chapter 17
Kit
I don’t say it back.
Not Saturday night, when Ben gets me home and takes all my clothes off in the foyer, then carries me upstairs, not taking his mouth from mine until we’re both so worked up that neither of us can say anything at all. Not Sunday morning, either, when he leaves for the yard and I leave for brunch, both of us late again from oversleeping, over-touching, over-kissing.
I don’t tell Zoe and Greer.
Instead, I hear him say it, over and over, right against the shell of my ear—Kit, I’m in love with you—even though he hasn’t said it again, either.
But there’s something different there, between us. Long after we’d been home from the party on Saturday, Ben and I had been lying in my bed, warm and rumpled, Ben’s hair still sweaty at his temples from exertion, and he’d told me more about Richard, his mother, their wedding, the way it all still got to him a little, even though he’d forgiven her, he’d said, he really had. I had my doubts about that—I didn’t forgive my mother for leaving me, and since I couldn’t pick her out of a line-up, probably, that was a massive waste of energy. But that’s the way it is with parents, I think. You’re always hauling around some of that baggage.
And we’d talked about Houston too. It’d been me, this time, to bring it up, to ask him to tell me about his place there. He’d had this look on his face at first, a bit startled, and I wasn’t sure he’d answer—except for the brief exchange we’d had on the way to the Ursinus, we’d only really ever talked about Texas in the context of my moving there to work for Beaumont, and I was curious about his life there.
“It’s an apartment,” he’d said, his voice low, sandpapery, the way it always is late at night or first thing in the morning.“Fifteenth floor of a luxury high-rise where Beaumont owns some units. There’s a gym and a Starbucks on the first floor. My best friend—Jasper, you’ve heard me talking about him—he lives a few doors down. I’ve got a view of downtown, so I can never get it all the way dark in my bedroom. Most of my furniture came with the place, except for an armoire I refinished my last year here, one my dad kept for me until I got a place of my own. I’ve got a cleaning service that comes, grocery delivery once a week. There’s a pool—it’s really big, actually, something you’d find at a resort. People love it.”
“Do you like it?”
“I don’t dislike it. I don’t—I guess I think of it as doing the job.”
“Doing the job of what?”
Here he’d rolled onto his back, gusting out a sigh before staring at the ceiling for a long, silent minute.“Of giving me a place to sleep. To eat. To occasionally mainline a season ofThe Americanson a weekend when I’m recovering from travel.”
“That’s a really good show,” I’d whispered back, and we’d both laughed softly in the dark.
It didn’t sound like any kind of place I’d want to be, me with my mostly mismatched furniture, my messy piles of home design magazines and scientific journals, my haphazard food supplies. And with this skin, I’d probably blind the guests at a pool. But if it’s Ben’s place, I’d thought—I should know it. I’d thought that we should talk about my visiting, if we were going to do long-distance, if he really was leaving next week, if we were going to start sayingI love you, but it’d been late and before either of us spoke again we’d both drifted off.
On Monday morning, though, it’s Ben who brings up Houston again, right before I’m about to hop out of his truck to head into the lab for the day.“We should talk more, about my going back. About what we’ll do.”
“Okay,” I say.“I want to do that.”
