Page 29 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“You’re nowhere near done, there’s a whole wall left—”

“Then I’m nowhere near done.” She comes down off the stool with a can in each hand and finally looks at me. There’s a flush up her neck that has nothing to do with shelving. “Why does it bother you?”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“You’ve been gone eleven hours on a day with nothing in it. Now you’re home four minutes and managing my Friday.” She sets the cans down harder than cans need. “Something’s bothering you.”

And there it is — the argument, and of course it arrives over nothing. We stand on opposite sides of my own counter and have it.

“I’m not managing your Friday. I’m saying you don’t have to earn the roof when the kids aren’t even in the house—”

“Earn the roof.” Her voice goes very level, which I should recognize as the last flat stretch of road before a cliff, and I don’t. “Is that what you think I’m doing? Working off my room and board?”

“That is not what I said.”

“Then say what you actually mean, Gus. You avoided me all day, all over this city, and now you’re four feet away being polite about it. I’d rather have the plain version. You told me something real last night. Today you can’t be in a room with me. If it’s regret, that’s fine. I’ve got a system for other people’s regret. But name it.”

“It’s not regret.”

“Then what is it?”

“Being in a room with you is the problem.”

It comes out plain, the way true things do when you stop guarding the door. She goes still. Not the carrying-something stillness — a different one, one I’ve never seen. It occurs to me far too late that I’ve been wrong about what we’re fighting about. Both of us have been, the whole time.

“Say that again,” she says, quietly.

“June.”

“Say it again.”

“Being in a room with you has been the problem for weeks.” My heart is going like I’m twenty-five again. “It’s not the roof, and it’s not regret. I told you the worst thing I know about myself last night, and you handed me a glass of wine and stayed. And today I drove around this city like an idiot. I knew that the next time I stood in this kitchen with you, I was going to do something I’ve decided — repeatedly, in writing, in my head — not to do.”

She looks at me for exactly as long as it takes to put the last can down.

“Do it anyway,” she says.

I’m around the counter before she finishes the sentence. One hand in her hair and one at her jaw, and I kiss her the way I’ve wanted to kiss her since that night in the parking lot after the gala. She comes up onto her toes and kisses me back like she got there first and has been waiting for me to catch up. She grabs the front of my shirt in both fists. The step stool goes over. Neither of us looks at it.

“This is a terrible idea,” she says against my mouth.

“The worst.” I walk her two steps back until she’s against the counter. “You should tell me to stop.”

“Noted,” she says, and pulls me closer, and that’s the end of the meeting.

There’s flour on the counter and it gets on everything — her shirt, my hands, her cheek where I hold her face. I kiss her jaw, the corner under her ear, the line of her throat. She makes a sound I have never heard from her — low, surprised, escaped before she could stop it. I want to hear every sound she has ever held back. The house is empty, and I want her to know it.

“Nobody’s home,” I tell her collarbone. “Empty all the way to Sunday. You don’t have to be quiet in this house tonight.”

“Gus.” My name, just that, and her hands are already working my shirt buttons wrong. She gives up at three and pulls it over my head instead. Then her palms are flat on my chest and traveling, and she exhales like she’s been waiting months to. “Okay. Two things, fast, while I still have a working brain.”

“Go.”

“There’s been nobody in over two years, and I have an IUD, and my last physical was clean.” She says it in her reporting voice, and God help me, the reporting voice works on me now too. “Your turn.”

“Nobody since Nora. Yearly physicals, all clean. That’s four years, if you’re counting.”

“I’m not counting anything tonight,” she says. “Then we’re covered. Kiss me again, and mean it.”