You and I will have a happy one, won’t we?
We will rewrite Chess.
Chapter Seventeen
Kennedy
I need speed. I need danger.
I strap on my helmet and blast off the sidewalk onto the road.
I hear a voice call out my name. I turn my head momentarily, but all I see is a flash of color—bright orange—before I turn my attention back to the traffic I must navigate on Central Park West and Columbus Circle. Soon, I weave over to Seventh Avenue into the early evening traffic, riding into it, blaring toward downtown, streaking past cars and trucks and delivery vehicles. I keep going, pedaling, squeezing in and out of tight little jams when Broadway cuts Seventh Avenue. With each block, the memory of my mother’s conversation with Amanda’s father sheds in a trail behind me.
A car door opens and I swoop. I’m off to the side, scooting around a cab as I soar ahead, my focus narrowing solely to the street and my role in it. The cab slams its brakes at the red light, but I whip through as the cars from Thirty-Ninth Street bang their horns at me. I’m faster than they are and I bolt past them. Then I tear across Chelsea, and I fly as the streets jut out at crazy angles in the Village. There’s an ambulance now, catapulting toward me, zipping into St. Vincent’s as I swing around the back of it, nearly clipping my leg on the bumper.
By the time I hit Tribeca, the back of my shirt is sticking to me, and my lungs are searing, but I haven’t stopped once, not for a light or a pedestrian or a car. Then Seventh turns into Church Street and my lungs jump into my throat. I push them back down again. A minute later I’m jetting past the Federal Reserve Bank and soon, soon, soon the edge of Manhattan grows bigger and I see trees looming closer and Battery Park is just one stinking block away. I tuck my body even tighter, my head lower, my eyes fixed only on the prize.
Almost there.
Seconds later, I stop, my breath coming in heavy pants as I yank off my helmet.
I made my best time ever. Sixteen minutes.
Little victories, Caroline would say.
My phone rings.
“Hello?” I answer without even looking.
“Don’t tell me I’m going to have to visit you in the hospital again like that time when you broke your foot from skateboarding into traffic.”
His voice sends a charge through me, lighting me up. He hasn’t called me in four months. We’ve only texted. He knows me. He knows I needed more than a text tonight. He knows me better than anyone. “I am safe and sound in Battery Park,” I say, loving that he worries.
“You ride like a Kamikaze fighter pilot,” he says in a careful warning.
“I know.”
Then there’s a pause. The air between us crackles like it always has, like it has its own energy or frequency. One of us is going to bend. One of us is going to break.
“Come back,” he says, so much longing in his voice.
“I don’t want to be there right now,” I say, running my hand roughly through my hair.
“Come back later then.”
“I don’t want to be there later.”
“Someplace else?” he asks, and there’s so much hopefulness in the way he speaks. I can’t help but match it. I feel it too. I want it too. I want the hope and the happiness and the escape I’ve always felt with Noah Hayes, the only man I’ve ever loved.
“Anyplace else,” I say, and as I give voice to the giving in, a feathery lightness dances through me. I am ready to stop staying away from him.
“I’ll see you at our place in three hours.”
Our place. I am lit up, I am ignited; a sweet return to the past that’s become the present again. It’s all so familiar and safe in its own way. The memories race back, tapping on the wall, poking their heads around corners, wanting to be seen. I give in to them; I hit Play and watch the reel of my favorite times from the six months when I was in my own secret affair with my mom’s business partner, her agent, her best friend.
Like the time we went to a Yankees game late last summer.
He was at our house one afternoon, and he wielded two tickets, showing them like a magician would a playing card. Naturally, he gave my mom first dibs. But she declined. “I detest watching sports that my daughter isn’t playing. Why don’t you take Kennedy?”
Like it was her idea.
Like we hadn’t planned it that way.
The day of the game, I went to the Mac store nearby and asked the makeup artist if she could paint a blue-and-white New York Yankees logo on my cheek. Then I went home, put on jean shorts, a blue T-shirt, and flip-flops and said good-bye to my mom.
“Be sure to take a cab home, my dear,” she said, pressing one hundred dollars into my hand. “Hayes will make sure to get you one.”
“Yes, Mom,” I said, then smiled to myself as I left the house as if I were heading to the nearest subway stop and planning to meet him at the ballpark. Instead, I walked a block up and a block over to the town car he’d ordered that was waiting. He pushed the door open from the inside and I slid in, shutting it with a satisfying click. All the people walking by after work or starting their early evening summertime jogs in the park were on the other side of the tinted glass.
“Hi,” I said, with a conspiratorial grin.
“Hi.” His eyes twinkled.
I ran my fingers along the leather seats. “Nice town car.”
“You like me for my town car?”
“Oh, exactly. Yes, that’s it exactly.”
“Say it,” he teased. “Say you like me for my town car.”