I look at the letter again, reading over the words I printed, words from Balzac to Hańska. Lane must have returned it to me, tucked it under my porch while I was riding across town. The bigger question is why. I hide the letter inside my backpack and head inside, strapping up Joe to the wall. Next comes the shower, blow-dry, makeup, a fresh pair of slacks and a blue starched blouse and I am ready for another day in my final week of high school.
“Good morning, darling,” my mother says from the kitchen as I walk downstairs. I smell coffee roasting.
“Hi, Mom,” I say, as she stretches her neck from side to side, working out the kinks. She wears a red dressing gown, mid-thigh length and silk. I keep a few feet of distance between us as she asks how I slept.
I answer “Just fine,” but all I can think is, I got away with it. I slept at your agent’s house last night and you don’t have a clue. I feel like I’m grinning from the inside out, I feel like cinnamon sugar on toast. Getting away with something tastes wonderful. Especially when that something is as fantastic as what Noah did to me last night. My stomach swoops in memory; a hot rush of sparks takes off inside as I remember how it felt to call out his name.
I better go before I linger in Lustlandia.
“’Bye, Mom,” I say, and head for the door. She moves in for a hug. When she wraps her arms around me, my nostrils meet up with her morning scent. She smells like sex. I unwrap myself from her, squirming out from her arms. “I have to go.”
“I love you, sweetheart. Be good today.”
“Yeah. You too,” I say, but it’s an empty wish because she’s not capable. But then again, I suppose I’m not so good these days either.
As I walk to school, my phone dings with a text from Lane.
I hope you didn’t get caught in the rain last night. Or if you did, that you had an umbrella to use. A red, polka-dot umbrella.
The umbrella he gave me. Was it more than an umbrella? My brow furrows. Does he truly feel something for me?
I stop at the Central Park West crosswalk, waiting for the little white man in the light to tell me it’s safe, and it’s as if the traffic and the people and the city are compressing around me. The people on the other side of the street seem so far away right now, like their faces and bodies are collapsing, turning tinier. And then, just like that, they’re zooming in on me. My world is both miles away and in my face, and the light changes and I cross the street, but my feet are heavy, and the concrete looms close and I know I’ll have to sit down soon and get a grip.
I don’t have a clue what to do about Lane. Or when my mom will be smacked in the face with my letters.
Soon I find myself in English, next to Amanda, and I have that desire again to tell her everything, to word vomit up all the things I keep inside me, to confess how I used her last night, how I knew her dad had to have been at my house, but I say nothing, and she’s strangely sullen all through class. When the bell rings at the end of first period, she whispers, “My dad didn’t come home till three thirty last night.”
Her eyes look glassy. The vacancy in her pretty blue eyes turns to anger. “I hate him for what he does to my mom.”
“I hate the woman he’s fooling around with,” I say, the words sliding out, unplanned, unbidden.
When school ends and lacrosse practice is over, I track down Lane and tell him I need to see him. We agree to meet for pizza on Lexington in the Seventies, near his house. As I walk across town, I rewind to last night. It’s like Noah and I stepped off a bridge together, and instead of falling, we flew. To be honest, I was never sure if I’d want that kind of closeness. I grew up surrounded by the wrong kind of intimacy, so I had no idea if I’d want anything like it for myself. But with Noah, I want it all. I want everything. I felt so free in his arms last night, so right in his bed as I gave myself to him. There’s no question – I want so much more of him.
I call him, and he answers on the first ring. “Hey there,” I say.
“Let me guess. You’re still feeling the aftereffects of last night,” he says with a sexy kind of confidence.
I laugh knowingly. “As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I was thinking about.”
We flirt like that, suggestive and naughty, as I walk uptown, past the buses spewing exhaust, the cabs blaring horns, the pedestrians chatting on their phones too. As I reach the pizza place, he says something that nearly makes me blush. “Nothing has ever turned me on more than the way you said my name last night.”
I moan. I actually moan. Because the memory slides over me, warming me up.
“I want you to do it to me again. Maybe tonight,” I say as I lean against the brick wall outside the shop.
“That can be arranged. Consider it another early birthday present.”
“I like the presents you give me,” I say, because I can’t seem to stop this kind of naughty banter with him now that we’ve started down this path of more than kissing.
“K, I will give you anything you want, any time. Come by this evening.”
“I’ll be there later. No one will have to know,” I say, and then he tells me he’ll call me later because David Tremaine is heading into the office for a meeting.
“No one will have to know what?”
I flinch, and let out a surprised squeak. Lane has appeared out of nowhere. “You surprised me,” I say, smacking his arm.
He laughs. “I can tell.” He raises his eyebrows and surveys me. My cheeks are red and I wonder how much he heard. This situation feels eerily familiar, like the tables have turned. Especially when he says, “So no one will have to know what?”