“Yes, sir.”
“And Holland, where did you and Calvin meet?”
“We met . . .” My brain is a slow-motion train wreck, coming around a curve too fast before completely careening off the rails. “At the subway.” Our plan is to say we met on the subway, riding together. Our plan is to avoid mentioning that he was busking for money, and instead focus on his various musical gigs with local bands.
Our plan is to be smooth, for Christ’s sake.
So I have no idea what’s happening when the next words fly out of my mouth: “I used to watch him play.”
I mentally scream as our carefully crafted, simple story somehow flies out of my brain.
“At one of the clubs?” Dougherty asks, brows raised.
Fix this, Holland. Say yes. “No.” Shiiiiiit. “At the Fiftieth Street station.”
“I would play there a couple times a week,” Calvin covers easily. “It was more for fun than anything.”
Dougherty nods and makes note of this.
“I could hear music when I’d pass, and one day I decided to see who it was.” I swallow, wondering if that’s the end of what has to be my complete mental breakdown. No such luck. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him and so . . . I’d sometimes take the train when I didn’t need to just to hear him play.”
I’m afraid to look at Calvin, and instead keep my eyes straight ahead, to where the fluorescent bulbs are reflecting off Officer Dougherty’s bald head.
“I have heard a lot of stories, but that is a new one,” he says. “Very romantic. And how long before you talked to him?”
For Christ’s sake, shut up, Holland.
“Six months.”
Calvin slowly turns to me.
Ughhhhhhhhh.
“My goodness, that is a crush.” Dougherty makes a few notes in his file, and I swear I am sweating through my chair. “And Calvin, what did you first notice about Holland?”
“Her eyes,” he says without hesitation, even though our story has dramatically changed. “The first time she talked to me we didn’t say much, but I remember her eyes. They’re hypnotizing.”
He noticed my eyes? They’re hypnotizing? Does he actually remember that I spoke to him that night before the zombie attack, or is he playing along? I don’t even get time to savor this moment because the officer looks up at me as if to verify this. “And Holland, do you remember what you said?”
I feel the embarrassment all over again. “I think I blurted out something about his music.”
Calvin nods. “She said, ‘I love your music’ and then sort of . . . shuffled away.”
I look over at him and laugh. I feel jubilant: he remembers. “I’d been drinking in Brooklyn with Lulu,” I tell him.
“I’ve figured that out in the time since, mo stóirín.”
Officer Dougherty chuckles down at his papers. “A love story as old as time.”
We walk to the elevator in silence, and our steps reverberate down the hall.
I think we did it.
I think we did it.
I am mortified that I admitted to essentially stalking him, but it doesn’t seem to have fazed him at all.
And who cares? Because we did it.
The elevator doors open and we step inside; thank God it’s empty. I fall back against the back wall, stunned.
“Holy shit.” He pushes a hand into his hair. “Holy shit. That was amazing.”
I open my mouth. My body hasn’t caught up with my brain yet; I still feel like I’m on high alert. “Oh my God.”
“I almost lost it for a second when you blanked on how we met,” he says, “but then you came up with that brilliant story about watching me for months.”
Oh, shit. “I . . .”
“The idea of you coming to the station every day just to hear me play,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s insane. He ate it up like cake.”
“Total cake,” I mumble.
Would he like me less if he knew that it was the truth? That I watched him for six months? That I wanted him, in painful silence, for too many subway rides to remember?
He moves a step closer, crowding me against the elevator wall. “Do you know what happens now?”
With him so close, I want to tell him every embarrassing time I wondered what color his eyes were, what he’d sound like when he opened his mouth, what he looked like when he smiled. With him this close, my brain becomes a film reel of every second Calvin was naked in my bed. The smell of him and the sight of his face at this distance triggers the memory of how his skin felt sliding over mine, of him above me, moving.
“What?” I say, eyes glazed over.
His teeth press down on his bottom lip before his mouth curves into a beaming smile. “Now, we celebrate.”
twenty-one
The plan is to go out for a celebratory lunch, but Calvin wants to stop at the apartment first. This morning I was too nervous to contemplate eating; now I’m too excited. We are both behaving like goofballs—racing from the subway station to the corner, play-wrestling outside the building, running up the stairs with enormous grins. I am aware, in this sharp sweep of clarity, how much fun I have with him.
In the time since we got married, I’ve discovered that I don’t only appreciate his awesome face and hot body, but I genuinely adore being around him. We have fun because he is fun, and there’s a little ache that chases that realization because I wonder where this can actually go.
Yes, he seems to enjoy being around me, but it’s not like he has a choice—and Calvin seems like the kind of guy who can make the best out of any circumstance.
I fumble with my keys outside the door, and he leans into me, breathless from the race upstairs, resting his chin near my temple.
“Are you starving?” he asks.
I shake my head, shoving the key into the lock. “I’m still too excited to be hungry.”
The feel of him against me—his chest against my arm, his breath on my neck—would completely annihilate my appetite anyway.
“You were so good,” he says, and kisses my hair. There’s a little growl at the end of the word good that feels like fingers running up and down my spine, and I hear the echo of his words from two nights ago:
I can feel the heat of you. Is it the drink, or is it me?
I don’t want to misread this situation because it could be devastating to think he’s into me when he’s really just being sweet and grateful, still high on adrenaline. But my pulse is rioting; the low ache in my belly is intensifying with every second. “You needed to grab something?”
He follows me in and closes the door behind us, saying, “I don’t need to get anything.”
Did I misunderstand him? “But I thought—” I move to put down my keys, but he reaches for my arm, turning me, gently guiding until I’m pressed with my back against the door.
“I didn’t need to get anything from the apartment.”
What?
Calvin bends, and his mouth hovers just below my ear. “I just wanted to come home before lunch.”
Oh.
The ache explodes.
My body is pretty sure it understands his meaning clearly—my hands move up his chest and around his neck. But my brain—my brain is always the problem: “Why?”
He laughs, scraping my jaw with his teeth, and then kisses my cheek, my ear. “Do you realize you’ve been avoiding any casual physical contact since we woke up in bed together?”
“I have?” I pull back. It’s surreal to be looking into his eyes when they’re so close to mine.
This makes him laugh again. “I think I’ve made it pretty clear you can have me if you want me. I practically refuse to put on clothes when we’re in the apartment.”
“Oh. That’s true.”
He smiles, kissing my nose. “But if you aren’t interested, I’ll leave you alone and not ask again.”
I hurl my words out like I’m bidding at an auction: “I’m interested.”
“I’ve wanted this since the first time we had lunch.”
What?
His smile moves up my neck, pressing parentheses into my skin. “I remember how nervous and sweet you were.” More kisses. “I wondered whether you liked me that way. But you kept so calm with me in your house . . . and I’m out here on the couch thinking about you.”
I don’t even know what to say to this. I want to repeat the way he says tinking about you. He was out here feeling what I was feeling? My charade was too convincing; apparently I could have been getting Calvin Sex for the past month. I want to both celebrate and scream.
“And then we fell into your bed,” he says, and his mouth moves across my throat to the other ear. He sucks just below, pressing into me. Something hard digs into my hip, and I gasp.
It makes him hiss. “I like your sounds. I remember how many of them you made.” His mouth moves closer to mine. “What do you remember?”
“Earlier,” I say, and he kisses me once, “in the elevator, when you were close to me, I was thinking about . . .”
He pulls back, waiting. “Thinking about . . . ?”
“When we were in my bed.”
“What were we doing?”
I push back the self-conscious doubt in my throat. “You were on top of me. We were already . . .”
Moving together, I don’t say.
Calvin groans, sliding his hands under my shirt to grip my waist. “You were thinking about fucking me in the elevator?”
And just like that, I am hot everywhere. He’s making this so easy. “I was remembering that feeling of skin on skin, where you can’t get enough?”
His mouth comes over mine, and I remember this, too. It’s not a new kiss, it’s a kiss we’ve done before—teasing only at first and then sucking, and deeper, and hungry.
He slides his hands farther up my shirt, and around so he’s unfastening my bra with a tiny pinch. My shirt and bra are pulled off together, and his mouth moves down, dragging words over my skin. I stare down at his shoulders, reaching for his shirt, wanting to see the way the muscles move as he grabs me and holds me, as he works his mouth down my belly to the clasp of my skirt.