Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (22 page)

Allie snorted. Their mother was big on “life experiences,” at least in the abstract.

Allie’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. She typed
Dan is here
, then stared at the
words
.

If May knew, she’d feel guilty. Maybe she’d feel like she had to rush home even sooner, like Dan was a problem she had to solve. But she’d broken up with him. She wasn’t responsible for him anymore.

What would May think if she knew that Dan had been hanging around the cabin, still welcome in the family after she’d kicked him out of her life? Wouldn’t that seem disloyal?

The cursor blinked.

Allie deleted the sentence and typed,

It was a hunch. Not quite serious, not quite a joke—the question they’d asked each other about every guy they’d been interested in during college and ever since. They asked it of strangers they ogled at concerts, of first dates and third dates.

It meant,
Have you kissed him?

It meant,
How serious is this?

After a moment, May’s answer came through with a chime.

It was Allie’s word—the highest praise she had to offer on the kissing scale she had
developed in college.

A loaded response, because Allie had always maintained that if a guy was an un-fucking-believable kisser, she had no choice but to sleep with him. Un-fucking-believable kissers didn’t come along often enough to waste.

Again, her fingers hovered over the keyboard. But she took a deep breath and typed anyway, because she knew if she’d been in May’s position, May would have done it for her.

Allie was smiling faintly as she switched off her phone.

Back at the cabin, everyone was waiting for May to come to her senses, but Allie was starting to hope she wouldn’t. At least, not right away.

May had never cut loose, never done bad things just to feel the rush, never chased after inappropriate men or woken up in an unfamiliar bedroom with a hangover and a weird rash.

Was it wrong to want her to have some of that?

Was it wrong to want her to cut loose while also hoping, rather desperately, that she’d come home and get back together with Dan and tell Allie what to do and fix this mess?

Probably. Allie was wrong most of the time. And she felt so stuck, with the wedding coming up, that she pretty much
had
to be living vicariously through May.

But May deserved her fun after what Dan had done. She could put things back together later, after she’d bonked the hottie with the jaw of steel and the nice forearms. Allie would return to the cabin and tell everyone May wasn’t coming. Send Dan on home. Make up something to tell Mom that would give May this little bit of breathing room she needed.

In the dark screen of the phone, she could see her own reflection. She stuck her tongue out and crossed her eyes. “Go crazy,” she told her absent sister. “It’s your turn to be the fuckup.”

And anyway, if Allie’s panic had its way—if she actually managed to choke back her cowardice and
do
something to put an end to her clamoring doubts about the wedding that was only six days away—she would steal back her title as Family’s Number-One Fuckup soon enough.

* * *

May handed the phone back.

“Where are we going now?” she asked.

He didn’t look away from the street. “Wherever you want.”

Not fair. She didn’t know the city, and she didn’t want anything except to fix what they’d managed, once more, to mess up.

All her life, she’d been a fixer. A good girl who smoothed over playground disputes between the six-year-old prima donnas and who carried notes from Allie to the boy she liked on the other end of the playground. May didn’t like to fight. It made her feel awful—made her stomach churn and her mouth sour while her heart beat too fast and she felt weak and terrible. She’d rather back off than clash, figuring it was easier to compromise, to drop the point, to take the blame—anything to keep from having to feel like that.

She was a coward, and she’d always been okay with it.

But something had clarified for her. Allie had helped her see there was no black line drawn through her life, no way of making herself over into a new person at a moment’s notice. There were only the choices she made, each of them separate and individual. The choice to leave Dan’s apartment. The choice to stay with Ben. The choice to push him when he didn’t want to be pushed.

This
was a choice she got to make, too: how to behave in the wake of their argument. She could choose to back off, or she could choose to step up. How she felt about it mattered far less than being honest with herself about what she wanted and what she was willing to do to get it.

She wanted to know what had happened to Ben.

She’d poked him somewhere that hurt, and despite his offer to answer her questions, he’d curled around the pain and snapped at her like a wounded thing.

She didn’t like that, but she did recognize it as the prerogative of someone who didn’t spend his whole life trying to please others. He got to act angry when he was frightened, instead of pasting on a smile and pretending not to feel anything. She envied him that freedom, even though she’d been the one who got bit.

And sure, it stung. He’d sunk his teeth in deep with that comment about strays, puncturing her ability to pretend that what had been developing between them was anything more than quick, convenient lust between two people who had nothing better to do for a few days than screw around.

The feeling she’d had a few times now—that something more was going on here, something deeper and more elemental—couldn’t hold up in the light of that reality. It was fantasy-world nonsense. Ben liked her company, provided she didn’t get too pushy. He would be game for a brief affair if she made herself available. That was all.

Part of her hated that truth so much, she wanted to run from it. Hide in an anonymous hotel room. Because Ben wasn’t easy, and he refused to behave in a way that the movie reel in her head could work with. He wouldn’t offer her a candlelit seduction or a montage-worthy tour of the city.

Instead, he gave her strange gifts. Rather than roses, he bought her cheap, flashy earrings. He tossed out permission to be who she wanted and wear what she liked. He offered encouragement to bare herself to him, and he responded with cynical anger when she tried to get him to reciprocate.

Such was life. And the thing was, with Ben, she really did want to
live
rather than pretend. To choose the uneven edges and uncomfortable moments that came with inhabiting the real world over the bland ease of fantasy.

She didn’t want to act as though nothing had happened.

She didn’t want to give up on him.

“I want to play darts with you,” she said.

But what she really wanted was to start over. Ben and May at Pulvermacher’s—except this time she wouldn’t pretend not to be attracted to him. She wouldn’t cower, frightened by his intensity and overwhelmed by her situation.

She would match him, drink for drink, dart for dart, growl for growl.

“I suck at darts.”

“So we’ll play pinball.”

His face set in hard lines. His eyes were shuttered. “Pulvermacher’s?”

She nodded.

“Are you hoping to find somebody else to show you around the city?”

“Why would I do that?” she asked sweetly. “You’re the best distraction I’ve found in weeks.”

That won her a cynical smile. She waited for his refusal, but after a long pause he said, “You’re on.”

Pinball was a
much
better activity than darts.

Such was the position of the machine in the passageway between the bar’s two rooms that May had to squeeze herself into the narrow space between the wall and one side of the game to spectate. But that was fine, because she had a prime view.

She leaned against the wall, beer in each hand, and shamelessly ogled Ben.

They’d decided on a best-two-out-of-three tournament, and she’d played first and lasted five minutes. He’d been playing for half an hour.

He worked the game the same way he did everything—intensely. Physically. He put his whole body into it, bracing his hands on the glass, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

She’d finished her own beer a long time ago. Now she was drinking his, which he’d given her to hold, and she was getting a nice buzz in her head from the alcohol and an even nicer buzz all over her body from the sheer visual pleasure of watching him shoulder into a play, biting his lip as he concentrated on handling two balls at the same time.

Was this as dirty as she seemed to be finding it?

Ben grunted and bumped the machine hard with his hip. He hit some kind of fancy bonus something-or-other. All the lights started flashing, bathing his face in blue and white. May just kind of glazed over.

She was going to sleep with him tonight.

“How’d you get so good at this?”

“There was a pinball machine at this dive bar near the apartment my mom rented in Ashland. I used to go play a lot after my parents split up.”

“So these are vintage pinball skills?” She leaned closer to watch the ball swoop up a ramp, around the curve, lighting a path as it rolled. She’d never thought of pinball as particularly pretty, but this Tron machine was beautiful.

“I play with Connor sometimes, too,” he said. “Especially in the past year or so.”

“Pinball is your refuge from divorce.”

“I guess.”

“Better than strong spirits and cheaper than hookers.”

He flicked her a glance without lifting his head. She watched the smile spread over his face, slowly cracking his solemnity. “Did you drink my beer?”

“I might have.”

“You gonna go get me another round?”

“I can. But it’s possible that I’ll drink that one, too.”

“My wallet’s in my back pocket.”

She could have plucked his wallet out with two fingers, but where was the fun in that? It wasn’t every day you had a good-looking guy bent over a pinball machine, vulnerable to your advances. She patted both pockets as though she wasn’t sure where to find his wallet, then dipped her whole hand in to retrieve it. She might have groped him a little.

“You want the same thing again?”

“Yeah. I barely got to taste it last time.”

“You got it, sailor.”

He was still playing when she returned. She didn’t have a free hand to give his wallet back, so she left it in her own pocket.

“You want me to give you a sip of your beer?” she asked. “I can hold it in front of your mouth and tip it. I worked in a nursing home in high school, so I have excellent invalid-feeding skills.”

“That’s sexy, but I’ll get a drink after this ball’s over.”

“You said that last time.”

“If you drink both those beers, I’ll have to carry you home.” He rocked forward and made a terrible face at the machine, but his attempt to move the ball with the force of his emotional intensity must not have worked, because he said, “Fuck!”

Two seconds later, he straightened and reached for his glass. “You’re distracting.”

“Don’t blame that on me. That slow flipper action was all you.”

“You shouldn’t insult a man’s flipper action.” He brought the beer to his mouth and took a long, deep drink. When he gave it back to her, he had foam on his upper lip. She watched him lick it off. “It’s sacred.”

“You think everything is sacred. Even your hobbies are life-and-death.”

“What hobbies?” He handed her the beer and pulled back the plunger, compressing the spring tighter, tighter, until he deemed the amount of coiled force just right and released it.

Slam
. The ball rocketed up the machine and shot into play.

Tension, force, impact, release—every loose ball was its own miniature orgasm.

And Ben’s really good at it
.

Her full-body hum got a little louder.

“You’re kicking my ass,” she said.

“Yeah, but you make a good groupie.”

“I’ve already done the groupie thing, thanks. I passed on the chance to make it permanent.”

“You felt like a groupie?” he asked. “With Einarsson?”

“How would you feel if all of a sudden you were getting asked to barbecues with people whose careers you’ve been following since the eighth grade?”

“Trippy.”

“Totally trippy. And like I didn’t remotely belong there. I never knew what to talk about, so I just talked about football. I was like that sabermetrics guy—you know, the baseball statistics one? Except for the Green Bay Packers. The other girlfriends teased me for it.”

“Which made you feel even more like a groupie.”

“Kind of. I felt like their mascot, sometimes. As if they were all grown-ups, tolerating the fangirl who’d wandered into their midst.”

“Not with Thor, though, right?”

“No. He liked how into it I was.” She gazed at a knot in the paneling opposite her, the tight whorl of its grain. “I think it was that Dan’s job was so huge and important, I had to be his number-one fan. As though, if I wasn’t his biggest cheerleader—his emotional support system—there wouldn’t be room for me in his life. So I guess I signed up for it.”

“Didn’t he give you anything back?”

“He gave me what he could.” She sipped her beer and let the admission unfurl behind her tongue, taking its final shape. “It wasn’t good enough.”