Nora was upstairs showering, the water running through the house’s old pipes. Miles sometimes worried that something big would go wrong with the house, something to do with plumbing or electricity, two categories of fix-it he’d vowed never to touch. He didn’t have the funds to deal with something big like that. Not the furnace or the roof or any kind of systems failure. Without an income, he could make ends meet for only another six months or so—yet another reason he didn’t feel like a good candidate for a relationship.
He felt “unfit.” That was the word that kept running through his head.
He hadn’t meant to ask her how long she was staying, but a thought had risen to the surface as he’d sat across from her, watching her eat her sandwich. I want to keep her.
Not a well-formed thought, just the sort of thing that bubbled up from your gut when you were unguarded and couldn’t help it. Almost ugly, the idea of keeping, but that was what it was. And she’d said he could, until tomorrow afternoon, and for a brief moment it had felt like enough.
But he was unfit. A suspect, not in a position to support himself if this went on much longer, not in a position to introduce someone else into his half-assed existence.
He made up his mind. Monday morning, he would begin to look for a new job. For a long time he’d kept hoping that things would happen fast, that he’d be cleared and would be able to resume his old life. The lawyer had kept telling him to hang on, not to do anything rash, that he’d have his life, his old job, his sense of self, back soon. But that hadn’t happened. The investigation had moved glacially, leaving him caught in this peculiar limbo for weeks and then months. A few days ago, he’d passed the one-year mark.
It was time for him to figure out how to build a new life in his reshaped reality. It wouldn’t be easy to get work, with the shadow of an investigation hanging over his head. He wouldn’t find anything that reflected his skill and experience level, but the economy had rebounded, and there were houses going up again—maybe he could do handyman jobs. Something, anything, to begin the process of making room for Nora in his life.
The water was still running upstairs—he imagined her sliding her soapy hands all over her body. He wanted to go up and get in the shower with her. Enjoy her, the sweetness of her mouth, the heat of her body, the restless hunger of her fucking, the way he could watch her mind work during the silences in their conversations, sometimes to the point where a private smile crossed her face. He wanted to know exactly what was behind those small hints at her inner world. If he could, he’d get inside her head and listen to her thoughts.
He stopped to pull another condom from the box in her messenger bag, took the stairs two at a time, knocked on the door, entered on her invitation. She was behind the glass door, behind a veil of steam, but Miles could make out her rosy curves and the dark circles of her areolae and the triangle of red hair where her thighs met. He was hard before he had his clothes off—he’d been on his way before he left the kitchen.
“Good,” she said. “I was feeling a little miffed that you didn’t want to get in here with me.”
“I want. Give me the soap.”
She handed it over without protest, and he soaped his hands and washed her. Not carefully. Not lovingly. Just to feel the unfettered slip and slide of skin over skin, everywhere. So few things moved like that—frictionless, slick—and it was like sex in another guise, as if you could unhitch sex from the specific body parts he’d always associated it with and turn it into a full-body, all-over experience, as if the palms of his hands were as sensitive as the head of his cock. He’d somehow gathered her into his arms and was kissing her hard, rubbing his whole self all over her, her breasts with their taut nipples slipping back and forth over his chest, her belly against his, her thighs against his, his leg between hers, his cock moving against her skin with the pressure of his body and the pressure of her body on either side, her moaning into his mouth, and—
“Give me a sec.”
He stepped out of the shower and got the condom he’d brought up, rolled it on. Stepped back in.
She smiled coyly at him, then turned and faced the shower wall, her palms against it, and he almost came right then and there. She pushed up on her toes, her ass tilted up to give him access, her flesh blotched pink from the heat and arousal, and he could see her inner lips, red and wet and ready.
He failed again at careful. At respectful. At anything you’d do to woo someone you wanted to impress. He just—he banged into her, really. A nudge to position himself and a mad thrust as deep as he could go, and, fuck, she was thrusting back against him. Making low, harsh noises punctuated with little squeaks. He tried to figure out how to maximize the squeaks for her, but she reached back and grabbed his hip and said, “More,” so he threw all the rest of his restraint away and gave it to her, and—“Oh, Nora, sorry!” he said, because he was coming, whole body spasms gripping him, and he had to brace himself against the wall, too, and even so he almost blacked out.
He had some trouble restoring his sense of which way was up.
“Sorry,” he said again, when he could. “Neanderthal.” He wasn’t yet to the point of being able to form sentences. “I’ll make it up to you.”
“I came.”
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. Before. When we were all soapy.”
“Jesus.”
“I know. That has never happened to me. It was right after you shoved your leg between mine. Everything was so slippery. And your chest hair kept rubbing against my nipples. You were kissing me, so you probably didn’t realize how much noise I was making.”
“Nora?”
“Uh-huh?”
“You’re turning me on again.”
“Sorry!”
“No, not a bad thing. Just … give me a few. I’ll be at your service.” She laughed. “I’m not worried.”
She poured some shampoo into her palm and rubbed it into her hair. She handed him the bottle so he could do the same, then stuck her head under the nozzle and rinsed. “I swear, I am also capable of having sex not standing.”
“Sure you are.” She rubbed her fingers over her hair, and it emitted a squeaky sound. He took her place under the shower, rinsing his hair. “I’m taking you out tonight.”
“What, like a date?”
“Yeah, like a date.”
“A first date,” she said, almost reverently.
He wasn’t as sure about that. A first date implied a string of other dates, implied a future, and he … he wasn’t sure he had a future, let alone one in which he could include her. “I guess.”
“Because we never had a first date. Right? We can’t count the party, because we were both already there. That was where we met. We can’t count the phone, because, well, it was the phone. And can’t count any of this, because it’s not a date. We’re at your house.”
“True. So tonight. Dinner and live music.”
“I can totally deal with that,” she said. “I even brought a skirt and nice top. Not that—I wasn’t thinking—”
He grinned. “Cut the bullshit, Nora. You called my friend to get my address. You flew a thousand miles. You’re allowed to admit you had some … expectations.”
She laughed. “Okay. Yeah. Let’s call them hopes, though. Sounds a little less stalkerish.”
They got out of the shower and he tossed her a towel.
“Hey, Miles?”
“Yeah?”
“I want to help you work on the tile project. Before we go to dinner. I don’t want you to waste this weekend.”
That made him laugh. “This weekend is the furthest thing from a waste I can imagine.”
“But you were going to get that done, and then I showed up. Torpedoed your real life.” This is way better than my real life.
But it reminded him that he had a real life, and he couldn’t pretend he didn’t. And if they were going to do something as official as have a first date, he had to make sure she knew what she was getting herself into.
“Get dressed,” he told her. “I’ve got something I need to tell you.”
* * *
He’d left her alone in the bathroom to get dressed. Who said, “I’ve got something to tell you,” and then fled the scene? That was bad manners.
In the empty, echoey bathroom, her feet cold against the ceramic floor tile, Nora’s vivid imagination had a field day.
I’m married. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a recovering ax murderer.
Maybe he had a few kids by a previous marriage. She could handle that.
But if it was really bad, she could still walk away, right? A midnight kiss, a few phone calls, some phone sex, plus the sex on the floor of his front hall and in the shower—surely she was not in so deep that she couldn’t extricate herself.
Surely.
She shook her head at herself. If it’s really bad, Nor, you need to walk away.
But all the other bits of her brain, the ones that should have said, Uh-huh! Yeah! We hear ya! We will!, were silent.
She stepped out of the master bath and into his bedroom, which occupied most of the upper floor of the house, under the eaves. Skylights everywhere, a low platform bed against the far wall. His quilt was black and white and the walls were gray, and—maybe it was the faint masculine scent of soap and aftershave—the room reminded her of men’s dress clothes. Of the excitement of seeing a finely dressed man appear before you when the last time you’d laid eyes on him he was a grubby guy in jeans.
Being with Miles felt that way all the time, she realized. The treat of his physical beauty, the way he was so assertively male. A lean grace to how he moved, how he spoke, how he treated her, his demeanor as pleasingly hard as male muscle.
Right now he was standing in the middle of his bedroom, wearing a pair of jeans low on his hips and nothing else, and that would be how she would fantasize about him tomorrow night when she was back in her bed by herself. Flat abs, the slanted ridge of muscle at his hips that dove under his waistband, the trail of curly dark hair that directed her gaze downward. And when she tore her focus from his crotch and looked back up, the planes of his pecs with their dusting of half curls. Her own nipples tightened, remembering how that hair had felt.
When her eyes finally met his, she found that he’d been watching her watch him, and her breath caught. But he shook his head, as if to say, Not now.
His face was so serious, it made her stomach hurt.
“I’m a suspect in a criminal investigation.”
Her vitals went nuts then, a flurry of manic heartbeat and tight chest and shallow breath, while her brain made fight-or-flight calculations. Door that way, large, well-muscled male between her and all exits. Oh, my God, what kind of self-destructive lunatic flies from Boston to Cleveland and enters a strange man’s house on her own?
“Nora, wait. Embezzlement. Embezzlement. I should have said that—”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t do that! I was thinking rape, assault, battery, serial murder of girls in shower stalls, where you scalp them and hang the scalps from your shower rod and—” Embezzlement. “Is embezzlement a felony?”
He pulled his shirt on, and his face popped out, grim.
“What they suspect me of is, yes. They suspect me of embezzling more than three hundred thousand dollars from the organization I work for.”
Three hundred thousand dollars. That was quite a hunk of change. Not murder or rape or assault, but a serious crime.
“Did you?”
She was surprised by how calm she felt, now that the painful adrenaline rush of a few moments ago had passed.
He’d looked away from her, into a far corner of the room, and there was a struggle behind his expression as he said, “No. But it’s messy. That’s why I’m taking the leave of absence. It wasn’t voluntary. I was suspended without pay. I had the best access, and the time frame of when I bought this house is suspicious. For a while my lawyer’s primary focus was on clearing me, but we’ve shifted to working on my defense, because he’s pretty sure I’m going to be charged, by the beginning of January at the latest. Unless they find another logical suspect.”
He said it matter-of-factly, but she saw in his eyes that this was the source of the sadness. There was nothing matter-of-fact in his feelings about the situation.
She felt a rising sense of outrage on his behalf.
You don’t know he didn’t do it.
—He said he didn’t.
You’re too trusting.
—Bugger off, Henry.
“You have a good lawyer, right?”
“An excellent lawyer, but … the way the money was taken, it’s called vendor fraud. We have a lot of programs, and we pay many vendors, and someone managed to create a large number of invented vendors. I’m the most logical someone.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
“Without knowing who did do it, it’s hard to clear suspicion from me. So it will probably go to trial.”
“But they’ll get you off, right?”
“It’s possible—my lawyer says probable, even, that they won’t get a conviction, if I’m lucky—but the point is, I would understand if this turned you off. I’m damaged goods. No job, the possibility of a criminal conviction, jail time. I’m low on funds. I’m going to look for other work, but my name’s been in the local papers, so I don’t know if I can even get it. Your friends would tell you to run the other way. Stat.”
Nora tried to imagine what Rachel would say. Back away from the possible criminal, Nora. Turn and run now. Don’t look back. Yeah, that was about right.
But she didn’t. Couldn’t. She’d known before he’d told her, as soon as she’d known there was something he wanted to tell her, that very little he could say would make her turn and run.
Probably Henry was right. She was too trusting. Too lacking in all the skills necessary for self-preservation.
In too deep, too fast.
In, for better or for worse.
She shook her head. “Well. That sucks. A lot. For you.”
“For you, too.”
“Does it?”
“ ‘Mom, I’m dating this guy. He’s charged with embezzling three hundred thousand dollars from an organization that feeds kids.’ ‘Oh, hon, that’s great!’ ”
“I’d say, ‘Mom, I’m dating this guy. He’s been falsely accused of embezzlement, but he’s innocent.’ ”
“Would you?”
“Of course I would.”
He closed his eyes, and Nora couldn’t figure out the look on his face for a moment, until she realized he was trying to keep some emotion in check.
“Miles?”
“Give me a minute.”
She did, and when he opened his eyes again, he said, “At the New Year’s party? I was on the rebound, too. Or something like that. My fiancée had just dumped me. Because she found out about the investigation.”
“Oh, God, Miles.”
“So … I might have … I didn’t … I wouldn’t have taken it for granted that you’d stand up for me, that’s all.”
His fiancée. The woman he’d been planning to marry. Someone who should have stood by him no matter what.
“At least you found that out about her,” she said.
“I thank God for that every day. Also, I wouldn’t have been single on New Year’s if she hadn’t left me. And I probably wouldn’t have been quite so—”
He stopped.
“I told you that you were a fuck-you to Henry,” she said. “You can hardly say anything more obnoxious than that.”
“I was going to say that I was ‘hard up’ that night.”
She hooted with laughter. “Okay, yeah, that’s pretty bad.”
“I was,” he said. “I was a mess. Angry, sad, all kinds of bad. The worst. Probably capable of wreaking havoc.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“You danced with me.”
“Yes.”
“And kissed me.”
His eyes were dark on her face. Steady. “Yes. But then, if you’ll recall, I tried to beat some guy up for also kissing you.”
“True. Not smart. But kind of a turn-on.”
“We can be glad our exes were such idiots,” he said.
“Definitely.”
He stepped toward her then and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, rested his head against hers. They stood there, and she could feel the forces that drew them together, but quieter now, at bay for the moment. Later tonight she’d want him to tear her clothes off again and make love to her slowly, thrusting and withdrawing, his body over hers, his breath against her cheek when his mouth wasn’t on hers. But right now she wanted this. This time together, a sacred space in the madness, an acknowledgment of the magic.
* * *
“What made you want to be a sixth-grade science teacher?”
They sat at a cozy table in a corner of his favorite restaurant, the Farmhouse Table in Cleveland Heights. Two music venues and the art-house theater were right near there, and they could linger as long as they wanted at dinner and then decide what they were in the mood for next. And Miles had in the back of his head that maybe they wouldn’t be in the mood to go out after. Maybe they’d be in the mood to go back to his place. That was what he was already in the mood to do, because he’d spotted a scrap of royal-blue satin on top of the pile of clothes she carried into the bathroom to change for dinner. He’d bet it was somewhere on her person. He bet if he peeled off her pretty flowered top and lifted her long brown skirt, he’d find it.
She paused with her fork still in the papardelle-and-mushroom pasta she’d been demolishing. “I started out wanting to be a doctor. I was pre-med in college, took a ton of science classes. And then someone very wisely suggested I spend a day shadowing a doctor. So I did. And I stood there, watching what she did, thinking, oh, God, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to take people’s lives in my hands like that. Not every day. Not ever, actually.”
She was so animated when she talked, hands moving, her skin glowing, cheeks pink, her eyes bright with excitement. He thought of the conversation he’d had with her on the phone, the urgency of the desire she’d called up in him. Even without visual contact, all her vivacity had found its way across the phone line and under his skin. That was her power over him.
“And then I thought, wait, if this is the best way to understand what a job is like, I should shadow some other people. I asked everyone I knew, my parents’ friends and stuff, if I could go to work with them. I went to work with, like, ten different people, and it all left me cold. Then I went to work with a woman who had been my babysitter when I was a little kid. She was a seventh-grade science teacher. And, honestly, she wasn’t that good at it. I kept thinking, Wait! I have a better way to explain that! I wanted to butt in so bad it hurt to shut up. So I knew.”
He’d like to watch her teach sometime. Maybe he’d go visit her in Boston soon, and he’d ask if he could see her in action.
If there was no criminal charge against him. That would probably put a damper on his ability to spend time inside a middle school.
When she’d asked him if he’d embezzled the money, every little thing inside him ground to a halt. It had become so quiet in his own head that for the first time in months he’d been able to hear something else. His heart. He wanted, with a kind of fervor he couldn’t understand, to tell her everything. How terrible it was to be accused, how terrible it was to be doubted, how quietly desperate it felt, knowing no one believed he was innocent.
It was connected somehow to the moments he’d first seen her, at the party. To the way she’d been then: So open, so completely in the world. So willing to pull everyone else in with her. If only he could pour everything out to her, he could be there, too. With her.
But when he had opened his mouth, none of that came out. Only the barest facts, the simplest delineations of what you could read in a newspaper. His assertion of his own innocence had felt like way too little, way less than he needed her to know. Not an invitation into the world, just a reminder that he was in a place no one else could live in with him.
“Miles?”
“Sorry.”
“You went somewhere.”
“I was thinking about—” But he didn’t want to return them to the darker topic, didn’t want to suffocate her ebullience. Didn’t want to subdue the sparkle that was all over her skin, something he could lick off later and hope would get into his own blood. “You’re lucky you had someone to tell you to do the shadowing. I don’t think enough people think to do that.”
“They don’t,” she agreed. “How’d you figure out what you wanted to do?”
“I was in I-banking after college. Not because it was the right thing for me particularly, but I was graduating and I didn’t know what I wanted to do and it was there. They came right on campus to recruit us, and it was a solution to not knowing, so I did it. And I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money—”
He heard the words coming out, felt them like a slug in the gut. He’d said that phrase a hundred times, probably a thousand times, told the same story to countless people, but for the first time, it was ugly.
“Shh,” she said. She took his hand across the table.
The warmth of her hand, the warmth in her eyes, helped steady his breathing. Again he felt the urge, the need, to pour himself out to her. I’m innocent! It would be a kind of anguished cry, an insistence bigger than the words. I’m innocent, and I need you and everyone in the whole world to know and see.…
Help me. Help me tell them.
And maybe she would. If there was anyone in the world who would, it was Nora.
“It’s fine. I know what you meant. Go on.”
Her voice, so quiet and even. Free of judgment. She wasn’t disturbed by his situation, but she might be turned off by his desperation.
And he’d been stoic so long, he wasn’t sure what would happen if he stopped. He’d made a science out of the stoicism, knew exactly how to wrap his arms around all the pieces and hold them together. The thing inside him—it had the feel of a genie in a corked bottle, all unintended consequences and wishes for things you could only approach, could never have. Weren’t fairy tales full of those kinds of stories? I want her to know what I’m thinking. Feeling. Only no one did, really. No one wanted to be that kind of naked and exposed.
He swallowed it—the bigness of what he desperately wanted to say—and went on with his story, more careful this time to listen to his own words. He wouldn’t say something like that again. Something that might make her doubt him. I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money. Jesus.
“It didn’t feel like the right thing for me to be doing, taking people’s money and using it to grow this big business, this too-big-to-fail bank. I didn’t hate it—I loved the thrill of it, convincing people to take my word for where their money would work hardest for them. But I had this sense that the ends didn’t justify the means. And then one of my customers started asking me about investing in some ‘do-good’ companies and nonprofits and so on, and things started to take shape in my mind. I went back to school, got a nonprofit management degree, started my organization, and the rest is more or less history.”
“So it didn’t start with some huge philanthropic vision. You kind of found the philanthropy.”
“It found me.”
“You love it?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re good at it?”
He could only nod. Several months before the investigation had opened, his organization had appeared on a national list of the best-run charitable organizations. He remembered thinking, This is the beginning. Everything good from here on out. His alma mater, Yale, had contacted him about an interview for the alumni magazine, a short feature on his organization and him. After news had broken about the investigation, the magazine editor had called him back to put the project “on hold.”
Even if he was acquitted, the Internet would never be sponged free of links between his name and the crime. The stain would follow him, and it would corrupt Nora, too, if she stayed in his life. She wouldn’t lose her job, but she might have trouble finding subsequent ones, because there would be guilt-by-association issues. Especially if they combined their finances. If they—
Had he been about to let himself think that? If they got married.
Fifteen minutes at the party plus four phone calls plus one day was still only a day of knowing her. It was just the way she’d occupied his mind for months, just the wanting, that made it feel like longer.
The waitress came and cleared their plates. “Can I leave dessert menus with you?”
He raised an eyebrow at Nora, and she nodded vehemently. He laughed, and the cloud lifted for a moment. Over and over she made him feel as if things were somehow, improbably, going to be okay, the kind of okay her whole world seemed to be made of.
He wanted to believe in it. He desperately did.
“Miles?” she asked, when the waitress was gone.
“Yeah?”
“Can we make another date? Like, for another weekend? You could come to Boston.”
“Of course,” he said.
“And if money’s an issue … You said—”
“We’ll make it work.”
But, despite his certainty, his heart beat against his ribs like something trying to escape, and he wanted to hold his hands there to keep it where it belonged. So many things he didn’t know: where the money would come from, how they would handle the thousand miles between them, how she would react if he was charged with embezzlement, if the case went to trial, if he was found guilty, if he went to jail…
She was gazing across the table at him with such earnestness, such openness, that it made his chest hurt. Shocking that a woman whose boyfriend had slept with another woman for nine months without telling her could still have that kind of willingness to open herself up.
He didn’t understand how she did it, how she could stand to be out there so far, on a limb, all her feelings raw like they were. He wanted to crawl back inside himself and zip up.
“Miles.” She put her hand over his. “Don’t panic. It’s just another date.”
“I think we’re past ‘just.’ I think we flew past ‘just’ sometime shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve.”
She laughed. “You may be right.”
“I’m not panicking the way you think. I’m not panicking about us. I’m panicking about me. I don’t know anything. Nora, I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t have to know anything,” she said. “You only have to—it’s a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other thing.”
One foot in front of the other. Just another date.
He could do this. He wanted to do this. For her. With her.
He turned his hand over and squeezed hers tight. “What are you doing next weekend?” In the wide-openness of her expression, something softened further, and he felt an echo in his chest.
“Hanging with you.” Within the cup of his hand, the smooth back of hers slid along his palm, a caress. A suggestion.
He almost couldn’t bear it—not her touch, not the sense of release her expression had provoked in him, not the answering rebound of fear, the way his brain wanted to lock down on his hopefulness. Nothing’s changed. You’re still a suspect. You’re still broke. You’re still a liability.
Unfit.
The waitress hesitated a few feet from their table.
“Can I … get you some dessert?”
Molten chocolate cake for Nora. A cup of decaf for Miles.
The waitress absorbed the order and stepped away, and Nora grinned at him. “Let’s go dancing. I want to dance with you again.”
Her words called up all the visual and tactile memories of Nora—dancing, the way she’d looked, the way she’d felt against him—and he was well on his way to hard. He dug in his pocket for his phone so he could look up clubs in Cleveland Heights. “Damn it. Left my phone in my jeans when we changed to come here.”
“I’ll look it up. I gotta run to the ladies’ room first.” She stood up and moved around the back of her chair.
He reached out a hand. “Leave your phone with me—I’ll look it up while you’re gone.”
She started to rummage through her bag for her phone, then stopped.
He didn’t understand at first. The way she hesitated, the apology forming in her eyes.
Then he got it.
She didn’t want to give him her phone. She didn’t trust him with it.
You’re an idiot, his brain informed him. You’re accused of embezzlement. She’s going to leave her phone with you and go to the bathroom?
—She said she believed you were innocent.
There are a million miles between saying you believe someone’s innocent and letting them hold an electronic device that probably contains every password and bank-account number and contact she’s ever collected in her life.
But his brain didn’t want to let it go.
—She said…
His agitation rose, and he clamped down on it. “Okay. That’s okay.” He said it as much to himself as to her. “We’ll look it up when you get back.” His voice was as steady as he could make it. No accusation. She didn’t deserve accusation or defensiveness. She had every right to fear him. To fear the life he could offer if they kept this up. Weekends here and there, oases in uncertainty. Long distance, hard work, money spent to bring them together, and for what? So he could drench her in his shame? So he could make her wait while he served jail time?
Red circles had risen on her cheeks. She pushed her phone across the table toward him, her gaze not quite meeting his, as if she were looking at his right cheek but not into his eyes.
He didn’t reach for it.
A chasm had opened under his feet, and he realized that it described the exact dimensions of whatever had, earlier in the meal, been locked up inside his chest. He’d known it was big but not exactly how big, how Grand Canyon, impossibly, soul-swallowingly large.
He still hadn’t taken the phone.
“I don’t like to leave my phone with anyone. Not even my mother.”
He’d never heard her sound so uncertain. Not even that first time she’d called him, when her words had almost been a question: “This is … the woman you kissed at midnight at that New Year’s Eve party?”
“You don’t have to apologize. It’s okay.”
But it was not. It was so far from okay. Because the chasm beneath him was the distance between what she’d said earlier—that she was convinced of his innocence—and what he needed her to believe: That he was not the kind of man who could ever in a million years have done what he was accused of doing. That he would no more have taken that money than he would have murdered his mother in her sleep.
But, more to the point, it was the distance between what he craved—a life with her—and the reality of what he could have. Between what he wanted to give her—everything—and what he could give her—only disquiet and awkwardness.
His throat hurt. His chest. God damn it, his ears.
He saw her across the table as if across that whole vast distance, the wonder and brightness of her receding, out of his grasp.
* * *
She’d meant every word she’d said earlier. She believed him that he hadn’t stolen the money. She’d stand up for him if someone questioned his innocence. She was in this with both feet.
But, as she’d feared, Henry had planted distrust in her, deeper than she could weed out. The moment with her phone had caught her off guard, and because it had, it had told the truth. A test Miles hadn’t meant to construct, a test that neither of them had seen coming.
She’d been willing to move forward with him, to commit her weekends, to commit herself. In theory. But when push came to shove, she’d balked. She trusted him with her heart but not with her phone. She didn’t believe, not completely, that he was innocent.
Oh, Henry. What have you done?
“I—” she tried.
“Nora, please. Just … let’s drop it.”
“I do trust you.” And then, when he glared at her to tell her she couldn’t bullshit him like that, she pushed the phone toward him another few inches, knowing it was futile. He turned away from it, as she’d known he would. Too little, too late.
He’d asked for something she wanted—needed—to be able to give him, and she couldn’t. Because Henry had taken it away.
Miles had said he’d come to Boston and see her. He’d been honest with her about his doubts; he’d overcome them to take the next step with her. And she’d failed him when he asked her to take the next step with him.
“I—Miles, I’m so sorry. It was a knee-jerk thing. I have trust issues. Henry …”
It sounded like an excuse. A paltry one.
“It doesn’t mean I don’t believe you’re innocent. It doesn’t mean anything. It was just—I’m weird about my phone.”
“You don’t have to apologize. You got dumped by a guy who cheated on you for nine months. You’ve known me a day.”
So kind. His voice so even and patient.
Of course, he had his own trust issues. A fiancée who hadn’t been willing to stick by his side, and now Nora wanted so desperately to take it all back. Her hesitation. Her attempts at excuses. Even her apology. But some things couldn’t be taken back. Some things, once they were out there in the world, were there.
She needed to say, I know you didn’t; I know you’re innocent, as she had earlier today, before the truth of her feelings had been tested. Before she’d had to lay her world in the palm of his hand and leave the room.
She opened her mouth, but the words she needed to say wouldn’t come out. She just stood there, looking at the hurt on his face. Looking at the despair on his face, which she’d put there.
He said again, “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. It was really not okay. She’d hurt him and she could see that he’d gone to some kind of weird dark place. “Miles,” she attempted. “I ninety-five percent believe you’re innocent.”
She watched as the pain on his face transmuted into something harder. Sometimes it was better to shut up. Sometimes you dug yourself into a hole and you needed to stay there and reflect on how dumb you’d been to get there instead of scrambling up the unstable walls and triggering a cave-in.
“It’s fine, Nora. I can’t ask more than that of you. Of course I can’t. I don’t want to be unreasonable about it.”
“You’re not being unreasonable. It’s not unreasonable to want people to have some faith in you—”
He shook his head. A denial of that possibility.
The waitress brought his coffee and her dessert, and they sat across from each other, but the cake had no flavor. She watched as the edge of her fork released an ooze of chocolate, but when she put the first bite in her mouth, it might as well have been dirt. “I’m sorry,” she tried again.
“Please don’t beat yourself up about it, Nora.”
He wouldn’t look at her. She’d lost him. He’d shut down some part of himself, the part that she’d reached out to at the New Year’s Eve party, the part that she’d awakened and taken into herself.
She stopped talking, because she hated all the words that came out, but that didn’t mean the words in her head had stopped. Pleas: Don’t shut me out, Miles. Defenses: But, Miles, you can’t expect—it’s not fair. Even an unexpected wash of anger: I’m doing my best, Miles.
Between them, at the table, there was silence now.
He drove her back to his house, and it was painful being next to him in the car. He was in there somewhere, but she couldn’t feel him. It was as if he were wearing his skin as a force field and she didn’t have the tools to break it down. She’d been exiled from him. The way it had been all those months after the party, when she didn’t know how to find her way back to him. Miles Shepard could hide from the world and he could hide from her, and if he wanted to hide, she didn’t know how to find him.
She was afraid he would put her in the guest room, and she didn’t think she could stand that. She thought if he did that, she would cry herself to sleep. But what he did was worse. He let her climb into bed with him, and when she turned to him, he made love to her. Exactly the way she’d imagined it would be in the bed, the two of them, in the dark. The light deprivation awakening her senses, her skin lit with the feel of his smooth skin, his rough hair, the heat of his body. The scent of him filling her, overflowing her. The rough sounds of his breathing, his grunts, the held-back moans and whimpers of hers. His entry into her languid, exquisite, an easy, slow slide, spreading and stretching and making the tears she’d been holding back trickle out the corners of her eyes as he moved over her, braced up on his arms, his face nearly invisible over hers. She wanted to hold herself back the way he could hold himself back, but she had no idea how to do that, and so her body melted and she lost all her boundaries, like quicksilver running across the floor to meld and merge into the larger puddle. And the sensation was like quicksilver, too, bright and metal-sharp and soft and round and definitionless, everywhere, and she recognized what this sex was, knew its identity as well as she’d known him when she’d first seen him across the room.
Goodbye.