BRENNAN FUMBLED WITH THE DEADBOLT WHILE TRYING NOT to spill the rum and Coke in her hand. She swung the door open to reveal a smiling Sean. She had shed her jeans as soon as she got home after leaving Hunter in the bar, but her sweater was warm, and she didn’t want to contort herself to unsnap her bra, so she poured herself her drink and waited bare legged for help to arrive.
“Hey, sexy,” she said.
He stepped through the door and kissed her. She leaned into the kiss; it was easier to let him support her weight than try to hold herself up. Sean stumbled back a step, nearly into the hallway again.
“Whoa there,” he said, lifting her back upright. The drink sloshed in her glass—or maybe the liquid was still and she was rolling from side to side. Or she and the glass were still as the apartment rocked like a cradle. The physics were complicated.
Sean leaned her against the wall inside her apartment and swung the door shut with his foot. He reached for her glass.
“No,” she said. “Make your own. This one’s mine.”
“Are you okay?”
She shoved him playfully as she made her way to the kitchen. “I’m fine. Wanna drink?”
“Sure.”
The bottle of rum waited on the island separating the kitchen from the living area. She resisted the urge to steady herself against the wall as she set her glass down next to it, opened the fridge, and retrieved the can of Diet Coke she had opened when she got home—after checking all of the rooms and behind the shower curtains. The dark apartment spooked her after the call earlier. It was part of the reason she called Sean.
Sean stood at the end of the island. In the absence of his smile, Brennan found she didn’t want to look at his face.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said as she filled a glass with ice.
“Like what?”
“Like Paul. He used to look at me like that. Conceeeerrned.”
“I’m a little concerned.”
“Don’t be.” She dumped rum into the glass until it was three-quarters full, then abruptly righted the bottle. Stray rum ran down the side. She ran her hand up the length of the bottle collecting the tendrils and then sucked her fingers as he watched. She slid his glass to him.
“You forgot the Coke.”
“Come and get it.”
She hated the feeling that he was humoring her. She wanted to be handled, but not like this. Why didn’t he fucking get it?
Sean hesitated, then approached her, taking the can of soda and pouring some into his glass. There was only room for a splash. When he picked it up, she jabbed her glass at his. The impact sloshed the drinks onto their hands.
“Jesus, Brennan!”
She smiled at him over her glass. “Sorry. Guess you’ll need to punish me.”
Sean shook his head. “You’re trashed.”
“So? Usually you like me trashed.”
“I’m just…I didn’t…This is not what I was expecting.”
Brennan rolled her eyes. She wanted to saunter to the couch, plunge into it, and invite him to sink into her and then go, but her one hip leaned against the counter, and she wasn’t sure that she could push herself away without falling.
“Come on, Sean. Lighten up. I thought my texts were pretty explicit about what I was expecting. It’s why you left your family at home to come here, right?”
Sean’s face darkened like concrete wet with rain. His lust was a string drawn between shame and compassion, vibrating in a deep bass Brennan felt in the pit of her stomach. If she kept plucking, Brennan knew it would break—it always broke the same way.
“You were out with your brother?” Sean asked.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Brennan shoved herself upright. She wobbled, then stumbled around the island to the couch. When she reached it, she stopped, sure that if she reached down to place her glass on the coffee table, she’d collapse.
“I need help,” she said. Sean took her drink and set it down. Brennan sank to the edge of the couch, reached up to hold Sean’s hips, and leaned her head forward against him. She wanted to sleep, that feeling of being dragged into unconsciousness, those ephemeral moments when she shut her eyes and felt herself spinning, body heavy on the bed, alone.
“Last chance,” Sean said. “Do you want to talk? Tell me why you really asked me to come here tonight?”
She might have been able to, bowed against him, in the darkness of her closed eyes, pressed against the rough fabric of his jeans like the mesh screen in a confessional. She could’ve admitted that she wanted to orbit Sean like an outlying planet, close enough to be trapped by his gravity, but too distant for his radiance to warm her—for him to be another point of light indistinguishable from countless untouchable others in her sky. She could’ve whispered to him about the abject loneliness of her certainty, the pain she’d inflicted on the men who loved her, her lifelong betrayals of her father in her moments of doubt or when she elided his existence, the horror that his absence had made her life easier, the preemptive grief that choked her when she visited her dying mother, and the bleak desolation promised by a future without family or friends.
“After she’s gone,” Brennan whispered, “it will be just me and him.”
“I didn’t hear you,” Sean said.
Brennan raised her head to look up at him, blinked the shimmer from her eyes, and began to unbutton his pants.
“I said I need help getting undressed for bed.”
#
“Admit it, you can’t wait to get me undressed,” Jenna said.
Hunter laughed. “I only said I’d rather go topless than wear a Mets shirt.”
“I didn’t know I was going to go out after work,” Jenna said, then smirked. “But keep talking like that and you may blow it.”
“I’d hate to squander a late lead. Although it might remind you of your favorite team. Is that why you invited me out? So I could close better than the Mets?”
“I wanted to unwind after work, but my coworkers are boring.
You—apparently a guy with no friends—said you were available.”
“I was out with my sister.” He wondered if she’d made it home alright.
“So you ditched her to meet me?”
Hunter shrugged, trying to avoid the thought that he should have seen Brennan home. The call she’d received weighed on him the longer the night went on.
“She’d had enough to drink, and I had a cute girl to meet.”
Jenna rolled her eyes at the compliment.
Hunter knew he was drunk, but she delighted him. He hadn’t laughed this much in a long time. They developed a natural, teasing rapport quickly, their banter sprinkled with biographical details like chocolate chips in ice cream. She hailed from some town he’d never heard of near Albany, studied literature at NYU, then worked at a tech company for a few years until it went under a couple of months before. Since then, she waited tables while she worked on a novel and decided what to do next.
“So, you told me before that you’re back in New York between assignments. How long is that?”
Hunter shrugged. “Not to bring the mood down, but my mom is really sick. So, I’m thinking I may stay around until…until that situation is resolved.”
“I’m sorry.” Jenna reached across the table and squeezed his wrist.
“It’s okay,” Hunter said. “She’s been ill for a while.”
“But it changes, right? When the end is imminent? My dad, he got cancer when I was at NYU. It never really went into remission as much as slowed down at times, I guess. So we had a lot of time to get right with the way things were going. You’d think that would help at the end, but it didn’t.”
Hunter set his hand over hers, still on his wrist, and gave it a brief squeeze before withdrawing.
“What about your mom?” he asked.
“Oh, she’s kicking around upstate. Works as an administrator at SUNY Albany.” Jenna sat back and picked up her beer to take a full sip. “What about your dad?”
Hunter thought about lying. Given the turn in conversation, they were more likely to end up crying on each other’s shoulders instead of finding the other comfort he was looking for. “He’s gone. I try not to talk about it. But enough about parents. You know about my sister. What about you? Any siblings?”
“Two sisters. They’re married. One lives in California now. The other is still upstate. It must be nice having your sister nearby. You must be close.”
“No. Not really.”
“I hate to ask, but is it your fault or hers? Checking for red flags.” Hunter didn’t know what his expression looked like, but Jenna’s smile faded. “I’m kidding. I was trying to…I make jokes to keep things light. Sometimes it goes wrong.”
Hunter said, “No, I get that, and I don’t mind. Honestly, it’s really complicated. She’s a good person. Amazing, really. But we see the world differently. Which is a bullshit answer, everyone does, right?”
“Sisters, right? It’s fraught, I get it. But”—she dragged the word out as she dredged her mind for the rest of her thought—“I’m picking up something else. Or I’m reading too much into your face. It’s hard to tell. I don’t know if you know this, but I had a long shift and a couple of drinks. I am, however, really very perceptive.”
Jenna sipped her beer and waited for him to respond. Hunter figured she was used to getting answers with that face and her demeanor—a mix of easygoing sympathy and bemusement that invited disclosures.
“She thinks that I act like I’m not accountable,” Hunter said. “If you asked her, she’d tell you you’re wasting your time. That I ruin things because I can’t admit when I’m wrong.”
“Are you? Wrong?”
“Of course not.” He gave her a rueful smile and dumped the rest of the beer into his mouth.
Jenna studied his face as if his thoughts were broadcasting on a frequency she could find if she could tune him correctly. Hunter considered laying it all out. Even with the boozy teasing, Hunter basked in Jenna’s sincere warmth. It salved something raw inside him—the places he avoided letting the other women he met touch.
Jenna got tired of waiting and asked, “What’s going on in your head?”
After my mother’s gone, my sister is all I’ ll have left is what he wanted to say. But the instinct to keep those areas hidden died hard. As much as he wanted to show her the broken pieces, he didn’t want her to confirm how bad it was.
“Can I be honest with you? My job, the travel, everything about me, my family makes it hard to form real connections. I pretty much only deal with…transient relationships. Flings. Whatever you want to call them. There’s already so much we all carry with us, but something like that? It’s weightless. Just two people being their best selves for each other for an evening. Maybe the next morning.”
Jenna crossed her arms. “That’s a rehearsed bullshit answer.”
Hunter shrugged. “I like to make sure that everyone’s clear-eyed.”
“It’s a little presumptuous.”
“Getting the timing right is tough. Too soon, and I sound cocky. Too late, and I’m an asshole who took advantage of you.”
“You can be both cocky and an asshole even if your timing was good.”
“How was my timing?”
“Honestly, a little early. But I’m not looking for a boyfriend and I’m in a forgiving mood. So let’s get out of here.”