I saw him silhouetted in the headlights before I even cut the VW’s engine. He was sitting in the wet grass under the huge white summer moon, watching the river rush past and tossing a baseball up in the air. Just tossing it and catching it, tossing it and catching it.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with insomnia tonight.
He didn’t turn around or interrupt his solitary game of catch, but he knew it was me. Who else could it have been at this hour of the night, at this particular latitude and longitude?
I turned off the headlights and got out of the car. The summer night was hushed but alive with crickets and mosquitoes and the cool breeze rising off the river. Blades of grass tickled my toes through my sandals as I stood on the overgrown dirt road I’d taken to get here. Our old stomping ground.
I took two steps toward Flynn and waited.
I could see the tension straining the shoulders of his T-shirt, which was bleached even paler than usual by the moonlight.
Given the fact that it was the middle of the night and I hadn’t expected company, I was decked out in a pair of Leah’s old white seersucker pajamas and a terminal case of bedhead. I smelled vaguely of shampoo and wet dog, and my left arm was wrapped in a fresh bandage.
It was just me, shipwrecked but salvageable.
I walked up behind him and plucked the baseball out of the air, mid-toss. “You remember when we tried to learn how to play out here?”
He didn’t look up. “I remember you hitting the ball into the river every single time you made contact with the bat. I had to wade in with you to get it because you were scared of leeches.”
My smile surprised me. “That fear was not unfounded. Remember the first time we went skinny-dipping in here? When you…” The sentence died in my throat, because it brought to the surface the things that had gotten us here in the first place. The sex on this sand and the quicksilver panic of the morning after and the rest of our lives without each other.
“I remember a lot of things we did out here,” he said.
I looked at him. He looked at the water.
I sighed and sat down next to him in the rich, damp dirt. I rolled the baseball between my palms. “Well. What now?”
He still refused to turn away from the river. “I specifically asked you not to contact me.”
“It’s not like I stalked you down,” I countered. “This river was my idea, not yours.”
“Right. That explains why I got here first.” We listened to the water lapping at the sand by our toes. “Let me ask you this, Geary. Were you even planning to say good-bye?”
I stopped fidgeting with the baseball and looked him right in the eye. “Knock it off.”
“I guess that answers that question.” He nodded and got to his feet. I couldn’t see his eyes, but his posture was casual. He seemed to consider breaking my heart a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of event.
I stood up too, wiping my palms on my dirt-streaked pajama bottoms. “Don’t just dismiss me like that. I think I deserve a little better from you after everything we’ve been through.”
The moon reflected in those deep autumn eyes. “You know, I used to be able to read you like a book,” he said. “You couldn’t hide anything. The worst poker face in the world. I really liked that about you. But I guess you got better at hiding or I got a lot worse at finding, because I really misjudged you this time. I really thought you had changed.”
“I have. And if you can’t see that…”
But he was shaking his head, his expression one I hadn’t seen for a very long time. He looked stark and stripped down to the essence of himself. “I just can’t keep breaking up with you.”
“Then why the hell do you keep breaking up with me?” My voice broke on the first word, so I let my temper take over.
“I don’t. But it’s kind of a moot point—you leaving me, me leaving you. It still leaves us both in pretty much the same place, doesn’t it?” He gestured to the vast expanse of dark wilderness. “Right here, having this same old conversation. Tell you what. I’ve been sitting here all night, collecting mosquito bites and trying to figure this whole thing out. Why don’t you try it for awhile?” He turned and started to walk away.
“That’s it? ‘Tag, you’re it’ and you cut and run?”
“Smarts, doesn’t it?”
“Flynn, just give me—”
“More time to decide what you want?” He stopped and turned back to face me. “I gave you ten years. And we’re right back where we started. Except now I feel like twice the jackass, because I’m older and wiser and you got me again.”
“I did?” Did he mean what I thought he meant? Or was I just being delusional in my attempt to get something—anything—positive out of this conversation? “What do you mean, I ‘got you’?”
“But that’s my own fault,” he continued, as if I hadn’t interrupted. “I believed what I wanted to believe, instead of what was right in front of me.”
“And what was right in front of you?” I demanded.
“I’m never going to be able to give you what you want. Just go back to L.A. We don’t need a big, drawn-out scene.”
“Why do you keep insisting that I’m going back to California?” I demanded. “Why do you insist in making up my mind for me?”
He narrowed his eyes. “So you’re not going back to L.A.?”
I heaved the baseball out at the river with all my might. “This isn’t about L.A. This is about you refusing to trust me. Ever. It’s all or nothing with you. It always has been. So that’s what we both have now. Nothing.”
Through my shame and my sorrow, I thought I could detect a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “You’re not going to L.A.?”
I threw my hands up and surrendered the last of my pride. “Of course not, you dumbass! Don’t you think I’ve learned one single, solitary, goddamn thing in the last decade?”
He threw me a small, grudging smile. “I do wonder about that sometimes.”
“Well, for your information, I’ve learned a lot.” I straightened my muddy pajama shirt cuffs. “But it doesn’t matter unless you see it, too. If you can’t trust me for who I am now, then please go right ahead and walk away because you never will be able to give me what I want.” I closed my eyes, but I could still see the glow of the moon through my eyelids.
He watched the waves ripple out from the baseball’s watery grave. “I want to trust you. But I can’t be your Ford or whatever it is you feel like reducing me to. I’m not just the backup plan. I’m not perfect. And you’ve decided not to need anyone. You’ve built this little fortress for one. What do you need me for?”
I crossed my arms and peered down at my innumerable shortcomings. The ill-fitting pajamas flapped in the wind, alternating patches of grime and wet with the occasional stray leaf clinging to the seams. “Flynn, of course I need you. And it scares the hell out of me. You were closer to me than my family. Everywhere I went, I carried pieces of you with me. You’re like my own personal Brunelleschi project, which I think I explained to you right before I lost it in Minneapolis, when I also needed you.”
I went for broke under the huge white moon, praying that he would want to step off this precipice with me.
“Don’t say these things if you don’t mean them.” His voice matched his face, a sharp contrast of light and dark.
“How could I not mean them? I’m lost without you. I mean, honestly, look at me. Really look at me.” I leveled my gaze and tied the errant tails on my pajama top around my midriff.
And then I finally admitted it to myself and to him. “I’m afraid to love you, okay? I admit it. But I’m not a lost cause.”
He took a few steps closer to me. “I know you’re not a lost cause.”
“Then don’t give up on us.” My voice was almost as soft as the leaves rustling above us.
Our bodies were half a foot apart. I took a deep breath and reached out to close the distance. My fingers grazed his cheek, trying to memorize the feel of that face in the damp breeze. My heart beat through my entire body, pulsing out to the ground and the sky.
We drank each other in under the stars. I was barely touching him, but I felt emphatically, electrically alive.
“I want to stay here with you,” I said. “And I can say it all day and night, but words don’t mean anything. You’ll have to let me show you.”
And there it was. The sum total of all I had to offer: a promise I couldn’t back up with anything more substantial than the moonlight.
“How can I say no to that?” He stroked my cheek. “Especially when you look so good in those pajamas and I can see right through them.”
You just can’t argue with that kind of logic.
He brushed his lips across mine. I could feel every inch of him through my seersucker ensemble.
Then he pointed to the creek and grinned. “Now would you please go get my baseball?”
This time, I recognized my opening. “Not me. There’s leeches in there.” I batted my eyelashes, the picture of squeamish femininity.
“But do you know who signed that baseball you so carelessly tossed in? Ryne Sandberg.”
“Well, I guess poor Ryne’ll have to stay in the briny deep, because no way am I wading into leech territory,” I said. “Old phobias die hard, you know.”
“I’ll go in with you.” He whispered this offer into the hollow between my ear and my jaw. “And you know what? I don’t think leeches even like Californians. Too smoggy.”
“You go first, then.” I nudged him toward the riverbank.
His eyebrows shot up. “Oh, ladies first. I insist.” He caught me by the waist and started purposefully toward the river.
“Hey! You said you’d come with me,” I protested, digging my heels in, with the result that my sandals lodged in the dark, loamy earth while my feet tripped off toward the river.
He scooped me up into his arms and strode ankle-deep into the water, unmindful of his scuffed brown Timberlands.
“Flynn, seriously.” I wriggled around like a worm on a hook, and he wasn’t even out of breath. “Listen to me. If you drop me in there, I will beat you like a rented mule. Do you know how cold it is in there?”
My bids for freedom resulted in an accidental knee to his ribcage, and we went down, tumbling into the river together. The water was warmer than I’d expected, tepid but fresh like a summer bath. Which was fortunate because we were both drenched, our hair plastered against our necks, our clothes plastered against our skin.
“Nice work, tiger.” He had cushioned my fall with his body, and I could feel his thighs under mine.
“Thank you, darling.”
We kissed and kissed. Things were getting out of hand very quickly. Realizing that we were in danger of drowning at the rate we were going, he pulled me back to the riverbank, where we tossed our wet clothes on the grass and followed them down. This may not sound very romantic, but trust me, what it lacked in hearts and flowers, it made up for in raw, shameless passion.
Our eyes met in the dark, gleaming and feverish while we moved against each other. My heart raced and I could feel things shattering inside me. It was a regular bull in a china shop in there.
“We can’t do this unless we’re sure,” I said.
And then we did, and it was like coming into myself, coming back to myself. Somehow that night, drenched in moonlight and river water, I found a new way home.
Afterward, we lay tangled up in each other, sprawled out on the hood of my car as we watched the stars shift on the horizon.
“So you really want to stay here?” He cradled my head against his bare shoulder.
“I really want to stay here.” I pressed my lips against his chest.
“Well, it’s about damn time.” He paused. “But don’t stay here just because of me. I refuse to argue for twenty years about how I didn’t value your work and killed your career.”
“You think we’ll still be together in twenty years?”
He kissed the top of my head. “Won’t we?”
I could picture it. Closets stocked with high heels and white T-shirts, the Oxford English Dictionary, and ice-fishing gear. A chi-chi, purebred dog named Wayne Gretzky or Gordie Howe. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. I can still write in Minnesota. And I’m thinking about trying to take some more classes. At the U, whatever. Accounting and management stuff. I seem to have small business in my blood.” I waited for him to mock me.
He squeezed me tighter. “But won’t your editor be disappointed about the California assignment?”
“Oh, I’ll do a few snappy pieces on hearty Midwestern fare and he’ll get over it. Besides. I have a little secret for you: I jet lag practically unto death.” I curled up into his warmth. “I want to stay in one place for a while. With you. Even though you’re so stubborn and bossy.”
“Aw.” He laughed. “I have to wipe away a tear.”
“The real question is: Are you willing to bear with me?”
He smiled up at the stars. “Geary, I am a lifelong Cubs fan. What do you think?”
“I think you’re in for a lot of trouble,” I said.
“Hey, they finally made the playoffs last year, right? Hope springs eternal.”