Evvie Drake Starts Over(62)

“Deal,” Evvie said. There was a wide staircase that went to the second floor, and her room was a few steps from the top of it. The lock clunked open satisfyingly, and she swung the door open. A king bed, a dresser, a TV on the wall, and a desk with a vase of roses. She went and lay on the bed, not even slipping off her black flats. She waited to be uncertain, but she was just twitchy, jumpy, waiting for him to knock.

And then he did. “Oh, hello,” she said as he extended her bag toward her. “Thank you very much. Excellent service.”

He looked around her room. “Very nice.”

“Thank you for the flowers.”

“I know they’re a cliché.”

   “For good reason.” As he stood in her doorway, she was struck once again by how tall he was. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know,” he said. “But now it’s going to be very exciting for me when you knock on my door in a few minutes.”

“You seem confident.”

He leaned down until he was only maybe an inch from her. His eyes are as green as a spring leaf flitted across her mind, unbidden and brutally corny and completely true, as he looked lazily at her mouth. “I’m…an optimist.”

She went up on her toes to kiss him and then looked up and down the hall. “I’m not going to make out with you in the hallway,” she said, “because people will stare at us. Now you get over there. And don’t fall asleep.”

“You have to believe me, Ev. I’m not going to fall asleep.” He pulled away from her and disappeared into the room across the hall, and she closed her door.

In the bathroom, Evvie brushed her hair. As she leaned into the mirror and reached up to swipe a speck of something off her cheek, she saw the glint of her rings. Her simple gold band and her diamond solitaire had rarely budged since her wedding. When she tugged on them, they eased over her knuckle and left a ghost stripe across her finger. For a minute she looked down at her hand, her own plain hand, looking like it had when she was eighteen, give or take fifteen years of sun. She set the rings on the vanity and slipped off her shoes. Barefoot, she opened her door and sneaked across the empty hall to 208. She knocked twice.

“Who is it?”

“You know who it is.”

“What’s the password?”

“Advice and consent.”

There was a pause. Then, through a grin she could hear in his voice, he said, “It’s open.”

She went into the room and closed the door behind her, then leaned back against it. Dean was sitting on the bed in his white T-shirt and jeans, with his back against the headboard and his bare feet stretched out in front of him. “Hi there,” she said.

   “Oh, hello, nice to see you,” he said.

She grinned and moved fast, crawling up onto the bed beside him and wrapping her arms around his neck, kissing him in a way that made her feel greedy and great. She couldn’t count the times she’d managed to touch his shoulder, his back, his elbow, his hip—all innocent in theory, but all because she wanted this, this very thing. She slid her hand up under his shirt and he obligingly peeled it right off, demonstrating nothing if not a dexterity that made her instantly grateful for the otherwise kind-of-boring world of professional sports. His fingers crept under the edge of her sweater, but then he paused. He pulled back from her, slightly out of breath, and gazed into her eyes. “What?” she asked. A beat, then another. He kept looking at her. Suddenly, she clapped her hand down on his bare shoulder so hard that it sounded like a slap. “Oh!” she said. “Go. Yes. Go, definitely. Definitely, go.”

He smiled, looking almost shy, and she helped unbutton the sweater and push it back off her shoulders until it fell. He picked up her hand, and he looked down at her fingers, at the ghost stripe, which he kissed. When he let go, she reached out and rested her hand on his right shoulder, where he always rubbed it like it hurt. She let it rest there, then drew her hand down his arm until their fingers tangled together.

When she would think about it later—and she did—it was like someone had spliced together a second or two of a movie at a time, perfectly clear but disjointed and maybe not in order. He had kissed the palm of her hand at one point, which had surprised her. She had pulled off the last of her clothes awkwardly, lying on her back, getting her foot stuck in the leg of her jeans and yanking at them while he teased her: “Get back here. You can leave that if you want. I can work around it.”

“This is going to go slower if you make me laugh.”

Evvie had expected to be self-conscious, feeling air and breath on all of her skin, knowing he was mapping her for the first time, but she wasn’t. She managed to keep her mind inside her body for once. Maybe even briefly subservient to it.

   She could remember she heard herself gasp, and that she reached up to wipe sweat off his forehead. She remembered seeing her hair slide across his bare shoulder. Eagerness bred clumsiness: she got him in the thigh with her knee, he accidentally elbowed her in the stomach, and when he did, she laughed and he kissed her brow bone.

“Is your stomach gurgling?” “Did you crack your knuckle?” “Do you have enough room?” “Are you okay?” “Definitely okay.”

It was different, that was for sure.



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