The Forgotten Hours(64)

“Yes, I remember that,” Jack said.

“Right then,” she said, “for me, it felt like everything was possible. It was all going to happen, and there was so much of it. All good. And then, yeah. It all went fucking haywire.”

They couldn’t hold each other’s eyes anymore. She wondered about the years he hadn’t told her much about—the lost years of drugs and drinking and unhappiness. It wasn’t clear if all that was really over yet.

“I’ll be back,” she said, sliding over the bench. “Ladies’ room.” When she stood up, the martinis hit her with full force. She tripped a little, lurching toward the bathroom. The cold water on her face was a huge relief. Four, five deep breaths, and she felt better. Her cheeks were deeply flushed. She would ask him more about Lulu. What she was doing now, whether she seemed happy. A sudden sob clutched her throat. It had been so long since she’d had a friend like Lulu, since she’d felt that kind of complete connection. No one in college or in the city had come close to being an adequate substitute. There had been plenty of nice girls, girls to go out with, to get drunk with, to share stories with. But not the stories that really mattered.





29

Emerging from the ladies’ room, Katie squinted to adjust her eyes. Someone bumped into her in the dark hallway. It was Jack.

“Katie, can I, can I just . . .” he said, as though he were short of breath. He cupped his hands over her shoulders. The tips of his fingers pressing on her bones were like warm stones on her skin, pinpoints of sensation; the pressure was a shock. And then he leaned forward and put his mouth on hers and kissed her, barely, as though asking for permission. He tasted like beer, like summertime; he smelled of warmth and sun. The tension in her body seemed to focus all in one place, at the base of her neck, and her skin began to prickle, rain on water, needles on skin. She couldn’t think. She kissed him back. The release was instant, a swooping sensation that was irresistible and sickening.

He leaned against her with his full weight then, pressing her to the wall. Soon she was lost in the feeling of weightlessness. It seemed to have its own momentum, a kind of inevitability. The skin of his face was rough against her lips.

Her phone rang, and she ignored it. A patron walked past them, briskly edging his way down the hall, but they didn’t pause. It was like being submerged in warm water. She was light, yet her limbs were oddly heavy too. A terrible urgency gripped her. They couldn’t hold each other closely enough. Jack slipped his hands under her shirt, and her skin burst into flame. His hip bones dug into her. The phone rang again.

She pulled away a little and caught her breath.

“No, no,” he murmured. “Don’t.”

She met him again in a kiss and pressed her fingers into his back. But the feeling of elation didn’t last; the urgency wasn’t what they’d thought—it wasn’t erotic; it was desperate. In that instant she saw that the dreams she’d had of this man were misplaced. Those memories of the time they’d shared as kids had assumed a significance, a kind of bloated purity, that was all out of proportion with reality; they had been sweet moments she could hang on to, promises of how life could have been. But it wasn’t real. Jack was not the solution. Jack was part of the problem. This was not going to work.

“Hold on—hold on a second,” she cried, recoiling when her phone buzzed with a message. She was heavy lidded with desire. She ran her tongue over her lips. “We have to stop. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a mess right now.”

“Shit,” he said. “Katie—”

“I have to deal with my life. Sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Fuck,” he said.

Wiping a hand over her mouth, she squeezed her eyes shut. Her lips were raw and swollen. “It’s always going to be the wrong time for us.”

“Don’t . . .” he said, and he drew his breath in sharply. “Don’t think about everyone else, for once. Think about what you want!”

“It’s just wrong. I’m trying to figure things out.” She stepped away, pressing her back against the wall. The black of his pupils was enormous. “We were just teenagers, Jack. Now we’re grown-ups.” But even as she said this, the low-slung excitement was still there in her stomach—the thrill of behaving badly, of breaking the rules. Of sinking recklessly, wanting something that she predicted wouldn’t end well for her. She pulled the strap of her bag up to her shoulder and began to head back toward their table.

“I didn’t tell the whole truth,” Jack called out to her. He was still in the darkened hallway, leaning against the wall. “On the stand.”

“How do you mean?” Katie swiveled to face him. The hair on her arms prickled. “You didn’t see them, through the window?”

“No, no, that was true: I did see them, your dad and her.” He scrubbed at his thick blond hair, pushing it back again and again. The bright blue of his hummingbird tattoo peered out from the edges of his T-shirt sleeve, like an iridescent petal catching the light. “But something else happened. Something pretty bad. Earlier that night.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Katie said, feeling faint.

“I knew I should tell someone, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure, you know—was it really relevant?”