This Place of Wonder (64)

If only. It just doesn’t work that way. Not for me. Not for the millions and millions of people who are also plagued with this addictive thing in a world where it’s perfectly normal to drink, and keep drinking, and laugh about going overboard and even blacking out, and make Mommy-wine memes about the stresses of parenthood driving you to the bottle, and you have to explain why you don’t drink rather than why you do. If people quit smoking, the world says, “Oh hey, good for you.” If you quit drinking, they peer at you and say, “Why?”

I bend my face into my hands, my cast banging against my cheekbone, and let the shame escape my body through my tears. I resist crying, but my counselor insisted I allow it back into my life, and I’ve been trying. For long moments, I just let the hot emotions flow out of me, tears of shame and tears of regret and tears of frustration, feeling tension ease along with them.

“Hello?” says a gentle voice. “Are you all right?”

Ayaz. I keep my head bent for a moment, trying to get myself together, but it’s not stopping. “I’m fine,” I say.

“Hmm. Here, take this.”

I peek through my fingers to see a big white handkerchief, snowy clean, and accept it. “Thanks.” I wipe my face and my nose, compose myself. “Sorry.”

“No, no. I am the intruder. Shall I leave you?”

His soft British voice is so soothing, I shake my head. “You can stay.” I gesture to the other chair beneath the tree. “Watch the surfing with me.”

“I brought ginger tea,” he says, and opens an old-fashioned thermos, pouring liquid into the plastic cup. “It cures many things.”

I smile. Beneath everything, I become aware that my broken wrist is starting to throb along with my heartbeat. I prop it on the arm of the chair. “Would you mind doing me a favor?”

“Not at all.”

“There’s a bag of melting ice in the sink. Would you dump it out and refill it?”

“Of course.”

“There are cookies, too, if you like. They might be nice with the tea.”

He flashes a smile, not very big, but it transforms his rather severe face into something kinder, younger.

At least the pregnancy solves this problem. We’re meant to be friends only, so I don’t have to engage the part of me that’s vividly attracted to his gentle competence, his beautiful eyes, his deep calm. I think of him on the beach, slowly going through a tai chi sequence. I’ve never known anyone so calm.

The tea is warm and soothing, and the high angst of moments before slips away. A breeze dries my face, eases the heat of shame. There is nothing I can do about the past anyway, so I might as well be here now.

“Here you are,” he says, returning with the ice and a bag of cookies, which he sets gently on the table between us. The ice he settles on my cast, inclining his head as he holds it there. “Is that right?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He sits on the chaise sideways, facing me. He wears a wheat-colored linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his tanned forearms, revealing a silver bracelet carved with symbols. His elegant hands are beautiful, as I’ve noticed before.

“I hope it’s all right that I checked on you,” he says. “I worried that you were alone with a broken bone.”

“You’re a kind person. I appreciate it.”

He only nods.

“I ended up not being alone, actually. My dad’s girlfriend . . . showed up, and she was remarkably kind.”

“That’s good, yeah?”

“Yes.” In the dappled sunshine beneath the tree, he looks like everything good and calm in the world. His eyes rest on my face without judgment. “It’s not hurting so much this morning. I was having a little breakdown over . . . everything. My dad. The winery. The whole big”—I wave my hand around—“everything.”

“I have had those moments,” he says, lifting his face to the sunshine and closing his eyes briefly.

“It’s hard to imagine.”

“What is?”

“You, having a meltdown.”

A smile crinkles his eyes. “Perhaps our methods are different, but the emotion is the same.”

A low stirring washes through me and I realize I’m reacting to the scent of him, salty and green, layered with faint perspiration in his hair or on his skin, which seeps into my pores and slams into my heightened hormones and gives me a picture of kissing him, not lightly, but with extreme and possibly sloppy attention. A lusty heat burns my cheeks.

I take a breath, look away, focus on the horizon. After a moment, it cools. When I look back, I see that he’s studying my face, my throat, and some of the same heat burns across his temples. He sees me looking, drops his gaze to his steepled fingers.

And then we just sit there in awkward, burning silence. The old me would have set aside the ginger tea, offered a hand, and taken him upstairs, living for the moment.

The me I am in this minute doesn’t want to risk the friendship I feel here, and he has come to visit, so it’s up to me to make it more comfortable. I pick up the bag of cookies and offer it with my good hand.

Only then do I remember that I’m braless beneath my thin T-shirt, my breasts swinging with the gesture to reveal their unbound state. It feels weirdly slutty, but why? It’s perfectly normal to be braless on my own patio, when a broken arm means a bra is a massive challenge.