Mrs. Fletcher(87)

“It’s raining out.”

“Come in.” He nodded at the passenger seat. “The heater’s on.”

Eve knew this was her own fault. She never should have sent Julian that picture the other night. It was a stupid, reckless thing to do. And now she had to deal with this. With him. And talking to him—clearing up his understandable confusion, apologizing for the mixed messages she’d sent—was the least she could do.

“Just for a minute,” she said. “I need to get home and make dinner.”

The door didn’t open all the way, on account of his terrible parking job, so it took some doing for Eve to slip into the Volvo. She felt calmer once she was inside, no longer visible from the street.

“I missed you,” he said.

Eve nodded, acknowledging the sentiment, but not quite returning it. They examined each other for a little too long, reacquainting themselves after the winter-long separation. He’d grown out some stubble on his cheeks and chin, a scruffy hipster look that added a couple of years to his face.

“I like your hair,” he said. “It’s really pretty that way.”

“Thank you.”

“I liked it before,” he added quickly, in case she’d taken his compliment the wrong way. “But this is better. You look really hot.”

Eve let out a cautionary sigh that was directed more to herself than to Julian, a reminder not to drift off course, to wander into a conversation that would be a lot more enjoyable (and dangerous) than the one they needed to have.

“Julian,” she said. “That’s really kind of you. But I’m old enough to—”

“I don’t care,” he told her.

“Look.” She shook her head in weary self-reproach. “I know I’ve done some things that have muddied the waters between us, and I’m really sorry about that. But we’re not a couple. We can never be a couple. I think you know that as well as I do.”

He conceded the point without a fight.

“I totally get that.”

“Okay, good.” Eve smiled with relief. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

Julian stared through the windshield—the wipers were still arcing back and forth—with a brooding intensity that reminded Eve of her high school boyfriend, Jack Ramos, a sad-eyed baseball player with an explosive temper. Jack had burst into tears when she broke up with him, and then ordered her to get the fuck out of his car, a yellow VW bug that smelled like dirty socks. There were no cellphones back then, and it had taken her an hour to walk home in the dark. But that had seemed like a reasonable price to pay, because the breakup had been her choice, and she was relieved to be done with him.

Julian reached across the console and took her hand. She was so surprised that it didn’t occur to her to resist.

“I was just hoping we could hook up sometimes,” he said, stroking her knuckles with the pad of his thumb. It was a nostalgic sensation, a memory made flesh. “Nobody has to know but us.”

Eve laughed. She hadn’t seen that coming. Belatedly, and with some regret, she extracted her hand from his.

“Julian,” she said. “That’s not gonna happen.”

“Why not?”

She groaned in disbelief. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Just give me one reason.”

“Are you kidding me? I mean, really. How would we even—”

“My parents are on vacation.”

Eve didn’t understand him at first. She thought he was changing the subject, conceding defeat.

“They’ll be gone all week.” He paused, giving her a moment to catch up. “Come by any night you want. Early, late, I don’t care. Just text me and come on over.”

Eve couldn’t even imagine it. What was she supposed to do? Walk up his front steps and ring the doorbell? Stand there in full view of the neighbors and wait for him to let her in? But it was almost like he read her mind.

“I’ll leave the garage door open. You can just pull right in. There’s a string with a key on it hanging from the ceiling. You can reach it from the driver’s-side window. Give it a tug, the door goes down automatically. No one’ll even see you.”

Eve didn’t know what to say. It sounded like a good plan, simple and totally plausible, if the person pulling the string had been anyone other than herself.

“You’ve given this some thought,” she muttered.

Julian looked at her. His face was serious, full of adult longing. It was like she could see right through the college boy to the man he would one day become.

“It’s all I fucking think about,” he told her.





Coyote


Eve had no intention of sneaking out for a tryst with a nineteen-year-old boy whose parents were away on vacation. Leaving aside the difference in their ages, which was a deal-breaker in and of itself, everything about the scenario felt tawdry and vaguely demeaning—the open garage door, the ticking clock (offer valid for one week only!), the whole booty-call/friends-with-benefits aspect of what he was proposing. It smelled like a surefire recipe for regret, if not disaster. Even the memory of their semi-illicit rendezvous at the Senior Center—the cold rain, the car and the van side by side in an otherwise empty parking lot, the brief interlude of hand-holding—made her feel foolish and a little uneasy in retrospect.