Flying Solo(34)

They sat at one of the tables, and Laurie ran her hand over the smooth top. “Very nice, very classy.” She touched a metal plate near the edge of the table that was engraved with block letters: POLLY SHAHEEN. “People sponsored tables?”

“My dad is a creative fundraiser,” he said. Nick handed over what he’d printed downstairs and a yellow highlighter. “In case anything looks interesting,” he said.

“It matches my flowers,” she said. And now, maybe, just a little bit, he was blushing?

As this new quiet, this promising and loaded quiet, fell on them, she looked over, out the east windows. From up here, the upper floor of the highest corner in Calcasset, you could see all the way to the water a few blocks away. Boats that would be anchored until very early in the morning bobbed in the harbor and bells rang, and the little orange blots were knots of buoys tied up so they wouldn’t get away. “You have a nice view here.”

The swell in her chest looking out that window was matched by how hopeless it felt to try to talk about it. Talking about this view was like talking about the weather—just a nod to a slice of reality that instantly flattened it. There wasn’t much for him to say, so she wasn’t surprised to feel his hand pick up hers and just hold it, and when she looked over, he was looking back. Their chairs pushed together, they both slumped down, sat back, let their necks rest on the backs of the chairs. “You take good care of this place,” Laurie said.

“It’s come back from the dead a lot, you know?”

“You must be really proud of it. Everybody loves you.”

“It’s not me,” he said. “It’s the library. This is one of the few places in this entire town people are allowed to just come and be. Even when they don’t need anything, they turn up and rattle around. I have a lady who comes once a month and reads upstairs while her house gets cleaned. I have a guy who I was pretty sure was living in his car who used to come in when it was cold, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know where he went this last winter. But we haven’t closed yet. It’s my job for the place not to go under, and we haven’t.”

She looked over at him. “You’re a damn good person, Cooper.”

Their heads were turned toward each other, just looking, and then she was the one—at least she was pretty sure she was the one—who started it, who sat up and leaned over to kiss him, putting her palm against his cheek. His hand was on the back of her neck and she felt it everywhere, just everywhere. And more than twenty years after the last time it had happened, it felt exactly like kissing him when he was sixteen and also nothing like it at all. It was familiar and totally foreign, like it felt when she hadn’t driven stick for seventeen years and then borrowed June’s old Civic. She still had the moves, even if she was very much out of practice.

Nick kissed, as he always had, with a certain amount of what she could only call conviction. It was notable particularly after she’d spent more than a year with Chris, who kissed with something more like resignation. Chris kissed only to get to sex more quickly, and while it wasn’t bad kissing, and it wasn’t bad sex by any means, kissing was not its own reason for them to wind their bodies around each other on a couch or in bed, first thing in the morning or at the end of a movie. Nick had kissed thoroughly, even as a guy who was as young and dumb as she had been back then, because he liked to. He apparently still liked to.

He didn’t have that jacket anymore, of course, that jacket with the shearling collar. So she took two fistfuls of his shirt and pulled him tighter, hearing herself gasp for breath, hearing one of them—both of them?—make little sounds from their throats. And then she stopped, pulled back, looked into his eyes. Literally panting, literally trying to get air, literally breathless. It popped into her head completely unbidden: And I’m gonna be forty!…Someday!

Finally, she let her hands trail down the front of his shirt.

He smiled and slid his hand up from her hip, over her waist, up to the side of her breast, and he said, “Want to go someplace and fool around?”

She dabbed the corner of her mouth with her thumb and smiled. “I’m a short-timer, Cooper.”

He shrugged. “Want to fool around for a short time?”

Yes, I do please, yes, I very much do please, let’s flop on top of the table please, I don’t even mind if I fall off. But when she looked at him again, she felt herself falling through twenty years, hearing him ask her why they had to break up when they only had two more years to be apart and they’d already done two years. Why couldn’t it work? What was the problem? Oh, dammit, dammit. She took his hand from her side, moved it. “Nick, I don’t know. I really want to. I really, very much want to, you know that. But I…don’t know.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

She could not say you are too good. She could not say this will only get worse. So she just put her hand over his. “I’m really leaving. I’m not moving back.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

“I know I started…that. I did. And I’m not trying to be weird about it, I just don’t want to start something pretending it’s going to be anything other than what it can actually be. And as much as I’d like to just sink into this for a few more weeks, I think it’s going to get really complicated.”

He nodded and hooked his finger through hers. “Fair enough. Probably just as well. The Missing Laurie Sassalyn routine knocked the wind out of me when I was twenty. I don’t know if I’d be able to do it again a month from now. I kind of thought maybe a little nostalgia thing, you know? But you’re right, I’m not sure I know how to wade into this with only one foot, now that I’m here.”