“Are you secretly my grandma, back from the dead?” I ask, looking at her neck again. “Because you’ve really got the buttoned-up, prim-and-proper thing down.”
In daylight, anyway.
She pushes her glasses up and glares at me, her lips moving the way they do when she’s trying to stay mad and not smile.
“Yes,” she deadpans. “I am, in fact, a deceased hundred-year-old white southern woman and I’ve donned this clever disguise so I can tell you to mind your manners, open doors for ladies, and wait until marriage because they won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk for free. Want my recipe for cheese grits and… what’s that thing you claim is a vegetable?”
I bump my knee into hers again, grinning.
“Collards are a vegetable.”
“Sure.”
I lean forward in my chair until my elbows are resting on the desk and my arm is touching her hip, a single escaped strand of hair moving with my breath.
“Did it work?” I ask, searching for it.
“Yes, it worked,” she says. “Did you see the picture? I look like I lost a fight with a vacuum cleaner.”
I grin, and our gazes meet as she tries not to smile. I lower my voice further.
“Did Meckler hate it, I mean.”
“He doesn’t know it’s there,” she says. I’m leaning further in and she’s not moving, just standing there in this perfectly casual pose, the only giveaway to her state the tension in her shoulders. “I put a pound of concealer over it because I’m not walking into my workplace with that visible on my neck, no matter how jealous it might make him.”
Finally, I see it: a splotch on her neck that’s not quite the same shade of tawny gold as her skin, and beneath it the faintest suggestion of a bruise, so faint it might be my imagination.
Say please, she said, and instead of saying it I pulled harder and she made the quietest groan and swore in a whisper and now she’s here, all sharp and spiky and pretending to be angry about it.
I stand before I do something else stupid.
“Sorry,” I say, even though I’m not sure I am. I rest my hands on her bare shoulders, feel her muscles like high-tension wires.
“Are you a teenager?” she asks, matching my voice, giving me a look upward through her glasses. “Am I your first girlfriend and you’re so excited for the whole football team to know you’re dating a real live person that you’ve gotta do this?”
“It’s pretty good proof,” I agree. “They’d be impressed.”
She glares. I grin.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’ll respect the addendum. It was an accident.”
I don’t tell her why it was an accident, that I got lost in the sounds she was making, in the hot velvet of her skin. That all I wanted was for her to keep making those noises and I didn’t think about one single consequence.
For fifteen years now, everyone around me has been dating, falling in love, settling down and embarking on new, coupled lives. They’ve been getting married or not, having kids or not, but by now most people I know are coupled off and heading down a path I can’t follow. The only people who aren’t are the other Wildwood guys, but that’s a matter of time, too.
I thought it would be me, of course. I thought I’d follow the same pattern as anyone, that I’d get over my issues and find a nice woman and settle down, probably get married and have some kids, but then I didn’t. I tried. I met people and went on dates and had relationships, but I could never make it work out.
It was a relief to stop trying. It was a relief to accept a life alone. It was a relief to stop looking for romance and start looking for other kinds of love in other places: the family I was born into, the family I’ve made, the people as important to me as any romantic partner.
It was a relief to accept sex as a means to satisfaction, an occasional and pleasant experience with no strings attached. Something I liked and enjoyed, but wouldn’t make a fool of myself for.
And then Kat showed up, glittering and sharp and angry, and I’ve been staring at hickeys and jerking off in the shower before work.
She nods once, her stance softening.
“Thank you.”
“We still on for coffee later?”