Completely (New York 3)

“I pushed you.”

“Doesn’t mean I had to snap at you.”

“No.” She pressed her cheek against his shirt. “If we go back to the hotel, can we watch rubbish television together, or will your mother wake up?”

“She sleeps like the dead.”

Kal watched her chuck the test into the bathroom trash.

They drove back to the hotel. Rosemary brushed her teeth and got into bed in panties and his T-shirt again. Kal stripped to boxers and laid down beside her.

He turned on the TV and found the guide channel, but he didn’t like reading the listings. He started flipping through the options. Rosemary extracted the remote from his grip and returned to the guide. She entered a channel number.

“What’d you pick?”

“I’ve no idea. Something with an exciting name that isn’t sports.”

It turned out to be a show about a family of eccentric white people who lived off the grid in backwoods Alaska. It kept cutting from bizarre interviews to action sequences where the grown boys did things like go hunting or attach an enormous metal barrel to tree trunks with ropes and attempt to ride it. The only women were the mother, malnourished and careworn, and a teenage daughter, who spoke of her brothers and her cats with the same excessive degree of romantic attachment.

“This is truly unsettling,” Rosemary said after a while.

“White people are terrifying,” Kal agreed.

She flipped the channels until she found another reality show, this one about dropping white people with ADHD from helicopters into the wilderness with rudimentary tools and no map and then filming what happened next.

/> “I suppose he must live,” Rosemary observed. “Or else it would be a very odd sort of show.”

“If he was starving or whatever, he could eat the cameraman.”

“There must be a whole crew of cameramen, sound, lights.”

“There’s six dudes outside the frame wearing fleece jackets and rain pants and eating granola out of Ziploc baggies.”

“Watching this shirtless man talk about how he can filter river water through his bandanna to survive.”

They watched it all the way through to the end, their bodies drifting closer beneath the covers, their breathing falling into sync.

If she didn’t have to leave, Kal wondered, would the day ever come when he stopped wanting to be around her all the time?

He couldn’t imagine it.

She found an old movie about teenagers fighting Communists, draped her thigh over his, settling against his chest with a sigh. Kal powered off the TV and flipped off the light.

“You’d better go bunk up with my mom.”

“In a minute.” She pressed her warm skin against his, smooth and familiar but no less exciting. Like it would always be this good, would always hit him in the gut this comfortable, would always feel like home.

She felt like home. That was what it was.

Rosemary was the only thing that made sense to him in the whole crazy world, and he wanted that feeling to be enough.

It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. But knowing didn’t change how he felt.

Kal held her against him, rubbing his hand up and down her back as her breathing shallowed and she fell asleep. Thinking about everything he’d told her at the restaurant and what she’d said in response.

Maybe you missed a step where you were supposed to ask, or listen.

He’d brushed her off, bristling at the idea she could have anything to say that might help him. But the words came back to him in the dark hotel room, leaving Kal wondering what she’d meant.