Madly (New York 2)

Oh, God.

It wasn’t what she wanted, or what she was supposed to have been doing. But she’d already surrendered to it, and there it was.

She’d fallen in love with the mailman.

“Also, I should mention, perhaps, that I haven’t a condom. I purchased sex toys at the drugstore, and I thought to purchase condoms and looked at them for quite some time, but I must have been distracted by some of the other items for sale, because I found just now, when I checked before I came into the bath, that I’d not—”

Allie arched her back and tipped up her hips to rub against him. “Get soap.”

Winston pumped soap into his hand and smeared it into her outstretched palm. Allie lathered it across her low back and the crack of her ass, then reached back to yank him closer, urging him to press her into the wall. “Hang on.” He repositioned, and then he was hard between her legs, the head of his cock parting just her lips, sliding back and forth without going in. It was glorious torture.

“Oh, jeez.”

“Like this, then?”

“Just like that.”

Winston moaned.

It should have felt like getting banged in a shower, pushed into a wall, used like a slippery toy, impersonal, unknown. She’d been here before, in a different shower, with a different man.

But now was not then, and Winston had taken the most minimal of cues from her and turned it into this slippery, soapy, frictionless symphony of goodness.

It shouldn’t have felt like it did with Winston, but here she was, here she was, fully present, her body a gift for him, her heart in her throat as they moved together, both of them here, both of them aware of what this was, what this meant, what they’d gotten themselves into.

She came a second time without meaning to or expecting it, a surprise pulled from her by Winston’s harsh movements and the sounds he made, falling apart.

Afterward, he leaned into her, breathing hard, fog all around them, and Allie started to feel dizzy, floating ten feet above herself.

He shut off the water and handed her a towel. Her hands worked automatically, wiping droplets from her legs and belly, twisting her hair into the towel, brushing her teeth. He did the same, readying himself for bed. She tried to act normal, like she would normally act after what they’d just done, but there was nothing normal about their situation and she’d never acted normal around Winston, never tried to play any kind of part for him.

He’d never seen her the way her family saw her—not as crazy, impulsive Allie who couldn’t make a good decision to save her life. And not as the other Allie she knew how to be—the Allie who tried to be responsible, tried to be good, tried not to give in to her nature.

He’d only seen her.

They slid between the sheets naked, and Winston found a movie to watch, the remake of True Grit. He held her hand in the dark, but he fell asleep with

in minutes and left her alone with gunfire and death and her spiraling anxiety.

She laid beside him, silent and still through the entire movie as he softly snored and she tried not to imagine what it would take to make more nights like this. How many sacrifices and changes it would require, just to try to make something with a man who would leave, who hadn’t bought any furniture and would sooner or later go back to London, probably, where she’d never been, to live in a country she didn’t know, with thousands of strangers. He had a daughter, a mother, a father, an ex wife, a business, an older man’s life, and she was barely a grown-up at all, a girl from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, who’d seen nothing and knew nothing and had her hands full with the overwhelming prospect of her family falling apart and coming back together in some new configuration.

Ben would be in Manitowoc by now. Where were they—out in the garage, or talking at the bar in the basement, or sitting at the kitchen table? She couldn’t imagine it, needed to, couldn’t imagine where her mother was sleeping or what she might be thinking, what she’d been thinking all these years, what she wanted or who she really even was. She thought about Chasity, about chasing the money, about Beatrice whose mother was planning to climb the tallest mountain in the world. The air-conditioning came back on again with a blast, the temperature dropped, and Allie imagined what it would be like to fear her mother would die on a mountaintop alone. She thought about money, how much it would cost to invest in Ben’s restaurant, if he’d even let her, all the changes he’d have to make.

She would never fall asleep. Never.

Quietly, slowly, she slipped out of bed and into the dark bathroom, where she located Winston’s robe. She tied it around her waist, shut the door behind her quietly, and roamed the living room until she found her phone.

It was one-thirty in the morning. She pulled up her recent calls, dialed the number without letting herself second-guess the wisdom of this move, paced back and forth for three rings until finally she heard her sister’s voice.

“What’s the matter?” May sounded muzzy and panicked.

“Nothing. No emergency. I’m sorry, I just needed to talk. But it was shitty to wake you up. Go back to sleep.”

“There’s nothing wrong? Dad’s okay?”

“Dad’s in Wisconsin. He’s fine as far as I know.”

“No, he is. That’s right. Ben says he’s fine.” May was starting to sound more like herself.