The F-Word

I can remember the feel of that skin. Its silky softness.

The knot inside me tightens.

“I’m sorry,” I say softly.

She nods. Her eyes glitter. She swings away and rubs at them. “Yes. I am too.”

“I only wanted to help,” I say. “Instead, I totally screwed things up.”

“It wasn’t you. It was me. I should never have—”

I capture her shoulders with my hands and gently turn her towards me. “It was wrong. I was wrong. Not for making love to you.” I reach out and catch a dark curl between my fingers. “For thinking we could keep it all a game.”

She nods again. Her eyes are damp. I want to kiss away that dampness, but I know it would be a mistake. I have to tell her some things first. Important things. Things I’ve only just learned, but not here. Not with Priscilla glaring at us from her perch on the stack of boxes, not with the sounds of the city intruding.

“Bailey?”

She looks at me.

“We have to talk.”

She shakes her head. I capture her chin in my hand.

“Okay,” I say, “I have to talk. Will you come for a ride with me?”

“Matthew. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She’s back to calling me Matthew. I tell myself that’s meaningful.

“Please,” I say. “Come with me. And if you don’t like what I have to tell you, I’ll bring you back here and you can—you can go to Minneapolis.”

At first, I think she’s going to turn me down flat. Then she gives a sad little laugh. “Do you really think I’d leave New York?”

“The boxes?”

“Old clothes. For the Manhattan Shelters Clothing Drive.” She manages a quick smile. “Somebody’s going to be happy getting all those old suits.”

I smile too. The knot inside me is still there, but at least it hasn’t gotten any tighter.

“Come with me,” I say.

I wait. And wait. Then my Bailey sighs, grabs a sweatshirt from the sofa, scratches Priscilla behind the ear, and we head out the door.

18

She doesn’t ask where we’re going.

That’s good, especially since I only just figured it out myself.

Wrong. I didn’t figure it out. It just came to me, the one place, the one right place where I need to take her. It’s almost an hour away and by the time I turn off the highway and I begin to navigate the series of country roads that lead to our destination, my palms are sweaty and my heart is pounding the same way it did a while ago when I stood outside Bailey’s door.

I was the kid who thought nothing of facing down three hundred pound linemen. The kid who took off for places that were only names on a map with a backpack and a bankcard. I turned into the guy who used to bet six figures on a stock without blinking, who walked away from all that so I could go into debt with little more than hope and a dream.

Yeah, but this is different.

I turn up a narrow dirt road that winds into a heavy stand of trees.

Bailey looks at me. “Where are we?” she asks, but as the trees open up just enough to reveal a gentle hill that overlooks a lake and an untouched valley, she catches her breath. “This is that property,” she says. “The one you wouldn’t put the wrong house on.”