Let Me Need You
Nothing to Hide · Book Four · Vera Calder
Opening chapter · 13,070 words · Explicit erotic romance for adults 18+.
Read after Touch Me Like You Mean It, Watch Me Want You, and Want Me As I Am. The numbered volumes form one continuing story.
Opening chapter: The Reach
They'd got back from the Meridian too late for a full night's sleep. Morning practice had left her loose and wanting anyway. Two hours on sand across the net from Maja generally did. They ran serve-receive until the sun turned mean about it, and in the middle of a set Maja caught her eye over the tape and grinned. The pull started under Marissa's sternum and stayed after Maja left for her noon shift at the Venice clinic. At the cars, Maja pressed her mouth to Marissa's temple, told her to ice the shoulder she had no intention of icing, and went.
So Marissa walked the boardwalk up to the Offshore alone with the want live in her, salt drying tight across her shoulders, sand to the shin, her hair dragged back and gone stiff at the nape where the sweat had set into it. She ordered the green thing she always ordered, kale and ginger and an indecent amount of lemon, and stood at the rail end of the bar with the cold cup sweating in her hand. She half-watched the courts across Ocean Front Walk. No rush to get to the Aldercroft pool. A recovery swim on the schedule, and a long bright nothing in front of it.
The surfer came up off the beach side.
She had him read before he opened his mouth. Late twenties. Lean and sun-cured down to the tendons, dark-blond hair gone bone-pale at the ends and crusted with salt, two or three days of stubble. He walked off the beach without hurrying, water bottle under one arm, shoulders loose from however long he'd been in the ocean, one thumbnail picking at the label while he checked her face and then her shoulders and then, openly, the rest. His elbows came down on the rail a courteous foot from hers. Green eyes, corners seamed from squinting at the break.
"You play?" A tip of the chin at the courts.
"When there's a league. Not today."
"Figured. You've got the shoulders for it." No leer in it. An appraisal, said out loud. "Dane."
"Marissa."
That did most of the work. He drank from the bottle and looked once up the beach toward the low block at its north end.
"There's a family room in the facilities building," he said. "The accessible one, north end. Door bolts." He laid it down the same flat way he'd told her she had the shoulders for the sport. An observation, an offer, no thumb on the scale. "If you wanted somewhere quieter for it."
The Aldercroft pool would keep another hour. Maja's grin had started something that kept running. Marissa took a drink through the straw and put the cup down.
"I want to," she said. "Yeah."
They went to the shower pad first, both of them crusted with beach. Six heads ran along a galvanized rack on the building's ocean wall; the slab beneath stayed dark and gritty, carrying runoff toward a gutter furred with sand. He pressed the button. Cold water came down hard enough to pull the gasp from her, and then his hands were under it, turning her by the hips, out in the open with the boardwalk twenty yards away and a family rolling a red cooler past the courts. She put a palm to his salt-slick chest, felt his heart slamming under the bone, and took her hand down to the drawstring. Both his palms had gone inside the back of her shorts. He hauled her against the one part of him the water had done nothing to, hard through wet nylon, and she opened the drawstring far enough to get her knuckles inside. Somebody on the boardwalk whistled. Marissa kissed him, got salt from his upper lip and lemon on her own tongue, and the combination was sharp enough to make her bite him once. When the timer cut the water, Dane hit the button again without taking his mouth off hers, groping for the metal disc with one hand while the other stayed under her shorts. The second burst hit his back and broke around them. By the time it ended she was finished with preamble.
The accessible room sat by itself at the north end of the breezeway. Dane pushed the door, Marissa went ahead of him, and the chrome bolt struck home behind her. The room was wide enough to turn a chair: concrete floor pitched to a center drain, steel sink hanging from a bracket, grab bar fixed into the back wall, one frosted pane high on the ocean side throwing a milk-colored square onto the block. The caged LED hummed and made Dane's wet skin look briefly green. Bleach, wet stone, salt drying on two bodies. Outside, a gull screamed over something worth stealing and the shower rack coughed on again. She'd grown up where walls were a courtesy, where privacy meant people agreeing to look elsewhere. The bolt was plenty.
They got each other out of their clothes fast and without ceremony. She hauled the muscle tank off over her head and let it drop. He skinned the wet sports bra up while her arms were still raised in it. She pushed the fold-over short and the thong down in one motion and stepped clear, and he shoved the board shorts off his hips, and she got her first whole look at him. Circumcised, thick and thicker toward the base, the head already up and dark and wet at the slit, a hard upward curve to him that promised one exact angle and a place inside her. Good. She closed her hand around him the same instant his fingers slid between her legs and found her open, and the sound each of them made was the same sound.
Then she stopped, her hand wrapped around him.
"Condom," she said. "I've got one. In my bag. In the car." A quarter mile off, which might as well have been Bakersfield.
"Don't keep them in board shorts."
She gave the missing condom one second. Her rule about strangers sat right there, clear as ever. Maja had lit the want, the cold shower had fed it, and Marissa overrode the rule anyway.
"Screw it," she said. "Just fuck me bareback." A beat, because the rest mattered and she wanted it plain. "You can come in me. I've got an IUD."
He didn't argue it. Men did not argue this.
She turned and set her palms flat to the cool block above the grab bar, arms locked, feet spread, back arched to give him the line of her. He took one hip and notched himself against her, using the other hand to draw the wet head through her open labia until it caught at the entrance. She was ready enough that he went in on the first push, a bright stretch at the mouth of her and then the long bare slide of him behind it. His skin caught every place latex usually blurred. The ridge of the head dragged the soft front wall; his thickest part worked higher, spreading her farther as it went, until his hips met the backs of her thighs and the upward curve pressed where it had promised. She had half forgotten the raw heat of a bare cock, the directness of it, how quickly her own slick made every withdrawal noisy. Dane held there for one breath with both hands on her hips and his chest off her back, giving her room to settle around the girth. A drop from her hair struck the concrete between her hands. Then he drew out until the head tugged at her opening, watched himself almost leave her, and drove in again. She shoved back to take it, the grab bar cold against one forearm, and the wet slap of his hips came back at them from every wall.
Her body took the work and her mind ran straight to Isaac. It had been doing this for weeks, taking whatever hand or mouth was actually present and laying his over it. Dane's grip became Isaac's hands on her hips, broad enough to hold her in place if he ever chose to, and the breath near her ear belonged to Isaac too, except Isaac would have said her name instead of telling the room she was beautiful. Isaac behind her at last after a summer of refusing the easy route. The substitution hit so hard that her pelvis clenched around the surfer's bare cock, out of all proportion to the man in the room. She kept her eyes on the gray slab and let Isaac stay. Dane increased his pace, reading the clench as his, and she let him be wrong.
"God, you're sexy," Dane said behind her, more to the room than to her. "You're so fucking beautiful." Marissa answered with an mmm on the downstroke. A word would have put Isaac back in West Hollywood, too far from the body she'd made for him in here. Dane set a pace and held it, hips clapping into her, the wet of her loud and constant off the walls. "Your pussy feels so good," he told himself. Her inner lips pulled with every stroke, the longer edges dragged inward around him and pushed back out glossy when he withdrew. Her clit hung heavy, untouched, so she took one hand off the wall and gave it the pressure she needed, two fingers circling once to spread her own slick and then bearing down. The first touch made her knees soften. She adjusted her feet wider and caught herself on the heel of her other hand. Bare cock. Her own two fingers. Isaac, impossible and vivid behind her shut eyes. The three refused to stay separate, and Dane kept talking to some version of her that had already left the room.
Each time his hips returned, the heel of her palm bumped the wall and drove her fingers harder against herself, a crude little mechanism the room had made for her, and she used it until the scrape at her wrist became part of the build.
The wall stopped suiting her. She wanted the thrust from the front, wanted somewhere for her weakening legs to go when they gave. She straightened and Dane slid out; the sudden vacancy gave her a jolt and left him shining with her from head to base between them. She turned inside his arms until her shoulder blades met the block. He got his forearm under her left thigh, ran the leg up his side and pushed back in while she balanced on one foot and caught the grab bar. Her opening stretched around the broadest part again, slower this time because the angle made him lift as he entered. Then the curve settled high along the front wall and each short drive rubbed the same place. She could see Dane's face, teeth set with effort, wet hair dripping into one eye. She closed her eyes and put Isaac's back.
"I love your tits," Dane told himself, watching them sway, and laid his free hand over one, fingers spread beneath the weight while his thumb dragged across the nipple. In the dark it was Isaac's mouth instead. The standing couldn't hold much longer. Her lifted thigh shook in the crook of Dane's arm; the planted calf had begun to quiver too, and the hand on the grab bar was taking enough of her weight to hurt. Pressure gathered behind her clit and farther in, where his curve kept finding her. One more thrust made her foot slide half an inch on the wet floor.
"Floor," she got out, her first word to him in ten minutes. Dane put her left foot down, shifted the forearm that had held her thigh behind her hips and bent through the knees while Marissa used the grab bar to lower partway. He stayed inside her. The last foot went all at once and her back met the slab hard enough to bark skin from one shoulder blade. Her knees came up and opened. He braced above her on straight arms, palms squeaking on the damp concrete, and shoved himself deep again before either of them could lose the rhythm. From flat on her back she drove her hips into every stroke. The floor knocked at her spine; her heel skidded and found the base of the wall; her fingers went back to her clit. She kept her eyes shut. Isaac stayed until the pressure got too large to carry an image.
It broke without warning. Her back came off the floor, thighs locking around his hips, her vagina clamping hard on his bare cock. Isaac disappeared. There was no room left to hold anybody's face. Uh... uh... uh, out of her ribs while her heels scraped for purchase and the contractions crowded together, each one gripping the whole channel of her before the last had properly let go. The caged light flared red behind her eyelids when her head knocked back. She kept moving under him because stopping was impossible, because her hand had found the pressure and Dane's cock had found the other one, and every upward drive arrived inside a body already closing down on him. Her own hips prolonged it. Then Dane struck into the next clench and made it worse, made it better, made her lose the count altogether. Her fingers slipped. She found her clit again by feel and bore down until a broken ahh replaced the rhythm in her throat.
His rhythm broke against hers.
"Oh god, I'm coming," Dane said, all the ease gone from his voice. "I'm coming..." He drove deep and held, hips pinning hers to the floor. The first hard pulse landed bare inside her, then a second, then more, eight or nine in all, each firing against walls that were already clenching him. She felt the distinct throb of every one through the thick base buried in her. His heat spread high, a fresh slickness joining her own and slipping around him whenever her body released enough to allow it. Every pulse stretched her orgasm past the point where it would have ended alone. His arms began to shake over her. His voice went on above, saying whatever it said, but she worked her clit until she was finished listening to anything, squeezing another sequence from herself while he softened and his weight came lower. The last contraction moved through them both; his cock answered with one weak pulse and then rested, seated deep, while her breathing broke against his collarbone.
The room returned by sound before sight: the LED buzzing in its cage, water ticking from their hair, a gull beyond the frosted pane, Dane trying to draw enough breath without dropping all his weight onto her.
The drop came in uneven pieces. He stayed in her through the first of it, then drew out and pulled one more clench from her. Dane climbed to his feet. She heard the board shorts slap wetly up his legs. "You're..." he started, and let the assessment die. The bolt scraped back. The door opened on gull-racket and the far hiss of the shower pad, then shut again. He left the bolt thrown back.
She couldn't move to fix it yet. The aftershocks kept her for the usual two or three minutes. She rolled onto one side, pushed herself by an elbow until her spine found the wall beside the sink, drew her knees up and dropped her forehead to her arms. Each clench pulled a short breath from her and left the next one farther away. Her clothes lay across the wet floor in front of her: thong, shorts inside out, bra, tank, each darkened wherever the runoff reached it. His come slipped out of her onto the concrete and started toward the drain in an opaque thread. She watched it travel two inches, lost interest and shut her eyes.
The door opened.
She didn't lift her head. Boardwalk glare dropped across the floor from her left, somebody standing in it after trying a door that should have been locked and finding a naked woman folded against the wall, clothes in the runoff, coming down. Marissa raised one hand from her knees and flicked them out. Go. Whoever it was backed away without speaking. The light narrowed, cut off, and the door clicked shut. She put her forehead down again. Somewhere outside, a child demanded blue shaved ice and was told the machine had broken. The remaining aftershocks spent themselves farther apart until sand against her shins and the cramp in one arch were louder than anything happening inside her.
She cleaned herself at the steel sink with cold water and brown paper towels, one foot planted on the grab bar so she could reach the slick on the backs of her thighs. The paper tore and stuck to her. She picked off what she could, dressed anyway, and discovered that the wet sports bra had chilled while it lay on the floor. Outside, the boardwalk glare flattened everything: rental bikes, palm shadows, a man selling mango under a yellow umbrella. She walked a little wide through the hips, swollen from the thick bare stretch of Dane, the ache heavy enough to alter her stride and pleasant enough that she made no effort to hide it.
Halfway across the sand she thought of Isaac again. Just Isaac this time, no borrowed hands, and the immediate want to tell him about the morning: Maja's grin, the surfer, the rule she'd discarded and the stranger who had walked in at the end. He would make one dry observation about the blue-shaved-ice machine and ask the serious question underneath whatever joke she used. Marissa could hear the shape of it before she reached the car. He was the person she would tell.
She got into the car and drove to the pool.
* * *
Vessel was three blocks off Santa Monica Boulevard and a flight of stairs down, a basement room whose black-painted ceiling vanished above the lights. Marissa had chosen it. She'd chosen everything about the night, from the hour they arrived to the stretch of rail where the recessed lamps would catch the open back of her dress. The music was built on the bottom end; bass came through the floor into her feet a half-second before it reached her ears, while the upper notes vanished into shouting and glassware and the ventilation system failing at its job. At the rail above the sunken dance floor, she let it climb. Isaac stood beside her with one shoulder turned against traffic and gave a passing tray exactly enough room.
She had worn the black Joah Brown, the cowl-back dress whose grey-blue twin had done its work at a dorm party in May and a whole self ago. Same reason: one particular person looking at her in a room built for it. The label's model wore it to mid-thigh. On Marissa it landed four inches higher, and she knew to the centimeter where because she had checked it bent forward, seated and with both arms raised before leaving Santa Monica. The bare back dropped nearly to the cleft of her ass; one wrong twist would show the black G-string. Crystal-wrapped heels took her to six-four. Her hair was down, brushed straight and then worked with her fingers until the front pieces fell as if by accident. Forty minutes had gone into making it look untouched.
Isaac had a club soda he'd not asked to have a lime put in. He had dressed for a world that wasn't his and gotten most of it right, dark charcoal shirt, sleeves shoved to the forearm, expensively plain, and it sat well on him, better than he'd believe if she told him, which she wasn't going to. His attention moved over the room like it was an assigned text.
Then it settled on her. His eyes went from the crystal straps at her ankles to her face, followed the open back of the dress when she turned one shoulder toward him, and returned to her eyes. He leaned close enough for her to hear.
"You're beautiful."
Her smile came before she could make it smaller. "Thank you."
He held her eyes for another second, then looked back over the floor.
"You hate this," she said, into his ear, over the noise.
"I don't hate it." Below them the floor filled and shifted under the light, red going to blue against the far wall, and he watched it. "I'm interested in it. Those aren't the same thing. I've read about this and now I'm standing in it."
"Read about what. Nightclubs."
"Crowds. What a person does inside a noise they can't think over." He tipped the club soda at the floor. "You, for one. You came alive on the stairs on the way down. I watched it happen to you."
"You make it sound clinical."
"Everything's clinical if you say it in a room this loud. No one can hear you, so it's safe." He almost smiled. "That's the whole appeal, isn't it. You can be looked at and not heard."
She left that one alone. "Deep," she said. "Come find out." She lifted his hand off the rail.
He came. She walked him down three steps into the heat and bodies and bass, the one room in Los Angeles where she was fluent and he had to work from a phrasebook.
Down here he couldn't ask her anything she had to answer. There was a body, a beat, old arithmetic. She started to move. Isaac came to it late and careful, suspicious of his own hips, so she gave him the count with hers until he found a version in roughly the same key, his shoulders easing by degrees as he quit trying to solve the room and let the bass tell him where to put his feet. He wasn't good. He was game, which interested her more. When somebody backed into him, he moved with the collision, recovered, and laughed once into her hair.
"There," she said, close to his ear. "You can dance."
"I can approximate dancing. Under duress."
"Nobody's making you."
"I came down to a nightclub in July. Let's not pretend nobody's making me."
She let him have a minute of that. The room had gone hot and close, sweat rising on the back of her neck, the bass sitting in her sternum now instead of her feet. Then she went to work.
She danced with the certainty she brought to anything she did well. Turning her back into him, she set herself against his length from shoulder blades to thighs and rolled her hips, taking her time, every inch of her working the front of him. The dress pulled up with the first pass and she left it there. She reached back, put his hand on her hip and moved under it, letting him feel the flex under the thin modal and the narrow edge of the G-string when her body turned. Two men who'd tracked her since the stairs watched from the upper rail. Fine. Isaac was behind her, his hand exactly where she'd left it, thumb spread along the point of her hip and fingers making no claim at all.
She pressed back and felt him hard against the small of her back where the cowl left her bare to the base of the spine. The contact was skin through charcoal cotton, undeniable whenever she rolled to the right. She had collected the same reading all summer, in doorways, on the pool deck, once in the dorm during a moment neither of them had mentioned, each one brief enough for him to pretend his body had made no argument. Here it stayed. His body wanted exactly what she was selling. The confirmation settled something animal in her, then sharpened it, because the wanting had never been the disputed part.
She turned her head and put her mouth back at his ear. "You feel that."
"Yes."
"That's not me imagining things. That's data. You like data."
"I'm aware of the data." He said it level, right into her hair, and that was the maddening part, that he could be that hard against the base of her spine and keep his voice that even. "The data was never what was in dispute."
She drew his other hand around to her stomach under the thin modal so he would feel where the movement started, the abdominal muscle gathering under his palm before each turn of her pelvis. Reaching back, she put her fingers into the hair at his nape and her open mouth at the corner of his jaw, breathing him. His skin tasted faintly of club soda where a drop had run from his glass. Men had come apart on a tenth of this. She gave him eight bars, changed the count halfway through, pressed her ass harder into him and let her lower lip touch the hinge of his jaw without closing into a kiss. Her mouth left a damp crescent below his ear.
His hands stayed where she placed them. He danced with her, his erection hard against her back and his breath changing beside her ear, present enough that she could feel his restraint being made in real time instead of handed down from some clean philosophical distance. Then he left the last inch open. Marissa increased the pressure of her hips. A couple struck her shoulder and apologized to nobody; the strobe divided Isaac's face into separate white frames when she turned to check him. He held his ground.
She turned around and faced him and put her arms up over his shoulders and brought her mouth to his ear.
"You could just," she said, and let the rest of it stand there in the three words and the heat off her breath on his neck.
His hands found her waist and held her exactly there. The message had arrived.
"I could." He said it against her temple so she caught every word under the music. "I want to. You know I want to. You've gone to some trouble tonight to make sure I can't hide that I want to." A breath. "Not like this."
"Like what." She pulled back far enough to see his face. "This is good. This is the best offer you get all summer and you're standing here knowing it."
"It's the best offer anyone gets." His wit had dropped out. "That was never the part I've been turning down."
"Then turn down the part you're turning down and keep the rest. I'm handing you the rest. Tonight, no argument, no philosophy. Say the word and we're gone."
"Marr."
"That's not a word. That's a stall with my name on it."
"It's the most honest thing I've got at this volume." He left it there.
She could have asked which part. He would have told her plainly, in a voice that left her no wall to push off. The want was up and unspent. She changed the question.
"You're going to make me work for it," she said instead.
"I'm going to make you sure of it." His thumb moved once at her waist and stopped. "Those aren't the same thing either."
There was something at the corner of his mouth when he said it, some private thing he was holding that had nothing unkind in it, and it was gone by the time she looked straight at it. She couldn't place it. Didn't try to.
She should have had six answers. Usually the next line was loaded before the last one finished landing. She opened her mouth, and the track dropped into strobe, and in the white stutter nothing came up the pipe. Marissa shut her mouth again. Her hip bumped a passing dancer hard enough to turn them both sideways; Isaac caught her elbow. She recovered her balance and stepped away from his hand.
She had never had to ask a man for this. She opened the valve and men came to her; that had been the mechanism all her adult life, dependable enough that she had mistaken it for physics. Isaac wanted her and kept refusing. In May she had treated it as a delay. June made it an argument. Now July was nearly gone and here they stood, his hand firm at her waist while a dancer's discarded glow bracelet pulsed green near his shoe, the needle unmoved.
Fine. The bar along the back wall was three deep and underlit. She got a fistful of Isaac's charcoal shirt and pulled. If his thinking was the obstacle, she could at least take some of it offline.
"This is a terrible idea," he said, towed.
"My ideas are only terrible in retrospect. We're not there yet."
"Where are we going," he said, close, following.
"To do the one thing you're even worse at than dancing. Drinking."
She hauled him up out of the sunken floor toward the back wall, and the two men on the rail watched a six-four woman in a black dress drag a thin man off a dance floor by the front of his shirt and could not have arranged the facts of it into any story that was true. She wedged into a gap at the bar and leaned over the rail into the underlight with both forearms flat on the wood.
The bartender came down. When he saw Isaac, something crossed his face and disappeared. Marissa raised two fingers and told him to bring two shots of tequila, the good stuff.
"One," Isaac said. "I'll have this one with you. I'm not spending the rest of the night at the bar drinking."
"We'll see."
"One, Marr."
The two shots came up on a black cocktail napkin, the good tequila the color of weak honey under the underlight. She pushed one toward Isaac and kept the other.
"We're going to play a game," she said.
"That has never once led anywhere good."
"It's going to lead somewhere excellent. Pick up the glass."
He picked up his glass and turned it in the light. "You understand the person who proposes the honesty game is usually the one carrying the most that could come out of it."
"Drink, Weil."
Before they drank, the bartender came back along the bar, a grey UCLA intramural shirt under his apron, dark curls damp at the temples. He put his forearms on the bar beside Isaac's glass.
"You two know each other," she said.
"Ari." He put a hand across the rail, cold and damp from the ice well, and she shook it. "Isaac and I did Ancient Philosophy sophomore year. I carried him."
"He audited," Isaac said. "Came for the arguments, left before the reading."
"I came for the arguments," Ari agreed.
She lifted her shot to Isaac. He touched his glass to hers and they drank. The tequila burned all the way down; she set the empty on the napkin and held up two fingers to Ari again.
"Two more. I need to pee. Don't let him leave."
The bathroom queue took longer than it should have. When she got back, two filled glasses stood on the fresh napkin and Ari was dealing with a card that wouldn't go through. Isaac had saved her place with his elbow.
"Let's leave those," he said. "We can go back to dancing. Or get something to eat."
"We haven't even started the game."
"We can talk without the shots."
"Ari," she called. "Keep mine coming, okay?"
He glanced up from the card machine. "You want the same?"
"Yes. Thank you."
Isaac moved his elbow so she could get back to the rail. She picked up her glass.
"Here are the rules," she said. "Every shot comes with a question. You answer it straight, or you drink again for cover and I still get my answer eventually. I go, you go."
"And the loser loses what?"
"We'll figure that out when somebody's losing."
"So the terms of the wager are secret and set by you, the house, mid-hand."
"You're stalling. First girl you were ever in love with. Name, and one detail."
Isaac lifted his glass and took a small sip; she held hers ready for the answer.
"Sophie Klein. Tenth grade," Isaac said without a hitch. "She underlined her books in a color system, by type of importance, not by what mattered most. I thought it was the most rigorous thing I'd ever watched a person do to a paperback."
"That's two details."
"Early cooperation earns a bonus. My turn. Why this club, tonight, me."
"Good music."
"That's not an answer, that's a Yelp review."
She drank. The tequila loosened something behind her ears, a pleasant little unfastening, and she went toward it.
"My turn again," she said. "What do you actually want. Not the seminar version. The picture."
"One person," he said. "Chosen on purpose, and then kept choosing, for a long time, until the choosing and the person stop being two separate things. A few books I've read more than twice. Work that's mine to be bad at until I'm good at it. A door I'm glad every time to walk back through."
"That's a very small picture."
"It's a very full one. And you took a turn on my turn."
Ari passed behind Isaac with a bus tub balanced at his hip, lifted one empty from Marissa's side and none from Isaac's, then disappeared toward the service well before she thought to wonder how many glasses he had already removed.
"You had a turn."
"You're doing most of the asking. I'd like a turn too."
She tipped the last drops into her mouth instead of giving him one.
"Ari," she called down the bar. "Bring the bottle down here, we've almost got the format right."
"Marr, you've got enough," Isaac said.
"I'm asking Ari."
Ari lined up two more, hers gold from the standing bottle, his out of a squat one below the counter, then went toward a couple waving a card at the far end. She thought only that he kept a tidy station.
"He likes you," she told Isaac.
"He tolerates me. He's precise about the distinction."
"My turn to ask," she said, before he could bank whatever he'd just won. "Have you ever wanted me. Yes or no. You don't get to qualify it."
"Yes." Nothing in front of it and nothing behind. "Next question."
"You can't just say yes and move on, that's the entire..."
"You said no qualifying. I didn't qualify. I answered the question you asked."
She drank. The yes was loose in the room now with nowhere to stand it up.
"Mine," he said. "One thing you've never told anyone. Doesn't have to be big."
"I sleep six hours. Always have. Everyone reads it as discipline, and it isn't. I just come awake at five, every day of my life, and I've never once set an alarm and beaten it there." She turned the glass on the napkin. "Most boring secret in the city."
"It's not boring. It's the first straight thing you've handed me all night." He left her glass alone. Marissa wanted another reward badly enough to resent him for it.
She pressed her thumb into the wet napkin until the paper tore beneath it, watching the little dark hole open while Isaac waited with enough patience to make the next honest answer seem both possible and extremely unwise.
"My turn," she said. "If you weren't doing philosophy, then what."
"Cartography."
"You made that up."
"I did not. Old maps, specifically. The ones where the mapmaker drew a sea monster over the part of the ocean he hadn't sailed yet, to be honest about where his knowledge stopped."
The club changed songs without pausing, one bass line falling away and another taking its place, and in the thin second between Marissa heard ice being shoveled behind the bar and Isaac's glass touch wood without a tremor.
"That's a weirdly beautiful answer for a man drinking in a basement."
"Mine, then. What's in the part of your map you'd draw the monster on."
"That's two questions wearing one coat."
"You can leave it unanswered."
She drank.
"Can I ask you something else?" he said.
"That is not how it..."
"You don't have to answer this one either. When was the last time you asked somebody for something you weren't sure they'd give you."
The true answer was never. The second-truest was that she was running a version of it tonight and losing at it. "Define something."
"Anything," he said.
She drank before he could narrow it down.
"My turn," she said. "Biggest fight you've ever had with your father."
"We don't fight. We argue, and he cites something, and then I concede or find the counter-cite by morning."
"That's not a fight, that's a seminar with snacks."
"It's a Jewish household. The snacks are load-bearing." He turned the glass over. "Mine. Last time you cried."
"Pass."
"You can pass. Put the glass down."
"I drink for cover, that's the mechanism." She drank. "My game. I get to keep the rules."
He paid out true things. Every time one of hers pointed back at him, she paid the house in tequila. His glasses emptied too, yet he stayed clear-eyed and dry and upright.
"How are you not wrecked," she said. The rail had acquired a pleasant tilt.
"I'm pacing myself."
"Pacing yourself. You've gone shot for shot with me all night."
"Have I."
"Glass for glass, Weil. I've been counting."
"I said I'd have one with you. You've had enough now."
"Ari. Another."
Ari came down the rail, looked at her and left the bottle where it was. "Water from here."
"I'm fine."
"You're swaying," Isaac said. He took the filled glass still beside her and pushed it across the bar. Ari removed it and set down water in its place. Somewhere Marissa had lost the count; it had been six and then stopped being a number and turned into a condition.
"My turn," she said, and it came out with a wobble. "Do you..." She lost the front of the sentence and went back. "Do you think about me. When I'm not in the room."
"Yes."
"You say that so easy. Drink for how easy you said it."
"That's not a rule."
"It is now. New house rule, retroactive."
He didn't drink. He let the not-drinking be the answer, and it landed somewhere the tequila hadn't reached.
She reached past the water toward the bottle at Ari's elbow. Isaac caught her hand before it got there and brought it back to the rail.
"That's the one that's the whole point," she said.
"Marissa." The full name, spoken level enough to make her look at him. "We're done with the drinking. Have some water. I'm getting us a car."
"After one more."
"No more," Ari said, and moved the bottle to the service well.
Then the thing she had to tell him shouldered everything else aside. She put her palm flat on his chest to hold him there.
"I have to tell you something."
"Okay."
"You're my best friend." She heard it leave her and it was so exactly, hugely true that she said it again to be sure it had landed somewhere it would keep. "You are. You're my best friend, Isaac. Did you know that? Have I ever once told you that?"
"You haven't."
"See, that's insane, because you are." Under her hand his heart was going, steady, quicker than steady. "I have people. You have no idea how many people I have. And you're... you're the friend. There's a lot of them and there's one of you. You're the one."
"Marr..."
"No, I need you to have actually heard it. Say it back so I know it went in."
He could have deflected it, and didn't. He brought his hand up over hers where she had it pinned to his chest.
"I heard you," he said. "You're mine too. Have been for a while now."
There was more in her, a bigger word coming up under the tequila. She opened her mouth to hand it over. The room slid several degrees off its mountings, and the word went back down.
"Okay," Isaac said. "Keep drinking the water. I'm calling the car now."
"I don't want the car. I want to keep going."
"I know you do. Drink the water anyway."
"Are you calling it because I told you about the best-friend thing? Because that was real, that wasn't the tequila..."
"I'm calling it because you can't feel your own face. Ari." He lifted two fingers down the bar without raising his voice, and Ari nodded, and he already had his phone against his chest, thumb going. "Four minutes. Think you can get the water down in four."
"I can get anything down in four minutes. That's been the entire problem all night."
"Water, Marr."
She got the water most of the way down. The last thing she saw clean of the whole bar was the little row of suns swimming on the wet wood, the spent shot glasses, six or eight or ten of them, every last one of them hers.
Her feet had quit being reliable somewhere on the club stairs, and Isaac had walked her out into the WeHo night with one arm clamped around her back and her own arm slung over his shoulders. Each step came up late. Her left heel missed the last stair entirely and Isaac caught enough of her to keep the recovery private. At the door, she stopped to tell the doorman he was very good at his job. He said something back that she did not retain, and she tried to turn around to make sure Isaac had heard the compliment and nearly brought all three of them down. Everything past the middle of the tequila game had gone porous, letting odd details through and keeping none of the connections. Then the Uber was there, a Camry that smelled of pine-tree air freshener and someone's vanilla vape, and she was pouring off the seat sideways into Isaac before it cleared the valet lane. Getting in had taken three tries, her legs arriving a half-second after she asked them for anything; the driver watched her fold one crystal heel under the other ankle and looked forward again. Isaac took her weight without complaint, one arm coming around her ribs, and let her settle against his side.
She put her face into his neck. Beneath smoke-machine residue and other people's sweat he smelled like skin and the cedar thing he wore too little of. She breathed him in until the day slid off her shoulders and landed somewhere on the floor of the car. The window cooled her forehead. Santa Monica Boulevard went past in wet smears of red and white, a green light they caught and ran, a man dragging in his taco cart, a bus shelter holding three women in silver dresses who appeared and vanished before Marissa could decide whether she knew them. Lovely, every stupid inch of it, including the cardboard pine tree twisting under the mirror. Isaac's charcoal shirt was the best-looking thing she'd seen all evening. She looked at good-looking things for a living. She rubbed one thumb over the weave as if this were additional evidence.
"You," she told the shirt, "are a good person. The best one I know. I don't say it, because it's not a thing I say. But you are." She rolled her head to the window. "Look at the lights. Have you ever actually looked at them."
"They're stoplights, Marr."
"They're incredible stoplights. Everything's incredible. This car smells incredible."
"That's a pine tree and somebody's vape."
"See. Incredible." She felt him say something down into the top of her head, more rumble against her cheek than words, and his hand moved once on her ribs, keeping her upright, keeping her aimed at the world.
"I could stay in this car," she said. "We could just drive. You and me and the incredible stoplights."
"We're going to my house. You need water and a bed."
"See, that's also good. You always have the good plan."
Then the truth came up without catching on anything. She pushed herself off his chest to give it to his face, because this one had to go to his face. Her hand missed his shoulder on the first attempt and landed high on the seat belt; the second got her upright enough that the car tilted behind him and his head seemed briefly too far away. Isaac put a hand at the base of her neck. She smiled at him, relieved by the sight.
"I love you," she said.
He looked at her. Something went through his face fast and got folded away before she could open it and read what was inside. "I've got you," he said. "We're four minutes out. Close your eyes."
"No... I mean it. I'm not..." The word she wanted was drunk, and she could not say it without proving it. "I love you. That's the thing. That's the entire thing, and I've never said it to you."
"I know." He caught a strand of hair off her cheek with two fingers, and the fingers rested a second at her temple before they went. "Close your eyes, Marr."
"Are you going to say it back."
"I'm going to get you home."
The Camry turned hard enough to slide her against him, and Isaac caught her with an arm across the ribs before her shoulder reached the window, holding her there through the turn while the driver apologized to the road ahead.
"That's not a no."
"Go to sleep."
She closed them to show him she could. Just to prove the point. Just for a second...
She opened them on a different street, quieter, with trees over it, and no memory of the distance between. Her cheek had moved from Isaac's chest to his shoulder. One of her hands lay palm-up on his thigh, useless, and she studied it for a moment before remembering it belonged to her. The missing stretch belonged to somebody else. The thought rose again, brand new, and she would have sworn she had never said it before.
She looked up at him. He watched the road he wasn't driving, jaw set, one hand spread between her shoulder blades. He was so suddenly dear to her that her ribs couldn't manage the size of it.
"Isaac."
"I'm here."
"I love you." New-minted. For her it was the first time. "I really, really do. I don't think you actually know it."
This time whatever crossed his face stayed visible a fraction too long. Surprise, perhaps, then pain or hope or both; the categories drifted apart as soon as she reached for them. He breathed out through his nose and looked once toward the driver, who stared at the red light ahead. His voice changed. She liked the sound and could not work out what had changed in it.
"You pick a hell of a night to start telling the truth," he said, mostly to himself. Then, to her, softer, his thumb moving once at her shoulder: "Okay. I hear you. I've got it. Go to sleep."
His hand came behind her head, lifting it from the hard edge of the door. She settled against his shoulder. Between one streetlight and the next, everything went out.
The third time she surfaced they were into the flats, off the boulevard, streetlights coming through the jacarandas in torn pieces across the roof. Isaac's palm circled her back. Same path, over and over, shoulder blade to ribs and up again. She dragged her face toward his, collecting charcoal shirt, throat, jaw and finally eyes, each part arriving separately. He was already looking down at her, waiting for something. Perhaps he knew the cycle better than she did by then. She couldn't read him at all.
"I love you." She got a hand up to the side of his jaw to hold his face where she could reach it. "Do you hear me? I love you, and it matters that you hear me say it. I love you."
Isaac's mouth tightened.
He bent his head. His mouth touched her hair, and her name came down through it, low and close. Only her name. His hand closed around the wrist at his jaw and eased her arm down. She caught two fingers in the front of his shirt, meaning to ask again. The weave slipped away beneath them.
The car was quiet now. No bass, no tires.
"Marr." His voice at her ear, level and kind and close. "We're here. I need you to try to stand up for me."
She tried. One eyelid came up; her legs lay somewhere beyond the reach of the instruction. "Marissa. Give me a little, okay?" She hummed into his shirt. "All right. No help. We'll do it the hard way." Cold air reached her from the open door.
An arm came beneath her knees, another behind her shoulders. She moved sideways across the seat in several uncomfortable pulls, her hair trapped beneath her back until his hand freed it. One crystal heel caught; her knee lifted and the strap came free. Then there was no seat beneath her. Her head tipped back, the car roof passed across her sight, and she found his throat with her face. "You smell good," she told him. "Okay. Here we go," he said. His first step jolted through them both.
Damp lawn and the cedar at his collar. Marissa lifted her head enough to see a strip of herringbone brick between clipped boxwood, the front door at its far end. Leaves brushed her bare calves. "Almost there," Isaac told her. "Stay with me." She put her cheek back on his shoulder. Each step rocked her against him.
At the door her feet met brick again. Stucco pressed against her bare back, his palm flat on her sternum. "Stay right there," he said. "One second. Don't move for me." His hand came away. Beside her, keys scraped and clinked.
She did not stay right there.
She was fine against the wall as long as the wall was the entire plan. The moment there was anything to decide, some part of her down in the dark decided she ought to help, and she pushed off the stucco to square herself up, and the step went wrong at the root of it. Her foot came down on the outer edge of the brick instead of the flat, on the four-inch heel, and the heel skidded off the lip into the little drop at the hedge, and her ankle folded, and there was no piece of her sober enough to field the rest. She went over sideways. Her whole length pitched across the boxwood, the hedge caught her at the hip and gave under her like a bad mattress, and she came down on the far side of it on the Weils' front lawn, flat on her back in the sprinkler-damp, the wind knocked clean out of her, the hedge now standing between her and the door and the man who had asked her not to move.
Keys rattled on the other side of the hedge. Then Isaac came around it, his face appearing above her against the sky.
He dropped to his knees in the wet grass beside her. Marissa lay on her back, staring past him at the sky. Isaac worked his hands under her arms and pulled, hunting for leverage against her slack weight, until he had her halfway upright against his chest with both arms crossed over her. Her stomach contracted.
She was sick down the front of the black dress, across her chest and Isaac's forearm, into the hair hanging around her face. The modal took most of it and held the mess against her skin. Three hours ago she'd put on that dress with more intention than anything she'd worn all summer; now the cowl had twisted under one arm, one strap hung halfway off her shoulder and the hem had ridden high over one hip. She heaved twice more onto the grass, each spasm folding her against the arm Isaac had braced under her breasts. Between them she tried to apologize, got only air, and gripped his wrist with both hands as if he were the cause of the ground staying under her. When her stomach finally emptied, she sagged against him. A boxwood leaf had caught in the wet hair across her mouth. He picked it out.
Isaac did not let go and did not make a sound about any of it. He held her up through the heaving with one arm and swept her hair off her face with the other.
"Sorry," she got out, wrecked. "'m sorry..."
"Don't be. You're okay." When she finished he said, "That's the worst of it. Worst part's done now." The certainty came before the fact. "Up we go. I've got you." Then he got them both off the lawn.
The dark house smelled of good cooking gone cold hours before, onion and cumin under the sharper smell they brought in from the lawn. Jeremy's door stood open on an emptied room, a duffel-shaped gap on the floor, a soccer trophy returning the hall light; he was at camp in San Diego. The door at the end of the hall was shut with no light under it. "Bathroom, then bed," Isaac told her, keeping her tracking. Both crystal heels struck the wood unevenly. By Jeremy's door he stopped, pulled the right one off and left it in the hall. Then he walked her into the bathroom off his room and set her on the closed toilet, one hand clamped to her shoulder while he reached in and cranked on the shower.
Steam came up. He got her onto her feet, pulled the left heel free and set it on the bathroom floor. Then he worked the ruined dress over her head, stopping when the wet modal caught around one wrist and again when her hair came with it. The dress landed in the tub with weight. Her black G-string followed; he looked at her face while he took it down because she couldn't lift either foot without holding his shoulder. Then he stood her into the water. "Wash, Marr. Can you do that?" She heard the word. Getting from the word to the action was beyond her. She stood in the spray with her arms hanging, water carving clean tracks down her chest through the sick, and lifted no hand to help. Her knees gave. Isaac caught one elbow and changed the fall into a descent, but she ended seated on the shower floor with the water hitting the back of her bent neck, doing exactly nothing a shower was for.
For a few seconds nothing happened except water on her neck. Then he pulled off his shirt, stripped the rest into a heap on the bathroom floor, stepped in and crouched beside her.
He cupped one hand at her hairline to keep water out of her eyes and rinsed the sick from her hair with the other. Twice, until the water ran clean. When she listed toward the wall he put her shoulder against his knee and kept it there. Green soap from the Weils' shelf went down her back, arms, chest and the legs the lawn had printed with grass; it smelled almost aggressively ordinary, the sort bought in a multipack, and the clean scent replaced the lawn by degrees. He tipped her head forward to wash her neck and behind her ears. Water warmed her scalp. His palm kept her forehead out of the spray. Even naked she was barely present enough to notice that he kept his body angled away whenever the cramped shower gave him the choice. He lifted one of her feet to clean mud from the arch, put it down, reached for the other. Marissa let herself be cleaned like a car on a lot.
Somewhere in the middle, her blindest habit took over. They were bare and his hands were on her. She rolled her head toward him, put a hand behind his neck and pulled, aiming her open mouth somewhere near his jaw. A piece of please came out.
"No," he said. Quiet and immediate. He took her wrist, brought her hand down from his neck and set it in her lap. "Not... no. Not like this. Come on. Arms up, I need to get your back."
That shard stayed: the shower floor, reaching, Isaac's no, her hand returned to her lap. The three declarations in the Camry vanished. This remained, isolated from everything on either side, waiting for morning.
"Up. Almost done," he said, and shut off the water. "I'm going to get you dry and into bed, and then you can be unconscious as long as you want." He brought her upright by both hands and waited while her balance arrived, then got her over the tub lip and onto the mat. The towel snagged on her wet hair. He dried what he could while she leaned into him, wrapped a fresh one around her and walked her the four steps to his room, his bare foot nudging a paperback out of the path before she could step on it. The pillow was cool against her cheek. His hand at her shoulder turned her onto her side; a sheet came up over her hip. Light lay across the open doorway. She closed her eyes.
She woke at eleven. The light through the strange window had climbed overhead, and her body began complaining before she opened her eyes. Mouth: dry socket. Something knocked behind her right eye with petty persistence. Her stomach felt scoured out and hung up to dry, then rolled when she tested one deeper breath. Both calves were tight from the heels. Her right ankle hurt where the boxwood drop had folded it, though she had no memory yet of a hedge, and there was a small raw place on one shoulder blade from the concrete floor in Venice that seemed to belong to a different person and a different week. Athletes learned to take inventory on waking, every joint and system reporting before the day made a claim. This morning every answer was wrong.
She didn't even like drinking. A drink could be pleasant enough; getting drunk mostly cost her a morning she would rather have spent doing something else. The two worst hangovers of her life had both been with Isaac. First the camping trip, waking beside the lake with her head in her hands, waiting for the Tylenol to work. Now the disco and that stupid drinking game. Never again. Never, ever again. Moving her tongue hurt. She hadn't known alcohol could make the roots of her hair feel hostile.
What was it about being around him that made her drink too much? She could count drinks perfectly well with anyone else. With Isaac she kept reaching for another, as though the next one might make something easier. What, exactly? She closed her eyes against the knocking behind the right one. At the lake she'd at least remembered the night. This time whole hours were gone.
The headache was the manageable part. She had run her life on the assumption that she chose what her body did, where and with whom, and if she changed her mind she could name the change while it happened. Somewhere around the fourth tequila, choice had gone offline for an entire night. She couldn't remember leaving the bar. A shower existed in pieces: green soap, Isaac's wrist around hers, his voice saying no. The rest was black. Under a strange ceiling, that blank frightened her more than the sickness did, and for several minutes she stayed on her back because sitting up would begin the work of finding out.
The room came to her by pieces. A narrow bed with the far side slept in and then squared flat, though the pillow retained a dent and a single dark hair that wasn't hers. Paperbacks on a shelf, their order invisible to everyone except the person who'd put them there; several carried slips of paper marking places he meant to return to. A grey sweatshirt on a chair. One framed photograph turned slightly away from the bed. West Hollywood light. Isaac's room, which she had never seen even on the dinner visit. The black dress was gone. Pieces of it tried to return: wet grass against her back, an arm under her breasts, something sour in her hair. She pushed them off.
A pale-blue shirt sat folded at the foot of the bed, corners matched. He'd left her something to wear. Either he'd chosen the longest shirt he owned or he had no idea what his clothes did on a woman with hips. Her hair had dried however it pleased, flat on one side and kinked at the ends. She put on the shirt. They stood the same height and Isaac was built like a rail, so it was barely oversized on her and barely covered anything. With Marissa standing straight and tugging the hem, it reached the tops of her thighs and just cleared her at the front. Her first step ruined the arrangement. She buttoned one more button, reconsidered, opened it again. The shirt smelled of detergent rather than cedar, a relief that came with an annoying little disappointment behind it. She left most of the front undone and went barefoot down the hall, one hand on the wall when the floor shifted under her.
He was at the kitchen counter with coffee going, dressed for the day in jeans and a dark tee, bare feet on the tile. Toast waited on a plate beneath a folded paper towel. Two waters stood ready, one with the cloudy residue of an electrolyte tablet at the bottom, and her phone charged beside them from a white cable threaded behind the toaster. He had probably slept four hours. There was a faint red mark on one forearm that she could not place and a nick near his jaw from shaving too fast. He looked good, because he always looked good to her. This morning the fact hurt.
"There's coffee," he said. "Toast too, if your stomach's taking meetings. Water first, though."
"What time is it." Her voice came out wrecked.
"Little after eleven. My parents left at seven, Jeremy's still in San Diego. It's just us and the coffee." He set a full glass on the counter in front of a stool. "Water first."
"You already said water first."
"I'm going to keep saying it until the glass is empty." She sat and drank. It gave her mouth something to do.
"Did you get any sleep?" she asked.
"Eventually. I stayed awake a while, checking on you."
She looked down into the water. "And my dress?"
"Rinsed it. It's over the rail in the bathroom. Still damp, probably."
He had washed her clothes too. She pressed the cool glass against her mouth without drinking.
"How were you still standing?" she asked. "At the bar. You drank everything I did."
"I had the first tequila. After that it was weak tea."
She lowered the water. "Tea."
"While you were in the bathroom, I asked Ari not to serve you any more. He said their policy wouldn't let him refuse until you were visibly impaired. He had tea for people who wanted to sit with friends doing shots without drinking. I asked for that."
The squat bottle. His glass touching the wood, steady. She had looked straight at both.
"You let me think we were drinking the same thing."
"Yes. I should have told you. I thought I could get you to leave the next one and go back to dancing. Then I kept answering your questions, and you kept drinking. I should have ended the game sooner."
She rubbed the edge of the paper towel over the toast. A little tuft came off between her fingers.
"I wanted you drunk enough to stop saying no."
Isaac put his coffee down.
"I knew what you were trying to do."
"You said one. I heard you." She rolled the paper into a damp pellet. "I'm sorry for that. I don't get to make your no something I can drink you past."
"Thank you for saying it."
He left his coffee on the counter. She drank some more water and tried to collect the other apology.
Half the glass went down before she made herself start. Isaac drank coffee and gave her the room to arrive at it, though his eyes went once to the hand she had wrapped too tightly around the glass.
"And I owe you an apology for the shower."
"You don't."
"I do. Let me." She set the glass down and made herself look at him. "I don't remember most of last night. I want to be straight about that, there's a hole in it, a big one. I've got the club, and then almost nothing, and then your shower this morning." Heat climbed her neck. "I remember enough of the shower. I remember reaching for you. I remember you saying no. And that's... you were taking care of me, cleaning me up off your own floor, and I came at you. I don't get to do that, however far gone I was. I'm sorry. I mean it."
During the last sentence she fixed on the small nick beside his jaw, because looking directly into his eyes would have broken the sentence and looking down would have felt like asking him to make the apology easier.
Isaac listened with both hands around his coffee. He made no move to rescue her when the apology snagged, and no move to hurry it through the part where her neck burned. When she finished, he waited a second before answering.
"You reached," he said. "I said no. You put your hand back. The whole thing took about four seconds, and there's nothing in it you need to carry." He pushed the toast an inch toward her. "You were sick, I cleaned you up, and now you're mortified, and the mortification is doing most of the talking. Eat something."
"Isaac..."
"There's nothing to forgive, Marr. I mean that. We're exactly where we were."
Coffee clicked in the cooling machine behind him; a drop worked free, struck the empty pot and made them both glance toward the sound, giving Marissa one second of relief before Isaac looked back.
"You keep saying that like it settles it."
"It does settle it. You're the one not letting it." A near-smile came and went, and he didn't push the almost into anything.
"I keep waiting for the part where you're angry."
"I'm not going to be angry."
"Everyone's a little angry. It's the tax."
"Not for this. You got drunk and I drove you home and cleaned you up. People who care about each other do that; it isn't a favor with a bill on the back." The toast came back in front of her a second time, pointedly. "The only thing you owe me is you actually eat that. Second slice, you'll feel human."
Marissa tore off a corner because his hand remained near the plate and because accepting toast was, for the moment, the closest she could get to accepting the rest of what he had done without turning it into a debt.
The four seconds she remembered had taken the whole apology to get through. Marissa thanked him, still looking at the nick beside his jaw. He accepted the thanks and pushed the toast closer again.
Her phone sat on the counter, plugged into a charger that wasn't hers. No missed call from Cindy; her mother trusted a text saying she was out and would be back the next day. One message from Maja, sent at 9:40 before the wheels came off: how was the campaign, had she gotten the philosopher onto a dance floor, had he survived. The last line held her: "report back, I have real money on this." Marissa read it twice. Last night she would have answered with a score, a joke, something dirty enough to make Maja snort in the clinic break room. This morning there was no version she could send without lying. She turned the phone face down. Isaac looked at the dark screen and then at the toaster. She waited, but he asked nothing. Maja's name stayed out of the room.
She ate the toast in small obedient bites. Isaac rinsed his mug, wiped up the water she'd slopped and put the butter away in the side of the refrigerator door, where it apparently had an assigned place. He moved a bowl of apricots out of a stripe of sun, shook the dishcloth once over the sink and folded it across the divider to dry. From a stool in his shirt, hungover and ashamed, Marissa watched him fit back into his own kitchen. He probably did these things alone, every morning, in rooms she had never been in. Something in her shifted and wouldn't tell her where it was going.
It had something to do with the sight of him wiping his own counter. Ridiculous place for it to happen, beside a butter dish with toast dust stuck to the lid. She wanted him, yes. Wanting was old information; it had been old in May, and she knew every physical direction it could go. This reached farther into her chest and stayed there. She wanted him present for rooms she hadn't entered yet, for conversations after midnight and grocery lists and bad news and the empty parts of ordinary Tuesdays. Years, maybe. The word years frightened her enough that she dropped the thought and picked it up from another side, where it became the plain wish to see him tomorrow. Tomorrow felt too small, and she set the toast down.
Marissa had loved people. Edward, Jason, others, all real and easy to identify while they were happening; affection and sex and loyalty took their places without a fight, and she had never needed a taxonomy beyond the one her body supplied. Isaac refused every shelf she tried. Closest friend in the world, plus an enormous physical want. That might explain it. It might be something larger, the big one people meant when they spoke as if all the smaller loves were tributaries and only one river reached the sea. She disliked that hierarchy on principle. She also wanted to steal this man's dishcloth and keep it for no defensible reason. Her body usually answered first, and he had kept that instrument off the table since May. So here she was, trying to make the read blind, turning an empty glass between her hands while he missed none of the water she'd spilled.
Isaac folded the dishcloth to a dry patch and went on wiping. She watched a crumb catch in the cloth.
All her life, other people had reached first. At the commune, where bodies and affection arrived without ceremony; at boarding school, where girls and boys found excuses to sit on her bed; in every adult room since, they angled toward her and worked up the nerve. She had accepted or declined. Sometimes she pursued the second step, often the tenth, but the first exposed hand generally belonged to somebody else. She had never needed anyone badly enough to cross the floor with no guarantee waiting. Freedom had come with that arrangement. So had cover, though she had only just noticed the cover part.
Isaac had closed the bodily route. The shower floor last night had proved it again, under circumstances so humiliating that the memory arrived with green soap and made her stomach turn. Whatever happened next would require words, out loud, followed by the wait for whatever came back. There would be no dark room or music to absorb them, no nakedness she could use to make the question look like something else. Marissa stared at the wet ring beneath her glass. The dishcloth passed over it and Isaac's fingers came within an inch of hers. She couldn't make herself start.
"You've gone quiet on me," he said. He'd stopped wiping. The dishcloth hung from one hand. "What are you thinking about over there?"
She could say a fraction of it. One true word aimed in roughly the right direction.
"That I am never drinking tequila again as long as I live," she said.
He looked at her for another second. The dishcloth went into the sink. "Fair," he said, and went to bring the car around.
The G-string he'd rinsed had dried stiff over the tap; she worked it on beneath the shirt before they left, balancing against the sink when lifting one foot made the bathroom tilt. That was her concession to the drive and Hank's front walk. Isaac drove the grey RAV4 with the windows cracked for her stomach. Marissa held the damp black dress in her lap and a crystal heel in each hand; she'd found them a room apart, one beside the shower and one near Jeremy's open door. The RAV4 smelled faintly of coffee and an orange he'd left in the cup holder. They crossed Beverly Glen with the radio off. Somewhere past Bundy, after rehearsing three different versions and discarding each for sounding like an invoice, she managed the one thing she could say. "You didn't have to do any of that. Last night. Any of it."
"I know."
"That's not the same as thank you." She watched the off-ramps. "It's just what I've got at the moment."
"It counts."
"For the record," he added, after a mile, "you were a very polite drunk. You told the doorman he was extremely good at his job. Twice."
"I did not."
"You did. He was touched."
She put her face into her free hand. "Tell me that's the worst of it."
"That's the worst of it," he said. Much later, she would understand it as the kindest lie he told her all summer. Isaac checked his mirror and moved over for the exit. Marissa watched the signs go by.
Hank came onto the front step while Isaac pulled her bag from the back, because Hank came out for everything: deliveries, dogs passing on the sidewalk, cars that paused too long at the curb. So the introduction happened on the walk in hard noon light, Marissa hungover in Isaac's shirt with the damp black dress over one arm and a crystal heel in each hand, her mother's partner in a bathrobe, and the man she had no settled word for. The shirt covered about half of what shirts were usually asked to and opened farther when she bent for the bag. Nobody remarked on it. Marissa never touched the hem. Isaac's eyes remained safely on Hank's face.
"Hank Bellamy." He took Isaac's hand in the full-body handshake he gave everyone. "So you're the famous Isaac. I have heard your name in this house more than I've heard the names of some of my own blood relatives."
"Most of that's probably complaints," Isaac said.
"Not one word of it. That's exactly how I knew it was real." Hank looked Isaac over with open approval. "You want to come in? Cindy's around here somewhere, there's half a frittata with nobody's name on it yet."
"I should let her sleep it off," Isaac said. "But thank you. Another time."
"There's going to be another time. I can feel these things." Hank turned the grin on Marissa, thoroughly pleased with himself, and she wanted to go and lie down in the ocean until the tide took her.
Isaac didn't stay. He said the right amount to Hank, declined the frittata without making the refusal sound final, handed Marissa her bag and told her to drink water, sleep and text when she was vertical. At the RAV4 he looked back once, checking that she had made the two steps to the door. Marissa lifted the hand holding both heels. He got in and went. She stood there in his shirt, the stucco hot against one shoulder, and watched the car all the way to the corner before she went inside.
Cindy found her in the kitchen twenty minutes later. Marissa had drunk another glass of water and was considering the frittata without any intention of eating it. Cindy took in the borrowed shirt, two heels on the floor, damp black dress over a chair and wreckage of her daughter's face. Her attention paused at the men's cuff trailing near Marissa's knee. She had met Isaac at the dinner and liked him. Pouring coffee, she gave the short version.
"That boy has a very good head on his shoulders."
"He does," Marissa said.
"Brought you home in his own shirt and didn't so much as come in to get thanked for it." Cindy tried the coffee, decided it would do. "You could do a great deal worse than a good head on a good set of shoulders. That's all I'll say about it."
"That is never all you'll say about anything."
"It's all I'll say about it today. You look like something the dog brought in." Cindy set the pot down. "Drink water. Eat something that isn't coffee. And text the boy you got in the door, he's the type who'll wonder."
"He knows I got in the door. He watched me do it from the car."
"Of course he did," Cindy said. Satisfaction showed at one corner of her mouth. She left Marissa alone.
The usual correction loaded itself: he was a friend; there was no better or worse to be done about a friend. She'd said some version of it a hundred times about a hundred people.
Marissa left it unsaid. She lifted the water glass, watching the doorway where Cindy had disappeared and waiting for the correction to force its own way out, but the house stayed ordinary around her and no words came. The blue cuff slid into the water and darkened at once.