Chapter 14: Facts Only, Again

Bea left at eleven with her bat and a look that said she would be asking questions tomorrow.

Rory had taken his mother back to Yonkers an hour before that, and he had promised to sit on her couch until she slept.

I told myself I wasn't waiting up.

I washed the pie plate twice.

At ten past one, someone knocked on my father's front door, three times, quietly.

I opened it, and Rory stood on the stoop in the porch light with his jacket over his arm.

"She's asleep," he said. "The bridge friend from next door is sleeping on her sofa, and she's armed with a rolling pin. Daphne's car never came."

"Good."

"I told her I was going home."

"Where's home?"

"A fourth-floor walkup in the Bronx with a radiator that bangs." He looked at me. "I got as far as the Whitestone Bridge and turned around."

"Facts only?" I said.

"Fact. I want to come in."

I stood in the doorway and didn't move.

"You said no touching," he said. "That was your rule."

"I know whose rule it was."

"You kissed me against a wall."

"You let me."

"I would have let you do it twice."

I stepped aside.

He came in, and I locked the door and set the chain, and when I turned around he was standing very close with his hands at his sides.

He did not reach for me.

"Facts only," I said, and hooked a finger into the front of his shirt. "You don't get to be careful."

"That's a rule I can follow."

He kissed me in my father's hallway under the picture of the Ridgewood stoop, and I felt him lift me clean off the floor.

I laughed against his mouth.

"Upstairs," I said. "Second door. And don't look at the wallpaper."

"What's wrong with the wallpaper?"

"Ducks."

"I like ducks."

"You won't in a minute."

He carried me up with my legs around his waist.

He stopped on the landing for another kiss, and I forgot what I had said about ducks.

My room was the back one, with the big bed and the window onto the yard.

He set me on my feet next to it and looked at me by the glow from the street.

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