Chapter 24: The First Night

We left the farm at ten, with rice in my curls and a pie wrapped in foil on the back seat.

Marjorie stood on the porch and waved until the car turned onto the gravel road.

Joanna drove with one hand on the wheel and the other in mine.

Neither of us said a word for the first ten miles, and it was the easiest quiet I'd ever sat in.

At the loft, she parked and came around to my door.

"Don't," I said. "I'm too big to carry up four flights."

"I carried you the first time."

"You were showing off."

"I'm showing off again," said Joanna.

She lifted me out of the car, which was a lie, and a lovely one.

She carried me all the way up, and she was out of breath at the top and would not admit it.

She kicked the door shut behind us.

The lamp by the piano was on, and the lid was still open from the night we'd laughed on the bench.

She set me on my feet in the middle of the floor.

"Mrs. Breckinridge," she said.

"Mrs. Breckinridge," I said back.

"Is that what you want to be called?"

"I want to be called both," I said. "Crowell-Breckinridge. Like a law firm."

"Like a law firm that sings," Joanna said, and kissed me.

It was a slow kiss, one of the long ones, with nobody watching and nowhere to be.

Her fingers found the tiny buttons down the back of my dress.

There were thirty small buttons, and Joanna undid every one.

She took her time over it, kissing the bare skin each button left behind.

When the dress slid down, she caught it before it hit the floor and laid it over the piano bench.

"Your turn," she said.

I peeled her white jacket off her shoulders and the silk beneath it, and I stood back to look.

She stood there in the lamplight, thirty-four years old, tall and lean and flushed from her throat to her waist.

"Stop staring," she said.

"I'm assessing."

She laughed, and I stepped in and kissed her, and we went down together onto the white sheets.

It wasn't like the other nights.

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