Chapter 7: Back Seat

We took Polly to Dee's.

She had fallen asleep in the back seat on the way, the duck pajamas under Nathaniel's coat, and Dee carried her upstairs without a word.

"I'll sleep on the couch," Dee said at my door. "Go. Do something stupid. I'll have a cookie ready for the kid in the morning."

"I'm not going to do something stupid."

"Honey, I have known you nine years. Your face says otherwise."

She shut the door in my face.

Nathaniel was waiting by the car without the cap.

He had loosened his collar and shed the gray jacket, and in the yellow streetlight his shirt was white and his hair was a mess.

"Where do you want to go?" he said.

"Not your house."

"No."

"Somewhere with no one in it."

He drove.

He drove fast and silent along the lake, past the dark hotel where a masked ball had once stood on a terrace.

Until the road ended at a stone wall and a bench.

He cut the engine.

The bench sat alone on a little rise, facing the water, with a small brass plate I couldn't read.

"That's mine," he said. "The girl with no name."

I got out and walked to it and read the plate in the moonlight.

FOR M. WHO LEFT BEFORE I COULD ASK.

I stood there with my arms wrapped around myself.

When I turned, he was right behind me.

"I'm so angry," I said.

"Good."

"At her. At him. At you, for not looking harder."

"Also good."

"And I want you so badly I can't see straight."

He didn't move.

His hands stayed at his sides, and his jaw worked.

"Tell me to stop," he said, rough. "Now. Because after this, I won't."

I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down, and kissed him.

It was nothing like the kiss I remembered.

It was bigger, and meaner, and it tasted like seven years.

He made a sound in his throat and his hands finally came up, one at the back of my neck, one low on my spine.

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