Chapter 3 #2
It smelled like laundry soap, and underneath, the faintest trace of cedar and skin, the particular clean-warm smell of a man who'd come out of the shower an hour ago. The collar was loose around my neck. The sleeves came past my elbows.
I caught my reflection again.
A grown woman with wet hair, in a man's borrowed T-shirt, in a stranger's bathroom, after having been chased across two yards by her own dog with a bra in his teeth.
I closed my eyes.
Then I opened them again and admitted the second problem.
Because under the mortification, under the abject horror of how this morning had gone, there was the other thing.
The thing I hadn't allowed myself to think about while he'd been standing in the doorway.
The fact that the shoulders on him hadn't been the shoulders of an eighteen-year-old Easton Ford.
The collarbones. The slight V of muscle at his hip, just above the elastic of the sweatpants.
I had clocked all of it, quickly, professionally, with the part of my brain that had been a fifteen-year-old crouched on her parents' porch fourteen summers ago, and had apparently survived everything.
Excellent.
This was excellent.
I splashed water on my face.
I gathered my towel into a ball, gathered my dog by the collar, took one breath, and opened the bathroom door.
He was at the counter pouring coffee into a second mug.
He hadn't put a shirt on.
He looked up. Did the same fast, deliberate non-look down the length of me he'd done in the yard, and then he focused very firmly on the coffee pot.
The smell of the coffee hit me before anything else did. Strong. Cheap, in the way Hartsdale was cheap—gas-station beans run through a drip machine somebody had owned for fifteen years.
"Thank you," I said. "For the shirt."
"Don't mention it."
He set the pot back on the burner. The click of the glass against metal was the only sound in the kitchen for a beat.
"I'll wash it and bring it back. End of the week."
"No rush."
He set his own mug down. Tipped his head at Moose, who was still tucked against his shin.
"He's been visiting her for a while, you know."
I blinked.
"Visiting who?"
He glanced over at the braided rug.
"Penny."
The golden retriever lifted her head at the sound of her name, gave me a long, patient look, and put it back down again.
"Couple times a week, he comes through the back gate. They hang out on the rug. He drinks her water. He leaves." A small smile. "I've been trying to figure out whose dog he was."
I closed my eyes.
"How long has this been going on?"
"Week and a half. Give or take."
"A week and a half?"
"Give or take."
"That gate." I pinched the bridge of my nose. "I saw it standing open coming around the corner, and I didn't put it together. He's a menace. I'm so sorry. I thought he was doing yard laps. I didn't know he had a social life."
He laughed. The Queens crept back in.
"What's his name?"
"Moose."
"He's welcome any time. As long as you don't mind."
"I don't mind. I'm just—" I dragged my hand down my face. "He has friends before I do."
"How long have you been back?" he asked.
"A couple of weeks."
"What brings you back to Hartsdale?"
And there it was. The polite, ordinary question any neighbor asks. The one I had a thirty-second version of, a three-hour version of, and no version at all that I could give in his kitchen, in his shirt, with his eyes on me like that.
"Easton?"
"Yeah."
I tucked my fingers under Moose's collar and tried to make sheepish look like grace.
"I'd really love to catch up. I would. But maybe we do it when I'm wearing something other than your shirt?"
He looked at me.
He looked down at the shirt that hit me mid-thigh, the wet hair on my shoulders, my bare feet on his kitchen tile.
He came back to my face like he was just catching up.
"Yeah." A slow exhale. The corner of his mouth turned up. "Of course. Sorry."
"Don't be."
He set his mug down and pushed off the counter.
"Come on. I'll walk you out the front."
He led me down a short hallway lined with photographs I didn't let myself look at too long. Past a living room with a couch and a folded blanket on the arm of it, and a guitar case leaning against the wall. Past a closed door, I assumed was a bedroom, which I tried very hard not to think about.
Moose padded behind us like a dog on a state visit. He looked back at Penny once on his way past her rug.
At the front door, Easton stepped around me and opened it.
He stood with one hand on the frame.
"Friday," he said.
"Friday. With pants."
A beat. He worked very hard at keeping a straight face, failing at it the way he'd been failing at it all morning.
"Pants is a strong opening offer."
"You'll have a shirt on."
He scratched the back of his neck and looked at the floor between us.
"Two of 'em, if it helps."
I almost laughed.
"Thank you," I said. "Again. For the shirt. And the not-laughing-too-hard."
"Anytime."
I gathered Moose by the collar, stepped past him onto the porch, and made it two steps down before the door clicked shut behind me.
I walked down his front walk in his T-shirt, with my dog under my fingertips, and made it to the end of his driveway before I heard the car.
I didn't have to look. I knew the sound. I knew the car. I could already see how the next two minutes were going to go.
I looked anyway.
Audrey's gray Subaru was rolling up Maple at the pace of a hearse. It slowed when she saw me. It pulled to a stop at the curb in front of my own house, directly across the street from where I was standing.
The driver's window came down.
Audrey leaned her elbow on it and looked at me from across Maple Avenue. Scrubs. Full lipstick. A paper bag from the bakery on her passenger seat. Audrey didn't leave the hospital in anything less than a performance condition.
I considered running. I considered fainting in the driveway. I considered casually walking back up Easton's front walk, knocking on his door, and asking him to also lend me a pair of pants and a passport.
I did none of those things.
I crossed the street.
I crossed it slowly because there was nowhere to hide and no version of this where speed would help. I crossed the way you cross a field when the whole town is watching, which, given that the Hallorans' window faces Maple, was probably technically true.
I arrived at the curb in front of my own house, beside her open driver's window, with my dog at my hip.
She looked at me.
She looked across the street at the bungalow.
She looked at the gray Hartsdale Fire T-shirt on me. The bare legs. The bare feet. The wet hair. The dog. The fact that I had very clearly just walked out the front door of a house that was not my own.
Her face did something I hadn't seen it do since the eighth grade.
"Astrid Matthews."