Chapter 11 #2
"Not the ladder. There's a service stair inside the column. Door at the base. Hasn't been locked since the bypass went in."
"You're kidding."
"I am not."
He took my hand and led me around to the back of the tower. A steel door was set into the concrete base, painted over forty years of repaints, and now mostly rusted. He pulled it open.
Inside, a switchback stair climbed up the inside of the column in the dark. A single bulb at the bottom was somehow still working.
"Audrey and I climbed the ladder."
"You could've used the stairs?"
"Audrey is going to be insufferable about this."
He went up first. The stairs were tight and steep. He stayed a flight ahead of me, the heel of one boot ringing on the metal a beat before the next, the slow, even pace of a man who climbed stairs for a living. He waited for me at the top of every landing.
We came up through a hatch onto the platform.
The platform was wider than I remembered.
The railing came to my hip. I could see the green bridge over the river, the small line of streetlights along Main, and the porch lights on Maple.
The whole town was holding still under us, and for a long beat, the only sound was the wind moving against the curve of the tank behind our heads.
He sat down on the platform with his back against the tank.
I sat next to him.
He kept his knee a quarter inch from mine. It wasn't a touch. It was the absence of one. The absence was, somehow, worse.
Then he said, "Tell me about your marriage."
I wasn't expecting that. I'd been expecting the polite version men used. So what happened in Boston? So what did the guy do? Easton had given me the front door.
I looked out at the river.
"I married him at twenty-four. He was charming. He read what I left on the coffee table. He sent flowers on Wednesdays. He looked at me like I was the only sensible thing in his world."
I drew a breath. The cold went all the way down.
"It turned out that was who he could afford to be.
His parents paid for the brownstone. His mother chose the lamps.
His mother chose the dresses. His mother chose the dinners.
I had a vet license I didn't use. By year two, I'd stopped saying the word license at his mother's table.
By year three, I was apologizing for the placement of a butter knife. "
I'd said those words many times in my head. Never out loud.
I let my fingers run along the seam of the platform. The metal was rough with old paint.
"His parents cut him off in March. He came home that night. He picked up a lamp off the side table and held it like he was going to throw it. He didn't throw it. He set it down. He cried."
I looked at my hands.
"I sat on the floor across from him and waited for the part of me that loved him to come back. It didn't. I'd ended it a year before. Two years before. I just hadn't told myself yet."
I let it sit.
He didn't say anything for a beat. The wind moved a piece of my hair across my cheek. He lifted his hand and tucked it behind my ear, carefully, like a man figuring out for the first time that he was allowed.
"He sent a text tonight."
I hadn't meant to tell him. It came out.
His hand stopped at my jaw.
"He sent a text?"
"I miss you. Three words. I deleted it before I put my lipstick on."
He didn't move his hand. He didn't say anything that a less careful man would have said. He didn't get up. He didn't put on the face Brett would've put on. He let his thumb run once along the line of my jaw, gently, and land at the corner of my mouth and stop.
"Good," he said.
I let a breath out. It went out shaky.
"Your turn," I said.
He took a breath and let it out.
"My grandmother got the diagnosis a little over two years ago. I was on Engine 295 in Queens. Had a good shift, a good crew. She had nobody else who could come up here for her."
He looked out at the river.
"I took the transfer. Hartsdale had an opening. Told myself I'd do a year, two on the long end, until she was through it."
"And then she went?"
"Yeah."
"And you stayed?"
"I stayed."
I let it sit.
He had a sentence he hadn't finished. So did I. I didn't push him for the rest of his. He didn't push me for the rest of mine.
The wind moved in the metal of the tank behind us. His thumb stayed at the corner of my mouth.
He must have seen something in my face.
He moved his hand from my jaw to the back of my neck.
His palm was warm there. The wind on the platform was cold. The two things together did something to my breathing I wasn't going to have a word for later.
"Astrid."
"Yes?"
He leaned in.
He moved slowly. He moved like a man asking. He gave me three full seconds to put a hand on his chest and stop him. I didn't. I lifted my chin.
His hand tightened at the back of my neck, the grip of a man who'd been waiting for permission and decided, just now, that he had it.
He kissed me.
It was a kiss that rewrote everything before it.
His mouth was warm. The stubble at the corner of his jaw scraped the side of mine.
His hand at the back of my neck was steady and unhurried, with nothing in it that said this was a thing he was rushing through to get to the next thing.
He was kissing me because he was kissing me.
There was no agenda underneath. There was no second move he was setting up.
He was here. I was here. The kiss was the entire thing.
His thumb moved once along the back of my ear.
I let one hand come up to the front of his shirt. I curled it into the fabric just above his collarbone and held on.
He made a low sound into my mouth, quiet and involuntary, like a man being touched somewhere he hadn't let himself imagine she would.
He pulled back half an inch.
His forehead came to rest against mine.
He didn't move. I didn't move.
His breath was on my mouth. My hand was still curled in his shirt. The town below us was holding its breath alongside us, and it surprised me that a town could do that.
"Astrid."
"Easton."
"I've been wanting to do that since you stood in my backyard in a bath towel."
"You have not."
"I have."
"Easton Ford."
"I had to wait the polite amount of time."
"And what is the polite amount of time?"
"Five weeks, apparently."
I laughed against his mouth.
He went to kiss me again.
His phone rang in his back pocket.
He pulled back. He let his forehead stay against mine for a beat longer.
The smile died at the second ring.
He went still against me.
He pulled the phone out of his back pocket and looked at the screen. The blue of it lit the side of his face.
"Duke."
The smile was completely gone.
"Easton."
"It's Saturday night."
"He knows."
"Duke doesn't call me on a Saturday night."
He slid his thumb across the screen and lifted the phone to his ear.
I sat back on the platform.
A minute ago, I'd been on a roof above Hartsdale with the warmth of his mouth still on mine. A minute ago, I'd been, for the first time in seven years, on a date with a man who asked me about my marriage straight through the front door and waited for the whole answer.
I watched his face.
Whatever Duke was saying on the other end of the line, Easton's face was already gone.
Kissing him on that water tower felt like the first true thing I'd done in years.
The phone ringing was the second.