Chapter Twelve #2
He removes my hands from his chest and it topples me forward, my forehead planting itself against his sternum. I roll my head to one side and the world tips. I feel his palm press between my shoulder blades but I’m still spinning, still floating away.
“Roz. What happened?”
I’m dizzy and wretched. It hurts not to hold on to him.
So I do.
I tip up and grab him around the ribs like he’s a dock in a roiling ocean.
“I—” I gasp. “I—accidentally—went—on—a date.”
And then everything just releases. My nerves and dismay.
Even the excitement I felt about going to the opening and spending time with my new art friends.
It’s all in a slushy pile of disappointment and embarrassment, dripping off the boots I still haven’t managed to get off.
I cry unseemly tears. There are bad noises and fingers twisted in his shirt and I can physically feel my makeup hotly displacing, melting across my face.
My lungs squeeze for breath and I try to calm myself a little, letting it out in a choppy stream. That’s when I register the rumble underneath my cheek. He’s shaking. Both hands around me and shaking. With laughter.
“Hey!” I tip my head up and sniffle. “Why are you laughing!”
There’s hair in my face and then it gets slid behind my ears. “I don’t know. I’m happy to see you.”
“I just told you I went on a date and you’re laughing? What the fuck is that! And I can’t get these fucking boots off! Don’t the people who make boots understand that eventually they must come off?”
He unclamps my hands from around his ribs and reclamps them against his shoulders, kneeling in front of me.
The night we decided to get married, I stepped on a nail in the yard at his mother’s house, and he knelt in front of me just like this, studied the puncture wound, rose with me in his arms, carried me to the car.
A loud zip! jolts me from the memory. He easily slides one boot down my calf and off my foot. “Oh. Right. The zipper,” I grumble.
He clears his throat and I think he might be hiding another laugh.
“It’s not funny,” I insist. “I can’t believe you’re laughing.”
“Right.” He clears his throat again. “Must have been terrible for you.”
“It was!”
“How do you accidentally end up on a date?”
“I thought my drawing teacher was going to be there too. He was supposed to come. But he bailed. Everybody bailed. And then it was just me and Lauro and there was, like, velvet and eye contact and the bartender made me a drink based on my laugh and Lauro took a sip and said it was delicious and did I mention the eye contact?”
Zip! The other boot slides off and my sock comes halfway off along with it. I start to bend to fix it, but he’s already there, fingers firmly straightening it back up my calf, fixing the front seam so that it neatly aligns along my toes.
He stands, slowly, steadying me at the elbows even though he’s the one moving. “So was the eye contact with Lauro or the bartender?”
I go to answer but then pull up short. Because now that he mentions it…“Both? Oh, God. Why did it all have to be so sexy?”
Now that I’m boot-free, I’m fancy-free, so I tumble past him and to the couch. It’s warm. He must have been lying here when I fell through the front door. I grab a blanket off the back of the couch and promptly suffocate myself in it.
“It was sexy to you?” he asks low, from a distance, and I realize he’s still standing at the door.
I’m continuing to fight for my life under the blanket, so it takes me a moment to register both the question and his placement in the room. When I blink it into focus, it’s a gut punch.
“I can’t look at you on that doormat without thinking of the time you left me the lease. And then you walked out the door without a word,” I say.
His face doesn’t even move a centimeter. “Which part was sexy to you?” he presses. “The situation? Or him?”
My heart is still racing, thinking I’m going to watch him walk out the door again.
“I like a dimly lit room as much as the next gal in heeled boots and lipstick!” I say with a scowl.
“I like getting called ‘baby.’ I like being told I’m delicious.
I—” I realize my feet are exposed at the bottom of the blanket and immediately pull them closer, inside, where it’s safe.
“I just didn’t want to be on a date with him. ”
Vin’s hand reaches up toward the doorknob, and metallic chemicals start pumping through my bloodstream. I feel instantly sober. Everything is bright and outlined in black pen. I’ve just told him I’m (accidentally) dating, so now, of course, I’m about to watch him turn that doorknob and leave again.
His hand lands on the brass knob. I watch for the twist, preemptively feel it in my gut. But then his fingers move two inches north. Clunk. The lock turns and he steps off the doormat, into the house, locking us in.
(Hey, Vinny! Somebody’s happy tonight!)
(What’s the smile all about, Vin?)
Nothing, nothing. It was just a good night. Is all.
(Come on, Vin! You better spill!)
All right. All right. Well. You know how that story I told before was called the Cat Doesn’t Come Back? Well. Uh. I’m smiling because…for the first time in my life…I think I waited long enough. I think the cat might have come back on her own.