Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ben spent the next few days holed up in the Montauk motel crafting the piece on Terrence. He polished it up on the train back to Bay Shore. Ben loved writing on trains. He once took a fifty-one-hour ride from Chicago to San Francisco when behind the eight ball on a deadline. By the time they had reached the plains of Nebraska, he was halfway through, and he finished up somewhere in the Nevada desert. Now, as the conductor announced, “Next stop, Bay Shore,” he proudly closed his laptop. He was satisfied that he had given Terrence his due as the legendary and barrier-breaking athlete that he was.
Ben boarded the ferry, sat up top, and thought about his next move with Addison. He had escaped unscathed, really, and contemplated chickening out. He didn’t have to open himself up like that again. As he walked home in the dark, he tossed both options around in his brain—deliberating between letting it go or pursuing her. Though he knew it was really a matter of the heart. The brain could come up with a thousand reasons not to do something, but it was the heart that held the presidential veto.
When he turned onto his block—their block—it became obvious what would come next. The draw was almost magnetic, and his feet were barely touching the ground. The light was on in her living room, and he could see her through her window, curled up on the couch watching TV. One look at her, and he was sure he had no choice but to tell her how he felt. He walked quietly onto her front deck, contemplating knocking, knowing full well that she would jump ten feet in the air when he did. With that in mind, he pulled out his phone to text her first.
As he was about to press Send, a man appeared in her living room with a big smile and a bowl of popcorn. He plopped down next to her on the couch with a casualness that couldn’t have belonged to a paying guest. Ben looked closer. The man said something that looked to be deep. Addison answered, placing her hand on his knee.
And Ben turned around and headed home to Sally, the only living thing that had never disappointed him.
The next morning, Ben woke with a familiar ache in his stomach, but refused to give in to it. Instead, he threw on his wet suit, grabbed his paddleboard, and headed to the beach. Watching all of that surfing reminded him how good it felt to be out on the ocean, to clear his mind. Sally followed and sat dutifully waiting for him on the shore, dipping in and out of the waves, becoming a wet, salty mess. She did her usual meet and greet on steroids when he made his way back onto land.
They headed back home together, him carrying his board, her running ahead and then circling back behind him again to make sure he was OK. She was in tune with his feelings and always had been. And while he was nowhere near the depths of grief that he had been in the past, he was most certainly bummed, and Sally most certainly knew it.
“Good girl,” he said, running his hand over her back as she passed.
Sally looked back at him knowingly and made a beeline for Addison’s house.
“Bad girl, bad girl,” he mumbled under his breath.
Ben kneeled down in front of the doggie door—ass in the air—and peeked through at Sally. She was wiggling her back all over Addison’s living room rug, doing the doggie mamba.
“Get out of there!” Ben coaxed, before changing his tone to a high pitched, “Here, girl!” Neither worked. He knocked on the front door. No answer. So he kneeled back down, his head through the doggie door, when Addison arrived behind him.
“Ben?” she called out.
Smack, boom. “Ow!” he said, flipping back on to his butt. He ran his hand over his forehead, grimaced at the blood on his fingers, swooned a little, and pushed himself against the door to settle down.
“Oh boy,” Addison said. “Let’s get you inside.”
The cut was nothing much, but Addison broke out Gicky’s first aid kit (a metal box painted to look like Clara Barton) and went to town while Ben whined on the couch. “This may sting,” she said, wiping a cotton ball with hydrogen peroxide over the wound. It did.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” he stung back.
“My boyfriend? Do you mean the guy who was here last night?” Addison laughed. “That’s Rome, Kizzy’s husband. He left on the morning boat.”
Ben’s expression said it all—followed by his words.
“Wow. Do you two share everything?” he asked.
“Yuck. Don’t be ridiculous. Kizzy was missing, and she left her phone behind—possibly on purpose. He came looking for her.”
“Kizzy is fine. Actually, more than fine. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but she’s in Montauk with Terrence Williams. They’re in love.”
“C’mon.”
“Yup. I asked her how she could do this to you—she said you’d be happy for her.”
“Of course I’m happy for her, but they’re in love?”
“For real. He’s giving up the road for her. Moving to the big city.”
“Who is he, Crocodile Dundee?”
“That’s what I said, and nobody got the reference.”
“Another gift from my mother. What’s your excuse?”
“I had a thing for reptiles—I was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle for Halloween four years in a row.”
She smiled, squeezed some Neosporin onto a Q-tip, and gently traced the cut with it. It had been so long since anyone had taken care of him. His eyes widened as he stared into hers.
“So, you and Terrence? Was that just your big foray into the one-night stand?”
He wasn’t happy about it but knew he could deal with it if it meant being with her.
Addison laughed, “Oh my God, Ben. That wasn’t me. It was Kizzy. You just saw them together—how could you think that?” She laughed again until she realized he was particularly serious.
“I thought it was you. That morning, when I came over, I thought it was you who had been with Terrence.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s not that crazy. You thought I traded sex for an autograph!”
“Well, I may have been wrong about that—but you had sex on the beach with that Sex on the Beach girl—I saw you saying goodbye to her on the stairs.”
“I was saying hello to her. She saw me walking Sally and called out to me.”
Addison laughed at all of the confusion. So did Ben.
“If conclusion jumping was an Olympic sport, we would have won gold,” he joked.
“Synchronized misunderstanding!” Addison added before carefully placing a small Band-Aid onto his forehead. When through, she rested the back of her hand on his cheek in a particularly loving way. It made his heart shake.
“You’re good to go,” she said, the words getting caught in her throat.
He blushed and looked into her eyes. “Do I have to?”
“Do you have to what?” she said, barely audibly.
“Do I have to go? I’m still a little dizzy, you know, from the gash,” he said, pointing to his forehead.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a gash.” She smiled. “It’s more like…a boo-boo.”
“Maybe you should kiss it, then, make it all better.”
She leaned over and kissed the tip of his nose instead, which had clearly been broken once or twice. He took her hands in his and pulled her onto the couch next to him.
“Not like that,” he whispered, running his finger across her lips as if silently asking for permission. She gave it and kissed him straight on. Their positioning was awkward, so she brazenly climbed onto his lap and wrapped her long legs behind him.
And they kissed.
They kissed like two teenagers who had never kissed before but also, so perfectly, and so in sync, as if they had been kissing each other for their entire lives.
She kissed the salty skin behind his ears and down his neck while running her hands through his disheveled hair. And he responded with a hunger that the small collection of women he had slept with since Julia hadn’t touched. He hadn’t truly desired any of them. It was just a primal urge. This was also primal, but from his heart. She had indisputably awoken his dormant organ.
He wanted, actually needed, to feel her skin against his. Needed to scoop her up in his arms, carry her to her bed, and make love to her. But with every inch of him pushing for that to occur, he knew that there was still one enormous obstacle. He was, in fact, wearing a wet suit. There was no graceful way of getting out of a wet wet suit. It was one of those things that needed to be done in private—nothing even minorly sexy about a grown hairy man peeling himself out of a spandex suit. Logic and humility stepped in and curbed the hunger.
He broke away.
“Are we doing this?” he asked quietly.
“It seems so,” she answered, clearly not interested in a break in the action.
“I’m going to bring Sally home.”
Addison looked down at the dog. Seeing her little snout resting on the coffee table and her human eyes staring at them was more than mortifying.
“That’s a good idea. Come right back?”
“Give me a half hour—I want to feed her and rinse off the ocean.”
The need to take off his wet suit made him seem cool and collected when, in fact, he was anything but. Her eyes longed for him, but she nodded yes. He almost stopped to tell her the truth—but that longing in her eyes was too good to squash with intimacies that usually aren’t revealed until at least the first anniversary. An anniversary—he flinched at the thought. The thing he had sworn against felt inevitable with this woman. He worried about going home, breaking the spell.