Chapter 54
Marin
I should be packing.
My flight leaves in five hours. My suitcase is open on the bed.
I’ve put one blouse in it. One. In twenty minutes.
Because I keep walking to the bedroom door and stopping and walking back to the suitcase and picking up another blouse and putting it down because apparently I’ve lost the ability to fold.
I pick up the blouse. Put it down.
The thing about sleeping with your handyman on a kitchen table while your kidnapped boyfriend listens from the basement is that there’s no manual for what comes next.
I’ve checked. There is no chapter in any self-help book titled “So You’ve Fucked the Contractor: A Guide to Post-Coital Hostage Management. ”
I would write one but I don’t think the market is big enough.
I go downstairs. Luke is leaning against the counter with a glass of water. At 3 a.m. He looks at me. I look at him. The kitchen table is right there between us, still slightly askew from earlier, and neither of us looks at it.
Until we do.
“I should pack,” I say.
“You should.”
I don’t move.
“He’s secure,” he says. “For now.”
“Good.”
“Your flight’s at seven?”
“Eight. I need to leave by six.”
“Three hours.”
“Three hours.”
We’re doing math. Two adults standing in a kitchen at 3 a.m. doing arithmetic to avoid doing the thing they’re both thinking about. I have a graduate degree. He builds houses. Between us we have enough brain cells to land a rocket and we’re standing here counting hours like children.
“I made a list,” I say. “For Charles. Feeding schedule. Medication. Water. What to say if Mrs. Mather comes by.”
“You made a list.”
“I’m thorough.”
“I know.”
He sets the water down. I watch his hand leave the glass the way I’ve been watching his hands for weeks—the knuckles, the scars, the way they rest on surfaces like they’re measuring them.
Hands that fixed my porch. Hands that installed my faucet.
Hands that were in my hair a few hours ago pulling my head back on a table where a Baptist woman prayed over my dying husband who isn’t dying and isn’t my husband.
“Stop looking at my hands,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m looking at the counter.”
“Your eyes aren’t on the counter, Marin.”
The kitchen is very small at 3 a.m. Or maybe it’s the same size and we’re bigger.
Or maybe the space between us is shrinking the way it always shrinks when we’re in this house and the lights are low and there’s a man in the basement and the whole world has narrowed to this room and this counter and this man who won’t stop being in my kitchen.
“This is a bad idea,” I say.
“Probably.”
“I have a flight in five hours.”
“You do.”
“And a boyfriend in the basement.”
“That too.”
“And a career to resurrect and a cover story to maintain and a neighbor who thinks I’m a saint and a life that is held together by lies and prayer beads and the sheer force of my unwillingness to admit I’ve made a catastrophic mistake.”
“All true.”
“So this—” I gesture between us. Whatever this is. “This can’t happen again.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
“It was a one-time thing. Stress. Adrenaline. Bad judgment.”
“Makes sense.”
“Stop agreeing with me.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to argue. I want you to say something. I want you to not just stand there being calm and reasonable and—”
“Marin.”
“What?”
He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me.
The way he looked at me in the truck on the side road with his thumb on my forehead.
The way he looked at me from the floor of the kitchen with the wrench in his hand.
The way he’s been looking at me since the first day I opened the door and handed him a mug and he drank from it like he belonged here.
I cross the kitchen. Stop in front of him. “This is a terrible idea,” I say.
“The worst,” he says.
“I’m going to regret this.”
“Probably.”
“I’m not over Charles. I don’t know if I’ll ever be.”
He nods. “I know.”
“I’m saying it so we’re clear.”
“We’re clear.”
We are not clear. We’ve never been clear. We will never be clear.
I kiss him. Slower this time. Not like the rage kiss. Not the table kiss. His hands find my waist and he lifts me onto the counter—might as well, the table’s already been checked off—and I wrap my arms around his neck and let myself have one more stupid, reckless, doomed thing.
“Three hours,” I whisper.
“Three hours,” he says.
We don’t use all three.
We use enough.