23 Life Is a Circle #2
Will’s hand touches mine. It’s so soft I have to look down to see if it’s really happened, but there it is, his skin against mine.
I know he’s holding his breath when I look at his face.
We’re close. Painfully close. And I think to myself, If we kiss now, we’ll never know what state we were in when my lips touched his, and we’ll remember that story forever.
But we don’t do it. I feel the first drops of rain on my right cheek, and the water seems to startle Will, who clears his throat and pulls his hand away.
With that, he quiets my desire and my heart and everything else.
I stand up. The dark clouds gather over our heads and convince us to take shelter in the car.
We return on the narrow road that led us there.
The rain started thin and soft, but now it’s falling rhythmically in big drops.
Will speeds up as we go downhill. I think he’s scared the storm could get worse and we might end up trapped here in the middle of nowhere.
When we reach Kimball, the nearest town, the sky is so dark, you’d think it was nighttime.
“What should we do?” I ask.
The windshield wipers move from side to side. Will parks and turns off the car. He looks at the nearby restaurant. “If this is how it’s going to be, I think we should stop and eat something. Let the rain pass before we get started again.”
“Sounds good.”
“You cold?”
“A little.”
The temperature has dropped suddenly. Will leans over to look for something in the back seat, pushing aside the books and all the rest of the things that don’t fit in his RV.
“Here.” He hands me a gray sweatshirt.
We go inside and take a corner table. There’s a daily special of meat and potatoes and a vinegary sauce I can’t identify. Will asks for the saltshaker, and the waitress, who’s around fifty and has her hair pulled back in a long, platinum-blond ponytail, squints at him.
“You don’t like it?” she asks accusingly.
“It’s just a little…” Will weighs his words. “Mild.”
“Here.” She slams down the saltshaker and walks off, shaking her ass in a pair of tight, gaudy pants that look like something from the eighties.
I try not to laugh. So does Will. This effortless togetherness persists as we talk about whatever and eventually order dessert: chocolate pumpkin pie, delicious.
“That was amazing,” he tells the waitress when she comes to take our plates.
“It’s my grandmother’s recipe,” she says dryly.
“Do you have room for coffee?” Will asks, looking outside and seeing the rain is still pounding. “We may as well have a cup and stay here a bit to try and wait out the storm.”
The waitress looks over at us and whistles.
“Ha. I hope you like coffee, then. Supposedly it’s going to get even worse. They say it won’t let up till morning. If you’re lucky.”
She walks off and talks to a man who’s been at the bar for an hour drinking beer. Will sighs and looks at his watch.
“What do we do?” I ask.
“It’s getting late. And we’ve got a lot of hours still to drive. The way I see it, there are two options: We leave now and risk it or we spend the night here.”
“I barely have any cash on me.”
“Don’t worry about that, Greta.”
“If we could find an ATM…”
“Seriously, it doesn’t matter. We’ll ask for the check and find out if there’s somewhere we can stay close by. We can’t go far if this keeps up.”
We walk over to the bar to pay. As he puts away his change, Will asks, “Are there any hotels nearby?”
“Don’t you young kids know how to read?” She sticks a finger on the top line of the sticky menu, where it reads Rigoberta’s Place.
“Yeah, Berta’s Place. I saw that, but…”
“Berta’s me.” She points at her stained apron, then looks at the man drinking beer next to her and sighs as if to say, the idiots I have to put up with.
“I’ve only got one room free. That’ll be sixty-six dollars.
You pay up front. Breakfast is included, it’s served at seven, don’t come early and don’t come late.
If you sleep in, I feel sorry for you. Rules are rules. ”
Will is trying his hardest not to laugh. “Sounds good. We’ll take it.”
He drops the cash on the bar and she gives us the key.
“Stairs to the right, door on the left.”
“Great. Thanks.”
The place is pretty run-down, but it’ll work for tonight, we decide. I guess Will hoped there would be two single beds, but there’s just one, a double. I call the left side and put my cell phone on the end table after checking and realizing there’s no signal.
“I’m going to go get some things out of the car,” he says.
I open the window to let in the cold, and a few minutes later, I see Will cross the street toward his Audi.
He’s one of those people who’s impervious to rain, so he doesn’t bother running.
That’s sweet to me. It makes him human somehow, because he’s so finicky about so much else.
I feel a kinship with him, since I never use an umbrella—they’re too uncomfortable, and anyway, it’s just water.
When he gets back, his hair and skin are damp.
“We’ve got books, a deck of cards, clothes, and a chocolate bar.”
“Wow, fancy,” I joke.
We’re sitting on the bed in front of his things. I pick up one of the books. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations. He’s read it, I can tell because some of the pages are dog-eared and there are underlines throughout.
“Did you like it?”
“Yea, a bunch,” he says.
“Have you always read so much?”
“Yeah, for years I did. Then I stopped for a while. Now you could say I’ve returned to my roots.”
“Life’s a circle.”
Will looks at me so intensely that the air in the room becomes denser and the walls narrow a few inches. “Maybe.”
“You up for a game of cards, then?” I ask to break the tension, uncertain where it’s coming from, whether it’s my imagination or the fact that I’m so close to him.
He nods and I shuffle and deal.
We spend most of the afternoon playing while the storm gets stronger, showing us the waitress knew what she was talking about.
Being with Will is easy—it’s like taking a tranquilizer.
I can feel my body relax and my heart slow down.
I’m not used to showing people who I am.
I usually weigh each word before I say it, but with him, everything just slips out effortlessly.
I guess it would have been hard to hide behind a mask while playing the Map of Longing.
Anyway, it’s liberating. I can just be. I’d love to ask him if it’s the same for him, if that curve in his lips is natural every time he looks at me or I win a game.
But then he breaks the silence. “You play just like your sister.”
“What?” I whisper.
“You always cover your back. You’re not a risk-taker. The best defense is a good offense, right?” He throws a couple of cards on the bed, on top of the others, and only then does he realize how quiet I am. “What’s up?”
I shake my head and try to return to the present, to this tiny room where just Will and I are, but it’s hard, because I feel the presence of Lucy’s ghost. “What you said… It just surprised me.”
“Why? You know we were friends.”
“The kind of friends who go for months without talking?”
I say this coolly, and he lifts his eyebrows—he didn’t see that coming. He shows me his cards, putting an end to the game.
“To be honest, yeah, that’s exactly what kind of friends we were. But if what you want to know is whether I cared about your sister, then you better be sure I did.”
“I wasn’t trying to say otherwise.”
Will stands up. “Should we go downstairs for dinner?”
“Sure.”
I descend the stairs behind him, still wrapped in the sweatshirt he gave me, which smells of him, of that evocative mixture of violets and the cold and running water. It’s funny how a cologne or a fabric softener can smell so different depending on who uses it.
There’s no one there. We expected that. It’s raining buckets and the gutter is overflowing and dumping water out into the lot. We sit down by one of the foggy windows. We can hardly see out.
Berta comes over to tell us all she has is steak and split pea soup.
Since there’s not a choice, we just nod.
We talk a little during dinner, lulled by the sound of rain and the cozy atmosphere.
My feet touch Will’s under the table accidentally.
Every time, he pulls away. But not immediately—he seems to think it over beforehand.
As if his instincts were telling him stay, and his head were reminding him he shouldn’t.
There’s cheesecake for dessert. I take mine to the room, where I can enjoy it in peace. When I get there, I remove my shoes, get in bed, and sink a spoon into its creamy surface. Will grins and grabs a pile of clothes.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m going to grab a shower.”
“Cool. Don’t use all the hot water.”
He disappears into the bathroom, and I finish my dessert listening to the banging of the pipes and imagining Will under the water.
Is he one of those guys who closes his eyes in the shower to concentrate on what he’s feeling, or does he soap up fast to not waste time?
Not knowing the answer bugs me. As does feeling my pulse race as I remember he’s completely naked just a few feet away.
I remember seeing him shirtless and realizing his body was as hard as his expression when he closes up inside of himself, and like an idiot, I can’t stop thinking about tracing its lines slowly with my index finger. Very, very slowly.
Will’s hair is damp when he emerges, and I feel an electric shock that starts in my stomach and stretches down my legs. Lust, I think. This is lust.
In a trance, I take the sweatpants he passes me and walk to the bathroom. In five minutes, I’ve showered, dried off, and come back into the room. The only light is from the lamp on the nightstand. It feels intimate, especially when I get into bed and he does too.
I slide an arm under the pillow and lay my head there, looking at him. He turns to me too, and I feel like we’re two moths circling the same flame.