Her eyes darkened, and she swallowed roughly, then whispered, “Yes.”
“Me too,” I said as I touched her face. I was buzzed with desire, desperate to connect with her. “Elle. You have to know . . .”
I stopped when she shuddered, whispering my name. “Colin.”
But I wanted to continue. Had to tell her. “How much I want to kiss you.”
“Oh God,” she gasped, then closed her eyes, swaying toward me. When she opened her eyes, she licked her lips. “I want you to, but . . .”
It was like a crashing sound.
But.
That was all.
That was enough.
When a woman said but, you stopped.
Plain and simple.
I let go of her face and dropped my hand from her hip. “Are you okay?”
She drew a deep breath, her eyes forlorn. “Yes. I’m just not ready.”
My heart sank.
But those were words I understood all too well. “I get it. I absolutely get it.”
And I did. More than I wanted to. But I had to. If she wasn’t ready, she wasn’t ready.
From inside her clutch purse, an alarm sounded on her phone. Grabbing the device hastily, she stared at it, her tone heavy. “I have to go. My mom has a shift at eleven. I told her I’d be home by ten thirty.”
“Then let’s go,” I said, doing my best to restore the friendly vibe and to erase the let’s get naked one. “Lyft or cab?”
She cleared her throat, seemed to push out a laugh, then said, “Lyft. Always the bargain hunter.”
I laughed too, good-naturedly. “Besides cabs aren’t what they used to be,” I said, and as soon as those words came out, my heart clutched. My father used to be a taxi driver, long ago.
Long before the world changed and taxis became an endangered species.
And there I was, thinking about my dad and taxis and how the world had shifted.
But something else had shifted tonight in my world.
The acknowledgment from Elle.
That she felt this thing between us.
She might not be able to act on it.
But she felt it.
And that gave me hope.
I didn’t want to give up.
I walked her to the portico, pressed my lips to her cheek, and gave her a chaste goodbye kiss that I hoped would linger in her mind the whole way home.
7
Elle
I gave myself the car ride to remember how Colin was so close to me.
To recall his scent, his words, his eyes.
I closed mine, replaying our almost kiss as the driver cruised along the streets to my building.
I’d nearly given in. I’d desperately wanted to be consumed by his lips, his heat, his desire.
But if I did, I’d be lost.
So I allowed myself another minute of meandering, then I folded up the memory and the dizzying sensations that went along with it, tucked it in a drawer in my mind, and put it away.
I reached my house and went inside, leaving that part of the night behind me.
My mother’s head was bent over the kitchen counter, her fingers swiping in a wild blur across her phone screen. “Gotcha, flesh-eater!”
Home. I was home. This was my place. My safe haven. “Saving the world, Mom?” I asked as I closed the front door.
“Somebody has to fend off the infected,” she said with a final slide before she looked up and closed the game.
I laughed. “I thought you were giving it up. You said it was giving you gamer’s thumb or something.”
My mother shook her head, her bouncy ponytail swinging with her. “I tried. Oh Lord, you know I tried. But your son . . . he challenged me. I couldn’t back down.”
I cracked up at her competitive ways. This woman loved going toe to toe in games. “You’re going to need to work on the newest versions of State of Decay next. Alex and his buddies are moving on in the post-apocalyptic gaming world,” I said, dropping my keys on the counter and giving my mom a peck on the cheek. She wore green scrubs with Snoopys and Woodstocks on them. “How was he tonight?”
“Fine. Just fine. I plied him with pizza and schooled him with my survival skills.”
“No easier way to the heart of a fourteen-year-old boy, is there?” While there was plenty of truth in that statement, for my son, video games weren’t just the snack-food-and-candy path to winning his teenage heart—they were essential to his emotional survival. They were the difference between him talking and not talking. Between speech and a complete breakdown. The main reason I signed him up for the summer gamer camp.
Some parents might worry that their kids played too many video games, and while I set limits, I also knew what they meant for him. Because the time before he’d played? That was the end of the world. Black, empty, cold. A true pit of despair. In those dark days, I’d have given anything—a lung, a kidney, a limb—for him to talk to me. He’d shut down after his father died, completely withered, barely able to utter a word except for the essentials—yes, no, I don’t know.
Understandable, given what he’d witnessed in our home on that night two years ago.
But eventually, somehow games, zombies, and post-apocalyptic stories became a portal for him. I never would have predicted it, but on the days after school when Alex would come by the center, he was drawn to the gaming room, and to the raucous energy of the boys shouting at the screen. After a year of being so traumatized by what he saw he’d gone nearly mute, video games reconnected the voice inside him to the rest of the world. They’d unlocked the part of him that he’d kept quiet, and how I loved to hear him shouting with his friends.
God bless the living dead.
Zombies had rescued my son from the near-catatonic state that the death of his father had sent him into.
My mother tucked the phone into her purse and gathered up her keys. “How was the benefit? Did you meet your goal?” She held up her hand and twisted her index finger around her middle finger. “I had ’em crossed all night for you.”
“We did. It was amazing,” I said, bursting with excitement once more as I gave a recap of the night. Well, the pre–almost kiss portion of the night.
Mom beamed, then pumped a fist in the air and did a victory dance in the kitchen. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!”
The woman had amazing energy.
Barely fifty, she poured her heart and soul into her two grown daughters, her grandkids, her job as a nurse, and even her new boyfriend. She’d put herself through nursing school when my younger sister and I were toddlers, struggling to make ends meet as a young single mom. She’d wanted different things for her daughters, and she’d achieved that with Camille, who’d wisely waited till she was out of college and married before she and wife decided to have kids.
Not me.
The bun unknowingly went in the oven on the night of high school graduation, when the condom broke with Sam, the guy who became my on-again, off-again boyfriend, then eventually my husband, then nearly my ex-husband, since I’d been separated from him the last year of his life while he was on-again and off-again in all sorts of ways. On drugs. Off drugs. In rehab. Out of rehab. Like a merry-go-round that gave me whiplash and nothing else but heartache.
“I am so proud of you, baby,” my mom said, walking around the counter and clasping me in a big hug. “You worked so hard for this, and those kids need you. You have done so much for them.”