I’d kept my head down, filling the pages of my notebooks with lyrics and chord progressions. My phone remained powered down and stashed in a drawer. No producer nagged me, and there were no conference calls with the record label. I grew the most outrageously ugly beard, and didn’t get a haircut all summer. By Labor Day weekend, I’d been shaggier than I’d ever looked in my life, but I’d felt so much better about myself that it wasn’t even funny.
On the second-to-last night I was in Maine, Kira asked me if I wanted to go to the county fair. “Sure,” I’d answered. I would have followed her anywhere.
Preserving my last moments of anonymity with a baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, I went to the fair with Kira in her father’s car. The whole evening was silly and glorious. First I talked Kira onto the Himalayan ride. And as it spun us senseless, I held Kira’s wrist in a death grip. She just laughed and threw her head back, thrilled with the motion.
Then, as the sun set, we ate corn dogs and caramel apples. We attempted to pop balloons with darts. I was a terrible shot, but after a dozen tries, and probably fifty bucks, I won a purple stuffed cat. We laughed at how ugly it was, but Kira tucked it under her arm anyway, and we got in line for the Ferris wheel. The queue inched forward as couples boarded.
“How about that view?” I joked when we were finally aloft.
“It’s killer,” Kira whispered from her side of our little metal bench. In the daylight, we could have seen for miles. But Maine was so rural that all we could see beyond the fairgrounds was the blackness of distant valleys and lakes.
Perhaps it was the novelty of seeing Kira away from the general store. But as we went whirling through the night air, hip to hip, I felt a new kind of electricity between us. Turning, I studied Kira’s wide-eyed profile. And it suddenly became very difficult not to kiss her. I’d be leaving in less than thirty-six hours, and I wasn’t happy about it at all.
Do it, my subconscious begged. You know you want to. I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t mind at all. The way she held my gaze a little too long when we laughed, and the way she blushed when I complimented her? Those were signs. Reading girls was one of my talents.
Somehow I had resisted, held our attraction at bay. But just when I was complimenting myself on my self-control, she opened her mouth and broke my heart.
“John?” she said softly. “I just want to tell you that hanging around with you this summer was a great help to me.”
“Yeah?” I croaked.
“This year was really terrible, and you helped me forget about it. You took me out of my own head. Because you…”
“I what?”
“It’s too weird. Too hard to say out loud.”
“Well, now I’m desperately curious. But no biggie.”
She’d laughed, but it held a nervous edge. “Okay, fine. I needed to have a guy friend, one who didn’t hit on me. Because…” She swallowed. “Last year. It wasn’t my pocketbook that was stolen that night in that parking lot.”
My body went cold, and I stared at her for two beats of my heart. “Kira, are you trying to tell me that you were…”
She nodded, eyes wet. The lights from the Ferris wheel were reflected in her tears. “See? You can’t even say the word.”
“Forced?”
“Raped,” she said, her voice flat.
“Come here.” I’d spent the summer trying not to touch her, but now I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against my body. There was nothing sexual about it. I buried my nose in her hair. “I’m so sorry, sweetness.” I tipped her head to rest on my shoulder and took a shaky breath. “Goddamn it, Kira. I would do anything to make that not be true.”
Miraculously, I kept my voice gentle, but my insides were tight with anger and helplessness. I’d felt a surge of blood in my ears, like nothing I’d ever experienced. I thought of myself as a rational man, but at that moment I would have killed the guy who hurt her. No question.
My free hand curled into a fist in my lap, but Kira picked it up, softening my fingers. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. I just wanted you to know how much you helped. You made me feel safe. And you reminded me that men aren’t terrifying.”
Her words did nothing to lessen my uneasiness. I was hit by the same sort of shock that comes after swerving to narrowly avoid a car accident. Because every time I’d restrained my desire for Kira, it had been at my own whim. Holding back was something I’d done for my own selfish reasons. I’d had no way of knowing that my actions—or lack of them—were important to her.
It was just incredible luck that I hadn’t fucked it up.
I felt dizzy as the old Ferris wheel spun us through the darkness. I held her tightly, privately sick with the idea that anyone could do that to sunny Kira. “I don’t know what to say. I could blather on about how nobody has the right to hurt you. But you know that already. Please tell me this bastard is in jail.”
“He is. But not because of me. The guy got caught a month later, when he tried it on someone else. But that girl’s boyfriend heard her screaming. John? You’re kind of squeezing me…”
I eased my grip. “Shit. Sorry. Not what you need.”
She shook her head before resting it on my shoulder again. “No, I’m not afraid of you. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
We sat quietly for the rest of the ride. No more words were necessary. I stroked her hair, and tried to breathe through the tension in my chest. When our turn on the Ferris wheel ended, the carnies opened the car’s door. We disembarked, our evening over. I held Kira’s hand as we walked back to the car. It wasn’t a conscious act. I could barely let go to allow her to drive home. And when we pulled into her driveway, it was all I could do not to follow her into the house.
I’d fallen for her, but I’d been too stupid to realize it. As we reached her door, I wished I could spend my last thirty-six hours in Maine holding her. Instead, I gave her a single, tight hug goodnight. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, my voice raw. “We need to play one more hand of cards before I go.”
She nodded against my chest. “I hope I didn’t freak you out.”
“You could never.” I kissed the top of her head. “Goodnight, Kira.”
On my last day in Maine, I spent an hour trimming and then shaving off my beard. My newly smooth face had unattractive tan lines striped down it, but it was nothing that a few sunny days in Seattle couldn’t fix.
When I whistled my way into the general store for the very last time, Kira gasped. “Oh my God, you look so different!” She ran out from behind the counter to put her palms on my cheeks, and my eyes fell shut from the warmth of her touch. I would have happily stayed right there forever, but she darted away.
“I made you a lobster roll for dinner,” she said. “I know we’re not on the ocean, but it’s something you’re supposed to eat when you come to Maine.”
“Awesome.” I smiled at her and accepted my dinner plate. “And there are whoopie pies, right? I can’t leave without one more of those.”
“Do you even have to ask?” She gave me an eye-roll. “This is your last meal in Maine. I’d get kicked out of hospitality school if I didn’t throw in a whoopie pie.”