Ian nudges the strap of my tank top out of the way and plants a trail of kisses along my collarbone, dark beard rasping against my skin. I reach for the hem of his T-shirt and he hums. The anticipation sparks between us like a live wire, and I know he’s wondering if this is the moment, same as I am: even though we’ve definitely fooled around a bunch over the last five months, we still haven’t actually had sex.
“I want to,” I promised him the first time we really talked about it, sitting on the lumpy mattress in his apartment last April, my bra strap slipping down my arm. “I think I just need some time.”
“Yeah, of course,” Ian said seriously, rubbing at his own bare, freckled shoulder. “Take as long as you need.” The fact that he was so sincerely nice about it made me like him even more than I already did, although now it’s almost the end of August and I know he can’t have been expecting it to take quite this long. I’m just waiting for the perfect opportunity—for the stars to align and the lighting to turn golden, for that moment when I’m one hundred percent sure. God knows I’ve made more than my fair share of mistakes about this kind of thing in the past, breaking hearts and ruining relationships and making choices I couldn’t take back. This time, I want to be absolutely certain I get it right.
I close my eyes and slide my palms over the muscles in Ian’s stomach, reaching around to count the ridges of his backbone and telling myself I’m not still thinking about Gabe. Ian’s a good kisser, friendly, and his fingertips are gentle along the underwire of my bra; he’s fumbling with the clasp when the reminder on my phone chimes out on the nightstand, the volume jacked loud and startling.
“Shoot,” I say, letting a breath out, squeezing Ian’s upper arms to call him off. “We’re supposed to go to that happy hour, remember? The place with the hundred beers.”
Ian groans. “Let’s skip it,” he says, ducking his head to nip at my shoulder.
“Can’t,” I murmur, grinning as I wriggle out from underneath him and reach for my tank top, enjoying the tease. “Gotta stick to the schedule.”
Ian grumbles a bit more, but after a moment he gets up too, heading into the bathroom to brush his teeth while I dig through my suitcase for a silky black T-shirt dress, pushing the thought of Gabe standing there on that train platform out of my mind once and for all. Everybody has their secrets, I tell myself, fluffing my hair out and slicking on a pale swipe of lip gloss. The trick is to leave the past where it belongs.
“You ready?” Ian asks now, coming out of the bathroom and holding his hand out, pink-cheeked and scruffily handsome.
“Sure am,” I say, then twist my fingers through his and squeeze. “Let’s go.”
Day 2
We spend the next day playing tourists, Tower Bridge and the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, popping up out of underground stations like subterranean animals after a long, cold winter. For lunch we slip into a tiny corner shop and pick up cheddar cheese sandwiches with mustard and pickles on bread so crusty you could break a tooth trying to eat it. I like traveling with Ian, I think again as we post up on a bench in Covent Garden to eat them: in spite of all my careful planning he’s open to a kind of wandering, with a willingness to sit in one place for an hour at a time and watch the world go by. “We’re not seeing anything,” I protest when he suggests running across the street for ice cream.
“Take a breath, General,” Ian tells me, nodding at the crowded plaza. “We’re seeing plenty.”
“Jerk,” I tease, although truthfully, my new vacation sandals are rubbing a blister on my pinky toe and I’m happy to have a break. In any case, it’s not like he’s wrong. When I follow his gaze I spy a deliveryman unloading a shipment of flowers from a truck and loading it into the service entrance of a nearby restaurant; I watch a pack of skateboarders in brightly colored T-shirts zipping through the throng. Across the street is a newsstand packed with gossip magazines, their covers splashed with lurid photos of Sabrina Hudson’s latest nightclub meltdown, and I frown for a second, squinting to read the headlines: Sabrina Hudson was a huge TV star back when I was in middle school, and there was even chatter about her possibly playing Emily Green in my mom’s Driftwood movie, but for the last year or so she’s been on what seems like one long bender, getting fired from film projects and arrested for a DUI and embroiled in public knock-down-and-drag-outs with one sketchy boyfriend after another.
“I used to have a huge crush on Sabrina Hudson,” Ian tells me now, nodding at the magazine racks with a grimace. “I mean, before she turned into a giant train wreck, clearly.”
“You and everybody else,” I tease, though I’m still peering distractedly at the tabloids. God, it must be awful to crash and burn like that in front of the whole entire world. “Okay,” I say finally, smiling at him and reaching for my phone to check the schedule. “Let’s get going.”
In the afternoon we wander through the cluster of bookstores on Charing Cross Road, all low ceilings and narrow aisles and the smell of old paper and must, rare first editions locked safely into glass-front cabinets and fusty shopkeepers like something out of Harry Potter keeping a watchful eye on their wares. A bookstore cat darts across the end of the aisle, a flash of white paws and Bengal stripes, there and gone again. It’s the kind of place I probably would have found boring a year ago, but Ian is so clearly in heaven that I find myself getting excited about it too, the two of us digging through the messy, overcrowded stacks with the enthusiasm of contestants on some kind of ultra-dorky game show.
“You’re not going to have room for all of those in your backpack,” I warn him finally, eyeing the growing haul tucked under his arm. Ian collects Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks from the eighties, the kind with tacky paint-by-numbers art on their covers and bright bands of color along their spines. I’ve seen them lined up on the bookshelves in his apartment, forming a rainbow nearly narcotic in its orderliness.
He shakes his head, looking confident. “Oh, I’ll make room,” he promises.
“You will, huh?” I ask, charmed. He raises his eyebrows in reply, then sets the books on a nearby shelf and kisses me, broad chest and beer-tasting tongue and both hands on my face. I love Ian’s hands; they’re oddly aristocratic compared to the rest of him, long and lean, with bitten-down nails that are all college dude. Watching him hold a pencil always strikes me as stupidly dear.
“This,” he mutters against my mouth, “is how I want to die.”
I laugh, flattening my palms against his T-shirt; I can feel his heart tapping steadily away underneath the cotton. Bookstores are holy sites for Ian—he’s a double major in English and secondary education, the only guy in his teaching cohort. Back when we first started dating he used to bring me books instead of flowers, leaving them on my desk and in stacks at my door like offerings—Stephen King, Jane Austen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’ve never been a huge reader, truthfully—not to mention the fact that after the Driftwood debacle I wanted to stay as far away from my mom’s career as humanly possible—but I didn’t want him to think I was a moron, and in the end I was surprised by how much I enjoyed them, dipping into a dozen different worlds in the sterile quiet of my dorm room. I wanted to know all the authors he’d fallen in love with. I wanted to read everything he’d read.