Stranger Read online

  I didn’t acknowledge him. We pretended we’d never known each other at all, even as we stared and looked away like just looking at each other would burn.

  We had danced together, eaten together, gone to the movies. We’d been naked and sweating with each other. I knew the taste of his skin and the way his face looked when he came inside me, and how his hand felt smoothing through my fuck-tangled hair.

  We knew all that and still we looked and looked away.

  I tried hard to focus on the book, but the words had been spoiled for me. I couldn’t read about lovers finding their way into each other’s arms. I blinked hard, and the tiny black letters swam viciously on the sea of their white pages, refusing to settle into words I could read.

  Melanie came to the table next to drink from her bottled water. She chattered and I answered with a nod and a tight smile. She wriggled on her seat, telling me about the puppet show she was putting on with another girl.

  “I have to go to the bathroom. You and Simon stay in the playground. Don’t go anywhere.” I kept my voice from sounding strangled, though I wasn’t sure how.

  “Okay,” came her cheerful answer, and she headed back into the playground.

  In the garish, jungle-painted bathroom, I splashed water on my cheeks again and again, not caring that I washed away my lipstick. I blotted my face with paper towels and stared at my face in the mirror. My cheeks still blushed pink. My eyes were too bright, the gaze bordering on frenzied, and I blinked again and again until I forced my expression into blandness. I wasn’t ready to leave the bathroom, but I couldn’t forget my responsibility to my niece and nephew, so I pushed through the swinging door into the corridor outside.

  He was there.

  At the end of the hall I could see the play area, teeming with kids, two of them belonging to me. I saw my table, my book propped unceremoniously against the napkin holder. And, through the plate-glass windows at the front of Mocha Madness, a thin and lovely blond woman holding a little boy by one hand while she stepped off the curb into the parking lot.

  For one heavy second we looked at each other before something in me kicked to life and I forced a shiny-bright smile that made my face ache. “Hi.”

  “Grace. Hi.” Sam looked hesitant, but this time he kept his eyes on my face. “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine. Good. You?” The hallway in front of the bathrooms was not the best place for a reunion, but it was the only place we had.

  “Good. Great.” He nodded.

  I had thought pretending we were strangers had been bad, but making each other into nothing was worse. Because even if I was nothing to him, he wasn’t nothing to me. My smile melted into a frown, and Sam frowned, too.

  “Hey—”

  I waved a hand. “Shh.”

  We stood and stared in the narrow hall stinking of chemicals with the sounds of hyper children echoing all around us. He only had to take one step to put his arm around me in a half hug that brought my face to his shoulder. My body stiff, my eyes closed.

  It’s the same, I thought as I drew in a deep, deep breath, smelling him. It’s the same as it always was.

  He smelled the same. I felt the same, this close to him, the trickle of his breath caressing my ear and his hand a weight on my back. His knee bumped mine. It was all the same.

  Everything and nothing. So much to say. So much that couldn’t be said, all packaged into the casual bump of a knee against knee and the smell of cologne.

  I was the one who pulled away. The embrace had lasted no more than a few seconds, not even long enough for his touch to leave any lasting warmth. I stepped back and sidled past him, toward the main room. He stared after me.

  “It was good seeing you,” I said. “I’ve got to get back. Simon and Melanie…”

  “Yes. Right, sure. Right.” Sam nodded and followed me.

  At my table he hesitated again, but I was already settling into my seat and picking up my novel. I looked up at him with a brief, tight smile and then back to the book in my hands, and though he paused for a few moments longer than was necessary, Sam didn’t try to get me to look up.

  “Good seeing you, Grace.”

  “Goodbye, Sam.”

  I didn’t look up to watch him go, but I knew when he’d gone all the same.

  At my sister’s house, Melanie and Simon ran off to the basement to battle each other with the crude plastic swords they’d used their prize tickets for. My sister offered me coffee. I don’t know who was more surprised when I burst into tears.

  She poured us both cups while I sobbed out the entire story. Sam with the bimbo. How he’d smelled. How it had felt the same as it always had, that brief moment, and how much more I wanted to hate him now, and still couldn’t.

  She listened without saying anything. The lack of advice was what finally dried my tears. I wiped my face and drank half a mug of now-cold coffee.

  “Nothing?” I said.

  Hannah shook her head. “Love stinks?”

  “Not helpful.” I rested my chin in my hand. “I thought I was over it.”

  She laughed. “You’ve been moping around for months. If you thought you were over it, you were fooling yourself.”

  “But…I’m not sad all the time,” I protested. “I don’t even cry about it anymore! At least, I didn’t until today.”

  “You don’t have to be sad to miss someone and wish they were still in your life.”

  When the kids pounded up the stairs, each bearing a handful of stuffing from a pillow they’d dismembered, I braced myself for a Hannah explosion. Instead, my sister sighed and rolled her eyes, took the stuffing and gave them both pudding cups to take back downstairs.

  Chocolate pudding cups.

  I stared at her until she raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  I took a plunge. “He’s been good for you.”

  “Who?” I’d caught her, but she wasn’t going to admit it.

  “Him. Whoever he is.” I poured more coffee from the pot and warmed my hands on the cup, but didn’t drink. “I don’t judge you, by the way.”

  My sister laughed. “For what?”

  “For what you’re doing. I understand. Just be careful, that’s all.”

  Hannah blew out a long breath that ended in another laugh. “You think I’m having an affair.”

  We both drank coffee while she laughed and I felt stupid. “You’re not?”

  “No, Grace. God, no.” She laughed again and made a face. “I’ve been going to therapy.”

  Many replies to this tried to burst out of my mouth, but I held them all back while my sister watched and looked amused.

  “Go ahead, say it,” she told me. “It’s about time?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.” I’d been thinking it, though.

  “It’s okay,” my sister said. “It’s true.”

  “Does Jerry know?” I studied her again, this time without the assumption that lust had changed her. She still looked different. My perception of her reasons for changing were different, but that was all.

  Hannah shrugged. “He does now. He didn’t at first. It’s made a big difference, though.”

  “I can tell.” I watched her tidy the sugar packets in their small basket on the table. She hadn’t been replaced by a pod person, after all.

  “Maybe you should call him, Grace.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Your therapist?”

  “No, dork. Sam.”

  “Right. Sam.”

  “Just call him,” my sister said.

  But I couldn’t. Turns out, I didn’t have to. Sam called me at his usual time of half-past ass-crack o’thirty. I swam up from sleep with a thick tongue that stumbled on the syllables of

  “hello.”

  “Grace?”

  “Timezit?” The bright blue screen of my phone pierced my eyelids but faded after ten seconds and put me back into darkness.

  “You don’t want me to tell you.”

  “No, I don’t. Hi, Sam.”

  “Are you