“It’s pretty,” he said. “What happens?”
She stretched against him, her arms over her head, her breasts lifted enticingly, her toes reaching for his shins. “Oh, the guy keeps begging his girlfriend to come here, come there, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, and she keeps telling him to settle down.”
“Do they end up together?”
“I can’t remember,” she told him.
“Stay with me,” he said.
She pulled away, propping her head up on her elbow. In the dark, he could feel her eyes on him. “I’m not sure we know each other well enough for this kind of decision.”
“Oh, you,” said Andy. Now that she was back, he couldn’t imagine being without her again.
“What about grad school?” she asked.
“I bet you can find a program here.”
Rachel was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I have something.” She got up, pretty and completely female with her full breasts and round bottom, and padded across the room. He heard her unzip her duffel bag and rummage around. She came back to the bed holding an eight-by-eleven-inch envelope, and leaned across him to turn on a light. Then he was looking at a picture of the two of them as teenagers. Rachel was wearing his hoodie. Andy stood behind her with his arms wrapped around her shoulders.
“Oh my God, my hair,” he groaned, turning away from his mullet.
“And look at mine!” Rachel giggled, pointing at her teased curls. She dipped her hand back into the envelope and pulled out what Andy knew was there, what had to be next: the necklace, with the red paper-clip heart on a chain.
“So,” she said, sounding suddenly shy. She rolled onto her back. “So I’d go to school, or work, and you’d run, and then at night we’d have dinner together?”
“Right.”
Rachel stared at the ceiling. “We were good together, weren’t we?”
Andy looked at the clock. He’d guessed that it was midnight, maybe one in the morning, but it had somehow gotten to be almost 3:00 a.m. He had to be awake in two hours, at the track in three. That should have worried him. In the middle of a six-week course of V02 max training, he needed his sleep. But he felt too excited to even close his eyes. He could visualize the morning’s workout, the feel of the track under his fingers, the sound of the coach counting them down. He could feel his body leaping forward, his legs eating up the yards, erasing space, moving him as fast as they could toward Rachel, his destiny, his one; Rachel, who’d be waiting at the end.
“Has it ever been like it was with us with anyone else?” Rachel asked. “You don’t have to be graphic,” she said hastily, rolling against him and burying her face in his chest, as if he was going to snap his fingers and force her to watch some videos. “I don’t need to know where the rest of those condoms went. I’ll just tell myself that the Condom Fairy came and took them. But I just . . .”
She reached up, letting her fingers graze his cheek, then stroke his neck. They both felt it—it was as if she’d struck a match or turned a strong magnet toward iron filings. For Andy, who lived intimately in his body, in tune with every twinge and flutter, the sensation was akin to being shocked.
He heard Rachel laugh, a little ruefully. “Do you remember when I asked you . . .”
“. . . if it would always be this way?”
“Maybe,” she said, “it’s that we’re each other’s destiny.” She’d made her voice deep and jokey, but Andy wasn’t in a teasing mood.
“Stay with me,” he said. He bent down, kissing her forehead, her cheeks, the tip of her nose, then her lips, at first lightly, then slowly, a lingering kiss, one that told her, in a way his words couldn’t, that he adored her, that he always had, that he always would. “Please,” he said, and kissed her some more, and when he finally lifted his lips from hers, Rachel raised her head, looking at him as she said, “I will.”
Andy
2004
His cell phone hummed on the bedside table, and he reached across Maisie to answer. Maisie slept in the nude, winter or summer, at ease in her body, and justifiably proud . . . but she also slept with her mouth wide open, due to an uncorrected deviated septum that Andy suspected, but had not confirmed, was the result of two separate nose jobs. Also, she snored. But she’d told him that he kicked in his sleep, that his legs churned like he was running at least once a night, which he figured made them even.
He and Maisie had met in a New York Sports Club a little over a year ago. He’d been in New York for the annual USATF Indoor Track & Field Championships, and the hotel’s treadmills were broken, so they’d sent him across the street. There, he’d seen Maisie pacing around an elliptical machine, frowning at the blank display board.