He lifted his arm, a cigarette lit between his fingers, and shrugged.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t.”
I took a few steps forward, glancing through the windows at the back of the house. Nobody was looking outside; they were all too busy mingling, gathering near an appetizer table arranged with plastic trays of sweaty cheese and baby carrots the texture of ashy elbows. They were eying the family pictures that cluttered up the walls—Allison on a soccer field, in a graduation cap, a wedding gown—shaking their heads and muttering the same recycled lines.
“Ben,” I said again, stepping off the porch and onto the grass,closer to him. We were hidden then, behind the house and beneath the trees. Nobody knew we were out there; nobody could see. “I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what to say.”
“Thank you,” he said, sighing. He leaned his head back, his eyes on the sky. “I just had to get out of there. Away from… everybody.”
“I get that.”
“You have no idea how many people I’ve had to talk to over these last few days,” he said, looking back at me. His eyes looked so tired, like he hadn’t slept in a week.
“I can imagine,” I said, taking another step closer. And Icouldimagine. I had been through it before; or, at least, something similar.
“And the entire time,” he said, taking another drag of his cigarette, the tendons in his neck bulging, “I was just thinking about how badly I wanted to talk to you.”
I stopped mid-stride, unsure if I’d heard him correctly.
“I know I probably shouldn’t say that, especially here… but fuck, Isabelle. I don’t care anymore. I don’t. Life’s too short.”
There was a crash from somewhere inside, loud, like someone dropping a glass. I heard a sob erupt and peeked around the corner of the house, seeing a flutter of bodies through the window running to something—or rather,someone—on the ground. It was Allison’s mom, I realized, crumpled into a heap on the floor. She was kneeling in a pile of shards—a broken wineglass—with bloody knees, crying.
I motioned to the back door, mouth half-open, like he should get back inside, but Ben didn’t flinch. He didn’t move. He just kept looking at me, kept talking.
“These last couple years with Allison have been tough,” he said. “She had a problem, Isabelle. A problem I didn’t know how to handle. I tried to help her, but—”
He stopped, pinched the bridge of his nose. The cherry-red tip of his cigarette was dangerously close to his skin, and I was sure that he could feel it. The burn of it, right between his eyes.
“I came home from the office Monday night and found her onthe bathroom floor. She was pale. Her eyes were open. That’s not the first time she had, you know… but this time, the way she looked, I just knew that she was—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. Instead, I closed the rest of the distance between us, wrapping my arms around him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”
I could imagine that, too. How he was feeling. Being the one to blame.
“I wanted to tell you so many times.” I could feel the warmth of his breath on my neck, the stale smokiness, and I realized that this was the closest we had dared to get since that night at the oyster roast. The first time since then that we had ever really touched. “All those times we were talking, and I was avoiding going home, avoiding having to deal with it, I wanted to just tell you all of it. Get it off my chest. We weren’t happy, Isabelle. We weren’t good together anymore.”
“It’s okay,” I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“Itried,” he said, pulling back from me. The way he was looking at me, so desperate, I could tell that he wanted me to believe him. Heneededme to believe him. “I tried so hard to make it work. I mean, you know, all those times that we were together, I wanted to… but, obviously, Ididn’t—”
“I know you tried, Ben. You don’t have to convince me.”
I pulled my hands from his back and placed them on his cheeks, holding him tight. I looked into his eyes; our faces, inches apart, and before I knew what was happening, the space between us closed. Ben’s lips were on mine, moving frantically, his hands pulling at my hair. I felt his cigarette drop to the ground, skimming my arm on the way down, and our kiss was long and hard and desperate, the culmination of six months of wanting, wondering, remembering what it had been like that first time on the water.
I had forgotten where I was in that moment, what I was doing. Allison’s mother on the ground inside, too distraught to care about the glass cutting into her flesh. All of my coworkers—my future, mycareer—one small step away from finding us out, from ruining it all. But I didn’t care about any of it. All that mattered was that I was with him, finally.
He wasmine, finally.
“Ben?”
I heard the back door open, the creak of the hinges. A pair of footsteps stepping out onto the porch, feet from where we were standing.
“Ben, are you out there?”