Chapter 21: The Same Tomato

Sue talked while I washed. She was good at it. Encouragement delivered like it was just conversation, not a rescue operation. My love life would look better sooner than I could imagine. Heartbreak had a shelf life even when it felt like it would last an eternity. She told me that I was young and assured me I was going to be fine. The sentences were kind and true in the way kind sentences can be true without being useful yet. I gave her the half-hearted replies you give a woman who is trying, because she was trying, and because arguing with Sue in her own kitchen would have been a different kind of rude.

My real attention, however, was the window.

Andrew bent to check the heat and the muscles in his back moved under the ink like the tattoos were riding something alive. When he straightened, his chest did the same work in reverse. I watched him do ordinary grill things and felt the afternoon replay itself without my permission. His hands on my calves, working their way up until the pause at mid-thigh. Then the longer passes across my shoulders, fingers digging in my tight muscles and his movements that continued down my back in a manner that told me his touching me had stopped being about sunscreen. The accident in the pool that had not felt like an accident from the inside: his fingers in the folds of me through wet fabric, his palm on my clit, the way he had lifted me out of the water. I stood at Sue’s sink and washed a tomato I had already washed and thought about Carrie’s brother’s hand on my pussy like that was an appropriate garnish for the salad.

Sue tapped my shoulder.

I jumped. Water went spraying the wrong direction. “What? Sorry.”

She laughed, not mean. “I was checking that you were all right. I asked you a question. You did not answer. Then I looked, and you had been washing the same tomato for about five minutes while you were staring outside, so I came to see what had you so lost.”

She followed my eyes through the glass. Andrew turned a rack of ribs and the smoke lifted around him as he had planned it. Sue’s mouth did a small, knowing thing.