Seeing him, looking that good, standing outside my door, was a lot like getting…well, struck by lightning.
A sensation with which I am not unfamiliar, actually.
“Ask him if he can break a fifty,” Skip yelled, thinking it was the pizza guy.
“Make sure he remembered the hot-pepper flakes,” Ruth called from the kitchen, where she was taking down the plates. “They forgot last time.”
I just stood there, staring at him. It had been so long since I’d stood this close to him. And everything was flooding back—the way he’d smelled (like whatever laundry detergent his mom uses, coupled with soap and, more faintly, the stuff mechanics use to get the grease out from beneath their fingernails); the way he used to kiss me…one or two light kisses, not even directly centered on my mouth all the time, then one long, hard one, dead in the middle, that made me feel as if I were exploding; the way his body had felt, pressed up against mine, so long and hard and warm….
“This is a bad time,” Rob said. “You’ve got company. I can come back later.”
“Hey, can you break this?” Skip pushed past me, waving a fifty-dollar bill. He stopped when he saw Rob wasn’t holding a pizza. “Hey, where’s the ’za?” he wanted to know. Then he looked at Rob’s face, and his eyes narrowed.
“Hey,” Skip said in a different tone of voice. “I know you.”
Ruth had poked her head out from the kitchen doorway. “Did you remember the hot-pepper—” Her voice trailed off as she, too, recognized Rob.
“Oh,” she said in a very different voice. “It’s…it’s…”
“Rob,” Rob said in that deep, no-nonsense voice that had always managed to send my pulse racing—same as, for some time now, the sound of a motorcycle engine had. It’s like those dogs we learned about in Psych. The ones who would only get fed after a bell rang? Whenever they heard a bell ring after that, they’d start drooling. Whenever I hear a motorcycle engine—or Rob’s voice—my heart speeds up. In a good way.
I know. Pathetic, right?
“Right,” Ruth said, darting a worried look in my direction. “Rob. From back home.” She refrained from calling him her private nickname for him: The Jerk. I thought this showed some real maturity and growth. Ruth’s changed a lot since high school.
Well, I guess we all have.
“You remember Rob, Skip,” Ruth said, elbowing her twin. “He went to Ernie Pyle.”
“How could I forget?” Skip said tonelessly.
Okay, well, I guess all of us have changed since high school except for Skip.
“Right,” Ruth said. “Well. Do you, um…do you want to come in, Rob?”
I didn’t blame Ruth for sounding confused and not knowing exactly what to do. I didn’t know what to do, either. I mean, a guy walks out of your life for a year, only to reappear on your doorstep in another state…It’s kind of disorienting.
“What’s the holdup?” Now Mike was crowding into the tiny front hallway. He hadn’t seen Rob yet. “You guys need change or something?”
“It’s not the pizza guy,” Skip said over his shoulder. “It’s Rob Wilkins.”
“Who?”Mike looked as shocked as I felt.“Here?”
“Look,” Rob said, beginning to look a little impatient. I could tell from the way his dark eyebrows were starting to constrict a little in the middle. It was the same expression he used to wear whenever I’d want to rescue some kidnapped kid using some wacky scheme that Rob thought was too dangerous. “If this is a bad time, Jess, I can come back—”
I could feel everyone’s gaze on me—Ruth’s, filled with concern (she was the only one who could even begin to suspect what kind of emotional whirlwind Rob’s sudden appearance had thrown me into); Skip’s, hostile and questioning (I had, after all, been dating him pretty much exclusively all summer…if you can call the occasional pizza and a movie “dating”); Mike’s, also hostile (he’d never liked Rob, primarily because he’d never tried to get to know him) but also sympathetic…Mike knew how hard I was running from my past.
And Rob was a part of that past.
Naturally, under so many people’s scrutiny, I could feel my face heating up. Plus, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Seriously. My mind was a complete blank. The only thing running through it were the wordsRob’s here. Rob’s here in New York.
And he smells really, really good.
Seriously. It truly was like getting struck by lightning all over again. Minus the hair-sticking-up thing. And the star-shaped scar that had since completely faded away.
Ruth was the one who came to my rescue.
“We’ll just go out and let you two have some time alone together,” she said, starting to put the dinner plates down.
“Go out?” Skip echoed, sounding more indignant than ever. “What about the pizza we ordered?”
“You know what?” Rob turned to go. “I’ll come back later.”
It was only when I saw his broad, jean-jacketed back turning away from me that I realized I felt something. Which, for me, was progress. Since I hadn’t been feeling too much of anything for a long time.
And what I felt was that this time, I wasn’t letting him get away. Not that easily. Not without an explanation.
“Wait,” I said.
Rob paused in the hallway and looked back at me. His expression was completely unreadable. And not just because the super still hadn’t changed the burnt-out bulb above Apartment 5A.
Still, I could see his gray eyes glowing, like a cat’s.
“Let me get my keys,” I said. “We can talk while we grab something to eat somewhere.”
I ducked back into the apartment, going to the skinny hall table where we throw our keys every time we come inside. Mike was blocking it.
“Move,” I said.
“Jess,” he said in a low voice. “Do you really think—”
“Move,” I said, more loudly.
I don’t want to give you the impression that I knew what I was doing. I most definitely did not. Maybe my brother sensed this and that was why he was acting like such a total tool.
Or maybe that’s just how big brothers act when the guy who broke their little sister’s heart shows up from out of nowhere.
“It’s just,” Mike said. “You really seem, um, better than you have in a while now, and I don’t want—”
“Move,” I interrupted, “or I will hurt you badly.”
Mike moved. I scooped up my keys.
“I’ll be back in a little while,” I said, slipping out the door past Ruth, who gazed at me sympathetically through her new contact lenses. She’d given up wearing glasses at around the same time she’d given up on low-fat diets and gone high-protein instead.
“I thought we were having pizza,” Skip called after me.
I’d joined Rob in the hallway.
“Save me a slice,” I said to Skip.
Then Rob and I headed for the stairs.
Three
New York isn’t like Indiana.
Well, you probably know that.
But I mean, it’s REALLY not like Indiana. In the town where I’m from, you don’t walk anywhere. Well, unless you’re my best friend, Ruth, and you want to lose weight. Then maybe you’ll walk someplace.
In New York, you walk everywhere. Nobody has a car—or, if they do, they don’t use it, except for trips out of the city. That’s because traffic is unbelievable. Every street is clogged with taxis and delivery trucks and limos.
Plus, there’s nowhere you’d want to go that the subway can’t take you. And all that stuff about the subway being unsafe…it’s not true. You just have to stay alert, and not look too much like a stupid tourist with your head buried in a map, or whatever.