Page 38 of The Maverick
I needed the quiet the way I'd needed the stairwell—as a place where I could think without anyone watching me think. I changed out of my good jeans and the borrowed top and hung the top carefully on Tasha's hanger, because it was Tasha's and Tasha was good to me and I wasn't going to stretch it out by leaving it in a heap. I pulled on my old sweatshirt from a Gatlinburg 5K I did in high school and soft pants. I sat on the edge of my bed.
The Gibson was still in its case by the door. I could feel its absence from across the apartment the way you felt the absence of something you kept close.
I pressed my fingertips to my lips, lightly, in the place where his mouth had been.
Can I?
Two words. Low, careful, without assumption.
I had known exactly what he was asking and I had nodded without making him say it more plainly, and that had felt like the right grammar between two people who were figuring out where the other one started.
I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.
The water stain was still there, still shaped like Tennessee, indifferent to what had happened to me today. I found that comforting. The ceiling didn't know about Tommy. The ceiling had no opinion about the fact that I had let a stranger kiss me in a donut shop on a Tuesday afternoon and then kissed him back on the jaw outside my building like a woman who did things like that, which I didn't. I didn't do things like that.
Or, I hadn't.
The thing was, I'd spent a lot of years learning to recognize the way certain men looked at women and understanding that the look was not, in fact, about the women. The look was about the man. About what the man wanted and whether it was available and what it would cost him to get it, and in thatequation the woman was a variable, not a constant. I'd watched it happen to prettier girls than me in the restaurants along the tourist strip and I'd learned to clock it and stay out of the way of it.
Tommy hadn't looked at me like that.
Tommy had looked at me the way my choir teacher had looked at me the day she'd written in my yearbook—like she was seeing something important, something with a name, something she wanted to make sure she'd gotten down right before the moment passed. Not the general fact of me. The actual me. The girl playing the actual guitar in the actual room doing the actual thing.
I didn't know what to do with a man who looked at me like that.
I didn't know how to hold it without either dropping it or gripping it so hard I changed its shape.
I thought about money, because that was what I thought about when other thoughts got too large to carry. I pulled out my phone and did the math. The hundred and fifty from Luis plus the tips from the jar—he'd handed that to me, too, an extra forty-two dollars in a rubber-banded roll that he'd pressed into my hand on the way out with a look that said this was not a one-time offer, if I ever needed it. A hundred and ninety-two dollars total today.
Two hundred and eighty-six minus a hundred and ninety-two.
Ninety-four dollars short.
Ninety-four. From two hundred and eighty-six to ninety-four in one afternoon. That was something. That was real, countable progress.
I let out a breath I'd been holding, probably, for days.
Ninety-four dollars I could manage. Ninety-four dollars was three good shifts or two good gigs or maybe even one night atThe Piazza, if the tip jar cooperated. Ninety-four dollars was not four hundred. Ninety-four dollars was almost okay.
I closed the calculator app.
Opened it again.
Closed it.
I thought about the Battery. The free walk. The harbor at dusk when the light went gold and the palmettos went black against it and the whole city looked like something out of a dream someone else had and was generous enough to share.
I'd walked it once since I'd been here, alone, early on a morning when the cold was sharp and there was nobody else out yet, and I'd stood at the seawall and looked out at the water and felt something I couldn't name—not happiness exactly, but the rare sensation of being in the right place at the right time in your own life.
I thought about Tommy walking it with me. The easy stride of him. The way he occupied space without apologizing for it. The way he'd look at the harbor, probably—not like a tourist, but straight at it. Honest.
I thought it would be enough. The walk. The light. The free thing.
I thought he might be the kind of man for whom it would be.
I also thought I was building something in my head out of a guitar string and two donuts and a kiss, and that the intelligent thing to do was keep my feet on the ground until I had more information.
Both things were true.
