Page 7 of Wicked Games

I walk across the grass and into her yard. Her house is similar to mine, the patio almost identical down to the furniture and grill. Her doors slide open though, and I knock on the glass. I can see her standing in the kitchen at the island, tomato chunks piled on a cutting board. She’s wiping tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand, the knife’s blade close to her face.

She looks up and pauses, deciding whether or not she’s going to let me in. She started this, and I bristle in annoyance. If she’d wanted us to keep to ourselves, she shouldn’t have fed me like a stray dog. She sets the knife down and rounds the island, and walking toward me, she’s just as graceful and as elegant as I took her for yesterday. She’s wearing denim shorts and a white tank top and her hair is loose around her shoulders. She doesn’t look any better, tears staining her cheeks, her eyes bloodshot. I feel like a jackass for intruding.

She slides the glass door and screen open. “It’s difficult to stop crying,” she says as if she knows I’ll know what she means. Of course I do, and I don’t pretend.

“Yes, it is.”

I stare. Her brown eyes, despite the tears in them, are warm, and her skin is luminescent. Suddenly, I want nothing more than to carry her to bed, undress her, and bury myself so deeply inside her I can forget this world exists. I shouldn’t be thinking it. The ink’s barely dry on my divorce papers, but I think if you asked Brooke, she’d say our marriage ended a long time ago. I just didn’t know it.

Avery doesn’t say anything else, and I’m trying to read her cues. She doesn’t seem scared or bothered, just stands there looking at me like I’m looking at her.

“I brought your cooler back, and a bottle of wine to thank you. Not sure how you knew I didn’t have any food.” It’s the closest I’ll get to asking her if she came into my house while I was passed out.

She smiles, kind of. It’s too sad to be called a smile, but the corners of her mouth lift up. “Because I thought if your fridge was like mine when I moved in, it was empty.”

“Then you’d be right.” I hold the bottle of wine out to her, wanting to move this along. I don’t need to be invited in, but she has to know she’s letting bugs into her house.

“Thanks. Come in. You must have gone to the bar today.”

“How would you know that?” I ask, stepping inside her kitchen and sliding the door shut.

“If you’d gone yesterday, you wouldn’t have resorted to drinking the bottle of champagne Kelly left in your kitchen. I figured you for more of a scotch kind of guy.”

“I can appreciate champagne,” I say, the cooler still hanging from my hand.

“You can put that on the floor. This town has a beach somewhere, and I brought it in case I wanted to spend the day there.” She tilts her head toward the island. “I’m making a salad if you want to stay for dinner. I’m sure you can appreciate champagne, but let’s be honest, it’s not the best if you want something to chug. Too many bubbles.”

I walk deeper into her kitchen and pull out a stool. I’m intrigued. Talking about drinking booze just to get drunk. “You don’t chug scotch.”

She takes her place at the cutting board where half a tomato is chopped into pieces. She’s got a real head of lettuce, not the kind in bags I bought at the grocery store.

“Tell me that again.”

“You’re not supposed to chug scotch,” I amend because somehow she knows exactly what I did for several days in a row after Theo was killed.

She meets my eyes. Her cheeks are still wet.

Her kitchen falls away and it’s just us. I swallow and try to fight it. This isn’t what I need right now. It’s nothing that I want right now. How can I even think about anything except Theo? My failed marriage? I told Violet I needed time to grieve, and falling in— I mean, doing whatever this is isn’t that.

Electricity zips between us and I break the connection. “Why are you spending the summer out here? Do you live in Ashfield?”

She picks the knife up again and shrugs. “Same as you, I imagine. Someone close to me passed away, and my husband decided it was a great time to end our fifteen-year marriage. I mean, we lasted longer than anyone said we would, so there’s that, right? But yeah, I live in Hawthorne.”

“I’m sorry. Do you have kids?”

“No.” She pauses. “I didn’t say it before, but I’m sorry about Theo. I’m sure you hear it a lot, but I wanted to say it.”

“Thanks. It’s hard to process, sometimes, that it happened because of who I am.”

She finishes cutting up the tomatoes and starts tearing the lettuce into pieces. Dropping them onto our plates, she asks, “Do you wish you weren’t rich?”

“I never used to.”

Silently, she finishes putting our salads together. They’re huge, and mine will fill me up for the rest of the night. She’s feeding me again, and I need to either stop her from doing it or keep letting her and enjoy it. If she’s just gotten out of a fifteen-year marriage, she probably doesn’t know how to cook for one any more than I do.

She sets out a couple different kinds of salad dressing, croutons, and bacon bits. I choose an olive oil and vinegar, and she takes a plastic canister of parmesan cheese out of the fridge and sets it in front of me.

I stab at my plate and lift a forkful of lettuce to my mouth. “Is there any money in being an essayist?”