Barbara Samuel (11 page)

“Maybe you can tell me that story sometime.”

She let go of a laugh that sounded a lot more bitter than sweet, and it embarrassed her. “I’d have to know you a whole lot better.”

A heartbeat of a pause, during which he looked steadily at her face. “Okay.” He tipped his head toward the window beneath the list of goods and prices. “You want to go in or stay outside?”

“Oh, outside definitely. With that sky?”

She felt she’d won something when he smiled. Together they walked to the window, where a painfully thin brown boy waited in an ill-fitting uniform to take their orders. Thomas looked at Luna. “Hot fudge?”

“Yes, please.”

“Banana split or sundae?”

She looked at the boy, wavered, conscious of her greed and the fact that those shorts had been so tight last night. “Sundae.”

“Nah, that hesitation was way too long.” To the boy, he said, “It’s our first date and she doesn’t want me to think she’s a pig. You know women.”

The kid was starstruck in three seconds, giving Thomas an abashed smile at being included in the knowing-about-women thing. “So, a hot fudge banana split, then?”

“Two banana splits, one hot fudge, one normal with
nuts and whipped cream. The works.” He pulled money out of his front pocket and peeled off several one-dollar bills he tossed on the counter, then looked at Luna with a wink. He patted his belly. “I’m a guy. We don’t have to go easy, even when we get big as cars.”

She grinned. “It would be good to be a guy at times.”

“It’s always good to be a guy.”

Something about the spread of his strong, square hand gave her a jolt of greed—a flash of those fingers on her body, his mouth on hers, a shockingly intense kind of thought. She found herself flushing, and looked over her shoulder for a place to sit down. “I’ll get the napkins and spoons. That table look good to you?”

“Sure.”

She gathered supplies and settled at a picnic table at the far end of the concrete apron. On the horizon, the clouds were darkening. Erratic, distant threads of lightning wove through them, but there was not yet any smell of rain.

Thomas joined her and didn’t sit across the table as she had expected, but right beside her, and not at a decent distance away, either. His thigh touched hers, bringing back her greed. She shifted a little away, took her banana split, bending to inhale the scent of chocolate for a moment. “Ah, thank you,” she said. “It’s very wicked.”

“Yeah—my mom keeps nagging me to eat better, but she doesn’t live here, so I’m safe.” His grin was wide and winning, showing big white teeth and crinkles around his eyes. “I wasn’t kiddin’ about being an ice cream-aholic, either. I’m crazy for it.”

“I used to see you here a lot last summer.”

Something stricken crossed his mouth. “Hard summer. First one, you know, I was divorced.” He dipped
his spoon into strawberries and vanilla ice cream, lifted it up.

Damn. He was
so
not over his divorce. “Sorry to remind you of the bad times.”

He shrugged. “You remember that, don’t you, going through the rituals by yourself?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I left town—but it was a little different for us. I hated my ex by then, and I was afraid of what I might do if I stayed.” Especially since she’d been drinking at the time. Drinking a lot. Late at night, her fantasies had been very dark indeed.

Interest glittered in his eyes. “Like what?”

“Oh, lots of things. I made up so many revenge strategies they would fill a book.”

“Tell me one.”

“Hmmm.” She swirled chocolate and vanilla together, admiring the preciseness of thin chocolate threads in the white. “Okay. One favorite was putting a bunch of rattlesnakes in their house one night—but of course, Joy lived with them, right, so that wouldn’t work.”

“Them? So it was an affair that broke up the marriage?”

“Yep.” She sighed. “They’re still together, so I guess it was true love or something.”

He snorted. “Or something. Tell me another revenge fantasy.”

“It’s been a long time.” She had to stop and think. “The usuals—sugar in the gas tanks, slit tires, breaking windows. I knew my ex would hate the mess eggs would make on his car, and I came very, very close to doing that.” She took a bite. “Oh, I remember one— ants in their bed. Kind of the same category as snakes, though, I’m afraid. I ran to comic book tortures.” She inclined her head. “Now you tell me one.”

“I didn’t have any.”

“Not a single one?” Much as Luna tried to repress her, Therapist Barbie perked up.
How interesting
, she whispered. “Why not?”

Very simply, very roughly, he said, “I loved them both.” Putting his attention on his dish, he cleared his throat. “She left me for my younger brother.”

“Oh, this just gets better and better,” Luna said, and it really did feel like her heart sunk—the lump in her chest dropped all the way to her belly. “Your brother.”

He nodded. “Sucks, huh? He’s always been a player, but I trusted him with my wife. Bad idea.”

“No, it wasn’t bad for you to trust them. It was bad for them to betray you.” He did need a revenge fantasy. “Did you know, in some African cultures, the adulterous couple is buried up to their waist in the ground? Then they’re starved, then the tribe”—she paused for effect—“cuts pieces of the lovers off and makes the other one eat it. Like cut her breast, make him eat it. Cut off his dick, make her eat it.” She gave him a bright smile.

That twinkle burst in his dark eyes. “And you look like such a mild-mannered type.”

“Beware what lurks in the hearts of women.”

He didn’t say anything for a while, and she figured she’d probably said enough. They ate in silence, their thighs somehow touching again, his arm sometimes brushing hers. In the far-off distance, thunder rolled softly.

“It would be so much easier if they were miserable together, wouldn’t it?” he said.

“Definitely. If they had to make us feel so bad, they could at least have the decency to suffer for it.” There was nothing left of her ice cream, unless she wanted to lick the dish. Wiping her hands with a napkin, she shifted a little toward Thomas, leaning with one elbow on the table. “My daughter was talking tonight about
her stepmother. God, I hated her so much once, it was like a work of art.” She could see it in her mind, something shaped of copper in the heat of rage and pain. “Truth is, though, I just feel sorry for her now. At least I escaped the bastard.”

“Eventually,” Thomas said slowly, “my brother will break Nadine’s heart. He’s just like my father—he’ll leave her. And then,” he added with a sigh, “she’s gonna show up on my doorstep telling me how sorry she is.”

“And what will you do then?”

“I don’t know.” He put a hand on her thigh and she jumped, which made him smile. “Are you afraid of me, Luna?”

She raised her head, daring herself to look right in his face. Nodded. “Not of you exactly,” she said, not reaching for him in return. But they eased closer, millimeters at a time, and the air thickened again. It swirled around her, around him, and they were just looking at each other. His hand didn’t move on her leg.

“I’m kinda scared of you,” he said in that evening-song voice. “Tell me who you are.”

His bare forearm rested on the table in front of her and there was no hair on it at all. It made his skin look smooth and silky, and she wanted to put her hand on it. It seemed bold, and considering what she’d learned here, a long way beyond unwise, but she did it anyway, settling her palm over the angle of elbow, sliding her middle finger into the crook neatly. “What do you want to know?”

Emboldened by her touch, he reached for a measure of her hair, twirled a curl around one finger. “What kind of shampoo do you use?”

She laughed. “Herbal Essence. You?”

“My grandma makes yucca shampoo. It’s good
stuff.” He quirked one eyebrow. “But I usually use whatever’s on special.”

It had been a very long time since Luna had been with anyone. Even longer since she’d been with someone who made her heart race. His hair fell in a curtain, hiding them from the rest of the customers, and she had a sense of his slanted cheekbone, the inky line of his eyelashes, before he bent in and kissed her.

And this time, she met him more easily, knowing it wasn’t wise, but sighing in relief that he’d done it. His lips were hotter than they should have been, and smelled of pineapples, and Luna tasted bananas and syrup and something much deeper on his tongue. She kissed him as thoroughly as he kissed her, sampling lip shape and texture, and found that it was better than she remembered. She discovered that he was one of those rare men who like to kiss, who kissed as she did, angling with her, slowing and breathing and pausing, savoring what was, before a more complete opening.

Bad idea
, said a voice she squashed by moving her hand on Thomas’s arm, rubbing her palm over a bicep that was as powerful as it looked. He pulled her into him, pressing their bodies closer, his hand sliding around her neck. It suddenly seemed very intense, as if they were on the verge of embarrassing themselves in public. He must have felt it, too, because he pulled back a little, saying words over her mouth. “Let’s go somewhere.”

She pushed away, coming to her senses. Thinking of Joy with a sudden sense of danger and regret, she said, “Uh, no. I can’t do that.” She frowned at him. “I can’t do
this.”
She stood up. “Thanks for the ice cream.”

Then she was bolting, as plain a case as she’d ever seen, because what she wanted more than anything was to turn around and take his hand and tell him to name
the place. She imagined him naked in some tawdry room, imagined herself naked and plastered against him, and the lure of it was not some light little scarf of a vision, it had teeth—it pulled hard on her spine, nape to buttocks.

She set her shoulders, tossed hair off her hot face, told herself this was starting off all wrong, with the wrong messages, the wrong timing, the wrong everything.

“Luna!” Thomas spoke out of his truck window, which was right in front of her.

She veered around him. “I’m sorry,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ve given you the wrong impression. I’m not the kind of person you think I am.” Glancing over her shoulder, she crossed the street to get away from him. To get rid of that thick feeling in her chest, she broke into a slow jog, heading down the hill. The clouds were thick and dark overhead, the wind smelling of rain any second, and she’d have to run most of the way if she was going to miss the storm. Damn.

The truck door slammed behind her. She ignored it, feeling her breath come hard as she picked up her pace. But he was taller and longer-legged and he caught her by the elbow before she made it a half block. “Luna, please listen for one second.” When she tried to keep walking, he said, “Please.”

She halted and looked up at him, afraid everything would show on her face. Wanting too much, as always.

“Shit,” he said, and put his hands on his hips. His hair lifted on the wind, making him look like a painting. “I don’t do this, okay, go around fucking everybody, all right?”

The language felt like sharp rocks. “We don’t have to—”

“Look at me.”

She did.

Thomas kept his hands on his hips. “I get really
greedy around you, Luna. I don’t know why. I wanted to fix this, not make it worse.” He swallowed, lifted his chin. “I swear to God I won’t touch you if you’ll just come somewhere and sit with me, talk a little while.” He raised a hand in an oath, and his eyes were sober and intense. Luna could see his hunger there. “When I look at you,” he said, putting his hand on his chest, “I can breathe. It’s been a long time since I could.”

If it was a line, it was the best one she’d ever heard. “Yes.”

He took her hand and led her back to the truck, and she liked being next to his big body as they walked up the road, feeling connected to him, wondering what people passing by thought about them. She climbed into his truck on the passenger side. It was clean and neat, with only a folder of papers on the bench seat he’d covered with a striped red set, the kind you could get at Wal-Mart for $29.95. He drove down to Rancho de Taos and pulled into a little café with windows facing the west. “This okay?” Thomas asked before they got out. “Just have some coffee?”

“It’s fine.”

It was far enough from the plaza and ordinary enough to be ignored by tourists, just a run-of-the-mill Mexican food café called Betty’s Burritos. It had a black-and-white linoleum floor and plain vinyl upholstery. A mural of a Native American fancy dancer, painted crudely but with much love in tones of red, blue, and green, adorned one wall. A handful of tables were filled—an older Spanish couple, neatly dressed, glasses of beer before them; a family with little kids in the corner booth; a single overweight Native American girl at the counter, eating pie. A beaded sheath gathered her wealth of hair into a single tail that swept past the bottom of the stool.

The single waitress, a skinny Hispanic woman in her forties, came out of the kitchen at the sound of the bell over the door. “Hi, Thomas,” she said. “Coffee?”

He nodded, pointed toward a booth by the window. “Do you want coffee, too?”

“Sure. It never keeps me awake for some reason.”

It was served in heavy ceramic cups with little plastic pots of chemical cream. Luna asked for milk instead. She and Thomas were silent as they waited for the waitress to return, as if they were here to discuss something weighty—two parents with a troubled child, maybe, or friends with a big project. She hated the tension. “You look like a calendar,” she said, noticing the way the light came through the window to wash over him.

He chuckled. “Maybe I could sell it on the Internet, huh?”

“The Lone Coyote.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s from a Joan Baez song,” she said. “I’ll play it for you sometime.”

He nodded, picked up his cup. “So, where’re you from?”

“Right here. Taos. I was born in Albuquerque, but my mom grew up here, and we moved back when I was little. You?”

He cocked a thumb toward the south. “Same. Albuquerque. Mom’s from here, too, though. Wonder if they know each other? How old is your mom?”