The Seven Year Slip

I STEPPED INTO MY apartment, slipping my flats off by the door. Rain pattered against the windows, soft like tiny fingertips tapping on the glass pane. The two pigeons were huddled in their nest on the AC unit, and I was debating whether or not to take a cold shower to scrub off the evening—and all the pesky feelings still humming in my chest, when someone called—

“Lemon?”

I froze. Then, almost disbelieving, I called back, “Iwan?”

Stumbling over my flats, I hurried into the kitchen. And there he sat at the table, a bottle of bourbon and a glass in front of him. He was still in a dirty white T-shirt from work and loose-fitting black slacks. “Lemon!” he said with a crooked smile. “Hey, it’s nice to see you. What’re you doing around this late?”

“I—I wanted to see you,” I replied, so truthfully my heart ached in my chest. I just didn’t think I could. This man with shaggy auburn hair and pale eyes, who smiled with that crooked and warm smile.

And you never get over me.

I crossed the kitchen, taking his face in my hands as he looked at me, eyes widening in surprise—oh, that wonderful wide-eyed surprise, and I kissed him. Roughly and hungrily, wanting to tattoo the taste of him into the gray matter of my brain. I’d wanted to do this all night. Run my fingers through his auburn hair, hold tight to his curls. Press against him so hard I felt him against me.

He tasted like bourbon, and his five-o’clock shadow was rough against my skin.

“Why so hungry, Lemon?” he asked, coming up to gasp for air, his curiosity a little heartbreaking, as if he suspected that I had ulterior motives. That I couldn’t possibly want to be here kissing him.

“Aren’t you?” I asked, and that seemed to be answer enough for him, because, yes, he was. Yes, I knew he would be. Of course I knew he would be. The way he’d looked at me all night, studied me, as if he wanted to drink me in, as if he thought he never would again—I knew that look. It was the look my mom gave my dad. That my aunt gave that far-off memory that sat like a sour candy on her tongue.

I knew that look so fucking well, I recognized it the moment he lifted his head from the table when I walked in, from the moment he called me Lemon with that hopeful disbelief.

He reached up and tangled his fingers into my hair, drawing me into another kiss. Slow and sensual, his hands cradling my face as his mouth pressed against mine, muttering soft affirmations against my lips. His tongue skimmed along my bottom lip, and I leaned into him, the feeling of Pop Rocks in my chest. He smelled so good, like wildness and soap and him, that made me hungrier for more.

“You seem to always visit right when I need company,” he murmured.

“Company—or me?”

He leaned back a little, looking up at me with those beautiful stormy eyes—like clouds before autumn’s first snow. “You, I think,” he replied, his voice soft and sure, and it melted the horrid wall I had built up around myself, and I kissed him again, to savor those words on my lips.

His hands were gentle as they cupped my face, slowly drifting downward toward my blouse, undoing the buttons one at a time with those nimble, long fingers of his. As he did, his kisses trailed from my mouth to my neck. I made a noise that sounded more feral animal than sexy as he scraped his teeth across the line of my throat toward my shoulder. He spun us, so I pressed against the table instead, and he lifted me up on it, scooting the bottle of bourbon out of the way. His tongue flicked against the skin at my collarbone, sucking, and then his teeth sank into it.

I felt myself prickle with gooseflesh, and I gasped.

“Too much?” he asked, looking up at me from under his lovely and long eyelashes, his gaze drunk on me.

No, the opposite.

“More,” I begged, feeling heat rise up on my cheeks.

“I love the way you blush,” he murmured, kissing the hills of my breasts as he undid the top buttons of my blouse. “It drives me mad.”

I never considered how I looked when I blushed. “Tell me.”

“It’s a lovely color,” he started, his breath hot against the skin between my breasts, as he laid me back on the table, his knee anchored on the edge, his hands planted on either side of me. “It starts right here”—he planted a kiss just below the center of my collarbones—“and it creeps up”—a kiss at the base of my throat— “and up”—another against the side of my neck—“and up.” Another on the edge of my jaw. On my right cheek. “And it drives me crazy when I know I’m the cause.”

I felt my skin flush at the—very true, honestly—assumption, my heart slamming against my rib cage. A slow grin crossed that terribly crooked mouth of his.

“Like now,” he purred, and kissed my blushing cheeks. The way he handled me was so tender, so honest, it was—quite frankly—erotic. I had been romanced before—of course I had, you didn’t travel the world and not fall for a handsome man in Rome or a smart-talking traveler in Australia, a Scotsman with a deep-throated growl, a poet in Spain—but this felt different. Every touch, every brush of his fingertips across my skin, had a weight to it. A reverence.

Like I wasn’t merely some girl to kiss and remember fondly in ten years, but someone to be kissed in ten years.

In twenty.

But, of course, that didn’t happen, that couldn’t happen, because I already knew how this ended.

He kissed the furrow between my brows. “What are you thinking, Lemon?”

My fingers trailed down his chest and curled up under his shirt. I was thinking that I wanted to get out of my head. That I wanted to enjoy him, here. I was thinking how selfish that was, knowing what I knew, knowing this couldn’t ever work out. I was thinking how my aunt had been smart to set up that second rule, and I was thinking how thoroughly I was going to break it.

I traced the tattoo on his stomach, a small running rabbit. Gooseflesh rippled across his skin at my touch. “How many do you have?” I asked instead.

He inclined an eyebrow. “Ten. Do you want to find them?”

In reply, I pulled his shirt the rest of the way off, and he dropped it to the kitchen floor, and I traced another tattoo on his hip bone—a wishbone. “Two.”

Initials on the left side of his torso. “Three. Four,” I added, kissing the bunch of herbs gathered on his left arm, tied with a red string.

One on the inside of his other arm, of a road filled with pines. “Five.”

“You are impressively good at finding them,” he murmured as I slid off the kitchen table, and pulled him slowly into the living room. He kissed me again, nibbling my bottom lip.

“I never back down from a challenge,” I replied, and turned him around, planting a kiss on the butcher’s knife on his right shoulder blade. “Six.”

The seventh one was on his right forearm, a radish halfway sliced, falling apart.

Eight was small, so easily overlooked on his wrist, a constellation of dots that formed Scorpio. Of course he was a Scorpio.

“It’s getting harder,” he taunted.

“Is it, now,” I replied, and he realized what he’d said and barked a laugh, this time blushing himself, and I tugged him down the hall, kissing him as I pushed him onto the bed and climbed on top of him. He was, in fact, extremely aroused by my game, and that was very thrilling. Number nine was tucked just above his collarbone, his crescent-shaped birthmark below. It was a line of a heartbeat, and when I nibbled against the skin there, he made a noise that sounded, a little, like he was coming undone.

He murmured, “Pity you won’t find the last one.”

Of course I would. I was nothing if not an attentive listener. I gently turned his head to the side, hearing his breath catch, and pushed back the hair that curled around his left ear, planting a kiss on the whisk hidden there. “Ten,” I whispered. “So what’s my prize?”

He scrunched his nose. “Would you take a dishwasher?”

“Someone once told me it’s the most important role in the kitchen,” I replied.

“He might never make much of himself.”

“Oh, Iwan,” I sighed, taking his face in my hands, “I don’t care. I like you.”

And there it was.

My aunt’s rule broken; my perfect plan shattered. I knew Iwan wouldn’t be a dishwasher forever, and even if he was, it wouldn’t have mattered—dishwasher or chef or lawyer or no one at all. It was the man with gemstone eyes and the crooked smile and the lovely banter that I felt my soul crushing for.

Those lovely pearl eyes darkened to storms, to tempests, as he seized me by the middle and shifted me off him and onto the duvet. He pressed against me with his weight, dragging his hands up my thighs, under my skirt. “I’m going to take off your blouse,” he said, his fingers finding their way to the buttons on my shirt, undoing the rest of them one by one with those long, nimble fingers of his. I wanted them elsewhere. “I’m going to kiss every part of you. I’m going to commit every piece of you to memory.”

“Every piece?” I asked as he reached back and unclasped my bra.

“Every”—he muttered as his mouth explored my breasts, his fingers following my curves downward, tugging at my skirt, slipping beneath my underwear—“lovely”—

I tensed in a gasp as his fingers toyed with me, my hands finding purchase in his messy hair.

“—piece,” he growled, and slipped his fingers into me, stroking me, as his tongue danced across the bare skin of my breasts. I squirmed beneath his weight, but he held me firmly and murmured sweetly, like chocolate, his words tart and coy like lemons, affirmation after affirmation into my hair. I was never the kind of woman to fall in love with a voice, but when I came, he pressed his mouth against my ear and rumbled, “Good girl,” in the exact way that made me lose all sense of self-preservation.

My aunt had two rules in the apartment—one, take your shoes off by the door, and I’m certain I’d forgotten to do that at least once.

So at least once I could break rule number two as well.

Just once.

But, unlike with shoes, all you need to do is fall in love once, though, to be ruined by it forever. “Birth control?” he asked between kisses.

I had to think for a second. “Um, yeah, but—”

“Hold, please.” He peppered a trail of kisses down my body, and planted one on my inner thigh, before he left to get something from his wallet, then came back into the bedroom, slipping out of his trousers. He tore the condom wrapper open with his teeth—which was so much sexier than I thought it could be—and put it on before he slowly, savoring me, slipped himself inside of me, murmuring psalms of my body as he traveled it, and I knew I was falling. The kind of falling that would hurt when I hit the ground. The kind of falling that would shatter me into pieces.

So I kissed him, feeling bright and reckless and brave, and I fell.

THE NEXT MORNING, MY mouth felt like I’d swallowed an entire pack of cotton balls—and then I remembered: bourbon. The empty bottle was still on the nightstand, and my pink lace panties were draped from the lampshade.

Classy, Clementine.

Beside me, someone groaned. I was so used to waking up alone, I hadn’t realized that Iwan was still in the bed beside me until he rolled over and kissed my bare shoulder.

“Mornin’,” he mumbled sleepily, and stifled a yawn against my skin. His voice was slurred and deep fried in the morning, and adorable. “How’re you?”

I pressed the palm of my hand against an eye. My head felt like it was full of sand. “Dead,” I croaked.

He laughed, soft and rumbly. “Coffee?”

“Mmh.”

So he rolled over and began to get out of bed, but the space he left felt so cold all of a sudden, and I quickly grappled for him around the waist and pulled him back to bed. He fell on the mattress with a chuckle, and I curled up against his back, shoving my freezing feet against his.

“Your feet are freezing!” he yelped.

“Deal.”

“Okay, okay, just let me—hang on,” he said with a sigh, and turned onto his back. “I didn’t take you for a cuddler,” he added, not unkindly.

“Five more,” I mumbled, laying my head on his chest. His heart thrummed quickly in his rib cage, and I listened to him breathe in and out. The apartment was quiet, and the morning light split into golds and greens through the glass artwork hanging up over the window behind the bed.

After a while he said, “I think the pigeons from the living room have been staring at us since sunrise.”

“Hmm?”

He pointed up at the window, and I looked up. Sure enough, Mother and Fucker were sitting there on the sill of the window. I sat up in bed, making sure to keep the bedsheet wrapped around myself, and squinted at them. “How long do pigeons live in the wild, you think?”

He considered it. “Probably about five years, why?”

“Just wondering,” I replied dismissively, and returned my gaze to the two on the sill. They did look the exact same as the ones from my childhood. One had blue feathers around his neck like a collar, the rest of him speckled white and gray, and the other looked a bit oily, with streaks of navy plumage that reached all the way down to the tips of their feathers. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember what the pigeons before them looked like, or if they’d had babies. I’d always assumed that they nested in the winter, and a new couple took their place every year, but now I was beginning to suspect something very different, and they reminded me—quite clearly—that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, either.

I waved my hand at them. “Shoo, shoo! Go away,” I said, but they didn’t take flight until I drummed my knuckles on the window. Then they just flew around to their normal perch in the living room. “My aunt hated those birds,” I said as I settled back against him, and closed my eyes.

He shifted a little. “Lemon?” he asked after a moment.

“Mmm?”

“Why do you refer to your aunt in past tense?”

I froze. The first thing that popped into my mind was to pretend to be asleep. Not say a single thing. My second instinct was to lie. What’re you talking about? Past tense? Must be a slip of the tongue.

What would a lie hurt? To him, she was still alive. To him, she was gallivanting off with her niece, sneaking into the Tower of London and day drinking in Edinburgh and being chased halfway across Norway by a walrus.

To him, she wouldn’t die for quite a few years. She wouldn’t even think about it. She was still alive, and the world still held her in it.

So this is where you find out, I thought, and my voice was tight as I whispered, “You won’t believe me.”

He frowned. It was a peculiar frown, eyebrows furrowed, the left side of his mouth dipped a little lower than the right. “Try me, Lemon.”

I thought to tell him. I wanted to—I did. But . . . “She’s never home long enough for me to ever see her,” I found myself lying. “She goes traveling a lot. She likes new places.”

He thought about that for a moment. “I can see the allure of that. I’d like to travel.”

“I used to all the time with her.”

“What stopped you?”

“Work. Adult things. A good career. A stable relationship. A home.” I sat up in bed and gave a shrug, wrapping the comforter around me. “I had to grow up someday.”

He wrinkled his nose. “You must think I’m nuts, then, to start a new career halfway to thirty.”

“Not at all. I think you’re brave,” I corrected, and kissed his nose. “People change their lives all the time, doesn’t matter how old you are. But . . . can you promise me something?”

“Anything, Lemon.”

“Promise me you’ll always be you?”

His eyebrows knitted together. “Well, that’s a weird thing to ask.”

“I know, but—I like you. Just the way you are.”

He laughed, a soft rumble in his throat, and kissed my forehead. “All right. I promise—only if you promise something, too.”

“What?”

“Always find time to do what makes you happy—like painting, and traveling, and fuck the rest.”

“How poetic.”

“I’m a chef, not a writer.”

“Maybe you’ll be both someday. And right now, what’s going to make me happy is a shower. Maybe it’ll help with this hangover.” I began to scoot out of bed, but he pulled me close to him again and kissed me. I loved the way he kissed, like I was something to savor—even with morning breath. “This also makes me happy,” I added.

He smiled against my mouth. “The happiest.”

Eventually, I peeled myself away from him, gathered my clothes, and left for a shower.

When I came back out, he was already dressed.

“Let’s go out today,” he said as I came out of the bathroom, drying my hair with a towel. He was sitting on the fainting couch, his eyes closed and arms behind his head, the window open to let the pigeons eat some popcorn on the sill. I glanced at the microwave clock—it was already one in the afternoon. “You can show me around the city. Ooh—and you can bring your watercolors. I can watch you. Where do you like to paint?”

I gave it a thought. “Tourist traps, mostly.”

“Central Park, then? Or is there another one you like more? Prospect Park is beautiful.”

“Well . . .”

He sprung up from the couch. “Let’s do it. Before the day’s gone. It’s so pretty outside today. Let’s lounge, and I can bring a book, and you can do your watercolors.”

“W-wait,” I said in a panic, as he disappeared into the study, and came back with my tin of watercolors and a book, and took my hand. “My hair’s still damp. My head’s throbbing. I don’t have any makeup on!”

“You look beautiful just as you are,” he replied, pulling me across the living room. He grabbed his wallet from the counter.

“That’s not the point.”

And yet I still let him lead me to the front door. I can’t leave this apartment, I wanted to tell him, but he wouldn’t believe me. Then again, I hadn’t tried to leave this apartment with him. Maybe . . .

I could have stopped him if I really wanted to. I didn’t. His excitement was infectious. He spouted off places he’d like to check out—the deli from When Harry Met Sally, some other movie-specific restaurants. He wanted to try a hot dog in the park, a pretzel, maybe some ice cream.

“Do they actually allow you to rent rowboats in Central Park?” he asked, sliding on his shoes, and I put on my flats. His hand around my wrist was tight with excitement, until I took his fingers and laced them through mine instead.

There, much better.

He smiled as he led me to the door, his eyes bright with the possibility. “We’ll go everywhere. Find some of the greasiest pizza in New York. We’ll—”

And the second he opened the door, he vanished, leaving only the warmth of his fingers through mine, and then even that faded, and I stood in my aunt’s dark apartment in the present, and looked at my empty hand.