She rolled her head on her hands as he eased himself down beside her, her eyes pale in the moonlight, almost as pale as her smooth skin, white against her blue-black hair. She pulled the iPod buds from her ears and he heard Kim Richey faintly singing ‘Here I Go Again before she clicked it off and said, ‘Took you long enough,’ and he relaxed and held one of the sundae cups out to her. She sat up and he watched the curves of her body, the plumpness of her breasts and the arch of her back, strong and graceful in everything she did. She was Queen of the Universe, and he wanted her so much he ached with it.
Slow, he thought, and Py raised his head and watched him as if he knew what Crash was thinking.
Well, he was a male cat, he probably did.
She cracked the plastic lid off and said, ‘Spoon?’ and he pulled one out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her and then took the lid off his own cup.
‘So,’ he said. ‘How’s things with the universe?’
‘It’s screwing me over.’ Mare scooped up some ice cream and fudge, and then closed her eyes as if savoring it for a moment before she swallowed.
Crash looked down the front of her overalls while her eyes were closed, all that blue lace and round flesh, the shadow of her cleavage, probably damp with sweat and-
Mare opened her eyes. ‘I asked it for a choice in my life, and it sent me two I can’t take and didn’t offer me the one I need. It’s just cruel.’
‘One of them’s me, right?’ Crash started on his ice cream.
‘Yes.’
‘Why can’t you take me?’
‘I can’t leave Dee and Lizzie.’
Crash almost said, Bring them along, until he remembered Dee hated him. ‘You’re going to have to leave them sometime. You’re not going to live together forever until you rot and die, right?’ What a waste of all that heat and flesh and-
‘It’s complicated,’ Mare said. ‘But basically, I can’t come to Italy with you. I’d have liked it a lot, but I can’t. Sorry.’
Crash nodded, and thought, Maybe. If family was the only thing keeping her back-
It couldn’t be just that. Nobody refused to get married because she couldn’t leave her sisters. It must be something else, the damn secret she could never tell him, the reason he could never stay the night, never climb inside her bedroom. Whatever it was, he didn’t care. He still wasn’t sure how he’d ended up back in Salem’s Fork, but he was growing more and more positive that he wasn’t leaving without Mare.
‘What kind of cat is Py?’ he said, spooning up more ice cream.
‘Tiger cat,’ Mare said.
‘Where’d you get him?’
‘Lizzie found him at the zoo.’
‘You had that cat the whole time I knew you, and I never asked you anything about him,’ Crash said, carefully building his argument, which wasn’t easy with so little blood in his brain.
Mare blinked up at him, beautiful and hot in the moonlight. ‘Well, you know. He’s a cat. You weren’t a cat person.’
‘I’m not a cat person now, but now I want to know because he’s yours. I’ll pay attention this time. Whatever you get from your sisters, whatever you need, I’ll give it to you, I swear. I’ll give you more. You can trust me. You can leave them. I’ll give you what you need.’ I’ll give it to you right now, swear to God.
‘You can’t.’ Mare leaned against his shoulder as she worked on her ice cream, and he closed his eyes because she was finally touching him. ‘You’re a good guy, Crash, the best, but you can’t make this work.’
Oh, yeah, I can. ‘I can make anything work. Wait’ll you see this little town I’m living in. You’d love it there. The whole town comes through the shop sooner or later, all of them, grandmas and little kids, too, everybody, because they all love the bikes because the bikes are so beautiful. Ducatis and Moto Guzzis and-’
Below, someone kicked a motorcycle into gear, and he stopped to listen, and she said, ‘What?’
‘Triumph TR6.’ He listened as the sound faded into the distance. ‘Who do you know has a classic Triumph TR6?’
‘It must have been Danny James,’ she said. ‘Dee’s guy’
‘Dee’s dating? Good for her.’ Maybe Dee would get married. That’d be one down. ‘My mom heard that Lizzie’s engaged to Charles Conway.’
‘That’s off,’ Mare said around her ice cream. ‘He went to Alaska. She has a new guy, though, and I think he’s a keeper’
‘Well, if they’re getting married, you can,’ Crash said, the Voice of Reason.
‘They’re not getting married.’ Mare sighed. ‘So tell me more about the bike business.’
They sat in the moonlight and finished off their ice cream while he told her about the business and the bikes and his partner Leo and Leo’s wife Amelie and their baby and the little house he owned there – ‘Does it have a red tile roof?’ she asked, and when he said, ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Oh,’ and he couldn’t tell if that was good or bad – and the sun and the heat and the thousand things he loved about it, and when he was done, they put their cups down for Py to lick and then sat silent in the moonlight. Beneath them, the roof throbbed as if music were playing below, something with a strong bass, but it was quiet down there, just a silent pulsing with a drift of purple smoke around the windows every now and then that Mare said came up from the river, which didn’t make sense. Crash didn’t care, although the throb under him made it hard to concentrate on Italy and almost impossible not to touch Mare.
‘So what are your other choices?’ Crash said when she’d been silent for a while.
‘Hmmm? Oh. New York. Jude offered me a job in New York City.’
‘Oh.’ He shifted on the roof. ‘Jude’s the guy in the suit at the video store.’
‘Yep.’
‘You might like New York,’ he said, trying to be fair. ‘I’d love New York,’ Mare said. ‘But I can’t go there, either’
You’re twenty-three, he wanted to say, you can go anywhere you want, but he wanted her in Tuscany, not New York, so he didn’t say it. ‘And the third one nobody’s offered you?’
‘My Aunt Xan,’ Mare said. ‘My mother’s sister. I’d kind of like to learn some stuff from her. The only problem is I don’t know where she is, and Dee hates her so I can’t go looking for her.’
‘Maybe your aunt would like Italy.’
Mare turned to him in the dark. ‘Are you telling me that you’re going to support me and my aunt?’
Crash sighed. ‘No. I’m just trying to find a way to make this work.’
Mare shook her head. ‘Crash, you don’t know me. At all. You think you do because you knew a little bit about me five years ago but-’
‘I know, there are secrets. I got real damn tired of those secrets, of getting shut out, of feeling like the guy you called around when you wanted a good time and then sent home.’ He stopped because he was getting mad again, and getting mad was what had kept him out of Salem’s Fork for five years, that ‘If I’m not good enough to come in the house, the hell with you’ feeling that he was old enough now to know was a lot more about pain than it was about anger, not that that made it any damn better. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is that you don’t need to keep secrets anymore because what I know about you is that it felt right to be with you then, and it’s felt wrong to be without you for the past five years, and now that I’m back, it feels right again, and I’m ready to make this permanent, so I don’t care what your secrets are, I’m for you.’
‘Oh,’ Mare said, a little breathless. ‘Oh. Well. Well, you don’t know my aunt at all. She’s a real piece of work.’
‘I’m good with little old ladies.’
Mare snorted. ‘Xan is not a little old lady. Xan is Vampira and Elvira, Queen of the Night and the Dragon Lady and Morticia Addams with a little bit of Jackie Kennedy thrown in to make things interesting.’
‘That’s everybody you ever dressed up as for Halloween,’ Crash said, his mind flipping through images of the past, each of them hotter than the last, each of them cooling his anger considerably, along with Mare pressed up against him again.