Page 75 of The Seven Year Slip

“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 wassomuch 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, mymouth 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. Theydidlook 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.”

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