Page 32 of Melt With You

They’d been known as the swingers in the neighborhood. With a hot tub in their backyard, and a steady stream of couples parading through their home on the weekends. The man had practically served his wife up for Rowan’s own consumption. He watched the husband move over to the small side lawn, and he saw the wife coming out with a glass of lemonade.

She was wearing a floral sundress with tiny straps that barely held her breasts in place. Rowan had to admit to himself that she looked good. Delicious on this hot day. He saw her gaze in his direction, saw her tilt her sunglasses down on her nose and stare at him, playing Lolita at age forty. He remembered seeing that look when he was fifteen and didn’t know how to respond.

But he wasn’t fifteen, was he?

No, he wasn’t. Not any more.

She’d been putting off this moment, almost as if she knew it had to happen, but hadn’t wanted to confront herself with the truth.

And the truth was her diary.

She’d found the slim burgundy leather volume tucked under her mattress on her first day back. She reached for it again now, knowing it would be there, knowing with the sick feeling in her stomach that she would have to read it. She’d destroyed the book while in college, hating the sappy melodramatic way she felt when she reread the words she’d written so earnestly, so hopefully.

But now, she felt different. She was an adult. She could look at those dreams and know that many of them had come true. She was in a different place, right? A better place.

Perhaps.

The book was small and slim. Not a real diary, just a blank leather-bound notebook. She’d started writing in it at the beginning of her senior year, when she’d begun dating Rowan. The passages were filled with descriptions of him, with the desire for him, as if she were the first person in the world to have sexual longing.

There were bits and pieces, fragments of kisses they’d shared, and where they’d been. She found movie ticket stubs taped next to dates, found a dried-up four-leaf clover pressed between two pages. And then she found a story she’d forgotten, walking in on Gael and Bette in the bathroom, the two of them doing coke from a hand mirror, both looking up in shock as she’d barged in, and then barged right back out.

The 80s looked innocent on the surface, didn’t they? But when you scratched that shiny candy-colored exterior you found something else entirely. Like the English Breakfast tea tin that held her mother’s secret stash of pot. Like the box in the liquor cabinet that held her father’s porn. Like the fact that she and Rowan had had sex …

Oh, God, was that why she’d destroyed the book? She’d been pretending that she’d kept her virginity until college for so many years that she’d actually believed the lie herself. But here. Look. There was a passage, recorded in that cramped, tiny writing of hers. A date. The movies. She closed her eyes.

She tried to remember.

They’d been dating for nearly the whole year. But she had waited until after her birthday to say yes. She’d wanted the night to be special. God, Luke had been right about her, hadn’t he? She needed the first time to be for love. She read the passage, and then stopped, feeling as if she were reading about someone else, some stranger’s secrets. The girl in the book wasn’t her.

Not any more. Not by a long shot.

Now, she was seeking only pleasure. She’d given up what she’d had once with Rowan. She’d given up the concept of true love always.

Dori stopped reading when she got to the heart of it, embarrassed for herself – not then, but now. A voyeur of her own life. Instead, she flicked through the pages, trying to find something else, anything else.

Gael’s Creamery looked very different at four in the morning. She’d always had a midnight curfew, extended until twenty minutes after the credits rolled for Rocky Horror excursions – because the picture show started at midnight – but the latest she’d ever been at the Creamery was around one.

Now that she was a grown-up, she could go any time she wanted. How freeing was that? She could drink espresso – except they didn’t serve espresso – black coffee, then, at four in the morning, and nobody would say a damn thing.

The café was nearly empty at this hour, as she might have expected, but that’s not what made the place feel different. Sitting in the front window, looking out at the empty street, Dori wondered whether the café would have felt like this had she been eighteen again. The quiet. The stillness. The traffic lights blinking red and yellow. The waitress had nothing to do when she wasn’t refilling Dori’s cup, and she sat behind the counter and read a fashion magazine.

Dori had moved first to LA and then to NY for the sole reason of being in a city that always stayed awake. Here, the creamery might be open, but her town was shut down, rolled up at nine p.m.

And then the door swung in, and she saw a man enter the café. He moved by her quickly, so that if she wanted a good look, she would have had to turn her head. And she wasn’t prepared to do that. She did her best to check out his appearance in the reflection in the window, but all she could see was that he’d taken a spot in the rear of the café, that he was faced away from her and that he’d brought a book to read.

She looked up at the print of Nighthawks. That Hopper picture had always depressed the hell out of her. But now she found the image soothing. She was a nighthawk herself.

She wondered why she’d wanted to come out after all. She hadn’t figured that the loneliness would follow her, no matter where she was, no matter who she was with, no matter what date was printed on the newspaper discarded on the wood chair at her side.

She put a few dollars down on the table and left the building, heading back to her car and to a house she no longer considered home.

He’d lost his nerve.

Jesus.

He’d followed her to the café, as he’d followed her so many times the past few weeks, and then backed out. Right when he thought he might be able to approach her, she’d left. He couldn’t see himself banging on her door at four in the morning.

She’d think he was a crazy person.

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