A dance floor. They were going to dance. The man caught May’s eyes from across the room and smiled.
Want to? he mouthed.
And she did. She did want to. She needed to move, to take the tension she’d created and push it outside of herself, because if she didn’t—
If she didn’t, something might happen with Ben that she wasn’t ready for.
So she crossed the room to the stranger, smiling back, and she pretended to believe that Ben would understand.
She pretended she wasn’t trying to make him snap.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He sat at an uneven, sticky table, nursing his second beer and watching her.
She’d stripped off her sweater and thrown it on top of her purse, exposing her bare arms and neckline. May and her new friends whirled around, grabbing one another’s arms, whooping with laughter, singing the lyrics of some inane piece of synthetic pop crap.
When she tossed her head, her earrings shivered.
He couldn’t decide if she was just having fun or if she was also trying to punish him—and if so, for what. For telling her?
He didn’t need her to punish him. He was doing a thorough job of it all by himself.
He watched her dance. He clenched his fist under the table every time the blond guy brought his mouth to her ear to shout at her over the loud music, and he hated himself for it.
She’s not going to do anything with that guy, you dick. And even if she did, it’s her right. Her body.
The music had an orange-red corona that pulsed pain between his eyebrows. He wore away the skin beside his thumb, storing blood beneath his fingernail and glaring at the table. At the floor.
At anything but May.
You can’t keep her, even if you want to. You’re about to lose your apartment, and you have to find a new one. She’s going back to Wisconsin. You and her make no sense. You’re a wreck, and you don’t deserve her.
Just go. She doesn’t want you here. She’s disgusted with you.
Go. You’ll both be better off.
But he didn’t. Even when the blond man flattened his hand on her back, swooped down, and kissed her, Ben didn’t move.
He couldn’t move.
May didn’t push the man away. She didn’t pull him closer. She didn’t react at all.
The music beat beneath Ben’s hand on the tabletop, and his blood drilled into his temples and turned everything a bilious red.
May put her hands against the blond man’s chest and took a step back. She said something that made the guy smile. Gave his arm a friendly squeeze.
She walked away from him. Directly toward Ben.
He rose so fast, his chair knocked into the one beside it. It fell over, spilling May’s sweater onto the ground.
“You ready to go?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
They both leaned over to pick up the chair. He got to it first. She wobbled on the way and had to grab his arm. “I’m all right,” she said in a put-on voice. “I’m aaaaalllll right.” She winked at him as if he wasn’t coming apart. “That’s a line from It’s a Wonderful Life. Uncle Billy.”
He shook his head.
“You haven’t seen it?”
“Not on purpose.”
May laughed for no reason he could discern, and he followed her toward the door, carrying her sweater. “You want this? It’s cold out.”
“No, I’m too hot.”
She tripped on the threshold of the steps leading up to the street, scraping her palm on the concrete. Ben helped her up, guided her onto the sidewalk, and inspected her wounds under a streetlight. When he ran a finger lightly over the base of her thumb, she sucked air in through her teeth. “It stings.”
“Don’t be a baby.”
She stuck out her bottom lip. “Kiss it better.”
He kissed her wrist instead and felt her pulse beat there. She closed her eyes. “That’s nice.”
He didn’t trust himself to speak. Clasping his fingers around her wrist, he led her down the street toward the subway.
“Hey, Ben?” Her voice was low and mellow, like she’d sounded when she was sitting in the sun on the step with the humming of bees in the air between them. “Is there any chance?”
“For what?”
But he knew. He knew what she meant, and there was no chance at all.
“He kissed me,” she said. “But it wasn’t the same.”
“You’ve had a lot to drink.”
“Did you mean it when you called me a stray?”
“You know I didn’t.”
They walked a block in silence. May crossed her arms and shivered. He pushed her sweater at her, and this time she put it on. They were crossing the street when she said, “I just liked that he wanted to. I haven’t … That doesn’t happen to me much.”