She wanted Ben, and he wanted her. Only chivalry had kept him from doing something about it last night. She would make damn sure he did something about it today. And in the meantime, she would prod him. She would test this new trust she’d found in the alleyway—this certainty that had dropped over her when she was tipsy and tired and frustrated that she knew what he was all about, and she saw him more clearly than he saw himself.
There was nothing cruel in him. His anger didn’t speak for his true self. It spoke for the part of him that had been deprived. Starved.
He was so hungry. She could feed him, if he would let her.
“All I’m saying is, it sounds to me like you came here with an ideal in your head,” he told her. “You don’t like New York because it doesn’t match. But that’s not really fair to New York, you know? It deserves a shot on its own merits.”
“So what are its merits?”
“I’m going to show you,” he said.
“On the ferry.”
“Yeah, on the ferry.”
“I can’t wait.” She tried to match the tone he used at his most sarcastic.
“Shush.”
The doors opened, and the crowd surged through them.
Cattle, she thought as they made their way along the hallway and down the ramp, carried along with the stream of humanity. She turned to Ben and said, “Moo.”
“Don’t be a brat.” He pulled her close by the arm, planted a quick, hard kiss on her mouth, and said under his breath, “Or you’ll pay for it later.”
There was an exciting idea.
Just as exciting, the way he was flirting with her this morning. When she’d sat near him at breakfast, eating pastry and drinking coffee, he’d asked her the crossword clues he didn’t know the answers to and cupped the back of her neck in his hand, a warm, lazy touch that thrilled her.
I want you, he’d said. I want you naked and panting and wet.
The words had been echoing around inside her body all morning, bouncing against her thighs, nudging her lungs. Filling her with a bright expectancy.
Tonight.
Tomorrow she would leave, and that would be that. But first she would get one night with sexy, angry, weird, frustrating, messy Ben.
She couldn’t wait.
Once they were on the boat, the crowd split into separate streams, with most people heading to the sides. The seats around the boat’s exterior faced the water, and tall windows offered the free view of the city that so many had come for.
A small portion of the riders stayed in the middle of the boat, settling with iPods and magazines into seats that had no view. Local commuters, she supposed—the people the ferry was technically supposed to be for, before it had become one more stop on the New York tourist circuit.
“Left or right?” May asked.
“Follow the Swedish volleyball team.” Ben steered her along behind a group that did, in fact, seem to contain a disproportionately large number of tall blondes.
The passengers who had chosen this side ignored the bench seats, gathering instead at the windows and talking excitedly among themselves. May found a clear spot and looked over the water.
Ben took a position beside her, his clasped hands hanging out the open window as he leaned on his forearms.
The last time she rode the ferry, she’d woken up on Saturday morning to an empty bed. Dan was already at practice, because Dan was always already at practice.
It hadn’t been her best morning. She’d lay there beneath the fluffy white comforter, staring at the blank ceiling and feeling bleak and watery, like there was no point in anything.
But she hadn’t allowed herself to accept that hollow feeling as her final state for the day. She’d gotten up, showered, and dressed. She’d packed her purse with water and a camera, planned her route to the terminal, and set out.
Thinking back on that day now, what struck her most was the silence. Waiting in the crowd, riding the ferry, disembarking and waiting again, riding it back. She’d eaten lunch at a place that supposedly made Manhattan’s best ramen noodles, taken in a movie at an independent theater, rambled through Central Park. Aside from the waiter and the man who sold her the movie ticket, no one had spoken to her all day.
Exhausted by the end of it, she’d bought a smoothie and trudged back to the train to New Jersey. She’d made her way to Dan’s house, where she sat at his glass-topped table with her laptop and sent her family an email full of cheerful bullshit.
Spent all day seeing the sights! New York is awesome—really feel like I’m getting to know it now! Miss you so much!
XOXO,
May
After she hit SEND, the message had flown off into cyberspace with a little whooshing sound, and the already familiar aural experience of Dan’s empty house—the hum of the refrigerator, the tiny crashing noises of the ice maker—had begun to wear her down. The watery, hollow feeling returned, worse than before, because she had spent an entire day looking, listening, and waiting to feel some spark of connection to this place, these people, this heritage. But even at the World Trade Center site, she’d been an anthropologist, at best. A participant-observant faking belonging.