“That was so unfair of me,” he says with a wicked grin, as I finally loosen the grip on his shirt. The fabric is wrinkled in the middle of his chest, marked by my need to hold him close. “Getting a headstart like that on all the other candidates.”
How can there be any other guys after a kiss like that? It’s a kiss to end all kisses, it’s a sip of lemonade in a hammock on a warm summer day. It’s a slow dance on hardwood floors while a fan goes round overhead, curtains blowing gently in the open window.
If he feels half as much for me as I do for him, then I want to sail away with him in the moonlight, and that scares the hell out of me. I have to extract myself before I let this go any further. I don’t mean the contact. I mean the way my aching, broken heart is reaching for Chris.
I channel my business self. My other side. The strong, tough side that won’t be hurt ever again.
“I should go,” I say.
Then he clicks on the car opener and I hear the doors unlock. He opens the door for me and I slip into the front seat. He’s about to close the door when I say, “Do you want me give you a ride home?”
He shakes his head.
“But Russian Hill is at least a couple miles from here. Let me drive you.”
“I’ll walk. I like the city at night.” Then he leans in to me, gently pushes my hair back and looks at me with a truly devilish smirk, his green eyes twinkling. “Besides, if I got into that car with you I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off of you. And we all know that really wouldn’t be fair to the others.”
“My, aren’t you considerate,” I say, keeping it light. “Goodnight, Chris.”
“Goodnight, McKenna.”
Then I drive away, watching Chris begin his long walk home in my rearview mirror. I head down Fillmore Street toward the water and he’s no longer a speck in the distance.
He’s gone.
* * *
As I drive back to the Marina, I do what girls, what women, always do in these moments. I replay the kiss. I put it on repeat in my mind. The way he grazed my neck with his hand, the way he lingered on a strand or two of hair, stroking it, touching it, like the shy but sexy Spanish guy did to Laura Linney in Love, Actually the night of the Christmas Party. She went wild inside, shivering with delight. I feel the same. I want to pull over on the side of the road. Pull over and lean my head back and close my eyes and just remember. But I keep driving, wriggling a bit in my seat as I find myself getting more turned on, getting wetter, the more I think about Chris, the more I think about what might have happened in this car if he’d taken me up on my offer for a ride home. I think about rolling up to a stop sign somewhere on a quiet street and going for another kiss. Then stopping on the side of the road and turning off the engine, then the lights, then climbing into his seat and making out in a parked car, a friend’s car no less, as he kisses me more. The kind of kiss where I let go, where I breathe out his name in a long, slow, lingering sigh that borders on a prayer. The kind of kiss that winds down my body, lips against my belly, fingertips grazing my waist. That makes me want to rock my h*ps into him, to let him take me places I haven’t been, as I let him inside me, all the way in. And when he’s there, it feels so right, so good, so deliriously out-of-this-world, that all I can do is say his name in a breathless, ragged kind of whisper as I struggle to form words because all the things he does have made me come undone for him.
Like a good boyfriend would do.
As I pull into my own garage I am struck by a simple thought: it would be kind of nice right now just to have a boyfriend, just a boyfriend, nothing more.
Chapter Thirteen
I don’t usually have questions about whether to fight or flight. I’m almost always on the side of fight. But when I see Amber a few days later power walking with her baby strapped to her chest, all I want to do is flee.
Because Amber is the living, breathing manifestation of all that I never was.
Good enough to keep a man walking all the way down the aisle.
She had something I never had. I don’t even know what it is about her. Is it her looks, all hourglass redhead? Or is it her body and the way she can bend? Or it is more? Is she funnier, smarter, more interesting? Does she love harder, better, more? How did he know in one night that he wanted to be with her forever?
I don’t have those answers as I walk my dog along the Marina bike path on a weekday morning. I don’t think I’ll ever have those answers. Worse, I don’t know if I’ll ever stop wanting them. It’s like there’s this raw wound inside me that can never be exposed to enough air to heal. I’ll never be able to treat it, so it’ll become a part of me, the ulcer in my heart that won’t ever go away.
And that’s why I want to duck and hide right now, to roll into a bush and curl up with my dog, like we’re two soldiers who’ve found a foxhole for protection.
But she sees me, and she waves and smiles.
Breathe deeply. Turn over a new leaf. I am Zen McKenna. I am cool, calm and collected McKenna, as I walk in her direction, imagining I am a guru, a yoga instructor, a therapist. I am serene, I am graceful, I am a mountain breeze.
“Hey, McKenna,” she says and stops.
Okay, so I guess I have to stop now too. But I don’t have to be nice because I’m not a yoga instructor or a therapist. I’m the jilted and I don’t like that the jilter is on my territory. “What are you doing in the city? Don’t you live in the suburbs?”
Amber pats the back of the sleeping baby on her chest. “I started teaching again. Gymnastics. I have a class with two-year-olds in about a half hour over in the Marina with some of the mommies there.”