Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [39]
She swallowed the bread she was chewing and cleared her throat. “Your being here is kind of like the letter,” she said.
Lena could hear the wind outside late that night. It sounded like the beginnings of a storm. She could almost feel the anticipation of it on her skin.
It was well after midnight, and she had expected that at some point Kostos would go back to his alleged vacation house, which she knew had to offer accommodations more comfortable than her grandparents’ old couch. But he didn’t. He lay with her, or mostly with her feet, sipping wine, occasionally talking, and eventually dozing.
Tonight we make strange bedfellows, she thought. Her loss, his guilt. Her insecurity, his good manners. Usually these things kept them apart, but tonight they brought them together.
Was there an attraction anymore? There had been, fiercely, before. But she was too distant from herself, too sad and empty and confused to know anymore. What, besides sympathy, did he feel for her now? He was large and dashing and glamorous, moving through time with ease, where she felt stunted and small and stuck, a stick figure of pity with large feet.
She could imagine how it seemed to him. If you couldn’t bring yourself to marry the sad granddaughter, you could at least take pity on her.
He didn’t touch her in any romantic way. The set of his body—even crimped with hers on this couch—was not suggestive or in any way demanding.
And if it had been otherwise?
Then it would have been all wrong. It might have momentarily flattered or reassured her, but at such a moment in her life, it would have felt desperate and sad. She wouldn’t have been lifted up by an expression of his attraction right now, she would have been diminished by it. Over time, she would have resented him for it.
So why be disappointed by wishes you would not want to come true? That was the road to unhappiness if ever there was one, and she had traveled it extensively.
Whether or not he had ever wanted to marry her, he seemed to know the right way to care for her at a deeply fragile time, and that in itself was something like love. The love of a near-relative, the love of an old friend. Whatever it was, she was too depleted not to take what was offered.
She’d been certain she wouldn’t and couldn’t fall asleep in such a configuration of limbs—his limbs, of all limbs!—and yet she opened her eyes and there was light poking in at the bottom of the shutters. She had slept, really slept, for the first time in days.
Kostos was opposite her, still sleeping peacefully with his arms crossed around her ankles. She wanted to imprint this on her brain, to scratch it in deep so she could have it for later, when she could feel things again.
God often gives nuts to toothless people.
—Matt Groening
The following morning Bridget’s hand was still pounding and swollen. She wondered if she’d just bruised it or broken a bone. She ripped one of her old T-shirts into strips and tied it up. It didn’t help anything, but it made her feel a little more protected.
She ducked into Pancho Villa for a late-morning burrito and was happy to see the familiar ladies in their hairnets smiling at her. She wished she could speak Spanish. She wished she were like Eric, who dreamed in Spanish. In fact, she wished she thought and dreamed in a language she couldn’t understand.
She wasn’t hungry, exactly, but she needed to eat. She ate two-thirds of the burrito and drank a Mexican lime soda before she felt sick and dumped the rest in the garbage. She hated to waste it. She would have eaten it if she could have.
As she unlocked her bike, she had an idea. She pedaled up Guerrero until she came to a gas station. She spent a portion of the little cash she had on a foldout map of California. She was getting good at riding with her pack on her back. So she set out eastward into the Great Central Valley with a hat on her head and her aching