The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [123]
Thomas stops at a gas station so that she can call the diner. She holds her nose and pretends to have a cold, while Thomas stands outside the booth, banging on the glass and singing. Help me, Rhonda. Help, help me, Rhonda. When they get back in the car, Linda kisses him so hard and for so long, she leaves him gasping for breath.
As they drive, the setting sun lights up the trees and the old houses beside the road so that, for a time, the world seems happily on fire.
“This is the best day of my life,” she says.
“Really?”
The water in the marshes turns a brilliant pink. Thomas reaches below his seat and pulls out a bottle of what looks to be scotch or whiskey. A shadow passes across the road.
“What’s this about?” she asks.
“You want a drink? We’re celebrating.”
The bottle is only half full. Perhaps there are things about Thomas she doesn’t know.
“You’ve never had a drink,” he says.
“Thomas, can we stop somewhere? There’s something I want to tell you.”
______
“He used to have sex with me,” she says, letting her breath out in a rush.
She waits for the car to buckle in, for the air to billow out. Thomas has parked the Skylark on a dirt lane in the marshes. They are partially hidden from the road by a grove of trees, glittering and melting in the setting sun.
“He raped you,” Thomas says.
“It wasn’t rape,” she says.
This will be the moment, Linda thinks, when Thomas will have to open the door of the car and get out, letting in a cool gust of air. He will have to take a walk, get his bearings, and when he gets back in, she knows, everything will be different between them.
“Often?” Thomas asks.
“Five times,” she says.
He lays his head back against the seat. Linda feels light-headed. She needs to eat.
“I knew it was something like that,” Thomas says quietly.
“You did?” She is only a little surprised. And perhaps a bit deflated. One’s terrible secret guessed after all.
“I didn’t know for sure,” Thomas says. “Actually, for a while, I thought it might have been your father.”
“My father left when I was five,” she says. “I told you that.”
“I thought you might be lying about when he left,” Thomas says. No judgment implied about the lying. It is understood she’d have had to do that.
“Was it awful?” he asks.
“It wasn’t awful or not awful,” she says carefully. And after a minute adds, “I don’t think we should talk about this particular thing anymore.”
He nods. What good can come of details? Of pictures that can never be erased?
“I love you,” Thomas says.
She shakes her head. The words should not have been offered now. She might always have to think they had been said partly out of pity.
“I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you walk into that class,” he says.
Yet words are momentous, she knows, and her heart lifts all the same.
“I sometimes think,” he says, “that we were meant to be together.”
“I agree,” she says quickly. And it is true. She does very much agree.
Elation makes him turn to her.
______
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“I’m sure,” she says.
He draws back and studies her. “This isn’t something he made you do, is it?” he asks. “Take all your clothes off?”
She shakes her head and realizes that Thomas has images too — his worse for being the worst he can imagine. What’s imagined always worse than what is.
She crosses her arms and removes her sweater, feeling more naked than she ever has before. She hitches her hips up so that she can take off her skirt. She hears Thomas’s breath catch.
“Linda,” he says.
Lightly, as you might touch a sculpture in a gallery, Thomas runs the tips of his fingers from her neck to her thighs. She sucks in her own breath as well.
“This is better,” she says.
______
They move into the backseat to avoid the steering wheel. Outside, it is winter still, but inside it is all steam and hot breath. A kind of cocoon, the world opaque.
Linda has thought the ache of pleasure