Page 31 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

“We’re in trouble,” I say. It’s not a question and it’s not a joke, and she doesn’t take it as either.

“So much trouble,” she agrees, softly. “He says, in the middle of the crime scene.”

We clean up the kitchen the way you’d expect two sensible adults to — badly, in stages, interrupted twice by kissing that starts as a joke and stops being one. At the bottom of the stairs she puts her hand flat on my chest.

“I need a minute where I’m not looking at you,” she says, “or I’ll never make it to my own room, and I think — for tonight — I should.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t say okay like that.”

“It’s the only okay I have.”

She goes up. I do the doors, the stove, the lights, and stand at the bottom of the stairs with my hand on the newel post. Two weeks ago I stood in this exact spot and decided nothing was going to happen. I remember being very sure.

Up in my room, I close the door, turn off the light, and lie there thinking about a woman I swore I’d never touch, while she lies awake at the end of the hall.

I’ll fix this in the morning.

That’s what I tell myself, lying in the dark. Even I don’t believe it.

June

I wake up at nine, which never happens, in my own bed, which took everything I had.

For one warm second I’m nobody with no history. Then the whole thing arrives at once — the pantry, the counter, the step stool on its side, his mouth, his hands, my own voice with nothing held back. I pull the blanket over my face and lie there with my heartbeat in my ears.

Here’s where things stand, in the light of day. I used to have one secret in this house. Now I have two. The old one is who I was. The new one is what we did. And the part that scares me isn’t either of them — it’s that only the old one feels like a secret. The new one feels like the first fully true thing I’ve done under this roof. And that’s the danger. Secrets are built to stay hidden. True things aren’t.

He was FOURTEEN. I’m JUNO. Last night the man who used to pay for my company had me on his kitchen counter for free. He thinks that’s the whole story. It’s not even half of it.

I can’t lie still with all of that, so I get up. Shower. Clean clothes. I put on the good sweater, catch myself in the mirror, take it off, and put it back on anyway. So that’s how I feel about seeing him this morning. Noted.

He’s at the stove when I come down, and something is burning.

“Don’t look at the pan,” he says, without turning around. “The pan and I are working through some things.”

“Are those pancakes?”

“The plan was pancakes. Whether they arrive as pancakes is a different question.” He flips one. It lands badly. He gives it the look he gives Brenda, and I laugh before I’ve decided anything about how this morning is going to go. He turns around at the sound of it.

Saturday-morning Gus, barefoot, T-shirt, spatula. We look at each other across the kitchen where everything in this house happens, and the air goes thick enough to butter.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

“There’s coffee. I made it in your machine. I want points for that.”

“Did you rinse the filter first?”

A pause. “I want points for the attempt.”

We eat burnt pancakes at the counter. I take a stool — not the one from last night. We both notice, and neither of us says so. He watches me pick the blackened edge off and eat the middle. Neither of us says any of the sentences stacked up between us like planes over an airport. We should talk about it. One of us should start. What we do instead is eat pancakes, knees almost touching, while the morning sun comes across the counter he wiped down twice, apparently, before I woke up.

“June,” he says finally, into his coffee. “We should probably—”

“Yes.”