She woke some time around dawn, the light creeping into the room, and for a moment she didn't know where she was. But Calvin was next to her, on his back, one arm up behind his head, clutching the pillow. Even in sleep, he looked like he was deep in thought. The night before came back to her and she felt a searing humiliation. I should leave, she thought. But he'd been so kind to her, so understanding--he had refused to sleep with her when she was drunk, which was a level of respect that she hadn't had from a man before. And she wanted him. She'd wanted him the night before when she was in his arms, and she wanted him no less now in the light of day. She had been wanting him for weeks now.
She slipped quietly out of the bed so as not to wake him and padded to the bathroom. Her head hurt some, and her mouth was dry, but she wasn't really very hungover. She found a bottle of mouthwash in his cabinet, which helped some, and then went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. She was standing in front of the sink, draining the glass, when she heard footsteps; before she could prepare herself he was there, leaning his big body against the doorframe.
"Hey," he said softly. "How are you feeling?"
She couldn't bring herself to look at him, instead gazing at the glass in her hand. "I've had worse mornings. I'm more embarrassed than hungover."
"Why?"
She laughed dryly. "You've been nothing but kind to me and I treated you abominably the other night. Then I show up on your doorstep, drunk and incoherent--"
"You were hardly incoherent."
"And then I threw myself at you like some kind of--"
"I rather enjoyed that part."
How could she get him to understand? "You should know what I was doing before I came here." She set the glass down on the counter. "I was actively trying not to think about you. I went to a bar and I met a guy."
"Am I going to like this story?"
"Just listen." She closed her eyes. "He bought me a drink. We danced. He asked me if I was into indie rock. I asked him if we could get out of there, so we go out on the street, start ambling to his apartment. Then he tells me we have to take a detour to the convenience store. Inside he went straight to the register and said to the guy, 'Can I get a couple packs of Trojans? The purple ones?' Then he turned and winked at me. I guess he thought he was being chivalrous or something. And all of a sudden I thought--oh, I don't even know what I thought. I just took the condoms and walked out. I just wanted to find you."
She waited, still not looking at him, waiting for what was certainly coming--disappointment, disbelief. Now he would tell her he was sorry, now he would ask her to lave.
But what he said was, "You really took the condoms?"
"They're in my purse." She risked a look at him. He was grinning. The he started laughing. And she laughed, too, from relief, and from the absurdity of the situation. It was, after all, pretty funny.
"Oh, God," she said, wiping her eyes. "At least let me make you breakfast."
"I feel bad just standing here watching you cook. I'll do all the cleaning." He was standing in the doorway while she fried the last of the eggs he had in the fridge.
"Don't. I like to cook. I cook for Cynthia all the time."
Cynthia, he remembered; the elderly woman she worked for. It reminded him of how little he really knew about Ginny, even after all these weeks working together. It wasn't that he didn't want to know about her; it was more that she had a way of shutting down any questions about herself or her life. He wondered if she would answer those questions now. "How'd you come across that job?"
"Well, it's her family I technically work for. Her son is a dentist in Brookline and his wife can only abide her mother-in-law from a distance, so I cook and clean for her. Sometimes I drive her to her doctor's appointments. We watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy together and I'm frequently told to get my tuchus out of the house to go have fun."
Calvin was laughing, but he found it an unappealing prospect and was surprised she seemed so pleased by it. "How long do you want to keep working for her?"
"It's a nice deal. I get two thousand dollars a month and I don't have to pay rent. She lives in a fabulous apartment. I'm socking away quite a bit of money."
"Two thousand a month? Is this woman impossible to live with?"
"She is for her daughter-in-law, but not to me. She adores me. She's the one who wanted me to dye my hair." She ran a hand through her neon-red locks. "You'll have to meet her sometime."
Calvin liked the implications of that, if not the actual suggestion. "Where are you from, Ginny?"
"Everywhere. My parents ran a traveling circus. We toured eight months out of the year and spent the rest of the time in Florida. We lived in a giant RV and a clown taught me algebra."
He stopped pouring coffee. "Are you serious?"
"Oh, yes. My father was the ringmaster and my mother tamed the animals. I rode on the back of an elephant."
"And you thought me growing up in Manhattan was weird?"
She laughed so hard she almost dropped the spatula, and he realized that she'd been putting him on. "But really, where are you from?"
"Put on some music," she suggested. "Something you wanted me to listen to."
Aware that he was being diverted, but going along with it for the moment, he went to the living room and chose a recording he thought she might like, the Debussy string quartet. They ate at his flimsy card table, which had never before hosted a guest; Ginny drank a great deal of black coffee. They were on the second movement of the Debussy now, his favorite. Playful and evasive, he thought, like her. "Do you like this?"
"I do. Calvin, did you always want to be a musician?"
"More or less. As soon as I realized I could write music as well as play it, I was sold. My mother likes to say that I never practiced piano until I started writing my own pieces and had to get a lot better in order to play them."
