And kissing, of course. There was a lot of kissing.
I’d kissed boys before, if not extensively. I was usually too wrapped up improving my port de bras or learning a new variation for performance, and most of the boys in my ballet classes weren’t particularly interested in girls. But I had made out with Tommy Giuditta during the second installment of Friday the 13th, and I’d fooled around with Brendan Hastings at Billy Caruso’s party over Christmas break.
Michael tasted different, felt different from other boys. I couldn’t get enough of touching him. The wiry hair on his chest was fascinating. The smooth, firm muscles in his upper arms responded beneath my fingers. And his mouth was hot and faintly sweet, like nothing I’d ever tasted.
When he touched me…well, that was different, too. I was so familiar with my own body, the strength of my legs, the jutting definition of my ribs and hipbones, the painful bunions and scabbed blisters on my feet, that I was convinced it couldn’t hold any surprises. But when Michael and I were kissing, tangled together in his bed or on the sofa in my deserted living room long after everyone had gone to sleep, I never failed to be awed. My body understood a whole host of things I didn’t, apparently, and Michael had been the one to introduce me to them. There was heat, a slow softening that blurred every edge when Michael touched me, but there was also an electric buzz, a new, urgent energy. Need, I know now.
I was consumed with it those first weeks we were together, restless and irritable when he wasn’t within arm’s reach. To satisfy my parents—who had explained that although not dancing certainly wasn’t my choice, I would have to spend at least some of my vacation productively—I’d found a part-time job at the cinema downtown. Michael wasn’t working, since his mother felt that the loss of his father, moving out of his first and only home and preparing to leave for college were quite enough for him to deal with.
I’d been heartbroken to learn that he had graduated already—he was only a few months older than I was, but he’d started kindergarten early or something like that. I was too shattered to listen to the explanation, and anyway, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was come September, he’d be leaving for Boston and Harvard.
One afternoon when I didn’t have to work and Michael’s mother had taken his sister, Jane, into the city for the day to visit friends, we were sprawled upstairs on his bed, drinking iced tea and feeding each other potato chips. We’d been talking about Michael’s favorite bookstore in Greenwich Village and had drifted into a strange conversation about reading The Scarlet Letter for school, and then about what classes Michael would take at Harvard, where he was going to major in literature.
I could feel him pulling back, the muscles in his shoulders stiff and his eyebrows drawn together over those huge, dark eyes. He would make noises about putting off school for a year, finding a job in town and waiting for me to graduate. He’d done it before, and although I’d stopped him each time, I was learning that he had a stubborn streak as wide as the sky.
I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t want him to stay, either—not with me as the cause. What if he stayed and hated me for it? What if he stayed and realized he didn’t really love me, even though he’d said it a million times already, like a prayer between kisses, whispered in my ear at the movies, written on scraps of paper he left in my shorts pockets or my bag. It was then that I’d realized that being the object of love gave you power. And I was desperate not to use it the wrong way.
I pushed up on my elbows without warning, nudging the nearly empty chip bag to the floor. Michael looked up; he’d been lying beside me on the bed, his dark brown hair gleaming amber in the sun and one cheek flushed with heat.
I sat up completely and peeled off my T-shirt and bra, then swung my legs over the side of the bed to shimmy out of my shorts and panties. Michael sat up, too, eyes wide, his mouth opening as if he was about to speak.
I held out my hand as I lay back on the pillows, and he straddled me, his jeans rough against my naked thighs, his T-shirt warm and soft against my breasts. “Tess?” he said.
I didn’t answer, but he let me tug off his shirt, and groaned as I ran my hands over his chest.
“This was more romantic in my head,” he said as I fumbled with his zipper. “There were going to be, like, candles and stuff.”
I smiled as he shrugged off his jeans. My blood was racing, but it felt good. We’d been giving ourselves to each other for weeks, fitting the smaller pieces into the bigger ones, revealing colors and shadings, creating a puzzle that was very definitely an “us” instead of the separate entities “me” and “him.” I wanted to finish this now, I wanted all of it, and I didn’t want to wait. “Doesn’t matter,” I told him, taking his face between my hands, studying the shadow his eyelashes made on his cheeks before he kissed me.
And then we didn’t say anything else for a long time. But I don’t know even now if I was trying to give him something to hold on to when he left, or shamelessly, wordlessly, trying to convince him to stay after all.
IN THE END, INSTEAD OF CALLING Lucy, I went inside and made another piece of toast. After slathering it with butter and grape jelly, I leaned against the counter to eat it, and marshaled myself to attend to the day’s tasks. I had the Blair wedding proofs to sort and number, my own photos to develop, nearly a dozen phone calls to return either to clients or friends and a mound of laundry roughly the size of a small car.
I’d always loved working at home. Michael and I had painted, and refinished floors, and spent countless hours at flea markets and antique fairs, hunting down treasures for the dining and living rooms. It was more than our house; it was a true nest, the one place I felt completely comfortable. My house was one of my favorite places to be. But until today I’d never noticed one of the disadvantages of working there—far too much time alone with my thoughts, the usual peaceful quiet tightened into a disconcerting silence.
I made a halfhearted loop through the rooms downstairs to get myself started, picking up stray books and a sweatshirt of Emma’s, tidying the stack of magazines on the coffee table, which always seemed to expand on its own, thumbing through the junk mail piled on the sideboard in the dining room and throwing all of it away. But the house was too silent, too still—even Walter was lethargic, dozing on the kitchen floor rather than barking at passersby through the screen door.
Before long, I was inventing errands to run, considering what I might need from the grocery store or the pharmacy, and I went upstairs to shower, as if I could scrub away my uneasiness. By nine, I was in the bedroom, damp hair twisted into its usual loose knot on the back of my head, rooting through a pile of clothes on the soft green chair in the corner, looking for a pair of halfway-clean jeans.
When the phone rang, I jumped at least a foot. It couldn’t be Michael—he wouldn’t even be in his office yet. The later morning trains were notoriously prone to delays. One hand pressed to my heart, ashamed of my foolish nerves, I picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Tess Butterfield?”
I said that it was, staring at my reflection in the mirror above the bureau, watching as my eyes widened when the husky voice on the other end continued.
“This is Sophia Keating.”
CHAPTER THREE
YEARS AGO, WHEN I’D FIRST BEGUN taking pictures, I’d begun a project that I fully expected would never end. I’d started collecting old photos of my family, which I’d haphazardly stored in half-finished scrapbooks and albums or stuffed into shoe boxes up in the attic. I’d wanted a record of everyone, individually and together, and I’d pestered my grandmothers for snapshots of my mom and dad as kids, as teenagers, grinning in front of the Christmas tree, pedaling their tricycles, holding up a science trophy.
There