The Last Hour (8 page)

“Beautiful car,” I said.

“A gift from my sister Julia,” she replied. Some gift. Julia must be the one married to Crank Wilson. I guess if you were the lead singer of
Morbid Obesity
you could afford to buy nice gifts.

“It must cost a fortune to maintain.”

“Not really ... an old friend of ours rebuilt it last year. It might as well be a new car.”

She opened the door and said, “Get in.”

I threw my rucksack in the back seat and got in. I was itching to drive this baby. She got behind the wheel and said, “Do you always kiss like that?”

I grinned. “I’ll do a survey and get back with you, okay?”

She gave me a wry look. “I’m sorry I asked.”

I chuckled and looked around the car. Leather seats, new carpet. The dash was highly polished wood. It was an antique, but whoever rebuilt it hadn’t stayed true to the period. It had a top of the line stereo and a dash mounted GPS. I barely heard it when she started the engine, and the car rolled out in glorious silence as we got on the highway.

“It’s official,” I said. “I am so jealous of your car it makes me want to cry. You
have
to let me drive it while I’m in town.”

She looked over at me for just a second, then said, “Don’t make me choose between you and my car. You won’t like the answer.”

I didn’t want to know if she was serious.

“Talk to me,” I said. “How did it go?”

Her fists clenched slightly on the wheel. I don’t know if she was conscious of it, but something had pissed her off.
 
“It went okay. I did a good job. But ... my thesis advisor made a pass at me. At least I think it was.”

“Are you serious?”
 

She nodded. “He’s always been such a nice guy. It blindsided me and I can’t figure out if he was just genuinely asking me over for dinner, or if it was something else.”

“Like?”

“Like ... the way he said it, it was like he was telling me the vote would go my way if I slept with him.”

I grimaced. “You think that was it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

“Just to set the record straight, I’d vote for you if you slept with me.”

She snickered. “You don’t get a vote.”

“I’ll keep trying anyway. You want me to beat the guy up?”

“No! It was kind of sad, really. He’s married, but I don’t think they’ve been happy together in a long time. Now that I’m getting some perspective on it, I mostly just feel sorry for him. I mean, he’s a great guy in some ways.”

“I know we haven’t known each other long, but you’re making me crazy jealous when you say that.”

“Not like that,” she responded. “Like a big brother. He’s been a real mentor.”

I knew what it felt like to have a mentor, a friend, disappoint you. Boy, did I.
 

I looked over at her and said, “I get it. You feel like someone you looked up to has blown your trust.”

“Yes!” she replied. “That’s exactly it. I’ve known Bill for two years. We’ve been up in the mountains together for days at a time. You have to trust somebody under those circumstances. And I ... this just really disappointed me. But I don’t even know if that’s what he meant.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“It was after my presentation. I asked him how I’d done, and he said, ‘Tell you what. Why don’t you come over to my place for dinner and a drink to celebrate, and we’ll talk about it.’ And I put him off, told him I had plans, but he was really insistent. So finally I said I was picking up my boyfriend who had just gotten back from Afghanistan. That shut him up.”

I looked at her and answered slowly.
 

“Sometimes, I think ... people we put on pedestals ... they’ve just got that much further to fall when you realize they’re human.”
 

“I guess,” she said. “I’m usually not one to put unrealistic expectations on people. I mean ... everybody screws up sometimes. But this felt ...
wrong.
I mean, how am I supposed to know exactly what he intended? Under other circumstances I would have thought it was just what it seemed, an invitation to dinner and drinks from a guy I respect. But combined with the fact that he’s one of the people who votes on my future? Ugggh.”

As she talked, I watched her, my eyes focusing on the darkness in the curve of her chin, the occasional flash of light against her face and neck. I thought about her question. How
would
you know? I’d seen pictures on her Facebook page, dozens of them, of Carrie hiking in the mountains, many of them with Bill Ayers, her thesis advisor. A bookish guy, bearded, but fit, probably about five-ten next to her six foot two. Pictures of them laughing together. She didn’t see what I saw, which was that in most of the pictures, Bill Ayers’ eyes were on her. He had it bad. I wondered if she even realized.

“Did you guys ever….” I trailed off, not finishing the question.

“No. I mean ... you spend that much time alone with someone, there’s bound to be some attraction. But he was my advisor, you know? Plus, he’s married.”

“Still, I bet you kicked ass on your presentation.”

She grinned. “I did!” she said, her voice excited.
 

I was excited for her. I was a little envious of her. She knew what her path was in life. Even if the NIH fellowship didn’t work out, it sounded like she’d already been guaranteed a spot on the Ecology faculty here at Rice. I barely had a clue where I was headed. Back to undergraduate school for sure. I had some vague ideas of what I might do, none fully formed. Before the Army, I knew exactly what I was doing—business degree, followed by Wall Street or possibly a startup firm somewhere. Pretty much what my parents had done. But after Afghanistan? Somehow that just didn’t seem like it would satisfy me. I wasn’t sure what would. I felt like I needed to do something that really mattered.

Finally she pulled into a small strip mall with a nearly empty parking lot, and she parked in front of a dimly lit restaurant named Al’s Pizza.

“Well,” she said. “It’s not Michelangelo’s. But you won’t find better pizza in Houston. Plus, it’s fast, which is important tonight. Come on.”

I followed her in, suddenly curious. Why did she need fast? I was hoping it meant she couldn’t wait another minute to take me back to her place and jump my bones. But honestly, that seemed premature. I’d go back with her in a heartbeat. But I’d been pushing it with that kiss.

Thinking about that kiss again made me lightheaded. We needed to try that again sometime soon.

Inside, the decor was stereotypical downscale Italian restaurant, right down to the red and white checked tablecloths and multicolored stained glass lampshades and bulbous shakers of Parmesan cheese on each table. Truth is, at this point I was so intrigued by her that she could have brought me to a greasy spoon diner and I’d have been happy. So we sat down, and a young buxom waitress magically appeared and took our order. For an eternity of seconds we sat, looking at each other. She took her hat off, her hair frizzing out a little, and I liked that she just ran her fingers through it once to try to make some order out of it. My last girlfriend, Laura, wouldn’t have taken it off in the first place, but if she had, she would have disappeared into the bathroom for half an hour to sculpt her hair back into place.

She met my eyes and grinned a little. Hers were a pale blue green, with a dark iris surrounding them, and what little makeup she wore showed them to their best advantage.
 

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“I’ve never kissed a guy taller than me,” she answered without hesitation.

I chuckled. “My dad used to play basketball for Duke. Babe, I’m a freak of nature.”

She smiled. “I guess I am too.”

“You know that’s just begging for me to say let’s go get freaky, right?”

She laughed again. “You’re getting better at this.”
 

“I was just out of practice. So ... why are we in a hurry, anyway?”

“We’re going to the theater.”

“Movie?”

“Broadway.”

I raised my eyebrows, grinning. “Okay,” I said. “I’d love that.”

Truth is, I really would. One of the advantages of living in Glen Cove was that it was a very short trip to New York City. I’d gone to several Broadway shows with dates in high school.

She smiled. “You passed that test.”

I laughed. “What, you’re testing me now?”

She nodded, laughter in her eyes. “You’re too perfect, Ray. Do you know how hard it is to find a guy who doesn’t see you as a sex-object?”

I met her eyes. “I definitely see you as a sex-object.”

She blushed, a deep red that reached all the way to her ears. I liked that. “Yes. But you also at least pretend to be interested in the rest of me.”

I leaned forward. “Carrie, any girl who wrestles with mountain lions is on my short list of amazing people.”

That made her blush even more. “Trust me, I don’t wrestle with them. Although I did once, accidentally.”

I waved a hand in the air, dismissing the comment. “Seriously. I know we haven’t known each other that long. I know this is new. But—I could fall for you pretty damn easily. Just so you know.”

Her breath caught, and her eyes went wide. Of course, our waitress chose
that
moment to reappear. “Are we doing okay?” she asked, in a kind of fake cheery voice as she placed a platter on the table.

I smiled back. “We are!”

Actually, the pizza looked fantastic, and I’d been cooped up in an aluminum tube eating peanuts for the last eight hours. I was doing better than okay, I was doing fantastic. I had a good beer, a good pizza and a good woman, all in one place at one table. This was the stuff of dreams.

The waitress went away, and Carrie watched me, and said, “What are
you
thinking about?”

By this time I was biting off a huge chunk of pizza, so I quickly swallowed, then said, “Pizza. Beer. Woman. I died and went to heaven.”

She threw her head back with a full-throated laugh. The kind of laugh that you want to join in.

“I didn’t know you were such a savage, Ray.”

I winked at her. “I know I give off this suave, cultured appearance, but in fact, I’m a guy.”

“I never had any doubts about that.”

I caught her eyes again, and her lips curled up in a grin, and I thought once again how much I wanted to feel her lips and body against mine.

It was a strange, awkward moment as we stepped out of the car in the valet parking area at the theater. I looked over at Ray and smiled. I didn’t understand it … it didn’t feel like we’d met just a few weeks ago and conducted our courtship online. Odd word, courtship. But it fit. He reached out and took my hand. I tentatively wrapped my fingers around his, and we walked into the theater hand in hand, the tension of that handhold almost electric.

I was conflicted. My mind kept turning back to the scene in the hallway with Bill, and honestly, I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to be completely here with Ray. But I couldn’t stop asking myself if I’d misjudged Bill. Was it just a friendly dinner invitation? We’d worked so closely together for so long, I really didn’t know what to think.

The irony, of course, was this wasn’t the first time it had been suggested. I shared an office with Nikki Reynolds, another graduate assistant, who has insinuated more than once that I’d somehow done something underhanded to become Bill Ayers’
favorite.
Nikki’s problem was simple. She believed she was competent, but she wasn’t. So when things failed, she always looked for someone else to blame.
 

I met Nikki my second day in the PhD program at Rice. She was a petite, compact woman, overflowing with politeness to the point I was uncomfortable.
 

She reminded me of my father in an odd way. Sometimes when my father has a little too much to drink, he’ll reminisce about negotiating with other countries during the Cold War.
 

“The crazy thing,” he said one time, “is that you’re sitting across the table with people you would never want to let in your home ... thugs and war criminals, dictators who got into their position by way of murder and mayhem, and yet, at the diplomatic table, everyone is excruciatingly polite and well mannered.”

I’ve always been far too blunt to be able to survive a career in the Foreign Service. But in some ways Nikki reminded me of that. Always prim and proper, always wearing a smile, but her words often had an edge of contempt, and if she were to hug me I’d want to check to see if she had a knife at my back.

I squeezed Ray’s hand a little tighter as we entered the theater, and tried to clear my mind. Bill and Nikki banished, I glanced at Ray with a smile. After a day of traveling, his face was darkened with stubble, which had roughened the skin on my face. I wanted to run the tips of my fingers along that chin.
 

Ray had taken me by surprise with that kiss. Our first kiss. It was odd, awkward for a few seconds. It was the first time I’d ever had to lean my head back for a kiss. I liked that. I liked that he didn’t hesitate. He wasn’t intimidated in the least. And then the kiss prolonged itself, suddenly out of control, my knees feeling week, my hands grabbing at his shirt, gripping it in my fists. As our bodies pressed together I couldn’t possibly miss the sign of his arousal, and I liked it that he didn’t try to hide that either.

Thinking about it made it hard to breathe.

We didn’t have to fight for seats, thanks to my father, who bought me a theater sponsorship when I’d first moved to Houston. I usually made it here half a dozen times a year, but I hadn’t seen
Once
yet. It was a Broadway musical adaptation of the 2007 movie, which I’d loved. The musical had garnered very positive reviews.
 

It would be interesting to see what Ray thought. Broadway shows, especially love stories, were a necessity in my life. Most of the guys I’d dated either tolerated it badly or not at all.

Ray took my coat and hung it on the rack at the back of our box, then put his next to it and took a seat next to me. “Private box?” he said. “Snazzy.”

“My dad,” I said. “My parents have long since figured out they’ll never be able to control me, so he tries to bribe me instead.”