In My Arms

a novel · sample excerpt · Chapter One — The Dress

The Dress

Marston in winter was all glass and money pretending it wasn't cold, and Elliot had booked a table three weeks out in the manner of tech money — the reservation appearing on his calendar like something his life had learned to do without asking him. Mara had said fine, fine, on the phone, the way she said yes to things she intended to survive, and then she'd flown up from Millfield in the same boots she wore to the farmers market, garment bag in hand, patchouli still on her wrists because she'd refused to wash it off for the flight. Leo was with Nate three states away, homework and bedtime and the ordinary chaos Elliot wasn't part of yet. This trip was only them. That was the point — them, not an affair, not a secret: Ellen gone, the divorce done, the jump already happened, courtship out in the open where it belonged.

The dress had cost six hundred dollars. Elliot had wanted her to have something that wasn't thrift-store luck and safety pins before they ever stood under a maître d's gaze — before the white cloth and the silent arithmetic of other people's eyes. She'd called the price obscene and packed it anyway, which was how he knew she wanted it too, underneath the performance of outrage.

She kissed him at the door of the hotel — one of those Marston towers where the lobby smelled like cedar and someone else's success — and he felt the last ten years across the street compress into her mouth, hungry and quick, before she pulled back and told him he was staring.

"You bought the dress," she said. "I'm wearing your panic."

She stepped out of the bathroom in it — white with a brown and tan floral print, fancy in a way she would normally call costume, right because she'd put it on for him. The front had never wanted to stay closed — wrap dresses lied about modesty — and somewhere between the garment bag and the mirror the overlap had slipped until the bodice gaped open like an argument waiting to happen. Mara held the fabric against herself and laughed — not polite, not embarrassed. Wild.

"Well," she said. "There goes six hundred dollars."

Elliot crossed the room and took the front panels from her fingers and held them where they wanted to fall, and they stood like that a moment, neither of them treating it as tragedy, which was another thing he loved about her.

The Pin

They were twenty minutes late because Elliot had a safety pin from the hotel sewing kit in his palm and Mara had him work at the bathroom mirror with the concentration of a man doing something intimate in public — pin through both layers at the center of her chest, holding the front together where the wrap refused to behave. Her skin was warm under his fingers. She watched him in the glass and did not make it chaste.

At the table she told him Leo had asked Nate if Elliot was staying, and if he was staying for good, and she'd answered that Elliot had bought a six-hundred-dollar dress and pinned it without crying, and Nate said the boy laughed the way he did when he was pretending not to care. Elliot said he was staying. It was easy to say in Marston with her hand on his sleeve and the city lit below them like proof.

Something moved through the table — not the wine, not the view, something simpler. Mara looked at him and said, too plainly for a room like this, "I'd marry you," and then reached for her glass as if the sentence had been someone else's and she was trying to steal it back before he could answer.