Page 38 of What's in a Kiss?

Stay the course. Call your mother.

I force myself to take a breath. I dial her cell.

“Hello?” It’s a gruff voice. An older man’s voice. Not Lorena.

“Whoisthis?” I say.

“Who isthis?” the man says.

“Where’s my mother?”

“Yourmother?”

“Lorena Dusk! Why are you answering her phone?”

“I’ve never known a Lorena in my life.”

“Well,” I say, sobs returning, “you should. She’s beautiful and kind and she has her own podcast—”

“You have the wrong number—” the man says.

“I produce the podcast,” I say, starting to hyperventilate. “I don’t read all the books like I should, but it’sourpodcast and it doesn’t matter no one hears it and you need to put her on the phoneright now!”

I look at the phone and see the man’s hung up. I look past the phone, at the concrete, suddenly sensitive to its texture. I become dimly aware of my body’s reckoning with how terrified I feel. I can’t do this—whatever this is—without my mom. Without Masha.

It’s only nine. I’ll get a Lyft. I’ll go to my old house. I’ll climb the stairs and enter the ice locker Lorena calls a bedroom. She’ll be wearing a silk robe with a thousand faceless people printed on it. She’ll be wearing retinol eye pads and watchingThe Thin Manon TCM. She’ll pat the empty side of her sleigh bed and I’ll climb in. I’ll give her the sign we invented after my dad died—one hand over the heart, one hand over the lips.

Hold me when I don’t have words.

A car horn sounds. Glasswell idles at the curb in a red Jag. He rolls down the window.

“Did you fuck with the Contacts in my phone?” I say while the valet stands there staring, like this is a black box play for his amusement.

“Come on, Liv,” Glasswell says, “let’s go home.” He pops open the passenger door.

I decide to call his bluff. It’ll save me forty bucks on the Lyft ride to Lorena’s. I slide into the car.

As Glasswell turns south out of the lot, I don’t reflect on what a failed evening tonight was. I rifle through my purse, looking for my keys. “Should I put the address into the GPS?”

“You’re really taking this role-playing thing to the next level,” Glasswell smiles again, which doesn’t make any sense.

My keys aren’t in my purse. I’m about to tell Glasswell to turn around—maybe I dropped them in the sand—but then I see a set of keys in the center console, attached to a tan and green valet tag. I pick them up. And suck in my breath. There’s the spark plug my dad gave me when I turned sixteen and got my license. The first key chain I ever had. Instead of my bent plastic Nissan key, this one holds a sleek black Jaguar fob. Along with several other keys I don’t recognize. What I don’t see—what I’m looking for—is the Magic 8 Ball chain bearing the key to my childhood door.

“Can you just drop me at home?” I ask Glasswell, curling into a ball.

“Where else is there to go?” he asks and squeezes my knee. His touch is brief, careless, but it sends the same sex wave through me as his breath did on my neck. I turn and find him watching the road like what he just did was nothing. But I still feel it in my toes.

Glasswell touches the navigation screen and sets our course. I watch the cross streets of my neighborhood populate the screen. I see the dot on the map where my house sits inside the labyrinthine hills of Laurel Canyon. I don’t care how he knew my address. All that matters is I’m going home. We’re thirty-nine minutes away. The traffic looks easy. I can make it.

Out my window the ocean is the same—original andendless. The beach-blown narrow mansions are familiar, too, as is the curve that dips beneath an underpass and grasps the south edge of the 10, the mile-wide artery that will pump me almost home. Maybe it was only the wedding where everything was out of whack.

I make a mental inventory of the comforts I’ll gather around me the second I get home. Box of frozen pizza bagels. Freezer-door bottle of Cazadores. Six and a half unseen episodes ofStranger Things. Softest of chenille pajamas, a Christmas gift from Masha. Gram Parsons in the green knit sweater he wears on chilly canyon nights.

If I can pile into my bed with all of the above, I will feel like myself. If I can make it to my bungalow, I intend never to complain about anything again.

Glasswell handles the screen again, cueing up a song. I’d rather ride in silence, but when the opening words of Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” come on, I’m too surprised to complain.

I remember Lorena used to blast it in her Volvo 240 wagon, driving Masha and me to baseball games when we were kids. I remember Glasswell following me out of prom when this song came on...

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