Page 43 of Caught in a Storm
“I’m Lawson.”
She’d recently discovered something odd about being famous. Even when everyone in the room knows exactly who everyone else is, you’re still expected to introduce yourself. So she played along and said her name, and they stood looking out over the terrace. A couple in an apartment across the street ate dinner. Lawson took a sip of his beer and smiled at the cold, blinking city. “Remember when we used to have to look up at all these fancy buildings?” he asked.
He didn’t know her, but he knew enough to know that a view like that was as new to her as it was to him. They were married six months later.
* * *
—
Billy asks now if he should draw the shade. “I should, right? Duh. The whole neighborhood can see in here.”
He gets up off the piano bench and pulls the gauzy thing down over the window, then he stands like he’s not sure what to do next. His anxiety is like moths fluttering around his head. Margot gets it. Years ago, late into the night on that Super Bowl Sunday, Margot was matter-of-fact about being in a cab with Lawson as they sped through the city toward his apartment. She was impossibly young, and his hands were on her body, and they felt amazing. He whispered sexy things into her hair and kissed her earlobe as the poor driver looked at the road ahead. She slept with Lawson that night because she wanted to. That’s about as much thought as she gave it. Now, though, sex is a minefield, and she finds that she, too, is nervous.
“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t normally do things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Ask men to sleep with me via piano.”
Billy looks at the closed shade. He pokes the drawstring, watches it swing.
“And now that I have, I don’t know if I’m…”
“Yeah,” says Billy. “I understand.”
“Maybe we can wait?”
Billy tells her that they can definitely wait—that he isn’t going anywhere.
“I got carried away,” she says. “The kissing thing, at the game. That was really nice.”
“Can I…?” he asks.
She slides over, and he plays the intro she just played. He fumbles a few notes and plays it again. “In fairness, we don’t technically know if this song is about sex.”
Margot touches middle C. “No, it definitely is.”
“Okay, yeah, probably. But music is interpretive, right? Maybe for us it can be about kissing again and then going to sleep. I assume you have pajamas in there, right?”
Margot looks at her bag. “You want to kiss me and then go to sleep?”
He slides closer. “Well, it sounds weird when you say it like that,” he says. “Listen, I know you don’t know me that well. But if someone had asked me six hours ago if I wanted to play the piano with Margot Hammer tonight, make out a little, then have a slumber party, I would’ve definitely been down with it.”
Well, shit, Margot thinks. Because that’s the hottest thing anyone’s said to her in a decade.
He holds her chin again, which must be something he does when he kisses. She likes it, because it’s nice sometimes to be gently guided. That joyful feeling again. Heat radiates at the center of her chest. This isn’t a kiss. This is a big, soft sledgehammer. He eases her head up and kisses her jawline, then her throat, then her lips again, and she whispers that it’s different without a crowd present, and he tells her that if she wants, he’ll go see if that Stevie Wonder guy and his dog want to come over and watch, and she laughs. When was the last time she laughed—genuinely? Margot can’t remember.
“Okay,” he says. “You should probably get some sleep. You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, you’re helping me move.”
Margot assumes he didn’t just say what it sounded like he said. She’ll ask him a clarifying question later. It doesn’t matter now, though, because she wants to kiss him again.
Chapter 27
The time between Margot playing the beginning of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and Margot deciding that she didn’t want to actually spend the night together—at least not in the Mick Jagger sense—couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds. Still, for Billy, it was quite a ride. Sudden elation, obviously, like stumbling into dumb luck. That was trumped quickly, though, by a crashing wave of anxiety. Then, ultimately, he felt relieved because he wanted to wait, too.
