Page 43 of Charm City Rocks
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.
Chapter27
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.
Sleeping with Margot would’ve felt too fast. Not in a puritan way. We’re done saving ourselves when we’re in our forties. It would’ve felt too fast because Billy still hadn’t wrapped his head around the fact that she was here in the first place, in Baltimore, in his apartment. For that he needed a minute.
And now she’s quietly breathing beside him.
A bed is such a different thing when there’s someone else in it with you—like a whole other structure entirely. For starters, the topography is off. It’s a fine-enough mattress, but their combined weight creates the slightest dip in the middle, giving him the sensation that he’s being drawn to her physically. Secondly, her warmth is unignorable. It practically hums.
“Are you asleep?” she whispers.
Billy laughs, because he couldn’t be further from asleep. If asleep is the sun, Billy is Pluto, or some other demoted celestial object, hurtling through darkness. “Well, I was,” he says. “Thanks a lot.”
They roll at the same time, facing each other. The lights are off, but it’s not fully dark because of Fells Point outside. Margot is wearing a plain, threadbare T-shirt and lounging pants. It’s not sexy but also incredibly sexy in that way that anything can be sexy in the right context. Her bare foot brushes his shin.
“I’m not scared of sex,” she says.
They’re close enough that her breath is warm. It smells like toothpaste—histoothpaste, because she packed her toothbrush but not toothpaste.
“Okay,” he says. “You can be, though. Sex is kind of scary. Nobody talks about that.”
“You had a crush on me when we were young, right?”
This has been established. Still, Billy is embarrassed. “I did.”
“Why?”
“I…” he says.
She watches him while he thinks. It’s a difficult question to answer.
“You liked how I played?” she asks.
“That was part of it,” he says. “But it wasn’t just that. I had a crush on…onyou.”
“You were attracted to me?”
“Of course.”
