“No,” I say. “Actually …”
“What?”
I’m afraid this is going to ruin a perfectly good evening. “We can’t go back to my house,” I say. “My sister is in town, visiting, and she’s crashing with me until she gets her own apartment.”
Marisa shrugs. “That’s cool, I don’t care.”
“Oh,” I say. She doesn’t care about going back to my house? Maybe I’ve misread this entire date. “Okay, that’s good.”
She looks at me and bursts out laughing. “The look on your face,” she says. She stops walking, so I stop, too, and she leans forward and to kiss me. “I meant I don’t care that your sister is there,” she says. “I’d like to meet her.”
“Nope,” I say, shaking my head. I start walking again, and Marisa hurries after me. “Not happening.”
“Why not?”
I struggle to find words that can adequately explain why not. “My sister is complicated,” I say.
“Everyone’s complicated.”
“Not like my sister,” I say. “Look, she won’t get home from her restaurant shift for another couple of hours, and she’s not the kind of person who comes home discreetly. Plus you’ve seen how small my place is.”
“So we’d all be right on top of each other?” Marisa asks.
“Exactly.”
She quirks an eyebrow. “Naughty,” she says.
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter, and she laughs again so it echoes down the long stone canyon of Peachtree Street.
“Fine,” she says when she’s recovered. “But it’s your loss.” And she walks ahead of me, swinging her hips from side to side. And although I laugh as she vamps for me, I also can’t help but watch her and stare at the back of her, and I know she knows it, too.
THE SUN DIAL sits at the top of the Westin Peachtree Plaza, a sleek, round tube of steel and glass that rises over seventy stories above the street. We ride to the restaurant in a glass elevator that shoots up the outside of the hotel, all the way to the very top. The outer perimeter of the Sun Dial, with floor-to-ceiling windows, shows off a panoramic display of the city.
A waiter leads us to a reserved table on the northern side, where many of the city’s tallest buildings shine in the night sky, a webbed necklace of lights spread out in all directions. A bottle of champagne sits in a sweating ice bucket, and the waiter pours us two flutes and leaves us alone with dessert menus.
“Good call, Mr. Faulkner,” Marisa says. “Very impressive.”
I raise my glass. “Cheers.” We clink and sip, the champagne dry and bubbly, prickling the inside of my nose in a strangely pleasant way.
Marisa sits back and stretches, her arms over her head. It’s both cute and alluring. “So, your sister,” she says, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the table as she gazes at me. “She have a name?”
“Susannah,” I say. “You have any siblings?”
She shakes her head. “Only child. A mixed blessing, although there’s not a lot of blessing in it. My father guilts me into taking care of my mother.”
I frown. “How’s that?”
She picks up her champagne flute, sips, then turns the glass in her hand, considering it. “I mentioned he can be controlling. Everything to him is the next big score. Everything’s transactional.” She puts the glass down. “My mother’s injury doesn’t fit into that paradigm. You can’t bargain with it or bully it or get around it. So he gets others to deal with it. Like me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. While I would give anything to have both of my parents alive again, I can understand that other people’s families are difficult, and I can see that having a sickly mother and a domineering father is hard on Marisa.
Marisa watches me, the nighttime city gleaming behind her. “You didn’t ask about my mother,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
“My mother. You didn’t ask about what happened to her.”
I look back at her. “I’m sorry. You said before she had some health issues, but you didn’t elaborate. And I didn’t want to pry.”
“It’s not prying,” she says. “I want you to know me. I want you to know everything.”
I reach for my glass and hold it up. “Now that I will drink to,” I say.
She smiles and shakes her head. “I’m serious, Ethan. I want us to know each other.” She leans forward, her eyes on mine. Those beautiful gray eyes, shot through with green. “It’s hard for you to talk about your mother, isn’t it?” she says.
I put my glass down. “No,” I say. “I just don’t want to.” I pick up a dessert menu. “Should we each get something different and share—”
“You’re avoiding talking about her,” she says.
I lower my menu and look directly at her. “Yes,” I say. “I am. Because I don’t want to talk about her.” Marisa opens her mouth, eyebrows curved in sympathy and understanding, and I hold up my hand to stop her. “I don’t talk about what happened to her and my father. It’s not about you, or me not trusting you. I don’t talk about it with anyone. So let’s just order dessert, okay? I’m having fun, with you. Can we keep having fun?”
For a moment, Marisa says nothing, her expression blank, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve stepped over a line. But she stepped over a line, too. I have a right to not want to talk about my parents. Suddenly I’m angry, sick to death of being the guy whose parents were killed, the orphaned boy who carries this thing around with him always, whose life seems forever determined by a single act of violence. I don’t want to be that boy anymore. And I don’t know how to not be him.
Then Marisa takes a breath and closes her eyes and nods, once. When she opens her eyes, they are dark and liquid and she seems to look straight into me. “I’m sorry,” Marisa says, her voice low, almost small. “I do this sometimes. I just want in and I push too hard.
