She seriously considered my question and languidly took another sip. “I have many.”

“Finish the last one then.”

“I don’t remember what it was.”

She drank the rest of her coffee, then stood up to leave.

“See you Tuesday,” she said, heading for the door.

“What’s Tuesday?” I called after her.

“Dinner at your house. I don’t eat pork.”

I heard the screen slam behind her. Max raced for the door, barking, his nails clicking against the tile as he scrambled past me. I leaned back in my chair, smiling. I didn’t eat pork either. Except bacon, of course. Everyone eats bacon.

She showed up on Tuesday, right at six. I had no idea when to expect her, so I made sushi with the salmon I’d bought that morning from the market. I was busy wrapping my rolls in seaweed when she let herself in. I heard the screen door slam and Max’s manic barking.

She slid a bottle of whiskey across the counter.

“Most people bring wine,” I said.

“Most people are pussies.”

I choked on my laugh.

“What’s your name?”

“Brenna. What’s yours?”

“You already know my name.”

It was mostly true. She knew my pen name.

“Your real name,” she said.

“It’s Nick Nissley.”

“So much better than John Karde. Who are you hiding from?”

She unscrewed the lid from the Jack and drank straight from the bottle.

“Everyone.”

“Me, too.”

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye as I poured soy sauce into two ramekins. She was young, much younger than me. What did she have to hide from? Probably an ex-boyfriend. Nothing serious. Just a guy who didn’t want to let go, most likely. I had some exes who probably wanted to hide from me. It was a shallow thought, because if this woman was really that simple, she wouldn’t have struck my interest. I saw her standing still and quiet, and she caused movement in my brain. I’d already written over sixteen thousand words since she’d walked with me to my house and then disappeared. A feat, considering I’d been claiming writer’s block for the last year of my life.

No, if this woman said she was running away, she was.

“Brenna,” I said that night as we lay in my bed.

“Mmmm.”

I said it again, tracing a finger along her arm.

“Why do you keep saying my name?”

“Because it’s beautiful. I’ve known Brianna’s, but never a Brenna.”

“Well, congratulations to you.” She rolled off the bed and reached for her skirt. That skirt had been what started it all. I see a skirt and I want to know what’s underneath it.

“Where are you going?”

The corner of her mouth lifted. “Do I look like the kind of girl who sleeps over on the first date?”

“No ma’am.”

She fished around on the floor for the last of her clothes, and then I walked her to the door.

“Can I take you home?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want you to know where I live.”

I scratched my head. “But you know where I live.”

“Exactly,” she said. She pushed up on her toes and kissed me on the mouth.

“Tastes like a New York Times Bestseller,” she said. “Goodnight, Nick.”

I watched her go and felt conflicted. Did I really just let a woman walk out of my house in the middle of the night and not take her home? I hadn’t seen a car. My mother would have a coronary. I knew so little about her, but there was no question that she wouldn’t take well to me galloping after her on my imaginary steed. And why the hell didn’t she drive? I walked back into the kitchen and started cleaning up our dinner plates. We had only made it through half of the sushi before I leaned across the table and kissed her. She hadn’t even acted surprised, just dropped her chopsticks and kissed me back. The rest of our night was impressively graceful. I credit her with that. She undressed me in the kitchen and made me wait to take her clothes off until we reached the bedroom. Then she made me sit on the edge of the bed while she undressed herself. Her back never touched the sheets. A true control freak.

I put the last of the dishes in the dishwasher and sat at my desk. My thoughts were coming at me fast. If I didn’t get them down, I’d lose them. I wrote ten thousand words before the sun came up.

A week later we took our first trip into Seattle together. It was her idea. We rode in my car since she said she didn’t have one. She looked nervous sitting in the front seat with her hands folded in her lap. When I asked her if she wanted me to put on the radio she said no. We ate Russian pastries from paper bags and watched the ferries cross the sound, shivering and standing as close as we could get to each other. Our fingers were so greasy when we were done we had to rinse them off in a water fountain. She laughed when I splashed water in her face. I could have written another ten thousand words just from hearing her laugh. We bought five pounds of prawns from the market and headed back to my house. I don’t know why the hell I asked for five pounds, but it sounded like a good idea at the time.

“You have one of these,” I said, as we were cleaning the prawns together at my kitchen sink. I ran my finger laterally along its body, pointing out the dark line that needed to be cleaned out. She frowned, looking down at the prawn she was holding.

“It’s called a mud vein.”

“A mud vein,” she repeated. “Doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

“Maybe not to some people.”

She de-headed her shrimp with a flick of her knife and tossed it in the bowl.

“It’s your darkness that pulls me in. Your mud vein. But sometimes having a mud vein will kill you.”

She set down the knife and washed her hands, drying them on the back of her jeans.

“I have to go.”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t move until I heard the screen door slam. I wasn’t upset that my words had run her off. She didn’t like to be found out. But she’d be back.

Nick's Book: Chapter Three

Nick’s Book

She didn’t come back. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t care. There were plenty of women. Plenty. There were women everywhere I looked. They all had skin and bones, and I’m sure some of them even had silver streaks in their hair. And if they didn’t have a silver streak in their hair I’m sure I could convince them to put it there. But there is something about the process of convincing yourself that you don’t care that just confirms even more that you do. Every time I passed the window in my kitchen I found myself looking up to see if she was standing in the rain, judging the weeds poking out of the driveway. I looked at those weeds so much that eventually I went out there in the rain and pulled them up one by one. It took me all afternoon and I got a nasty head cold. I was cleaning up my driveway for a woman.

I wanted to go look for her, but she’d told me little to nothing about herself. I could hold the five things she’d said in the palm of my hand, and still find plenty of room. Her name was Brenna. She came from the desert. She liked to be on top. She ate bread by pulling off little pieces and placing them in the center of her tongue. I had asked her questions, and she had skillfully turned them back on me. I had been eager to give her answers—too eager—and in the process I’d forgotten to collect answers from her. She had played me like a narcissistic trombone. Tooting, tooting, tooting my own horn. She must have been thinking what a fool I was the entire time.

Toot, toot.

I went back to the park, hoping to run into her again. But something told me that day in the park was a fluke. It wasn’t her day to be there, and it wasn’t mine. We met because we needed to, and I’d gone and screwed it up by telling her she had a mud vein. I thought she knew. God. If I had another chance with her, I’d never talk again. I’d just listen. I wanted to know her.

I sat in front of my laptop and wrote more words than had come to me in years—all at once. They just strung themselves together and I felt like a writing god. I had to have more of this woman. I’d write a library full of books if I had a year with her. Imagine a lifetime. She was meant for me. I cleaned out my weeds, I cleaned out my closets, I bought a new table and chairs for my kitchen. I finished my book. E-mailed it to my editor. I lingered some more at my kitchen window, industriously washing and rewashing my dishes.

It was Christmas before I found her again. Actual Christmas—the day of tinsel and turkey and colorful paper wrapped around goodies we don’t want or need. I have a mother and a father and twin sisters with rhyming names. I was on my way to their house for Christmas dinner when I saw her jogging along the barren sidewalk. She was headed for the lake, her fluorescent sneakers blurring beneath her. She was a flash of speed. Her legs were chorded with muscle. I’d bet she could outrun a deer if she tried. I sped up and pulled into the empty lot of an Indian restaurant about half a mile ahead of her. I could smell the curries seeping from the building: green and red and yellow. I hopped out of my car and crossed the street, planning to cut her off before she reached the lake. She would have to go through me to get to the trail. I looked bolder than I felt. She could tell me to go to hell.

By the time she saw me it was too late to pretend she hadn’t. Her pace slowed until she was bent at the knees in front of me. I watched the way her back rose and fell. She was breathing hard.

“Merry Christmas,” I said. “Sorry for interrupting your run.”

She glared at me from her bent position, confirming my guess that she didn’t want to see me.

“I didn’t mean to upset you the last time you were at my house,” I said. “If you’d given me the chance to apologize I wo—”

“You didn’t upset me,” she said. And then, “I finished my book.”

Finished her book? I gaped. “In the three weeks I haven’t seen you? I thought you’d barely started.”

“Yes, and now I’ve finished it.”

I opened and closed my mouth. It took me a year to complete a manuscript, and that didn’t include the time I spent on research.

“So when you just left like that…?”

“I knew what I had to write,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Why didn’t you say something? Call me?” I felt like a clingy high school girl.

“You’re an artist. I thought you’d understand.”

I was wrestling with my pride to tell her that I didn’t. I’d never in my life run out on dinner to finish a story. I’d never felt even a chord of passion strong enough to drive me to do that. I didn’t tell her because I was afraid of what she would think. Me—New York Times Bestseller of over a dozen sappy novels.

“What did you write about?” I asked.

“My mud vein.”

I got a chill.

“You wrote about your darkness? Why would you do that?”

There was nothing pretentious about her. No show, no thriving to impress me. She didn’t even try to guard the ugly truth, which made every one of her words feel like a cold dousing of water to the face.

“Because it was the truth,” she said, so matter of fact. And I fell in love with her. She didn’t have to try to be anything. And everything that she was was something that I was not.

“I missed you,” I said. “Can I read it?”

She shrugged. “If you want to.”

I watched a trickle of sweat wind down her neck and disappear between her breasts. Her hair was damp, her face flushed, but I wanted to grab her and kiss her.

“Come with me to my parents’. I want to have Christmas dinner with you.”

I thought she was going to say no and I’d have to spend the next ten minutes convincing her. She didn’t. She nodded. I was too afraid to say anything as she walked with me to my car, in case she changed her mind. Without any objections, she climbed into the front seat and folded her hands in her lap. It was all very formal.

As soon as we were on the road, I reached for the radio. I wanted to put on Christmas music. At least prepare her for the Christmas crack she was about to experience at the Nissley house. She grabbed my hand.

“Can you leave it off?”

“Sure,” I said. “Not a fan of music?”

She blinked at me, then looked out the window.

“Everyone is a fan of music, Nick,” she said.

“But not you…?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it. I’m begging for a detail about you, Brenna. Just give me one.”

“Okay,” she said. “My mother loved music. She played it in our house from morning ‘til night.”

“And that made you dislike it?”

We pulled into my parent’s driveway and she used the distraction to avoid answering my question.

“Pretty,” she said as we slowed to a stop.

My parents lived in a modest home. They’d spent the last ten years making upgrades. If she thought the outside was pretty I couldn’t wait to see what she thought of my mother’s pink granite kitchen counters, or the fountain depicting a peeing boy they installed in the middle of the foyer. When I lived at home we’d had linoleum and plumbing that only worked a tenth of the time. She made no comment about the giant reindeer lawn ornaments, or the wreath almost the size of the front door. She hopped out without any reservation and followed me to the house of my very happy childhood. I looked at her before I opened the door, dressed in running clothes, her hair messy and stuck to her face. What type of woman jumped in the car with you on Christmas Day to meet your family, without putting on a cardigan and a dress? This one. She made every woman I’d ever been with feel insignificant and fake. This was going to be fun.