Caught Up in Us (7 page)

“Would you tell me the story of
Made Here? I’ve read the version on your Web site, but I’d love to
hear it from you.”

He put his phone away, and held my
gaze, and in that second I felt an electricity, a tightly coiled
line between the two of us. He had a way of making me feel as if he
were touching me, even if we were inches apart. Maybe it was
because he wasn’t afraid to look me in the eyes, or to hold onto
the look. Nor was he afraid to be close. Whatever the reason, the
effect was heady, and it was dangerous. Perhaps I should pretend he
really was the skater gal. I pictured him wearing cat’s eye glasses
and a black wig with pink streaks. There. I’d never been a fan of
men in drag, so the image helped me focus.

“I suppose it
all began when I was reassigned a few weeks after I started my
first job out of graduate school. I was supposed to work in New
York, but I was sent to Paris instead for a year…” he said and kept
talking, but it was as if someone knocked me out of time. I thought
he’d stayed in New York after he ended it with me.

“You were there
for a year?”

He nodded. “Yes. I was sent there
right after…” his voice trailed off. Right after he broke up with
me.

“It’s okay. You
can say it. I’m a big girl.
Right after
you broke up with me.
”

He sighed deeply. “Yes.
Then.”

I held out my hands. “See? That
wasn’t so hard to say. We just get it out there in the open and
move on.”

“Okay. So there it is. Out in the
open.”

“And now we go back to the whole
we just met routine. Good?”

He nodded.

“Where did you
live?” I asked, shifting the talk back to Paris.

“In the Latin Quarter. Across the
river from Notre Dame.”

“Me too.” I pictured the flat I’d
lived in with a hip and trendy young French couple. The narrow
staircase that wound up four flights. The cramped kitchen and even
smaller bathroom. But it was Paris, and from the window in the
second bedroom I had a view of the river and Notre Dame and farther
beyond I could see Sacre-Coeur. A torch singer who lived across the
street from me used to fling her windows open in the evenings, and
she’d sing while cooking, songs about love gone awry. She had one
of those voices like whiskey and honey, the best kind of voice for
those songs. I half expected her to slink around her flat in a
sexy, sequined red dress like a cabaret singer. “So you went to
Paris for work. But this was before Made Here?”

“The company I worked for right
out of business school had an office there. I thought I’d just
visit it from time to time. But instead, they relocated me. So I
spent a year in Paris, learning the ropes, and the firm did a lot
of business with small suppliers who made handcrafted special
goods. High-quality watches, and leather bags, and wallets and
such. And I was able to observe some of the processes, the
handiwork, the craftsmanship. It got me thinking I could do the
same back in the States, but I had to capitalize on something that
was on the cusp of being popular but that wouldn’t just be a trend.
That’s when the cufflink idea came to me, so when I returned from
Paris I connected with Wilco,” he said, referring to his former
business partner. “He was the money guy. I was the idea guy. So he
raised the capital and I started building the business. And voila.
Four years later, here we are.”

I noted that he didn’t say
anything bad about Wilco, when it would be so easy to disparage the
man given the trouble he’d caused for Made Here. “Voila, indeed. So
I take it you’re fluent?”

“Oui.”

“Moi aussi.”

He raised an eyebrow. “So then I
can flirt with you in French and it’ll be like a secret language
just between us,” he said to me in French.

Flirt. Secret.
Us
. What was he doing using words like
that? Playing with my emotions? “Yeah, not so secret, Bryan. A few
million people speak French.”

Then I turned to look out the
window. We were passing through a beautiful town in Pennsylvania,
rushing by farmhouses and stately white homes with impeccably
trimmed green lawns and shrubs.

He peered out the window too, his
body moving closer to mine, doing that thing he did where he
migrated into my space. I could feel his chest against my arm as we
watched the towns zoom by. Soon, he reached his arm across my back,
his hand touching my shoulder. Technically, it was the sort of
thing friends might do. But it didn’t feel like we were friends. It
didn’t even feel like flirting. It felt like foreplay.

And I didn’t want to pretend
anymore.

I didn’t want to be mean
anymore.

I didn’t want to toss barbs at him
anymore.

I wanted him to touch me, so I
didn’t dare move. I didn’t risk a look or a glance. The moment was
full of too much heat that I didn’t trust myself. I thought I was
over him. I thought he’d earned the spot I’d tucked him in back in
the far corner of my mind. I was wrong. I had been forcing him
there for five years. Because now, with him by my side, inches
away, looking out the window of a racing train, I knew all I’d done
was white knuckle it through. I’d faked my way through every other
relationship, when all I was doing was resisting him. He was the
only one I’d ever wanted like this, and my body was on fire for
him.

He leaned in to whisper to me, and
I closed my eyes. I felt as if I might collapse into him. “The
towns are so pretty, Kat. Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” I managed to say without
melting into his arms.

“And sometimes, I think, they’re
even prettier five years later. Just like you. You’re even prettier
now, and you were beautiful then.”

I wanted to turn my face towards
his and let him devour me in kisses, let his hands find their way
underneath my shirt, and onto my skin. I could see kisses on my
neck, lips on my belly, legs wrapped around him. It was almost too
much to bear. I tried to shake the images – these pictures of him
on me, in me, under me – but they’d staked out a home.

Somewhere, there was a modicum of
restraint in me, because I didn’t answer him.

Soon, the train pulled into our
stop. We both rose, and I noticed his cheeks were flushed. He
looked at me, his eyes darker than usual, full of unsaid
things.

Chapter Eight

I’d had a few boyfriends before I
met Bryan, but none of them serious. I was the artsy girl growing
up, so I was always drawn to those types too, and went out with a
dark-haired hipster guy who inked comic books when I was a junior
in high school, then to senior prom with a totally beautiful golden
boy who looked like the quarterback but wrote like a poet,
including a sonnet for me tucked inside the corsage.

I liked them both, but they didn’t
compare to Bryan. They didn’t come close in any department, not in
my heart, and definitely not in the kissing division. Any girl who
says she doesn’t keep a list of best kisses ever is lying. She may
not have a pen-and-paper list, but she knows in her head who rocked
her world and made her more than weak in the knees. Bryan was my
butterflies-in-the-belly, my soft-and-hungry-and-neverending
kisses. He was all the kisses I’d ever want. Because he was kind,
and he was witty, and he always wanted to know more about me, and
maybe that’s why he kissed like a dream – he was my dream
guy.

One summer night Bryan and I went
to the water and stretched out on a blanket on the sand. As I ran
my hands over his chest and his stomach, he made this noise, like a
low growl and a sigh all in one, and I wanted to pull his perfect
body to mine and move against him.

“We can’t do
more than kiss,” he said as my fingers explored the underside of
his tee-shirt while the midnight waves rolled along the beach, then
back out to the ocean.

“Why?”

“Because. Because I’m your
brother’s friend. Because I’m older than you.”

“You’re only
five years older,” I pointed out.

“I know. But you’re
seventeen.”

“So? I’m old enough to know what I
want.”

“I know, and I want it too. But
it’s wrong.”

“Would it be
wrong then when I’m eighteen?”

I looped my hands around his back
and wriggled my hips closer. From the feel of him against me, I
doubted it would be wrong. I was sure it would only be
right.

“Kat
.”

“Would it be wrong when I’m
eighteen?” I repeated, bringing my lips to his, and running my
fingers across his smooth, strong back. He shuddered under my
touch, and I felt powerful. I felt wanted. I felt like the girl who
was becoming irresistible to the boy.

“No.”

“So then…” I let my voice trail
off. He was leaving for New York in a week to start his job. I was
starting school a month later. Nervous hope clanged inside me. “I’m
going to be in New York soon too. I’m going to NYU.”

“I know, and you’re going to love
it. But my job is going to take me out of town a lot,” he said, and
my heart sank. I wanted to be more than his summer love. Summer
romances, by definition, are bittersweet. They have an expiration
date. “Don’t be sad, Kat. I’m totally falling for you, and I don’t
want to take advantage of you. I like you that much.”

That made me smile and feel better
about the possibility of an us, even though it seemed like grasping
at the edge of a cloud.

A few days later, we were at the
movies again, and I kept thinking about what he’d said about
falling for me. I was falling for him too, and then some. Age
difference or not, brother’s best friend or not, I wanted him to
know. I wanted to put it out there, obstacles be damned. After the
credits rolled, and the lights came up, and we were the only ones
still in the theater except for an usher cleaning the front rows, I
looked in his green eyes, took a breath, and said, “I’m falling for
you too.”

He smiled, the kind that only
spelled happiness, and pressed his forehead to mine. “Kat, will you
come visit me in New York next month?”

I was a pinwheel of colors. I was
the winner at the carnival. The boy I wanted wanted me. “Of
course.”

And so we made plans. I’d take the
train in on weekends to visit him, and we’d do all those things
young couples do in New York. Walk through the Village holding
hands, kiss by the fountain at Lincoln Center, bring a picnic to
Central Park and find the most secluded spot. Then, when I turned
eighteen at the end of the summer, we’d do more. We’d do
everything. He would be my first, and there was no question I’d
waited for the right guy.

We went to a restaurant in Little
Italy the first weekend, and he touched my legs under the
red-checked tablecloth the whole time, sending me into the most
heated state. When we left, I pulled him against me and we made out
in front of a closed hardware store next door, not caring who was
walking past us.

Another time, we spent the
afternoon in the Impressionist galleries at the Metropolitan
Museum, where I showed him my favorite Monet, one of haystacks in
the snow. He said he liked the way the artist crafted shadows in
the sun. Then, Bryan pointed at the folds on a dress in a Renoir
and mused that they seemed like diamonds. I looked at him, at the
way his green eyes studied the painting, and it all seemed too good
to be true – here I was with someone who was gorgeous, and funny,
and who actually liked looking at art – but yet, it was
true.

The next weekend he said he’d
found the perfect store for me, and he brought me to a cobblestoned
block in the Village and held open the door to a tiny little
Japanese manga shop. I gave him a quizzical look. I wasn’t into
manga.

“Just go in. You’ll
see.”

After I passed the shelves of
comics, I saw the most fantastic display. A wall full of Hello
Kitty jewelry – bracelets and rings and hair clips and necklaces
and keychains and every adornment imaginable with the
cat.

Bryan was smiling, as if he’d
brought me to buried treasure. “I thought you might get a kick out
of it.” A nervous grin came next. “But then again, you make such
amazing stuff this might all seem silly to you.”

I placed my hand on his arm. “I
love it. No matter what I make, I will always love Hello Kitty.
It’s a life-long kind of thing we have going on.”

“Good. Pick anything you
like.”

I studied the displays, checking
out a rhinestone necklace, a white and pink pendant, a silver and
black chain. Then rings in all shapes and sizes. I showed him a
cute, sparkly ring. “I do love this ring.”

I moved over to the necklaces.
Bryan shifted closer and slipped his hand onto the small of my
back, touching me underneath my tee-shirt. I closed my eyes because
it felt so good I wanted to purr. The slightest touch from him was
intoxicating.

“One more week until your
birthday,” he whispered.

I leaned into him, savoring the
feel of his body against me. That we were in a public place barely
crossed my mind. All I could think of was him.