was the third rail her mother had been reaching for in the kitchen: Did Sara love Will the same way she had loved Jeffrey, and if she did, why wasn’t she marrying him, and if she didn’t, why was she wasting her time?
All good questions, but Sara found herself caught in a Scarlett O’Hara loop of promising herself that she would think about it tomorrow.
She shouldered open the door and was met by a wall of heat. Thick humidity made the air feel like it was sweating. Still, she reached up and took the band out of her hair. The added layer on the back of her neck was like a heated oven mitt. Except for the smell of fresh grass, she might as well be walking into a steam room. She trudged up the hill. Her sneakers slipped on some loose rocks. Bugs swarmed around her face. She swatted at them as she walked toward what Bella called the shed but was actually a converted barn with a bluestone floor and space for two horses and a carriage.
The door was open. Will stood in the middle of the room. His palms were pressed to the top of the workbench as he stared out the window. There was a stillness to him that made Sara wonder if she should interrupt. Something had been bothering him for the last two months. She could feel it edging into almost every part of their lives. She had asked him about it. She had given him space to think about it. She had tried to fuck it out of him. He kept insisting that he was fine, but then she’d catch him doing what he was doing now: staring out a window with a pained expression on his face.
Sara cleared her throat.
Will turned around. He’d changed shirts, but the heat had already plastered the material to his chest. Pieces of grass were stuck to his muscular legs. He was long and lean and the smile that he gave Sara momentarily made her forget every single problem she had with him.
He asked, “Is it time for lunch?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s one forty-six. We have exactly fourteen minutes of calm before the storm.”
His smile turned into a grin. “Have you seen the shed? I mean, really seen it?”
Sara thought it was pretty much a shed, but Will was clearly excited.
He pointed to a partitioned area in the corner. “There’s a urinal over there. An actual, working urinal. How cool is that?”
“Awesome,” she muttered in a non-awesome way.
“Look how sturdy these beams are.” Will was six-four, tall enough to grab the beam and do a few pull-ups. “And look over here. This TV is old, but it still works. And there’s a full refrigerator and microwave over here where I guess the horses used to live.”
She felt her lips curve into a smile. He was such a city boy he didn’t know that it was called a stall.
“And the couch is kind of musty, but it’s really comfortable.” He bounced onto the torn leather couch, pulling her down beside him. “It’s great in here, right?”
Sara coughed at the swirling dust. She tried not to connect the stack of her uncle’s old Playboys to the creaking couch.
Will asked, “Can we move in? I’m only halfway kidding.”
Sara bit her lip. She didn’t want him to be kidding. She wanted him to tell her what he wanted.
“Look, a guitar.” He picked up the instrument and adjusted the tension on the strings. A few strums later and he was making recognizable sounds. And then he turned it into a song.
Sara felt the quick thrill of surprise that always came with finding out something new about him.
Will hummed the opening lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”.
He stopped playing. “That’s kind of gross, right? ‘Hey little girl is your daddy home?’”
“How about ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’? Or ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’? Or the opening line to ‘Sara Smile’?”
“Damn.” He plucked at the guitar strings. “Hall and Oates, too?”
“Panic! At the Disco has a better version.” Sara watched his long fingers work the strings. She loved his hands. “When did you learn to play?”
“High school. Self-taught.” Will gave her a sheepish look. “Think of every stupid thing a sixteen-year-old boy would do to impress a sixteen-year-old girl and I know how to do it.”
She laughed, because it wasn’t hard to imagine. “Did you have a fade?”
“Duh.” He kept strumming the guitar. “I did the Pee-wee Herman voice. I could flip a skateboard. Knew all the words to ‘Thriller’. You should’ve seen me in my acid-washed jeans and Nember’s Only jacket.”
“Nember?”
“Dollar Store brand. I didn’t say I was a millionaire.” He looked up from the guitar, clearly enjoying her amusement. But then he nodded toward her head, asking, “What’s going on up there?”
Sara felt her earlier weepiness return. Love overwhelmed her. He was so tuned into her feelings. She so desperately wanted him to accept that it was natural for her to be tuned into his.
Will put down the guitar. He reached up to her face, used his thumb to rub the worry out of her brow. “That’s better.”
Sara kissed him. Really kissed him. This part was always easy. She ran her fingers through his sweaty hair. Will kissed her neck, then lower. Sara arched into him. She closed her eyes and let his mouth and hands smooth away all of her doubts.
They only stopped because the couch gave a sudden, violent shudder.
Sara asked, “What the hell was that?”
Will didn’t trot out the obvious joke about his ability to make the earth move. He looked under the couch. He stood up, checking the beams overhead, rapping his knuckles on the petrified wood. “Remember that earthquake in Alabama a few years back? That felt the same, but stronger.”
Sara straightened her clothes. “The country club does fireworks displays. Maybe they’re testing out a new show?”
“In broad daylight?” Will looked dubious. He found his phone on the workbench. “There aren’t any alerts.” He scrolled through his messages, then made a call. Then another. Then he tried a third number. Sara waited, expectant, but Will ended up shaking his head. He held up the phone so she could hear the recorded message saying that all circuits were busy.
She noted the time in the corner of the screen.
1:51 p.m.
She told Will, “Emory has an emergency siren. It goes off when there’s a natural disast—”
Boom!
The earth gave another violent shake. Sara had to steady herself against the couch before she could follow Will into the backyard.
He was looking up at the sky. A plume of dark smoke curled up behind the tree line. Sara was intimately familiar with the Emory University campus.
Fifteen thousand students.
Six
