A Walk and a Drive

They kept walking, Andy noticing after a block that Erin was slowing down, the rhythm of her stride getting deliberate, almost cautious, as they reached a stretch of city street lined with old brownstones. The block was a classic: shallow stairs, iron railings, street trees thick with dead leaves, half the windows frosted from years of neglected insulation. Erin kept her eyes front, but Andy could see the way her jaw set, the slight tightening of her fingers around his.

At the stoop of a three-story walk-up, Erin paused mid-stride and pivoted on the ball of her foot so abruptly Andy almost walked into her. He saw, in the subtle shift of her shoulders and the quickening of her breath, that the memory was sharp and sudden, not planned for, but real all the same. For a moment she kept her back to him, head slightly bowed, gaze fixed on the sun-stained limestone and battered steel banister as if she was reading a plaque with their names carved on it. Maybe, Andy thought, she was.

He caught up, stopping just behind her, but gave her the space to decide whether to speak. The stairs themselves were the same as always: worn smooth in the center, small chips and flecks of blue paint where previous tenants had tried, and failed, to cover the evidence of decades’ worth of lives. The number “72” was still stenciled above the mailbox in flaking black paint, same as it had been when they moved in together, same as it had been the day she moved out.

“This is it, isn’t it,” Andy said, his voice low and intent, not so much asking as affirming. He felt the tug of the past click into place, as if the whole block had been designed to slot around this moment.

She didn’t look at him. “Second floor,” she said, voice not shy but careful, like she was holding it in the cup of her hand. “The winter after graduation. It was so cold you could see your breath all day long, even inside.” She nearly smiled, her eyes wet. “We used to tape towels to the window frames and you kept threatening to break the lease, but you never did.”

He looked up, seeing it now: the cracked window with its yellowing shade, the faint ghost-ring where a suction-cup thermometer had once lived. “I wonder if they ever fixed the radiator by the kitchen,” he mused, mostly to himself.

She grinned, and this time it crept across her whole face, not just the mouth but all the way to her eyes. “No idea. It only ever worked if you opened the kitchen window, which made zero sense. But you insisted on fixing it every other week.”

Andy snorted. “That was never about the radiator. It was a matter of pride. I didn’t want the apartment to win.”

She finally turned to face him. “You spent more on replacement valves than new tenants would have spent on a space heater.”

He shrugged, rolling his shoulders to fight off the cold. “I didn’t want a space heater,” he said, letting the words out before he could regret them. “I wanted that radiator to work.” He looked at her, then away, then back again. “I guess I thought if I just kept trying, it wouldn’t break again. Or at least, not on my watch.”

The pause that followed drew out, not uncomfortable, but charged with the current of a conversation that had been waiting years to happen. Erin let her hand rest gently on the chilled railing, her thumb tracing the dip and rise of the old iron. “It was the only place I ever felt like an adult,” she confessed, keeping her gaze fixed on the stairwell. “At least for a while.” Her voice grew softer, but not small. “I used to wake up and just… wait for the next stupid thing to go wrong. And when it did, I knew you’d be there to fix it. Or try.”

He nodded, letting the cadence of her memory wash over him. “It was a good place,” he agreed. “Even the neighbor upstairs wasn’t terrible, apart from that thing about the cactus.”

She laughed—a real, deep laugh that vibrated all the way down the stairwell and bounced back up at them. “I wonder what she would say if she knew you kept Sir Spikes alive all these years.” Her eyes sparkled. “I bet she thought you’d murder it out of spite.”

Andy smiled, a little bashful. “I had to repot him three times, because the mug kept cracking, but I think he’s immortal now. I kept buying Tigers mugs on eBay to keep it authentic, though. I even bought one of those grow lamps for him when I moved.”

She made a face, lips quirking. “I still can’t think about you keeping that plant without my chest going tight. Is that stupid?”

He shook his head, once, no hesitation. “No.”

She looked at him, really looked, and in that moment the years peeled back. For an instant she was the girl from that apartment, the one who had taught him how to cook rice and flossed every night, who left her socks in the shower and read out loud from her favorite books when she thought he was asleep. “I’ve wanted to ask you something,” she said, “since the day you showed me that cactus was still alive.” She let out a long, slow breath that turned visible in the winter air. “Did you keep it because you liked it, or because it was from us?”

Andy thought about it, long enough that he could feel the answer settle in his bones. “Both,” he said, quietly. “But mostly because it reminded me of you. Like, if I let it die, that would be it. I couldn’t let it die.”

She was still for a moment, then nodded, as if this made perfect, mathematical sense. “Thank you for not pretending otherwise.” She blinked hard, once, but her eyes stayed dry.

He let that rest, aware that sometimes the best thing to say was nothing at all. The wind cut a little harder now, and Andy shifted his weight, hands buried in the pockets of his jacket. He looked up at the apartment again, noticing the details he’d missed the first time: a new satellite dish bolted just below their old window, a suncatcher shaped like a cheese wedge dangling from a suction cup in the glass. He wondered who lived there now, if they ever tried to fix the radiator, if they ever argued over who made the coffee or who put the empty milk carton back in the fridge.

Finally she glanced up at their old window again. “The curtains are wrong. Whoever’s in there now, they’ve got the bed on the wrong wall, judging by the light.”

Andy almost laughed. “How could you possibly know that?”

She was dead serious. “I lived there a year. I know.”

He watched her, saw the way her shoulders squared against the cold. “I always thought it’d be weird, coming back here. I thought it would be embarrassing.” He dug his hands into his pockets, searching for anything else to do with them. “It isn’t.”

She didn’t answer, just kept looking up at the window. “I want to say something,” she said, her voice shifting—calmer, but not less intense. “I’ve never said it out loud, and if you interrupt, I won’t finish, so…” She swallowed, then stared straight ahead.

He nodded, silent.

She stared up at the glass, the clouded yellow curtain. “I was happy in that apartment,” she said, and the words made her eyes spill over, right there. She didn’t bother to wipe her face. “I didn’t know I was happy, because I’d never been it before, and nobody in my life thought I deserved to be. But I was. It was a bad apartment, and the heat never worked, and the fridge made that weird shrieking noise at two in the morning, but it was ours.” Her voice broke, just a little, but she kept going. “Sometimes I’d stop on the landing and listen for your voice before I opened the door. Just to make sure it was real.” She hiccuped a short, wet laugh. “I never told you that.”

He wanted to say he understood, that he’d done the same thing, but he bit it back, and just let her have the moment.

She uncrossed her arms, put her palm flat on the stone just above the stair. “I never forgave myself for not knowing it at the time. For not being able to keep it together, for not being better at it.” She exhaled, hard, and got about half of the next thing out before she had to stop and breathe: “When it ended, what I lost wasn’t you—it was the year itself. The way it proved I could have a thing like that. And after, I was sure I’d used it up. That I’d just burned through my allowance of good luck and that was it for me.”

He stepped in, not touching her but close enough to give her the shadow of a hug. “You didn’t,” he said, voice barely there.

She turned and faced him, tears all over her cheeks now, not shy about it. “I have it again,” she said, almost shaking with the force of it. “I have it now, and I’m not going to be careful about saying it. I love you, Andy. I love you and I’m finished tucking that word at the end of the sentence to make it easier to carry.”

He reached for her, but she was already moving. Her arms went around his neck, hard, and she held on so tight he had to shift his feet to take her weight. Her body, soft and powerful, pressed into him, and her face was wet against his neck and her hair smelled like grass and wind. She shivered once, all the way through.

“I love you too, Erin,” Andy whispered in her hair, and he felt her sob.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. A woman came out of the building above, clattering down the steps in a coat two sizes too big, and she gave them a sidelong glance but didn’t say a word. Even after the stranger had passed, Erin didn’t let go.

When she finally pulled back, she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, then looked at him and gave a half-laugh, half-sob. “I used to drive past this building after the breakup,” she confessed. “More than once. Never stopped. Just… circled the block, watched the light in the window. I guess I wanted to see if it would be okay without me in it.”

Andy didn’t speak, because there was nothing you could say to make that less sad or more manageable. The urge to touch her was strong, but he let her have the silence.

She blinked, gathering herself, then made herself look him in the face. “How many times do you think more than once was?”

He considered. “At least enough for it to stick. Ten?”

She snorted, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Higher. But not by much. I stopped when I realized you must have seen my car.”

Andy nodded, recalling the blue Ford, the cracked taillight. “Once, yeah. I thought about coming down, but then I thought that would be a disaster for both of us.”

“It would have,” she agreed, voice thinner. “But I kept doing it anyway. I wanted to know if the building would, I don’t know, reject whoever moved in after me. Or if you’d let it.”

He almost smiled. “I’m not sure I ever really moved out of that apartment, myself. Even when I left.”

She turned, arms crossed tight beneath her breasts, and looked at the window with its jaundiced curtain and the sad bike chained to the railing. “I hope the new people are better at being happy than I was,” she said. Then, almost a whisper: “But I doubt it.”

Andy let the words stack up, holding their weight. After a while, Erin said, “There’s one more place I want to go. It’s not going to be as easy as this was.”

He didn’t flinch. “Where?”

She gave a half-laugh, but it was hollow. “If I tell you, you’ll talk me out of it. So I’ll just show you. But first I need you to close your eyes.”

He didn’t.

She reached for his sleeve, bicep to wrist, and pulled him around the corner.

He should have expected the car. Not just a car, but the car—a cherry-red convertible, two seats, detailed to a molecular shine, top down and idling in the cold. The kind of thing only a newly-minted lottery winner or a person going for broke would rent for the day, and even then only if they were desperate for someone to notice.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Erin asked, keys dangling from her fingers, the fob painted to match the car.

“I’m deciding between ‘over the top’ and ‘inspired,’” Andy said.

She grinned, wide and dangerous. “I spent an unreasonable amount of BP on it and have no regrets.”

He walked a slow circle around the car, half for the drama and half because the thing was worth seeing from every angle. “It’s perfect,” he said, genuinely. “Why this?”

Erin didn’t get in right away. She leaned against the door, arms folded, and let the January sun make her mint skin nearly white at the edges. “My brother used to have an exact match, back when he still lived in the city. He let me drive it twice, and I’ve wanted one ever since.” She looked at him, sly. “Arabella pulled strings. Said it was the least she could do.”

Andy eased into the passenger seat. The leather was so cold it stung, but the effect was immediate: he felt younger, lighter, as if the car ran on a mixture of premium and pure potential. She started the engine, and the purr was something between a boast and a dare. “You ready?”

He nodded. “Where are we going?”

Erin hesitated, just for a fraction. “Warrenville,” she said. “Your parents’ place.”

It knocked the air out of him, but he didn’t show it. “Was this the plan all along?”

She shrugged, eyes on the road. “It was the plan as of four days ago. I’ve changed my mind about it, twice a day since.”

He watched her for a moment. “We don’t have to.”

“I want to,” she said, not glancing over. “But I need you to want it, too, or this is a waste of a very expensive car and a perfectly good afternoon.”

Andy considered, then put his hand on her thigh, firm and gentle, the way he’d done a thousand times before, and said, “Let’s do it.”

They took the Eisenhower west, Erin merging with a gunner’s confidence, top down, temperature somewhere south of zero. The city dropped away in segments: high-rises first, then glass boxes, then the cinderblock density of outskirts and commercial parks. By Cicero the sky opened up, blunt and blue and endless, and the only thing keeping Andy’s teeth from chattering was the heater, cranked so high it made the edges of his socks damp with sweat.

It didn’t bother Erin. Her green skin looked nearly white in the sunlight, smooth as a grape, and she drove with both hands on the wheel, the rest of her bare to the wind. She didn’t seem cold. She didn’t seem anything but absolutely, almost aggressively, present.

They didn’t talk much. Not for the first ten miles, anyway. Andy watched her in profile, the line of her jaw, the way her hair whipped straight back from her face like a standard. She had, in this body, a grace that the old Erin never allowed herself—a comfort with being seen. Andy realized, with a little shock, that every time he’d looked at her on campus, she’d met his gaze without so much as a blush or a flinch. That had been the game, maybe; the proof she could be the more fearless of the two.

It made him want to touch her. Not in the way he always wanted to, but in the way you want to hold something that’s spent most of its life being dropped.

They passed the exit for Oak Park and neither said a word. The digital dash ticked up another five miles per hour; Andy didn’t need to glance at the speedometer to feel it, but he did, and it was an even hundred. The convertible vibrated in the lane, but Erin kept it steady. She never sped, not before. He wondered what changed.

At the second interchange—294, the turnoff for O’Hare—Erin shifted gears, down two instead of one, and said, with her eyes still forward, “You want to hear something pathetic?”

Andy was slow to answer. “Only if it’s better than my college application essay.”

She almost smiled, but not quite. “Not sure it’s that bad.” She took the ramp hard enough that Andy had to grab the door. “Six months after we split, I drove out to Warrenville. I sat at the end of your parents’ driveway for half an hour, trying to decide if I wanted to ring the bell or just keep going. I had this fantasy I’d say something epic and it would fix… I don’t know. All of it. But after thirty minutes I just put the car in reverse and left.” She braked, and the speed dropped by twenty. “Didn’t even turn off the engine.”

Andy didn’t know what to say at first. He didn’t want to cheapen it with a joke, but he also didn’t want to crowd her with sympathy. So he picked the only honest thing: “I know.”

She blinked, twice. “How?”

He exhaled. “My mom mentioned it. Last time I visited, with Laura. She said she saw your car, and by the time she opened the door you were gone.” He felt himself flush, but let it show. “I figured it wasn’t mine to bring up.”

The wind carried her next breath right out of her. For a minute, she drove without saying anything, then looked sideways at him, the sharpness in her eyes traded for something Andy couldn’t quite name. “How long have you just… had that in your back pocket?”

“A while.”

“And you never—”

“It was yours,” Andy said. “If you wanted to talk about it, I figured you would.”

She nodded, then put both eyes back on the road, and for five full miles they just rode, the sound of the wind louder than the radio would have been, if either of them had thought to turn it on. They passed a sign for Lisle, another for Naperville, and the buildings turned to subdivisions, then to nothing.

The horizon opened up east and west, pure and uncompromising, and the sun hovered just above it like a dare. On the far side of the car, Erin’s profile was all hard lines and clean intent, but there was a fragility in the way her lip would sometimes catch in her teeth, the way her tongue would flick a reminder to breathe.

It was Andy who finally broke the quiet, though not with words. He reached over and gently brushed a stray lock of hair from Erin’s cheek, letting his fingers linger just long enough for her to notice. She didn’t flinch. Instead, her left hand, still on the wheel, squeezed down minutely, and the car drifted half an inch in the lane before correcting. That tiny reaction meant more than any sentence could have.

Past the exit for Naperville Rd, she said, voice low, “Is it weird if I try again?”

He didn’t answer right away. He watched the way her hands gripped the wheel, the way her body seemed to draw inward right before she spoke. “No,” he said, and it was important to say it with no irony, no joke. “Not weird at all.”

“I don’t want to make it weird for them. I just…” Erin trailed off, then said, “I don’t know. I want to do it right, once.”

He looked ahead; the road was a perfect straight shot, the kind of gridlocked inevitability that only a city like Chicago could produce. The sky was a bleached, brittle blue, and for a hundred yards ahead there wasn’t a single car between them and the horizon. “What changed?” he asked softly.

She laughed, but the sound was more vibration than volume. “You’re marrying me in two days. And I can’t stop thinking that I should at least say something to your parents. For every Christmas card your mom sent that I never answered. For every time she left a voicemail to ask me how I was and I ignored it. For… I guess for me, too.” The car slowed a little as she braked, then she glanced at Andy, eyes wet but fiercely clear. “Would you be mad if I just said hi?”

He shook his head. “I’d like it.”

Erin let out a breath, but didn’t slow down. “I might freeze up and bail. I want to warn you.”

“Seems unlikely,” Andy said, and he meant it.

She grinned, and this time it went all the way to her eyes. “You don’t know your mother. She is scarier than the sum total of every transformation I’ve had so far.”

Andy let his eyes wander over her: the impossible mint green of her skin, the breasts that had swallowed the seatbelt, the way she wore nothing but sneakers and the kind of smile that could open locked doors. “You realize she’s going to see you exactly like this, right?”

Erin nodded, jaw set. “And thanks to the Reality Adjustment, she’ll think it’s perfectly normal, which might actually make it worse. She’ll probably just ask if I want a sweater.”

He laughed, loud and unguarded, and for a moment the rush of wind and the roar of the engine felt less like a barrier to intimacy and more like a protective shell. Erin joined him in the laughter, her hair wild and streaming behind her like a pennant of pure defiance. It was a contagious, contagious thing, dissolving a thousand layers of tension at once.

Afterwards, when the laughter had faded and only the wind remained, Andy looked at her, and asked, “Do you regret any of it?”

Erin took her right hand off the wheel—just for a second, but it was deliberate—and reached for his. Her palm was cool, dry, and the grip was not tentative but sure. “I regret not doing it sooner,” she said. Andy heard the weight in her voice, the way the regret wasn’t about the car, or the drive, or even the contest, but about the years she’d spent not letting herself ask for this kind of thing. Not letting herself want it.

They rode the next mile in silence, but it was a different silence than before: not avoidance, but anticipation, like the last breath before something irrevocable. The exit for Winfield Rd came up, then another for Butterfield; each was a milestone, a marker on a pilgrimage that neither would have dared to call one out loud. Erin signaled and merged. Then she cut left onto the frontage road, the engine making an almost affectionate purr compared to the violence of the highway.

The wind whipped her hair into a dark, chaotic halo behind her, and Andy watched her drive with eyes that felt newly calibrated. He saw, for the first time, how much it cost her to keep everything so neat and under control. How every emotion had to pass through three different filters before it could be allowed to show.

They crossed an intersection, then coasted through a roundabout lined with the ghosts of last summer’s flowers, and Erin pointed with her chin. “Should I go slow, or just rip the Band-Aid?”

Andy looked at the house up ahead, the pale brick and the careful landscaping, and said, “Let’s go for it.”

She gunned the gas.

The house was a quarter-mile up, driveway perfectly plowed even on a weekday. There were two cars in the drive: his mother’s sedan, and a Honda CRV he didn’t recognize, but it looked like the sort of thing his dad would buy “for trips.”

They pulled up to the curb. Erin put the car in park, but left her hands on the wheel. She stared at the house, then at her hands, then at Andy. “You sure?” she said, voice small for the first time all afternoon.

Andy reached across, touched her shoulder, and squeezed. “I’m with you.”

Erin nodded, then let out a short, ragged laugh. “This is the first time I’ve ever been nervous about being naked in front of your parents.”

“Liar,” Andy said, gently.

She grinned. “Okay, second time.”

They got out. Erin popped the trunk, got a package out, and shut it. “Gift,” she said. “For your mom. She’ll kill me if I show up empty-handed.”

He walked beside her, up the shoveled drive, watching her take each step as if it cost her a little less than the one before. On the porch, she paused, set the box down, and rapped twice, knuckles hard on the glass.