No one does it like you, p.3
No One Does It Like You, page 3
There was only one message, dated almost three months previous, and it made her whole body lock up in shock when she heard it. She nearly dropped her phone, one hand automatically scrabbling in her purse for her rescue inhaler, even if it wasn’t her asthma that was closing up her throat.
Hey, Rosie? It’s me.
She hadn’t heard Tom’s voice in ten years, but identifying it was the only effortless part of hearing his message.
I’m, um. Well. I might be about to die.
The message was rough and full of static. The roar in the background must be the rain. He’d left her a message just before that infamous picture of Boyd Kellagher’s rescue was taken.
I’ve always loved you.
Rose’s mind skipped right past that, as she’d long since decided that Tom meant something very different by those words than she’d originally thought. It was the next statement that caught her attention:
I’m sorry for everything. I wish I had the chance to make it up to you.
Tears threatened to spill out over her cheeks. There wasn’t a way to make it up to her. He was supposed to love her for the rest of her life; tickets to his Broadway premiere weren’t going to cut it as a substitute, and it was beyond her what else he might think he had that she wanted. Why bother being sorry now? Once again, he was too late.
However.
Didn’t she need someone who knew how to swing a hammer? That was ironic. That was great timing.
Could she bust into his Boyd Kellagher–adjacent celebrity lifestyle and ask him to help pick out new siding for the inn? Reseal a few windows? Air out the drapes? She was sure he hadn’t thought about it at all, just like he’d never thought about what it would really mean to be married to her.
That was Tomasz Wilczewski—completely sincere when he made promises, totally incapable when it came time to live up to any of them.
Rose wiped her face with her palms.
I wish I had the chance to make it up to you.
She’d always let it go before. Every time he was late, every time he forgot, all the promises he made to her, even their damn wedding vows. She’d never held him to any of it.
It would serve him right if she decided this time she was going to make him live up to every single word.
It would serve him right.
2
New York
The blaring of the front door buzzer woke Tom up just before midnight. He’d passed out on the couch with the lights and TV on, which wasn’t uncommon, nor was the blaring of the buzzer, but he wasn’t expecting anyone.
Tom picked up his phone from the coffee table and squinted at the date and time. No missed calls.
The buzzing didn’t stop.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he mumbled. He stood up, winced at the pain in his back, and lurched in the general direction of the door. Today he’d worked a double shift at a fancy steak house downtown, which would provide a nice financial cushion before rehearsals started, but at thirty-four, he couldn’t shrug off twelve straight hours on his feet with his waiter’s apron.
He hobbled barefoot down the length of his hallway and two flights of stairs without bothering to put on more clothes. Anyone unexpectedly at his door at midnight didn’t deserve to complain if they saw him in his skimpy boxers.
Tom threw open the front door of the building to admit a wintry mist of freezing rain, but that wasn’t what had him rocking back on his heels. He made a wordless grunt of surprise, a soft, guttural huh, like he’d been slogged in the stomach. Shock sent him reeling to the side.
It was Rosie, shivering and wet on his doorstep, one hand frozen on the buzzer and the other clutching the handle of a roller suitcase nearly as large as she was.
He’d forgotten how small she was, even if he thought he’d forgotten nothing else. Tom was a couple inches short of six feet tall, so Rose Kelly was one of the only people on earth he towered over. His first sight of her in a decade was the top of her head, but that was a familiar view.
Tom put a hand on the doorframe to hold himself up. He could have used a little warning. A lot of warning. Rosie’s reentry into his life ought to have been accompanied by an act’s worth of foreshadowing and some kind of orchestral theme—maybe a mashup of the “Imperial March” and the bridal one.
He licked his lips, half wondering if he was hallucinating even though he couldn’t recall imbibing anything stronger than half a strawberry White Claw after work today.
“Rosie?” he finally managed, sounding strangled. He cleared his throat. It helped a little that she seemed to be having just as much trouble speaking as he was. Two bright spots of color had appeared on her full cheeks, matching the tip of her nose and the rims of her eyes, which were still fixed on his bare chest. Her sweet and dainty cupid’s-bow lips were parted as she took in the new topography of his chest muscles, then his entire bare body. He’d done nothing more than strip when he got home from work; his apartment was on the top floor and always boiling hot, even in January.
He wished he were wearing more clothes. Better underwear, at least.
His voice jarred her out of her reverie, and her gaze jerked up from his chest to meet his eyes.
“What’s on your face?” she blurted, sounding horrified.
Tom rubbed his mustache automatically.
“I—it’s for a role?” he said, feeling delirious. She’d never seen him other than clean-shaven, but then again, he hadn’t even needed to shave every day when they first met.
This was like a dream. A pizza dream. His ex-wife showed up at his door at midnight, looking adorably disheveled, only to severely judge his grooming.
Rosie swallowed hard, visibly attempting to gather herself. She stuck a hand in the pocket of her sodden camel overcoat, fumbling for something, then opened her handbag. Her hands were shaking.
“I mean, um. I came to ask you if you meant it—”
“What?” Tom said, shaking the last vestiges of sleep out of his head. He was still holding the door open with his body, and his favorite bits—the ones protected from the wind by just one thin layer of threadbare cotton—were about to freeze right off. Rosie’s black curls were nearly soaked to her head. This was all insane.
He carefully grabbed her by the upper arm and pulled her stumbling and half-heartedly protesting into the vestibule. He opened the door again to grab her suitcase and, without waiting for her agreement, began hauling it up behind him.
“Come in, at least,” he said when he was half a flight in, his mouth belatedly catching up with the rest of his body.
He liked to think of himself as largely immune to the more toxic impulses of his gender, and where he wasn’t, he was working on it, but within thirty seconds of seeing Rosie for the first time in a decade, a very primal set of instincts had kicked in. Get her into his cave. Get her wet clothes off. Keep her there. All of a sudden, the world had simplified.
Tom halted when he reached his open doorway, viewing his apartment with the same gaze he assumed she’d apply to it. Shit. It wasn’t wrecked, but it wasn’t how Rosie would have kept it.
He parked Rosie’s bag next to the door, then stooped for the nearest stack of clean laundry, hurriedly pulling on a shirt before turning back to her.
“I, uh, I wasn’t expecting anyone,” he said.
“Of course not,” she said, big blue eyes still wide and anxious as she hovered in the doorway like she might bolt anyway.
She’d cut her pretty hair; when he knew her, she’d laboriously straightened it every morning until it ran smooth down her back, then used a curling iron to put it into perfect waves around her face. Now she wore it just below her shoulders in her natural wispy ringlets, though it was frizzing from the rain.
“Let me take your coat,” he said.
He’d never seen her this undone. Rosie was always so perfectly put together that all his associations with her current state of deshabille were erotic ones: times he’d smeared her lipstick down her chin or rubbed her hair into knots against his cheap pillowcase.
His knuckles brushed the soft fuzz of her white sweater as he peeled her coat off her stiff body. He wanted to press them against her to keep the small contact. She smelled like wet hair and expensive perfume, and he took a deep breath just to soak his lungs with her scent.
He propelled himself away just long enough to snatch a towel from his pile of clean laundry.
“Sit, sit, please,” he said, gesturing at his couch and pushing the towel into her hand.
He grabbed the half-empty White Claw from the floor next to the couch and tossed it in the direction of the kitchen sink. “Can I get you something to drink?”
He knew he was stalling, but he was still trying to remember his lines. Over the years he’d imagined scenarios where he saw Rosie again—bumped into her on the sidewalk in Midtown, at a friend’s engagement party, in the audience at his grand return to Broadway—but all the moving, charming, heartfelt speeches he’d composed for the occasion simply escaped him now.
“…Yes, all right,” she said from the other room, just short of a whisper.
He opened his liquor cabinet, which was also the under-the-sink cabinet.
But why do you have the palate of a fifteen-year-old girl whose parents are out of town? she used to tease him.
Better the palate than the musical taste. He always pushed right back.
Me? You’re the one who likes doing it to Kesha. He remembered kissing her mouth and tasting the red wine he wouldn’t drink.
Fifteen years later, he had only sour apple pucker and spiced rum.
He recalled that he had a bottle of Żubrówka in the freezer alongside twenty-five pounds of smoked salmon, part of Boyd’s objectively thoughtful Christmas gift. Rosie was allergic to apple juice, the mixer he had on hand, so he just poured two fingers neat and rushed it back to the living room for her.
She had taken a seat on his big denim sofa and clutched the red throw pillow he’d been sleeping on to her chest, shield-like. He paused for a moment to fill his eyes with the sight of her: the small, round body, her porcelain-doll features. He’d caught only fragments of Rosie in the years since she’d left him, spotted around the edges of photographs taken at parties he wasn’t invited to. It hadn’t been nearly enough to make a full picture.
“Here,” he said over a tight throat, offering her the drink.
She sniffed it and took an exploratory sip, her eyes widening at the burn of the alcohol.
“I could get you some ice—” he began to offer, but she shook her head. Her hand tightened on the glass before she tossed the whole thing back in one gulp. “Whoa. Easy there, killer,” he said as she coughed.
That got a faint smile out of her when she handed the empty glass to him.
She took the towel and wrapped it around her hair, then tipped her head back to regard him, her gaze finally present and direct.
“Thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”
“I’m just sorry the place is a mess,” he said ruefully, though she wouldn’t have expected anything else.
“No, it’s nice,” she protested. “You have…furniture. You have good stuff.”
Tom laughed. “You were probably expecting more of a ball pit concept?” She pursed that little flower bud of a mouth, unable to lie. “It’s okay. You know, Adrian threatened to put me in an aquarium lined with cedar chips if I didn’t get better at picking up after myself.”
It was dangerous to mention their mutual friend—and also, obliquely, that Tom had slept on his couch for a year after Rosie kicked him out—but Rosie mustered half a smirk even though her posture was still rattled and uncertain. “As though Adrian wasn’t always training to be someone’s fancy little pet,” she said.
Tom wanted to pick up his phone and text that cuttingly accurate observation to the group chat with Adrian and his girlfriend, but he was afraid to take his eyes off Rosie lest she vanish.
He’d been hovering awkwardly, but he took a seat at the other end of the couch, just close enough that his bare knee might brush Rosie’s corduroy-clad one. He looked at Rosie’s suitcase.
“Um. Do you need somewhere to stay…?”
Many of his fantasies about finding Rosie again had revolved around her needing something implausible from him, like a date to a wedding full of assassins or maybe a kidney. Anything for you, my love, he’d sob as the surgeon drew on him with a Sharpie, and then the third act would explore the physical metaphor of organ donation in a satisfying way.
He had a hard time coming up with other explanations for Rosie on his doorstep in Inwood at midnight.
“Oh, no, I just got off the train from Boston,” she said. She took a deep breath, as though preparing a long explanation, but her eyes landed for the first time on the painting hung behind the couch. It was a colorful abstract floral piece, and Adrian had given it to them as an engagement gift. It was one of the few things Tom had come out of the divorce owning. Rosie’s face fell, and she ducked her chin.
“This was a bad idea,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.
“What is it?” Tom said, stretching his arm out down the back of the couch in reassurance. “You came all the way here from Penn Station, you might as well tell me.”
She popped her head to the side in a heartbreakingly familiar chiding expression before she looked down at her lap. “I came to ask if you meant it.”
“Meant what?”
Rose reached into her handbag again, coming out with her phone this time. With a few clicks of her thumb, his recorded voice hissed through the room, startling and unfamiliar for the static and the distance.
Hey, Rosie? It’s me.
She stopped the recording and looked at him expectantly.
Tom wet his lips. He’d thought of that message often for the first week after the hurricane, but when it went unanswered, he’d put those thoughts away for safekeeping with every other hurt that bore her name.
“Did you mean it?” she asked again.
Mean what? That he still loved her? Like REO Speedwagon sang it: when I said that I love you I meant that I love you forever.
“Yes?” he said, incredulous that it could really be that easy. It couldn’t possibly be so easy to get her here as just calling her and telling her that. It didn’t make any sense; whether they were in love had seemed very irrelevant to her reasons for divorcing him.
She must have heard the news. About the storm, Boyd, the Broadway run. In the press or maybe from Adrian or one of their other friends. Something to make her think he wasn’t the same selfish jerk he’d been at twenty-two.
Rosie looked skeptical, catching his hesitation.
“I meant it,” he confirmed, wiping his face clean and summoning more confidence.
“Okay. Okay, so, I actually do need something…” she said slowly.
Rosie was trying to work herself up to it. Oh God, it probably was a kidney after all. Rosie’s health hadn’t ever been great, what with the asthma and the dramatic allergen encounters, and maybe some exotic inflammatory reaction meant she needed a new organ?
Well, this was the reason he came with spares, he supposed. Hopefully the recovery period didn’t take him too far into rehearsals.
“You remember the Windward Inn?” Rosie asked instead.
Tom blinked. “Of course I do. We went like ten times. And for our honeymoon.”
She winced at that last word, but she continued. “So, in the hurricane—you know, the same hurricane…you remember the hurricane.”
“Yeah, I heard it smacked Martha’s Vineyard pretty good,” he said, not sure where this was going other than not to the operating room.
“The inn got damaged in the storm. The roof and I don’t know what else. My family thinks we should sell rather than try to fix it up,” she finished in a rush.
Tom twisted up his mouth, trying to remember the place. His top concern, before their honeymoon, had been not getting caught sneaking into or out of Rosie’s room, not the quality of the furnishings. And on their honeymoon—well, the suite’s bed, walls, and floor had been pretty sturdy, he could confidently report.
But now that he thought about it, he could recall getting beaned by a chunk of ceiling plaster in the shower. Creaky stairs. Peeling paint.
“Yeah, it’s kind of a shithole, isn’t it?” he said cautiously.
Rosie went stiff. “It is not!” she protested. “It’s a great building. In a great location. It just needs some cosmetic updates, and…and a few repairs.”
From her affronted, worried look, Tom could begin to guess what she wanted, though he had no idea why she’d thought of him in connection to the project. His portfolio of useful abilities, which were mostly limited to stage acting and sexual prowess, did not include home repairs.
She twisted her delicate, ladylike hands in her lap with another deep breath. “So I—I remembered that your parents used to be property managers at that retirement community outside Boca—”
“Still are,” he cautiously confirmed.
“—and I thought, they probably had to handle a lot of repair stuff? I know you said you went with them on all their rounds during summer vacations…” She trailed off hopefully.
Tom swallowed hard. He had indeed spent most of his childhood trailing behind his parents as they went from one septuagenarian’s apartment to another, but if he’d picked up anything along the way, it had been nothing more than a little Yiddish, a fondness for show tunes, and a good sense for which old folks kept bowls of candy for visiting children and which would smack him with a spoon if he touched their piano while Wheel of Fortune was on.
“Yeah, definitely,” he lied. “All the hitting things with hammers. And unscrewing things. Screwing them too. I learned how to do all that.”
