Asking For It.

Natalia

"Gosh, I hate this town."

Calvert is exactly how I left it.

Small, quiet, suffocating.

The kind of town where everyone knows your name and exactly three things about you, and the three things they know about me have apparently been updated this week, because the moment the car turns onto Elm Street, I see two elderly women on Mrs. Patton's porch stop mid-conversation and turn to stare.

I look out the window.

They stare.

I stare back.

One of them leans toward the other and says something behind her hand and they both look at me with that particular expression ... pity wrapped in satisfaction ... that small towns reserve for people who left and came back wrong.

I crack the window.

"...always thought she was too big for this place," one of them is saying, loud enough to carry. "Ran off to Hollywood and look at her now. Back here with her tail between her..."

"Excuse me..." I reach for the door handle.

"Natalia." My father's voice comes from the porch steps.

I freeze.

He's standing at the front door in his coat, like he came outside the second he heard the car. Like he's been watching for me. He looks older than I remember and I don't know what to do with that so I don't do anything with it.

I get out of the car.

"Come inside," he says.

I look back at Mrs. Patton's porch. The two women are still watching. I give them the most pleasant smile I own ... the one I use for journalists I hate ... and follow my father inside.

…

The house smells the same.

That's the worst part. After everything ... eight months, three thousand miles, a career imploding on national television ... it smells exactly the same. Old wood and Jonathan's coffee and something warm underneath it all that I have never been able to name but that has always, infuriatingly, felt like home.

He is not my father. Not biologically. He married my mother when I was four and I don't remember a time before him and I have never once called him anything other than Dad, which probably says everything.

I drop my bag at the bottom of the stairs.

"You're thinner," he says, from the kitchen doorway.

"Nice to see you too."

"Sit down. I'll make something."

"I'm not hungry."

"Natalia."

"Dad."

A pause. He looks at me. I look at him. He steps back into the kitchen and I follow because I always follow, that hasn't changed either.

I sit at the table and watch him move around the kitchen and I think about the last time I was in this room. Two Christmases ago. My mother was in that chair ... the one across from mine ... picking at her food and looking at her phone and making comments about my hair that weren't quite compliments and weren't quite criticisms either. That was her specialty. That was always her specialty.

"You didn't come," Dad says. His back is to me.

Here we go.

"Dad..."

"To the burial." He sets a pot on the stove. Doesn't turn around. "Eight months ago. You didn't come."

"I know."

"I called you four times."

"I know."

"She asked for you." He says it quietly. Matter of fact. "At the end. She was asking where you were."

The kitchen is very quiet.

Something moves through me ... not grief exactly, not guilt exactly, something in between that I don't have a clean word for. My mother asked for me. My mother who forgot my birthday twice and missed my first premiere and spent thirty years making Dad feel like he was never quite enough ... she asked for me at the end, and I wasn't here.

I don't know how to feel about that. I have been not knowing how to feel about it for eight months.

"She cheated on you for years," I say. "Did you know I knew that? I knew from the time I was fifteen. And you stayed. You just ... stayed, and loved her, and she kept..." I stop. Press my lips together. "I don't understand why you want me to grieve someone who never..."

"I'm not asking you to grieve her the way I did." He turns around. His face is calm, the way it always is when he's being most serious. "I'm asking you not to let the anger eat you alive, Natalia. There's a difference."

"I'm not angry."

He looks at me.

"I'm not..." I push back from the table. "I'm fine. I've been fine. I had a career and a life and I was completely fine and then this week happened and now I'm sitting in this kitchen and you want to talk about my mother and I cannot..." my voice does something I don't give it permission to do, "...I cannot do this tonight. I'm sorry. I cannot."

"Natalia..."

"I'll be back later." I grab my jacket. "Don't wait up."

"It's late..."

"Dad." I stop at the doorway and look at him ... this man who showed up every single day of my life without being asked to, without being owed anything, without anyone making it easy for him. I look at him and I feel something crack very slightly behind my ribs. "I know. Okay? I know I should have come. I know." My voice drops. "I just ... not tonight."

He doesn't try to stop me.

That's almost worse than if he had.

…

The club is called Lola's and it is the only club in Calvert and it is exactly as small and loud and sticky-floored as I remember, which is to say I have been inside for four minutes and I already want to leave.

I order a drink anyway.

"Rough night?" The bartender is young, maybe twenty-two, and he's looking at me with the barely-concealed recognition of someone who can't quite believe what he's seeing.

"Rough week," I say.

"I heard that." He slides the glass across. "On the house."

"You know who I am."

"Everybody knows who you are." He shrugs. "Doesn't mean you don't deserve a free drink."

I almost smile. Almost.

I take the glass and turn around to find somewhere to stand that isn't directly under a speaker, and I make it approximately two steps before I walk into a wall.

Except it isn't a wall.

The glass tips. The drink goes ... all of it, in one cold spectacular splash ... directly onto the chest of the person in front of me.

"Oh my God." I grab for napkins that aren't there. "I am so sorry, I wasn't looking, I..."

I look up.

The apology dies somewhere in my throat.

The apology dies somewhere in my throat.

The first thing I see are his eyes.

Not his height, though he has plenty of it ... tall in the way that makes you recalibrate the space around you. Not his shoulders, though the dark shirt stretched across them is now thoroughly soaked because of me. The first thing I notice, the thing that stops every coherent thought in my head, are his eyes.

One is green. One is grey.

Not a trick of the bar light. Not a contact lens. Just ... two different eyes looking down at me with an expression so completely, perfectly blank that I can't read a single thing behind either of them.

His face is ... it's a problem. That's the only way I can put it. Sharp jaw, mouth set in a flat line that shouldn't be as distracting as it is, and those eyes ... mismatched and steady and watching me like I'm something mildly interesting that just fell out of the sky.

"I'm..." I reach up with a napkin I grabbed from somewhere. "Here, let me just..."

I press the napkin to his chest.

He lets me.

That's the thing ... he just stands there and lets me, and I'm patting uselessly at his shirt and I'm close, too close, closer than you get to a stranger in a normal interaction, and I can feel the warmth of him through the wet fabric and his chest is ... he is very ... the napkin is doing nothing...

"Is it helping?" he says.

His voice is low. A little dry. Like he finds this mildly amusing and is deciding whether to let it show.

"No," I admit.

"I didn't think so."

I look up. He's looking down at me with that same blank expression except there's something in it now, something at the very edges, and I realize with a start that we are extremely close and I have my hand flat on his chest and neither of us has moved.

I have met beautiful people. I work in Hollywood. I have been on screen with some of the most attractive humans on the planet and I have never ... not once ... felt my brain just quietly vacate the premises the way it is doing right now.

Not even with Tristan. Especially not with Tristan.

"I really am sorry," I say. My voice comes out lower than I mean it to. "I'll pay for the dry cleaning..."

"Don't worry about it."

"No, I insist, if you give me your..."

"I said don't worry about it." Not unkind. Just final. He looks at me for one more second ... unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and is choosing how to spend it ... and then the corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. "Try to watch where you're going next time."

He steps around me.

He walks away.

I stand there with a wet napkin in my hand and watch him go and something in my chest does something completely irrational, and before I have processed a single thought or made a single decision my mouth opens and the words come out like they were always going to.

"Sleep with me."

It's barely a whisper. Barely anything. Swallowed almost immediately by the music and the noise and the crowd.

But he stops.

He stops walking.

The pause that follows is approximately three years long.

"I'm sorry." He doesn't turn around. His voice has changed ... lower, rougher, like the words scraped something on the way out. "What did you just say?"

My heart is doing something insane.

I could take it back. I could laugh, say never mind, turn around and order another drink and pretend this entire interaction never happened. I could do that. It would be the smart thing. It would be the sane thing.

I turn around.

He turns around at the same moment.

And I look at him across two feet of space in this small loud sticky-floored bar in the town I hate, and I think about my mother's empty chair and Tristan's smiling eyes on national television and seven strangers in ring-light videos and every project on hold and my whole life sitting in a box on the floor ... and I think: I have nothing left to lose tonight. Not a single thing.

"Sleep with me,"