Forbidden Fruit

The house smelled like her.

That was the first thing. Not the cookies she'd baked that afternoon, though those were still on the counter, cooling on a wire rack, and not the lavender candle burning in the kitchen window. It was the underneath smell. Something floral and warm that had soaked into the walls over years, so that every time I walked through the front door I felt like I was stepping into her. Into Amy.

I'd been coming to this house since I was twelve. Ten years. Long enough to know which stair creaked and which cabinet held the good bourbon and how the light hit the living room at four in the afternoon, golden and slanted, making everything look like a memory. Long enough to know that when Danny said "come over anytime, man, you know where the spare key is," he meant it. Long enough that I should have felt like a son here.

I didn't.

I stood in the kitchen, holding a beer I'd pulled from the fridge without asking, and listened to the house settle around me. Danny was at the Fillmore, some band I'd never heard of, and he'd texted me at seven: *Dude where are you, doors open in twenty.* I'd texted back: *Can't make it, tell me how it is.* A lie so easy it barely registered. I hadn't even tried to come up with a reason.

The truth was simpler and worse.

I heard her before I saw her. Bare feet on hardwood, a soft padding that got louder, and then she appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, a book in one hand, reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She was wearing a thin gray sweater that hung loose off one shoulder and a pair of jeans that had a hole in the knee. Her hair was down. When Danny was home, she always wore it up.

"Oh," she said. "I thought you were going."

I shrugged. "Changed my mind."

She looked at me for a second too long. Not suspicious. Something else. Then she crossed to the counter and picked up a cookie, broke it in half, and handed me one. Chocolate chip. Still warm.

"Danny's going to be annoyed," she said. "He was looking forward to it."

"Was he?"

"He said something about it. This morning." She bit into her cookie. "You know how he gets."

I did know. Danny had been my best friend since seventh grade, when we'd both gotten detention for the same dumb thing and decided we might as well be friends since we were stuck in the same room. He was loud and loyal and exhausting in the way that people who've never had anything bad happen to them can be. He didn't know what he had. He didn't see the way his mother moved through a room, the way she tilted her head when she listened, the way her mouth curved when she thought something was funny but didn't want to give you the satisfaction of laughing.

I'd been in love with Amy for three years.

I didn't plan it. It wasn't a moment. It was a slow accumulation, like water wearing down stone. A touch on the shoulder that lasted a beat too long. A look across the dinner table when Danny was talking and neither of us was listening. The way she said my name, like it meant something more than a name. I'd tried to stop. I'd dated other people. I'd stayed away for a month once, made up excuses, and she'd texted me: *Everything okay? Danny misses you.* I'd shown up the next day.

Now here we were. Alone in her kitchen. Eating cookies.

She leaned against the counter, and the sweater slipped a little further off her shoulder. I looked at the window instead.

"You don't have to stay, you know," she said. "If you're just hanging around because you feel bad."

"I don't feel bad."

"Then why are you here?"

It was a real question. She wasn't teasing. She was watching me with those eyes that were almost green but not quite, and I realized I didn't have an answer that I could say out loud. So I told the truth in a different way.

"I like it here," I said.

She nodded slowly. "Me too."

We stood there for a while, not talking. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. I finished my beer and set the bottle on the counter, and she picked it up and put it in the recycling without being asked. That was the kind of thing she did. Small, quiet, always cleaning up after someone.

"Danny's lucky," I said. I don't know why I said it.

She looked at me. "What do you mean?"

"Just. You know. You're always here. You're always. . ." I trailed off.

"I'm his mother," she said. "That's the job."

"That's not what I meant."

She didn't ask what I meant. She just looked at me, and the air between us got thick, and I thought about all the things I'd never said and all the things I couldn't say. She was forty-three. I was twenty-two. She was my best friend's mother. There were a thousand reasons this was impossible, and I knew every one of them by heart.

But I still thought about her when I couldn't sleep. I still drove past her house on my way home from work, even though it was out of the way. I still remembered every conversation we'd ever had, word for word, like they were lines I was supposed to memorize.

"I should go," I said.

"You just got here."

"I know."

She set the book down on the counter. She took off her glasses and folded them and set them next to the book. She was still looking at me, and I couldn't read her face, and that scared me more than anything else.

"Stay," she said. "Danny won't be home until late. We can watch something."

It was nothing. It was a normal thing to say. But the way she said it, quiet and deliberate, like she was offering something she wasn't supposed to, made my chest tight.

"Okay," I said.

We went into the living room. She sat on one end of the couch, and I sat on the other, and she turned on the TV and scrolled through Netflix without really looking at the screen. I watched her profile in the blue light. The line of her jaw. The small crease between her eyebrows. She picked something eventually, a movie I didn't recognize, and we watched it in silence for twenty minutes without either of us laughing at the jokes.

Then she said, "You look at me differently now."

I didn't pretend not to know what she meant. "I know."

"When did it start?"

I could have lied. I could have said I didn't know, or that I was just tired, or that she was imagining things. But she wasn't imagining things, and we both knew it, and lying would have felt like a betrayal of something I hadn't even admitted to myself yet.

"A while ago," I said. "I don't know exactly."

She nodded. She didn't look at me. She kept her eyes on the screen, but I could see her hands were folded tight in her lap, knuckles pale.

"We can't do this," she said.

"I know."

"I mean it."

"I know."

"Then why are you still here?"

I turned to face her. She did the same. The movie kept playing, some scene with cars and shouting, but neither of us heard it. The space between us on the couch was maybe two feet. It felt like a mile.

"Because I don't want to be anywhere else," I said.

She closed her eyes. For a long moment, she didn't move. I thought she was going to tell me to leave. I thought she was going to stand up and turn off the TV and drive me home herself. I thought a lot of things.

Instead, she opened her eyes and said, "Danny can't know."

It wasn't a yes. It wasn't even close to a yes. But it wasn't a no either, and I felt something shift in my chest, something that had been locked tight for years finally coming loose.

"He won't," I said.

She reached over and took my hand. Her fingers were cold. She held on anyway.

"Okay," she said.

We sat there like that, holding hands in the blue light, while the movie played on without us. I didn't know what happened next. I didn't know what we were doing or how long it would last or what it would cost. But her hand was in mine, and she wasn't letting go, and for now that was enough.