Everybody in Marlow, Iowa, knew at least one thing about Jenna Kowalski, and most of them were wrong about the rest.
Luke Brenner learned the true parts in a hallway, fourteen months ago, holding a red cup of warm Busch Light he’d stopped pretending to drink.
The party was at a rented house off Main Street, a sagging two-story with wood paneling and a porch that tilted toward the river like it wanted to leave. Somebody from the plant had a birthday. Somebody else had a keg. Luke, twenty-three and lonely in the plain way of a man who works all day and goes home to a microwave, had been invited by a furnace customer and actually come.
He stood by the keg because the keg gave him something to do with his hands.
That was where he was when she laughed.
It cut through the music, which was some country-rap thing nobody liked but everybody knew. It wasn’t a polite laugh. It was a whole-body laugh, head back, a little snort at the end she didn’t bother to hide. Luke turned toward it the way you turn toward a window when the sun comes out.
She was blonde, but not the kind of blonde on billboards. Dirty blonde, darker at the roots, hair just past her shoulders and pushed back like she’d done it with her fingers in a car mirror. Freckles. A pretty, ordinary face. A black tank top and jeans that had actually been worn.
“That’s Jenna,” said a guy next to him, not to Luke exactly, more to the room. He said it with a little curl in it. “Watch.”
Luke watched.
There were three of them with her. A tall man in a flannel with his sleeves rolled, calm in a way that made people step aside without being asked. A younger guy in a gray hoodie who was clearly telling her something outrageous, because he was miming it with both hands, and she was slapping his chest. And a third, in a plain tee, a little older, watching all of it with a slow, amused smile, like he’d seen this movie and liked the ending.
All three of them Black. All three of them looking at her like she was the best thing in the house.
She took the flannel guy’s hand. She hooked a finger in the hoodie guy’s belt loop. She looked back once, over her shoulder, at the guy in the tee, and said something Luke couldn’t hear, and the man laughed and followed.
And then she led them down the hall, past the bathroom with the broken lock, to the bedroom at the end, and opened the door, and went in first.
The door closed. The music kept going. Somebody by the stairs said “Jesus Christ,” and somebody else said “every weekend, man,” and a girl near the kitchen said a word Luke didn’t like, a mean little word, and two of her friends laughed.
Luke didn’t laugh.
He stood there with his warm beer, and his heart was going like he’d run up the porch steps, and he was hard in his jeans so suddenly it was almost painful. He was embarrassed by it. He turned toward the keg so nobody would see. But he couldn’t stop seeing that look over her shoulder: not ashamed, not drunk, not lost. Happy. She’d looked like a woman walking into exactly the night she wanted.
Under the music, if you stood close enough to the hallway, and Luke found that he had somehow drifted close enough, you could hear her. A low laugh first. Then a man’s voice, deep and warm, saying, “Come here, Jen.” Then a sound from her that had no laughter in it at all, a long, startled, grateful moan, like something had finally been put back where it belonged.
Luke went home before midnight. He lay in his apartment above the laundromat on Fourth and stared at the water stain on the ceiling and did not sleep for a long time, and when he finally touched himself, it was her face he saw, looking back over her shoulder, happy, and the door closing.
He thought it would pass.
It didn’t pass.
Fourteen months later, on a Friday in late September, Jenna Kowalski scraped tartar off the molars of a retired Lutheran pastor for forty-five minutes and listened to him explain soybean futures.
People liked her at Riverside Family Dental. They booked with her specifically.
What people said about her outside the building was a different matter, and she knew it. She’d known it since she was nineteen.
In a town of forty thousand, you could be a lot of things privately. You could not be a white girl from the east side who went home with Black men, more than one at a time sometimes, and never once let any of them buy her a ring, and still be private. Not here. Not with the gas station and the Hy-Vee and the one good bar and every truck in the county recognizable from half a mile.
So they talked. She was that girl. She was a story people told after their second drink.
Nobody who talked about her was paying her rent. Nobody who called her names had ever made her come.
She pulled her mask down in the parking lot and checked her phone.
Terrence: off shift at 6. you still want company or you need a quiet night
She smiled at it. Terrence always asked. Three years of Fridays and he still asked.
Jenna: company. bring the good beer not the stuff you drink at the station
Terrence: the stuff at the station IS the good beer
Jenna: that’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said to me
Across town, in the Hy-Vee parking lot, Luke Brenner sat in his work van with the engine off and a gas-station coffee going cold in the cup holder, and told himself, for the four-hundredth time, that he was not a creep.
It was a fair question. He’d asked it of himself honestly. A man who couldn’t stop thinking about a woman he’d never spoken to: there was a word for that, and it wasn’t a nice one.
But he didn’t follow her. He’d never once looked up her address, though it would’ve taken two minutes. He didn’t stalk her social media. He just… knew things. The way you know things in a town like Marlow. That she worked at the dental place on Riverside. That she drove a dented blue Civic. That she drank at The Lantern on Thursdays sometimes, and laughed louder than anyone there, and never left with a white guy, and never left with the same Black guy every week either, though there were a few names you heard more than others.
Because that wasn’t what he’d seen in the hallway. He’d seen a woman with a wild side so big and so honest she didn’t bother to hide it in a town where everybody hid everything. Luke had spent his whole life hiding everything. Luke hid the fact that he’d never really wanted anything at all, until that door closed.
And then he wanted something so specific it scared him.
He didn’t want to be one of the men she went into the bedroom with. He’d thought about it, pictured it, and it never quite fit. What fit, what made his whole body go hot in the van, what he thought about in the shower and in the crawlspaces of strangers’ houses with a flashlight in his teeth, was the hallway. Being the one who was there. Being the one she looked back at. Knowing.
And then, after, being the one she came home to.
It was crazy. He knew it was crazy. He was a twenty-four-year-old HVAC tech with a savings account and a decent credit score and a van that smelled like refrigerant, and he had decided, more or less, somewhere around month six, that he was going to marry Jenna Kowalski.
He hadn’t said one word to her.
Last month, he’d gotten close. He’d been at the Hy-Vee self-checkout with a frozen pizza and a bag of apples, and she’d come up to the machine beside him in her scrubs with a basket of limes and tortilla chips and a twelve-pack, and the machine had yelled UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA at her, and she’d said, “Oh, fuck you,” to it, sweetly, like you’d say it to a friend.
Luke had laughed. Out loud. She’d glanced over.
And he’d frozen so completely that his own machine timed out and asked him if he needed more time, in a loud robot voice, twice, while she looked at him with one eyebrow up.
“You good?” she’d said.
He’d nodded. Like an idiot. Nodded, paid, and walked out without his apples.
He thought about the apples a lot.
He had one more call tonight, a no-heat in a duplex on Sycamore. He started the van.
Terrence Hale was thirty-one, a lieutenant at Station Two, and the calmest man Jenna had ever met. He came through her door at six-forty with a twelve-pack of exactly the beer she’d asked for, kissed her on the forehead first, which he always did, and said, “You smell like mint and other people’s mouths.”
“That’s the most romantic thing anybody’s said to me all week.”
“I know. I’ve been practicing.”
They didn’t go to bed right away. They never did, and that was part of why she’d kept him for three years while other men came and went. He sat on her secondhand couch with the ugly floral pattern her grandma had left her and put his arm along the back, and she curled into him, and they drank one beer each and talked.
She told him somebody had written BBC SLUT in the dust on her back windshield in the Riverside lot again, and he went quiet.
“You want me to find out who?”
“No. I want you to not make it a thing.”
“It’s a thing, Jen.”
“It’s dust,” she said. “I went through a car wash. Problem solved.” She tipped her bottle at him. “You know what I am, T. I know what I am. Everybody else can write whatever they want on whatever window they want.”
He looked at her for a long moment, in that steady way he had, like he was reading a smoke pattern on a wall.
“What are you?” he said.
She thought about it honestly, because he deserved an honest answer. “I’m a girl who knows what she likes,” she said. “And I’m not sorry about it. And I’m not giving it up for some guy who wants me to be sorry about it.”
“Nobody’s asking you to.”
“Somebody always eventually asks.” She shrugged. “That’s why I don’t date.”
“I know.” He set his beer down. “You want to stop talking now?”
“God, yes.”
He kissed her. Terrence kissed like he did everything, unhurried and thorough, and she melted into it the way she always did, her hand going flat on his chest, feeling how big he was through the navy t-shirt, feeling his heartbeat steady under her palm. When he pulled her into his lap she went willingly, straddling him on her grandma’s couch, and felt him already thick and hard against the inside of her thigh through two layers of denim.
“Bedroom,” she said into his mouth.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Don’t you dare.”
In the lamplight, he undressed her slowly, the gray t-shirt first, then her bra, his big hands cupping her breasts and his thumbs dragging across her nipples until they went tight and she sucked in a breath. He kissed down her stomach, past the soft little curve she’d stopped hating at twenty, and peeled her jeans and underwear down together and knelt on her rug between her knees.
“T—”
“Shh. Let me.”
He licked her the way he kissed, slow, patient, like a man with nowhere to be. His tongue flat and broad from the bottom of her to the top, then circling her clit until her hips started rolling up toward his mouth on their own. He slid two thick fingers into her, curling them, and she grabbed a fistful of his short hair and said his name in a way that wasn’t a word anymore. When she came, it rolled through her slow and deep, her thighs shaking around his ears, and he didn’t stop until she pushed his head away, laughing and gasping.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Your turn. Get up here.”
He stood and pulled his shirt over his head, and she sat up on the edge of the bed to unbuckle his belt herself, because she liked this part, she had always liked this part, and she was not going to pretend she didn’t. She pushed his jeans and boxers down his hips and his cock came free, heavy, dark, thick enough that her fingers didn’t meet around it, hard and curving up toward his stomach.
“Hi,” she said to it.
“You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m saying hello. It’s polite.” She looked up at him through her eyelashes, smiling, and then she took him in her mouth.
She loved the weight of it on her tongue. She loved the stretch at the corners of her lips, and the salt of him, and the way his breathing changed, the way that calm, unflappable man’s stomach went tight and his hand came to the back of her head, not pushing, just holding. She took him as deep as she could, which was not all the way, and never had been, and wrapped her hand around the rest and stroked him slow while she sucked, until he was groaning her name and his thighs were trembling under her other hand.
“Jen. Jen, if you want me inside you—”
She let him go with a wet sound and lay back across the bed and opened her knees. “I want you inside me.”
He climbed over her, and she reached down between them and guided him, and the first push was what it always was, that moment of almost-too-much, the thick blunt head of him stretching her open, and she gasped and dug her nails into his shoulders. He held still for her, like he always did. His forehead against hers. Breathing.
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. God. Keep going.”
He sank into her inch by slow inch, and she felt every one, felt herself opening around him until he was all the way in and she was so full she couldn’t think of anything else. Not the dust on her windshield. Not the women at the post office. Nothing. Just this. Just this heavy, warm, complete feeling that was the closest thing to church she’d ever known.
He fucked her slow at first, long deep strokes that dragged against everything inside her, and then, when she started meeting him, when she wrapped her legs around his back and said “harder,” he gave her harder. The bed frame knocked the wall. Her grandma’s quilt slid half off the mattress. She came again with him buried deep, clenching around his cock, crying out loud enough that the neighbor’s dog started barking through the duplex wall, and Terrence laughed breathlessly into her neck and kept going.
“Turn over,” he said.
She turned over. He pulled her hips up and back and slid into her from behind, and that angle was always the one that wrecked her, the one that hit something deep and made her eyes roll. She pushed back onto him with her face in the pillow, her hands fisted in the sheets, saying yes, yes, there, fuck, don’t stop, and he didn’t stop, one big hand flat on her lower back and the other gripping her hip, his thrusts going ragged.
“Where,” he panted. He always asked.
“Inside. Inside me, T, please—”
He drove into her deep and held there, and she felt him pulse, felt the heat of him flooding into her, and he made a sound low in his chest like something breaking open, and she came a third time just from that, from feeling it, from being filled. They collapsed together in a sweaty heap, his weight half on her, his heart slamming against her back.
For a long time neither of them said anything. The dog next door gave up barking.
“You okay?” he finally said.
“I’m the most okay anyone has ever been.”
He laughed and rolled off her and pulled what was left of the quilt over both of them. She lay with her cheek on his chest, feeling him leak out of her, warm and slow, and didn’t care at all.
“Can I say something without you getting weird?” Terrence said.
“No.”
“I’m gonna say it anyway.” He ran his hand down her hair. “One day some guy’s gonna come along who wants all of you. Not just this part. Not instead of this part, either. All of it.”
She snorted. “In Marlow?”
“Stranger things.”
“Name one.”
He thought about it. “There was a pig in the Hy-Vee last spring.”
She laughed so hard she had to sit up. “That’s not stranger, that’s Iowa.”
“I’m just saying.” He tucked his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling. “If he does, don’t run him off just ’cause he’s not what you’re used to.”
“T. I don’t date.”
“I know you don’t.”
He fell asleep a little after eleven. Jenna didn’t. She lay in the lamplight with a sore, satisfied ache between her legs and the quilt kicked off, and thought, for no reason she could name, about a guy at the Hy-Vee self-checkout last month. Brown hair. Work jacket. A nice, awkward face. He’d laughed when the machine yelled at her, a real laugh, surprised out of him, and then looked at her like she’d caught him at something.
He’d left his apples.
She’d almost run after him with them. She’d stood there in her scrubs holding his bag of Honeycrisps like an idiot, and by the time she got to the door, the white van was already pulling out.
She still didn’t know why she’d wanted to.
On the other side of a duplex wall, Luke Brenner finished the no-heat call at eleven-fifteen. A cracked igniter. Twenty minutes and a part from the van. The old lady who lived in the left half of the duplex paid him in cash and a slice of pie he didn’t want, and apologized for the noise from next door.
“The girl in the other half,” she said, lowering her voice, as he packed up his tools. “She has company on Fridays. That dog of hers goes crazy.”
Luke paused with his hand on the toolbox latch.
“Blue car out front?” he said, before he could stop himself.
“That’s her.” The old lady made a face, half disapproving, half fascinated, wholly Marlow. “Sweet girl, honestly. Cleaned my teeth once. But Lord.”
Luke walked out to his van and sat behind the wheel for a long time with the engine off, looking at the warm yellow light in the right-hand window of the duplex, the dented blue Civic in the drive, and the big pickup parked behind it with a Station Two decal on the bumper.
He didn’t go to the door. He didn’t go to the window. He wasn’t that guy.
But he sat there with his heart pounding and his whole body lit up, imagining it. The lamp. Her laugh. The door closing. Being the one who knew.
And then, finally, being the one she came home to.
He started the van.
Monday, he decided. Monday he’d say something. Anything. Even if it was just you were right about the self-checkout machine.
He pulled out onto Sycamore, and in the right-hand window of the duplex, for half a second, a woman’s silhouette passed in front of the lamp, stopped, and turned toward the street, toward the white van pulling away, as if she’d heard something she couldn’t name.
Then the lamp went out.
