Twelve
Wait. Wait wait wait wait wait. Wait wait wait. Wait.” In the center of my Mac’s monitor, Mara holds up both index fingers to command Hannah’s and my attention. Despite the fact that she already had it. “Wait. What you’re saying is that all this time we’ve been doing weekly summoning circles to give this guy disfiguring genital warts and toenail funguses and those giant subcutaneous pimples people get surgically removed on YouTube . . . but he did not, in fact, deserve any of it?”
I groan. “No. I don’t know. Yes. Maybe?”
“Related question: How long were you in that elevator?” Hannah asks.
“I’m not sure. One hour? Less? Why?”
She shrugs. “Just wondering if this could be Stockholm syndrome.”
I groan again, letting myself fall back on my bed. Ozzy shuffles over to sniff me, just to make sure that I haven’t turned into a cucumber since the last time he checked. Then he scurries away, disappointed.
“Okay,” Mara says, “let’s backtrack. Is what he told you believable?”
“No. I don’t know. Yes. Maybe?”
“I swear to God, Sadie, if you—”
“Yes.” I straighten up. “Yes, it does make sense. I did detail my framework for sustainability proposals in my published article, and I detailed it even more in my thesis—”
“Which you maybe should have embargoed,” Hannah interjects, playing with her dark hair.
“—which I definitely should have embargoed, so it’s possible that someone who read my stuff could have used it to mimic my pitch. Of course, when it comes to actually doing the work, they won’t have the expertise Gianna or I have, but that’s a problem for later. I guess that what Erik said is . . . conceivable.”
“So, no genital funguses?” Mara asks. “I mean, it seems only fair, considering that you did publish that article and write that thesis to encourage people to adopt your approach.”
“Right. Yeah.” I close my eyes, wishing for the seventeenth time in the past two hours that I could vanish into nothingness. Maybe since the last time I checked, a portal to another dimension has appeared in my closet. Maybe I can travel to Noconsequencesofmyownactionsland. “I didn’t really figure it would be used by my direct competitors.”
“I realize that,” she says, with a tone that suggests a strong but. “But, I’m not positive that it’s Erik’s fault, either.”
“And he did apologize,” Hannah adds. “Also, the fact that he read your dissertation is kind of cute. How many of the guys I’ve slept with have read my stuff, do you think?”
“No clue. How many?”
“Well, as you know, I firmly believe that sex and conversation don’t mix well, but I’d estimate . . . a solid zero?”
“Sounds about right,” Mara says. “Plus, you said he offered to find a way to fix the situation. And that just doesn’t seem like something he would do if he didn’t care about you.”
“Agreed.” Hannah nods. “My vote is for no genital pimples.”
“Same. I am dissolving the summoning circle as we speak.”
“No, wait, no dissolving, I—” I scrub my eyes with the heels of my hands. “Whose side are you guys even on?”
“Yours, Sadie.”
“Unlike you,” Hannah adds.
“I— What does that even mean?”
They exchange a look. I know we’re on a Zoom call and it’s technically impossible for them to exchange a look, but they are exchanging a damn look. I can feel it. “Well,” Hannah says, “here’s the deal. You meet this guy. And you boink him. And it’s really good boinking—yay. The day after, you find out that he’s a dick, which sends you on a three-week downward curlicue of tears and Talenti gelato that’s about twelve times more intense than the time you broke up with a dude you’d been dating for years. But then you find out that it was all a misunderstanding, that things might be fixable, and . . . you leave? You said he wanted to talk more, and it’s obvious that you’re interested in hearing what he’s saying. So why did you leave, Sadie?”
I stare at Hannah’s implacable, matter-of-fact, kind eyes, which go very well with her implacable, matter-of-fact, kind voice, and mutter: “I liked it better when you were in Lapland.”
She grins. “I did, too, which is why I’m trying to get back there—but let us return to discussing your terrible communication skills.”
“They’re not that bad.”
“Eh. They kind of are,” Mara says.
I glare at Mara, too. I’m an equal-opportunity glarer. “You know what? I will accept that my communication skills are poor, but I refuse to be shamed by someone who’s on the verge of going ring shopping with the dude she once nearly called the cops on because he left a CVS receipt in the dryer.”
“Pfft, they’re not going ring shopping.” Hannah waves her hand dismissively. “I bet she’s going to get some kind of family heirloom.”
“Doesn’t he have older brothers?” I ask. “They probably already ran out of heirlooms four weddings ago.”
“Oh yeah. Maybe there will be some shopping. You think he’s going to call us from some D.C. mall’s Claire’s asking us which ring Mara would prefer?”
“Oh my God, you know what? Last week I read somewhere that Costco sells engagement rings— Oh, hi, Liam.”
Mara’s boyfriend enters the screen and comes to stand right behind her. In the past few weeks he’s become a sort of informal fourth in our calls—an occasional guest star, if you will, who mines for embarrassing grad school stories about Mara and kindly offers to murder our asshole male colleagues when we complain. Considering that our first introduction to him was Mara plotting to booby-trap his bathroom, it’s surprisingly fun to have him around.
“Really, guys?” he asks, all frowny and dark and cross-armed. “Claire’s? Costco?”
Hannah and I both gasp. “Costco is amazing.”
“Yeah, Liam. What do you have against Costco?”
He shakes his head at us, presses a kiss on the crown of Mara’s head, and exits the frame. I’m a fan, I must say.
“Okay,” Mara says, “going back to your poor communication skills.”
I roll my eyes.
“Are you still angry at Erik?” Hannah asks. “Because you spent weeks being sad, and furious, and sadly furious. Even if you now know that your reasons weren’t as valid, I feel like it would still be hard to let go of that. So maybe that’s the issue here?”
I think about Erik’s hand closing around my arm in the lobby. About the way he kept looking at me when the elevator restarted: focused, intent, like the world could spin twice as fast as normal and he still wouldn’t have cared, not if I were nearby. I don’t let myself recall the words he said, but a memory resurfaces, of us laughing and standing in his kitchen and eating Chinese leftovers, and I don’t push it down. For the first time in weeks, it’s not soaked in resentment and betrayal. Just the achy, poignant sweetness of the night we spent together. Of Erik turning up the thermostat when I said I was cold, then wrapping his large, warm hands around the soles of my feet. That feeling of being right there, on the brink of something.
I don’t think I’m angry, not anymore.
“It’s not that,” I say.
“Okay. So the problem is that you don’t believe him?”
“I . . . No. I do. I don’t think Gianna deliberately lied to me, but she didn’t have all the facts.”
“What is it, then?”
I swallow, trying to prod at the reason my stomach feels leaden, the reason I’ve been feeling sick with disappointment and fear ever since finding out the truth. And then it hits me. The one thing I have been actively trying not to verbalize hits me just as I say, “It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
I close my eyes. Yes. That’s it. That’s why. “Because I ruined it.”
“Ruined it, how?”
Now that I can name it for what it is, the horrible feeling grows, acid and bitter in my throat. “He won’t be interested in me. He met me and thought that I was funny, that he had tons of things in common with me, that he really liked me, and then I . . . I acted like a totally irrational, absurd, deranged person and blocked his number and accused him of fucking corporate espionage and maybe he wants to set the record straight, maybe he hates the idea of me thinking that he’s a horrible person, but there’s no way he wants to pick up where we left off and—aaaargh.” I bury my face in my hands.
I fucked up. I just . . . I fucked up. And now I have to live with the knowledge of it. I have to go on in a world in which no man will ever compare to Erik Nowak. No man will ever make me laugh, and make my body sing, and make my soul absolutely indignant with his outrageous opinions on Galatasaray—all at once.
“Oh, honey.” Mara cocks her head. “You don’t know that.”
“I do. It’s likely.”
“That’s not the point.” Hannah leans closer to the screen till all I can see are her beautiful face and dark eyes. “Okay, so Erik now knows that you occasionally display an appalling lack of conflict-resolution initiative.”
I groan. “I really wish I had the emotional fortitude to hang up on you.”
“But you don’t. What I’m saying is, maybe Erik will decide that you’ll make for a terrible girlfriend who overreacts and is more trouble than you’re worth. Maybe he’ll decide that he wants to bitch about you on the relationship subreddit. But if you cut him out like you did three weeks ago, you’d just be making this decision for him.”
I blink, confused, suddenly remembering why I went into engineering. Logarithmic derivatives are so much easier than this relationship shit. “What do you mean?”
“Sadie, I know you like this guy a lot. I know that if he does decide that he doesn’t want you in his life it’s going to hurt, and that you’re tempted to preemptively pull back to protect yourself. But if you don’t at least give him a chance to choose you, you’ll lose him for sure.”
I nod slowly, trying to think past the hard knot in my throat. Letting the idea—go for it, just go for it, ask for what you want, be brave—slowly seep through me. Remembering Erik. Remembering the breeze hanging between us on a park bench, on a deserted sidewalk. The way my stomach fluttered at the feelings it carried. Of possibilities. Of maybe.
This is my new happy place, Erik murmured into the shell of my ear the second time we had sex that night. And then he pushed my sweaty hair away from my forehead, and I looked up at him and thought, His eyes are the exact color of the sky when the sun shines. And I always, always loved the sky.
“You’re right,” I say. “You’re so right. I should go to him.”
Hannah smiles. “Well, it’s actually what, one a.m. in New York? I was thinking more of a phone call tomorrow morning. Around ten.”
“Yes. I should go to him right now.”
“That’s the exact opposite of—”
“I gotta go. Love you.”
I hang up and bounce out of bed, looking for a jacket and my phone. I start ordering an Uber, except—shit. I know where Erik lives, but not his address. I run to the door, simultaneously looking for my keys and typing the closest landmark to his apartment that I can recall. How the hell do you spell—
“Sadie?”
I look up. Erik is standing in my open door. Erik, in all his tall, unsmiling, Corporate-Thorship splendor. Wearing the same clothes he had on when I left him plus a light jacket, his hand up in midair and clearly about to knock.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“No. Yes. No. I . . .” I take a step back. Another. Another. Erik stays right where he is, and my cheeks burn. Am I hallucinating him? Is he really here in Astoria? In my apartment? I hear a loud thunk, and my keys are on the linoleum floor. I need a nap. I need a seven-year nap.
“Here.” He bends down to pick up the keys, pauses for a second to study my soccer ball key chain, and holds them out to me. “Can I come in for five minutes? Just to talk. If you feel uncomfortable, the hallway’s okay, too—”
“No. No, I . . .” I clear my throat. “You can come in.”
A brief hesitation. Then a nod as he steps in and closes the door behind him. But he doesn’t move any farther inside, stopping in the entrance and simply saying, “Thank you.”
I was coming to you, I open my mouth to say. I was on my way to tell you many, many confusing things. But the surprise of seeing him here has frozen my bravery, and instead of flooding him with the impassioned speech I would have typed on my Notes app in the Uber, I just stare. Silent.
For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with me—
“Here,” he says, holding out a phone. His phone.
Uh? “Why are you giving this to me?”
“Because I want you to look through it. The passcode is 1111.”
I glance at his face. “1111? Are you joking?”
“Yeah, I know. Just ignore it.”
I snort. “You can’t ask me that.”
He sighs. “Fine. You are allowed one comment.”
“How about one one one one comments—”
“That’s it. Your comment, you used it up. Now—”
“Come on, I have way more to—”
“—will you please unlock the phone?”
I pout but do as he says. Mostly out of sheer bewilderment. “Done.”
He nods. “If you click on my email app, you’ll find my work correspondence. Most of those messages are highly confidential, so I’m going to ask you not to read them. But I want you to search for your last name.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s all there. The emails. Me requesting your thesis. Me circulating it to ProBld like an asshole. A couple of instances of me generally discussing your writing. The timeline should confirm what I already told you.” I stare at him. Speechless. Then he continues, and it gets worse. “This is all I can think of, but if there’s anything else I can show you that will help you believe that Gianna misinterpreted things, let me know. I’m happy to leave my phone here. Take however long you want to go through it. If someone calls or texts, ignore them.”
It’s the calm, earnest way he’s looking at me that does it. It snaps what’s left of my terror of being rejected, and I’m abruptly done with whatever fearful bullshit my brain is trying to feed me.
A new knowledge uncurls inside me, and I instantly know what to do. I know how to do it. And it starts with clutching his phone tight, stepping closer, and sliding it into the pocket of his jacket. I let my hand linger inside for a second, feeling the warmth from Erik’s body. The clean cotton. No lint or candy wrappers or empty ChapStick tubes.
I adore it. I love it. My hand wants to slip inside this pocket on rainy fall afternoons and chilly spring mornings. My hand wants to move in and just live here, right next to Erik’s.
But for now, there’s something else I need to do. Which is holding out my own phone to him. He looks at it skeptically, until I say, “My passcode is 1930.”
His mouth twitches. “Year of the first FIFA World Cup?”
I laugh, because . . . yeah. Out of everyone, he would know. And then I feel myself starting to cry, because of course, out of everyone in the entire world, he would know.
“Unlock it, please,” I say between sniffles. Erik is wide-eyed, alarmed by the tears, trying to come closer and to pull me to him, but I don’t let him. “Unlock my phone, Erik. Please.”
He quickly punches in the numbers. “Done. Sadie, are you—”
“Go to my contacts. Find yours. It’s . . . I changed it. To your actual name.” It’s hard to sustain high and prolonged levels of hatred for someone who’s saved on your phone with a cutesy nickname, I don’t add, but the thought has me chuckling, wet, watery.
“Done.” He sounds impatient. “Can I—”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Now, please, unblock your number.”
A pause. Then: “What?”
“I blocked your number. Because I . . .” I wipe my cheek with the back of my hand, but there’re more tears coming. “Because I couldn’t bear to . . . Because. But I think you should unblock it.” I sniffle again. Loudly. “So if you decided that you don’t mind the fact that sometimes I can be a total lunatic, and if you want to give me a call and give the . . . the thing we were doing another chance, then I’d be happy to pick up and—”
I find myself pulled into his body, hugged tight against his chest, and I should probably insist on apologizing properly and offer an in-depth debriefing of everything that has occurred, but I just let myself sink into him. Smell his familiar scent. When he smooths my hair back, I bury my face into his shirt and melt, soaking in the silence and the relief.
“I think I just really suck at one-night stands,” I say, muffled into the soft fabric.
“We didn’t have a one-night stand, Sadie.”
“Okay. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never . . .”
“I’ve had enough for both of us, and then some.” He pulls back to look at me, and repeats, “We did not have a one-night stand.”
I don’t make the conscious decision to kiss him. It just happens. One second we’re looking at each other, the next we’re not. Erik tastes like himself and a late-spring night in New York. He holds my head in his palm, presses me into him; he groans, bends down to push me into the wall, and licks the inside of my mouth.
“So we’re good?” he asks, coming up for air. I want to nod, but I forget when he bends down for another kiss, just as deep as the one that came before. Then he remembers his question and repeats, “Sadie? Are we good?”
I close my eyes and bite into his bottom lip. It’s soft, and plump, and I remember the patient way he worked between my legs. I remember coming over and over, the pleasure so strong I couldn’t comprehend it—
“Sadie.” He’s not breathing normally. He takes a step back, like he needs a moment to get himself under control. “Are we good? Because if you think this is a one-night stand, then—”
“No. I . . .” I reach up to his face. This time, when I bring his mouth down to mine, my kiss is slow and gentle. “No. We’re good.”
“Promise?” he asks against my lips.
I nod. And then, because it seems important: “I promise.”
It’s like flipping a switch. One moment he’s looking at me questioningly, the next our hands are on each other, me unzipping his jeans, him unbuttoning my blouse. There is a heat growing between us, a heat that has us work frenziedly, clumsy and too eager. When I tug down his jeans and briefs, his cock springs out, straining and leaking and so hard, it has to hurt. I wrap my hand around him, pump up and down a couple of times, and he groans, a soft, guttural sound. Then he pulls me away, pins my wrist to the wall, and attacks my pants.
His fingers brush under the elastic of my underwear, and when his knuckles graze the damp cloth of my panties it’s all I can do not to spread my legs as far as they’ll go. “Purple,” he rasps out when my slacks are pooled around my ankles. “Finally.”
“Pitch today. Yesterday,” I amend, helping him get rid of my top.
“By the way,” he says, voice scratchy, “last time you left your bra at my place.” He traces the line of the one I have on but doesn’t take it off. Instead, he lowers the lace cups, tucks them under the curve of my breasts. When my exposed nipples harden to points, we both make choked, breathy noises.
“Y-you can keep it.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
His thumb moves back and forth across my nipple. “It’s not exactly in a . . . pristine state.”
I laugh, breathless. “Why? Have you been using it?”
He doesn’t reply. Instead he lifts me up until my legs are wrapped around his hips, pinning me against the wall next to the door even though there’s a bed, a couch, a dozen pieces of furniture just a handful of feet away—and then stops abruptly. “Do you— Are you feeling trapped? Is this—”
“No, it’s good. Perfect. Please, just—”
He hooks his fingers in the crotch of my panties, haphazardly shoves them to the side, and he tries one, two angles that can’t possibly work, but then he adjusts me, he tilts me like I’m no larger than a doll, and on the third try he just . . .
Slips inside. The pressure is enormous, stretching and burning and familiar and inexorable and lovely, and all I can think of is how much I missed this, the sharp feeling of something too big that’s somehow meant to fit inside me, the way he mutters sorry, please, more, almost there.
“I missed you,” he breathes against my temple when he’s reached a full seat, sounding like he’s under great strain. “I only knew you for twenty-four hours, but I’ve never missed anyone so much.”
I moan. An embarrassing, mewling sound that cannot possibly come from my mouth. “For the record.” I feel so full, I can barely speak. “I thought the sex was good.” It’s an understatement. It’s as much as I am physically able to say right now.
“Yeah?” He bites me on the flesh between my neck and my shoulder—not hard enough to break my skin, enough to suggest that he’s not fully in control. It reminds me of our night together, the way he kept me still for his thrusts, the way he made me feel at once powerful and powerless. “That’s good. Because I can’t think of anything else.” He moves inside me. Once, twice. Once more, a little too forceful, but perfect. My forehead leans against his, and he pants into my mouth. “Three weeks, and I could only think of you.”
It lasts less than a dozen thrusts. His mouth is by my ear as he tells me how beautiful I am, how he wants to feel all of me, how he could fuck me every second of every hour of every day. The spasms bloom inside me, drive me mindless, and I cling to his shoulders as my orgasm explodes through my body, wiping my mind clean. Erik, I mouth against his hair. Erik, Erik, Erik. He stays still while I ride it out, a near-silent growl in his throat, the tension in his arms nearly vibrating. Then, when I’m almost done, he asks,
“Should I— Fuck, should I pull out?”
“No,” I exhale. “I’m—we’re good. Pill.”
He comes inside me before I’m done talking, burying the sounds of his pleasure into the skin of my throat.
We stay like that, after. He holds me up, like he knows that I would wobble on my legs if he were to let go of me, and kisses me for long moments. Chaste pecks wherever he can reach, long licks up my sweaty neck, soft hickeys that have me squirming and giggling in his arms. I never, ever want this moment to end. I want to paint it and frame it and hang it on the wall—this wall—and treasure it and make a million more and—
“Sadie?” Erik’s voice is even deeper than usual. I am happy and pliant and relaxed.
“Yeah?”
“Do you still have your hamster?”
“Guinea pig.”
“Same thing. Do you still have it?”
“Yeah.” I pause. “Why?”
“Just making sure that a giant rat isn’t trying to eat my jeans.”
I look down over his shoulder and burst into laughter for the first time in weeks.