Chapter Three
Jo
It had been some years since I’d last slept in my room in the Adelmans’ Gold Coast penthouse. During my second year of medical
school, the radiator in my studio burst, plunging the temperature of my already shoddily heated apartment into the low forties
and coating my windows in a gray layer of frost. I’d spent a week shivering under piles of blankets before Ezra dragged me
out of “that fridge” into his house and declared a guest room mine. When two weeks passed and my landlord still hadn’t fixed
the heat, I emptied my suitcases into the closet. Put up a whiteboard. Filled the empty bookcase with Osler and Sattar and
Gray’s. Renata’s love for me had been fresh at the time, more a consequence of gratitude than true affection, and she showed
it by leaving small trinkets by my door: boxes of chocolates, a diamond tennis bracelet, unhelpful study guides recommended
to her by her out-of-touch, long-out-of-practice doctor friends.
But a man? Even for Renata, that would be a bit much.
“Um,” the intruder said, jumping jaggedly to his feet. “Sorry. I—I didn’t realize—”
I assessed him. Copper-brown skin gleaming under my bed room lights, neat finger-thick locs that fell artfully over his forehead, stubble that probably reappeared within hours of a shave. Too broad to be one of Renata’s models, too easily flustered to be one of Ezra’s actor friends. His blue velvet smoking jacket was certainly a choice, but he filled it out nicely.
“I promise I’m not a pervert,” he said, and I raised my eyebrows, not sure if I’d anticipated those words in that sequence.
He must have heard himself because he winced. “Oh god. That is definitely something a pervert would say. But I had to say
it, you know, because there’s a very short list of reasons why I could be in your room, and I’m sure you were thinking it.
So yes. Your panties are safe, or whatever.” I raised my eyebrows higher, and he cursed under his breath. “If it helps, I
really want to disappear right now. So, um, let me get out of your space...”
My body moved automatically to block his path.
“Who were you talking to?” I asked. I watched his eyes flit pleadingly to the door. “Earlier, I mean.”
“No one,” he said quickly. Then he dragged a hand down his face. “But you knew that. There’s no one else here. I was talking
to myself.”
“You could’ve been on the phone,” I offered, holding back a smirk when he scowled. To think I’d come into this room to sulk . This was so much more fun.
“Well, I wasn’t.” He sighed, shoving his hands deep into his pockets and rocking forward on the balls of his feet. “All right,
I think I’ve been punished enough. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d really like to leave with at least a shred of my dignity intact—”
“Josephine,” I said suddenly. I thrust out my hand, holding his eyes in a challenge. “Most people call me Jo.”
He stilled. I watched, with fascination, as a full spectrum of emotions crossed his face—bewilderment, embarrassment, curiosity, and then finally, relief.
“Malcolm,” he said, taking my hand in his. “Most people call me Mal.” This time, he held my gaze. From up close, I could see
that his eyes were uniquely shaped: partially hooded, slightly downturned, soul-searching in a way that lent a quiet intimacy
to his regard. They widened, almost imperceptibly, with recognition. “And... please don’t be weirded out, but I think I
know who you are.”
I pursed my lips. I was nowhere near as famous as Ezra, who could barely get a coffee at the Intelligentsia’s on his block
without ending up in a Bustle article critiquing his outfit, but I was niche famous, familiar to health care workers and the
kind of vaguely man-hating doomscrollers who appreciated my frank approach to sex ed and my perspectives on being a woman
in medicine. People like Mal—namely, presumably straight men—were definitely not my target demographic.
“Through social media?” I said.
“Yeah,” Mal said, suddenly shy. “You’re Dr.Jojobee on Instagram, right? We’ve... um... talked before, in the DMs.”
“Oh?” I said, stepping around him to sit on the edge of my bed. “What’s your handle?”
He told me: Inlandwaters (“Made the account in college,” he confessed, sheepish.); and I pulled out my phone, navigating to
our conversation. The second I saw his profile picture, a stylized photograph of a hand crushing a juice box, heat rushed
to my face.
“Oh god ,” I said, scrolling through our conversations. Most of them were likes and thumbs-ups, singular comments (“Have fun,” he’d said, to a video of my roommate Dahlia and me drunk enly belting “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy and Monica on the Ferris wheel in Navy Pier), and the occasional brief exchange on the topic of my most recent posts. But sometimes the conversations were extensive. My most viral post to date, a video in which I responded to a follower’s question about how I communicated my boundaries with my sexual partners with an apparently shocking “Actually, I’ve never had sex,” had generated a surprisingly academic hour-long conversation about virginity as a social construct. In response to my post explaining why I hadn’t started a staff job after residency, he’d said, “I think it’s good that you’re taking some time—whether to rest or to evaluate what you want to do with your life next. We don’t romanticize just existing enough in this culture,” and I’d spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on the couch, encouraging him to massage away my guilt.
The mattress dipped next to me.
“Find anything good in there?” Mal said, a smile in his voice.
“I don’t know if I’ll call it good, ” I said, stunned, still scrolling. “Oh my god, I told you about my mother .”
Mal laughed. Even quietly, it sounded like thunder.
“I thought you were very appropriate,” he said. “And I was touched that you confided in me.”
I peered at Mal out of the corner of my eye. When I first started my social media platform, Dr.Jojobee, I’d answered almost
all of my messages. But when my following exploded, the expectations of parasocial relationships had floored me. Four hundred
thousand people who thought they knew me and therefore owned me, who greeted me with wide smiles and open arms like old friends
when they saw me in real life, who dissected my every move and threw tantrums in my comments section when I made posts criticizing
behavior that they felt echoed their own.
I didn’t know Mal. I hadn’t even known what he looked like. His page was sparse, with only one photo from eight years ago of a significantly lankier, significantly gawkier version of himself, with a face that hadn’t yet hollowed out. But he sort of knew me, and I found that immensely irritating.
“All right, Mal,” I said. “You know that I’m an unemployed doctor who’s never had sex and has serious mommy issues, which
I think puts us on very unequal footing. You owe me some secrets.”
“Secrets?” Mal said, considering. “I don’t really have many of those.”
Somehow, I believed him. There was an openness to his expression that suggested that, unlike half the attendees of this party,
Mal wasn’t accustomed to artifice.
“Truths, then,” I offered. “No low-hanging fruit, though. The kind of truths that you wouldn’t normally tell someone you just
met.”
“Truths,” Mal repeated. “Okay. Well. I’m a writer who used to be a photographer, and I have a pretty good relationship with
my parents. And I have had sex, though I’ll admit it’s been a while.”
I nodded, trying to keep the surprise off my face. Mal had been blessed with good looks, not the kind that would inspire a
double take, per se, but features that got more interesting the longer you looked at them. And there was a steadiness to his
spirit that set me at ease, as if I were talking to an old friend rather than some guy who knew me from the internet and had
been muttering to himself in my bedroom. In the few minutes since our interaction had begun, I’d almost forgotten about Ezra
and Ashley, about Renata, about the loss I was soon to endure.
“A writer,” I said. “And I’m assuming a good one, since Renata invited you.”
“Ha,” Mal said. Suddenly he looked shy again, as if, despite having never read a word of his work, I’d just offered him the highest praise. “Um, who knows. I don’t check my ratings, and I’m only on social media to lurk, so I don’t even really know how my book’s being perceived.”
“What’s the name of your book?” I said, my finger hovering over the search bar to look it up.
Mal scratched the back of his neck nervously.
“ She Blooms at Dusk ,” he said. “Came out last winter.”
My jaw dropped. She Blooms at Dusk had topped the New York Times adult hardcover list for three weeks straight, and I’d seen it all over my feeds, and, more recently, on Renata’s bookshelf.
“Have you read this one yet, Josephine?” Renata had asked me just the other day. “It’s divine. Very different. I think you’ll
like it. And, I think, a great potential project for En Garde.”
“You’re Malcolm Waters,” I said. Inlandwaters. Of course. “Have you met Renata yet? She’s obsessed with your book.”
Mal ducked his head, embarrassed, and I studied his face, trying to piece him together. Most writer types were a bit self-absorbed,
soaking up flattery like neglected houseplants even while they played at humility. But Mal seemed genuinely uncomfortable
with my commentary, as if he’d rather I hadn’t offered it at all.
“She’s who I’m here to see. Just haven’t been able to track her down,” he confessed. He stared at the floor, a muscle in his
cheek twitching. “But honestly, before you showed up, I was thinking about getting out of here. I got a bit, ah, overwhelmed.”
The man I’d seen when I first entered the room had seemed nervous, his legs jostling, his hands anchored on either side of the bed. I’d watched him inhale, count down on his fingers, exhale, breathing exercises that I, being chronically serotonin-deficient myself, recognized on sight.
“Anxious?” I said, nodding sagely.
Mal glanced up at me with saucer-wide eyes.
“A little,” he confessed. “I... don’t do well with people.”
“You’re doing well with me, though,” I said, and I watched him fight a smile, fascinated by the flash of his teeth, by the
way it softened his entire face. It occurred to me, suddenly, that I thought Mal was cute. And not in the passive, fleeting
way that I sometimes found men attractive, but in the way that made me want to see what other expressions he could make.
“That’s... I’m shocked by that,” he said. “I know this isn’t news to you, but you’re stunning . I’m surprised I’ve managed to string a sentence together.”
And there it was: confirmation of mutual attraction. An idea formed in my head, rapidly taking shape as I assessed him. Smart—check.
Respectful—check. Thoughtful—check. Hot— very . Experienced? Well, certainly more than I was, and probably willing to teach, if his insights on my posts were any indication.
A very suitable virgin slayer indeed.
Ezra Adelman didn’t want me. Fine. But Malcolm Waters might, and I was very interested in seeing where that could take me.
I stood, placed a hand on Mal’s, held back my satisfaction when he winced like I was hot to the touch.
“No need for flattery. I was planning to help you out anyway,” I said, guiding him to his feet. “Come on. Let’s go find Renata.”