Chapter IV
IV
Marin
I climb into bed at the Best Inn and Suites across the street from the pub.
I am actively trying to stop fixating on images of Teddy.
His deep-green eyes. They never left me from the second we parked to the moment we started to kiss.
The movie projector in my head keeps rolling on the way his pupils dilated as he leaned in with parted lips and pressed them against mine.
How he rocked on his back foot, pretending to pick any song other than “Hotel California” at the jukebox, trying not to smile.
His jawline. I try tirelessly to think of anything else—this morning with Georgie, my first camp counselor, Tom Selleck in the eighties—but Teddy’s the only thing on my brain.
I toss and turn on the worn mattress, weighing whether the vibrator somewhere in my bag will help conjure sleep or delay it further.
The reality of the situation sinks in the same way it does when I’m fighting a cold or a UTI and attempting to convince myself it’s not really happening: I have a crush.
It is undeniable. I sigh as I pull the scratchy comforter over my head.
Pulling the door shut, my emotions a jumble of live wires, I roll my shoulders back, determined to play it as cool as possible.
I’m about to start the rest of my life. That’s overwhelming enough.
As the elevator descends, I find myself attempting to organize my feelings into tidy compartments in my mind and tuck them away.
One box for my grief. Another for my anxiety about being so far from Sloane.
A third for this sudden tug toward Teddy.
Now he’s within my line of sight, standing in the lobby by the coffee station, freshly showered. “Hi,” I mutter, trying to avoid eye contact. He looks up, sincere, and gestures as I approach.
“Milk? Or these weird flavored creamers? How’d you sleep?”
“Black,” I respond. I slept like my whole body knew you were just down the hall.
“Of course.” He passes me a cup and reaches for my bag without making it a thing, and we head to the car, me trailing a few steps behind.
The fact of the matter, the ten-hour fact of the matter ahead of us, lingers. Last night happened. But I don’t want to talk about it. I buckle myself in and pull on my sunglasses. “Chicago traffic is going to be awful. I’ll help navigate.”
Indiana’s out the windows. Suburban sprawl and cornfields alternate under billboards advertising lawyers and salvation.
I glance at Teddy as I snack on pistachios.
He’s tough to read. Almost like he’s been media trained, but it could just be emotional repression—or maybe that’s me projecting.
His Wayfarers fit his face like a presidential hopeful.
I notice his arms— how many times can I notice his arms?
—muscular under a white T-shirt, and the way his grip is loose but steady on the wheel.
His hands make my stomach flip. Imagining them tracing my body is fair play , I tell myself.
The second we get to the city, it’s over.
“I still think we’ll be friends, Marin,” he says, almost at a whisper.
I drop a shelled pistachio into his open palm as a peace offering. He couldn’t even wait an hour to bring it up. “I know you do. And I hope we are, Teddy. Someday, maybe you’ll be my old friend from Iowa, a place I haven’t been in years.”
“But why New York?”
I look up and see that we’re approaching Cleveland, and the midday sun is hitting Teddy’s hair, bringing out the copper tones.
I’d been in my own world, at that moment in the kiss loop where he reached his left hand to the small of my waist and tugged on my belt loop.
Daydreaming about a person in his presence is a universal sign you’re a goner.
So is sharing vulnerable childhood memories.
“My dad took me to New York when I was eleven. Just me and him—not my sister, not my mom. He said I was his city kid. We saw Broadway shows and ate nachos at a fancy restaurant in Central Park.”
“Nachos at a fancy restaurant sounds like a perfect date, honestly.”
I laugh, trying not to linger on the choice of the word “date” and continue. Teddy keeps messing with the nonexistent AC and finding reasons for his hand to drift across the imagined boundary between us.
“New York was a completely different world. And even then, as a kid, I fell in love with that idea. I knew I’d come back, and then when he died, it was the thing I latched on to.
This notion that life could and would be different in almost every way.
I could and would be different if I could just get to the city. ”
We’re quiet, and I think about the magnetic pull New York has had on me for almost half my life.
Starting over there is all I ever hope for.
Though I sometimes question what it says about me that my future looks like a place, I’ve been grateful to have a destination to cling to, even if the rest of my vision lacks.
.. vision. Even though we just met, Teddy is part of my old life, the past I’m desperate to shed.
And as daunted as I am to start from scratch, I can’t have someone I met a day ago hold me back.
Teddy looks over, worried. I wonder if he assumes my silence has to do with nerves, or the way his hand had wrapped around my neck like an old habit when we kissed, or the things we’ve divulged to each other already. It’s somehow all of that and none of that.
“Well, I’ve never been, and I’m terrified.”
I pause before responding, considering whether I find this relatable.
I am terrified, but I’m not scared of the city.
What I fear is anything that might pull me away from it.
“You’ll have new classmates and built-in structure,” I say, and he nods like he needs to hear it.
“You’ll do great.” I rest my head on the window.
He stretches out his right arm, and I hold my breath, wondering if he’s going to touch my shoulder.
But instead he reaches behind us and grabs one of his pillows from the Tetris of the back row—books, garbage bags of sweaters.
“Try getting some rest,” he says as he tucks it between me and the headrest.
Teddy
Marin is asleep practically on my lap, and I’m having a hard time parceling my nerves for law school and my inability to pinpoint my feelings about her.
That’s what I-80 East is good for, I guess.
Last night was a fluke—not indiscretion but a perfect storm of whiskey, nervous excitement, and a small-town cast of supporting characters.
This explanation does not account for the fact that within minutes of safety-locking the door of my hotel room, I was coming into my hand.
So much pent-up desire that all it took was a few strokes, and I was done, like I was sixteen again.
I organize all my thoughts on a mental whiteboard while she naps, careful to stick within five miles of the speed limit.
I’ll graduate from NYU. Get a job at a top law firm after impressive summer internships and perfect grades.
Make lifelong friends and avoid alcoholism.
Meet the woman I’m destined to marry—at a mutual friend’s birthday, maybe, and who would guess that she’s also ready to move back to the Midwest?
Buy the house next to Carter’s grandma’s on Fifty-First Street.
Pass the Iowa bar. Forget about this road trip in a matter of two to seven years.
My dad risked the balance of our life when he cheated, and it didn’t take more than three therapy sessions for me to realize that every decision I make is an attempt to conjure compulsory stability.
Wanting things to be settled and safe is how I cope.
I just wonder how Marin, potentially the total antithesis to my plan, fits.
We’re closer now, and the GPS countdown haunts me from where my phone is propped against the ashtray mount. The inevitability of this drive ending makes my stomach turn, my brain desperately scrambling to make sense of my feelings for Marin before our arrival.
I’m starving, I realize. The last proper meal we ate were those onion rings for dinner.
Carefully, I pull over to search for sandwiches nearby.
I don’t want to wake Marin. I get the sense she doesn’t allow herself to rest like this very often.
Her forehead softens. There’s a piece of hair I want to push behind her ear.
As I pull up to a sub shop, I text Sloane to find out Marin’s ideal sandwich order.
She responds immediately. “She wants an Italian Night Club, but if you ask, she’ll say she wants a Tuna Club.
” Italian it is. It doesn’t occur to me until I’m contemplating the chip selection at checkout that my exchange with Sloane wasn’t tinged with the same fraught thrill I usually experience with any interaction with her.
I wait to eat until Marin wakes up, twenty minutes later.
Unwrapping our sandwiches together in the late afternoon light strikes me as somehow romantically charged.
So mundane as to be intimate. A distinctly different experience than I’ve had consuming dozens of other Turkey Toms in my life. I stuff that notion somewhere unseen.
“Salt and vinegar. Bold choice,” she says, opening the chips I got us to share. “I respect it.”
We reach at the same time, hands brushing, and I promise myself she didn’t feel what I just felt. Except she’s blushing.
It would be simpler to kiss her, but I scan my brain for conversation topics instead, trying to toe the line between making it obvious I want to know everything about her and keeping things chatty.
Before I come up with anything, she asks, “What are you most nervous about?” She licks chip dust off a finger and twists her hair into a bun.