Chapter VIII
VIII
Teddy
Just after five o’clock in New York, I’m home and contemplating a take-out order when my phone rings from my back pocket. I answer like it’s an emergency.
“Is it snowing there?” she asks, her tone soft, devoid of her signature intensity.
“What’s your weather app say?”
“Don’t be an asshole. I’m homesick. Comfort me.”
“There’s snow in Copenhagen, if I’m not mistaken?”
“But it’s not New York snow. It’s too clean here. I mean, it’s a perfect city, and everyone’s so hot, but there are no brown puddles of slush or late-night karaoke dives. I miss the messiness. I miss New York.”
We’re messy , I want to say. But instead I turn over her comment in silence.
There’s just the sound of me opening a beer and reclining on the sofa, my body going through the familiar motions while my head spins in every direction.
Marin’s never sentimental like this. She’s devoid of longing or nostalgia. Then it hits me.
“Oh my god, Marin, you’re high, aren’t you?” In response, she unleashes her perfect, earth-pausing laugh, the one that’s haunted me since that shitty bar in Illinois.
“Sue me, Teddy. I had a single square of mushroom chocolate two hours ago. And I’m not calling for legal advice. Is that OK?”
“It’s fine.” My heart quickens. “It’s great. But it’s late for you?”
“I stay up past my bedtime for a very select number of people. You’re one of them.”
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I mentally play out the fantasy where she tells me it was always me, we repeat that kiss, and I am finally able to feel the press of her thighs against my hips.
We throw a courthouse wedding with Carter and Sloane as witnesses and have a million more of these conversations without creating excuses to do so.
All it takes is her telling me she likes staying up to talk to me for my mind to slip out of control and bolt off to an imagined distant future.
The snow colors the East River outside my windows a shade of deep blue, and we fall into an easy conversation.
We talk about the vanCarter is renovating for his and Sloane’s cross-country summer road trip.
We don’t discuss that both of us have kept these calls a secret from our best friends.
I don’t need Marin to admit she hasn’t told Sloane because Carter would have brought it up with me if she had.
I realize I’m pacing at some point, desperate to channel all this excitement—this disbelief at the path we seem suddenly to be on—into something. When I mute my phone to pee, I try to ignore the oven flashing eight o’clock. Marin sounds more awake than she did earlier, somehow.
At almost nine, my phone drops to low battery, and I climb into bed to charge it and slip under the covers.
“If you really think about what’s in a lake long enough, it will keep you from jumping off the dock.
” Marin’s making her case for her distaste of large, still bodies of water.
“I’m not saying that as a metaphor.” I debate running to my closet to grab sweats but worry any sudden movements might shift the entire conversation, keep it from teetering at the edge of friendship.
I burrow deeper under the blankets instead.
She pauses mid-sentence. “Are you in bed?”
“It’s where my charger is, Mar. I’m assuming you’re in bed too. Even if I’m trying to keep myself from doing the plus-six time zone math because of how late it is for you.”
“My sleep schedule... this doesn’t bother me.
I have this massive king here, and not to induce apartment envy, but it barely fills out my bedroom.
” I picture her curled up in one of those beds you see in Flatiron showroom windows—all-white linen and fluffy pillows.
I want to see her in it. Want to know what she wears to sleep.
I picture boxer shorts, and I feel myself getting hard.
“My arm and leg can touch both bedroom walls from mine, so consider me jealous.”
I’m not greedy enough to wish we were on a video call. Her voice is enough, more than enough. But I realize, in this moment, that I’ve been picturing her in my head this whole time, trying to conjure her, but my images of her are all years old or via work Zoom.
“Teddy, when was the last time we were together? Was it really karaoke?”
After that night, I promised myself I wouldn’t let Marin go again, not the way I had when I dropped her off at her first apartment or when she slipped into a cab outside of Sing Sing. I owe it to every single sacred memory of the two of us to be honest.
“Marin, you know it was,” I start. Then, afraid of spooking her, I sigh and pull back. “You took a chance on a Katy Perry song that very much did not pan out in your favor.”
“I could say the exact same to you about the Paul Simon impersonation you did, but I won’t, because I agreed to a Karaoke NDA, if you’ll recall.”
I have a retort at the ready, but I swallow it.
Tell her. Having this window but not saying something, ruminating on it for another year—well, that feels worse than the risk of rejection.
I close my eyes. “I wanted to kiss you so much that entire night, from the second I spotted you at Josie’s.
Every part of me was trying to be cool enough not to grab your face in front of your very hot girlfriend and re-create the moment at that highway-exit dive bar. ”
There’s silence, not the cold kind I’m used to from Marin on work calls when I can sense she thinks someone is stupid.
This is something gentler. I can feel her contemplating the weight of her next move.
If she hangs up on me, at least I got it off my chest, but where would that leave us?
Whatever arousal I felt imagining her in bed has been bulldozed by the fear that I’ve toppled the first domino.
“Well, I probably wouldn’t have kissed you,” she starts. I’m gutted, red in the face in a dark room. I hear her readjusting her blankets, maybe turning on her side. “But I think about that dive bar all the time.”
Relief floods my system. I’m not completely alone. Even if her feelings for me pale in comparison to mine for her. I fight the urge to make a joke. The tension is clear, but I know it’s worth staying inside of it—how often do I have access to this side of Marin?
“I keep expecting another kiss to feel like that.” I want to be honest without freaking her out. I worry I’ve gone too far.
“I think a lot of it was the nerves of moving to the city and being exhausted from the drive,” she rationalizes. Then she pauses, and I steel myself to reply with “Of course” or “Right.” But she’s not done. “It was all those things, but it was also you, Teddy. Us.”
My breath hitches. I could listen to her say my name over and over and over and find a new reason to rejoice every time.
Fuck caution. I want all the risk associated with telling Marin how I really feel.
Whatever strategy or restraint I’ve been exercising hasn’t worked thus far. I make the decision. I’m all in.
“Mar, I think about it every time I kiss someone for the first time. I always wonder if it’ll feel as... earth-shattering as ours did.” I wait, realizing my voice is shaking a little. “It never does.”
“Not even with Caroline?” Her voice is lower, gravelly and perfect. It makes me shudder, the intimacy of it. I’m no longer imagining her a phone call away. She’s here, next to me.
I feel enough shame that I can’t say Caroline’s name but not enough to keep from confessing.
“It’s only ever been you.” My guilt is buried under the thrill of my proximity to the real, unarmored version of Marin.
The part of her that’s as hard to catch a glimpse of as unblemished New York City snow.
I close my eyes, taking in the moment one inhale, exhale at a time.
The quiet doesn’t scare me anymore. What terrifies me is what I hear myself say next, emboldened by the desire—the need —for Marin to know how close I feel to her even in her absence.
“If we were together, right now, what would we be doing?”