Chapter Four #2
I texted them each a thumbs-up emoji and hid my phone back in my pocket.
“So, do you?” he asked.
“Do I…?”
“Enjoy working at the library.”
“Oh, um—”
Swooping in, he kissed me. It was unexpected and shocking. We had been descending from the fourth floor to the third, and then we weren’t. Flummoxed, I immediately laughed. He pulled back in alarm.
“No,” I said. Then, with another unwanted flash of memory, I corrected myself. “I mean, yes. It’s okay.”
It was happening much faster than I’d anticipated, but perhaps this was how these things went.
Our mouths met again, tentatively at first, and then energetically.
My second kiss! I thought with a thrill.
Well, not my second kiss . But Adam would now and forever be the second man I had ever kissed in a romantic way. It felt like a victory.
He tasted different than Cory. Not unappealing, but odd. I continued to catalog the differences as if I were an outside observer: My head was tipped farther back. The hand on my waist was bigger. The neck that my arms were wrapped around was thicker.
“We could skip the restaurant,” he said against my lips.
My spine stiffened from bottom to top.
He pulled away again. “I only meant if it would be easier for you.”
I swayed as I took a step back.
“I’m sorry.” There was a beat, and then his expression turned apprehensive. “I promise I didn’t mean anything by that. I just thought with your situation, maybe…”
I hugged my coat around my body. “My situation?”
“This deal with your ex. Or I guess he’s still your boyfriend?” As he observed my reaction, he shrank even further. “You didn’t know. You didn’t know that I knew.”
“No,” I said tightly.
“I’m sorry. Oh God. This is awkward.”
My thoughts were tumultuous, confusing, and contradictory. Casual sex with a kind and attractive man was what I wanted, but not with someone who already knew I was an easy lay. But I was using him, too, so wasn’t it better to be on equal footing? Wasn’t this all a good thing?
“You call the shots,” he said. “We could go to your place. Or mine. Or we could still go to a restaurant first—”
“No.” I winced at how fast I said it, because I hadn’t meant to say it at all.
“No to the restaurant, or…”
The night tilted at a wrong angle. He wasn’t being vulgar or doing anything I wasn’t doing, too, but it was wrong. I didn’t understand why, I just knew that it was.
“To all of it,” I said.
“You can’t tell a man that she wants no-strings-attached sex,” Brittany said to Reza.
“But she does ,” he said, panicked.
My mortified friends apologized over the phone as I cried and scalded my tongue on a London fog.
As ashamed and disappointed as Adam had looked, it couldn’t touch the shame and disappointment that I felt.
As soon as I was out of his sight, I’d fled to my car, only to become paranoid about the two drinks.
A few blocks away, there was a teeny walk-up tea kiosk inside a modified red British telephone booth, so I’d gone there to sober up.
Normally I loved the quirky kiosk. Tonight it seemed lonely and pathetic and confused about its place in the world.
“Please stop apologizing.” I sniffled, shivering and huddling with my disposable cup behind a stunted oak tree. The temperature was freezing, but people were still milling around downtown. I didn’t want to be seen. “It’s my fault. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Brittany said. “You just weren’t ready.”
I wiped my runny nose on my glove because I’d forgotten to get a napkin. “I thought I was ready. I wanted to be ready.”
“He wasn’t the right guy,” Brittany said.
“The whole point was that it didn’t need to be the right guy,” I said. Adam was the second person I’d ever kissed, but this no longer felt like a victory. It was special when there had been just one. Now it seemed unfathomable that there had been only two.
“Well,” Reza said, “maybe it doesn’t need to be the right guy, but it still needs to be a right guy.”
“I wish we knew somebody else we could set you up with, but everyone at my studio is a woman,” Brittany said. “And the rest of our friends are either married or literally on the other side of the planet.”
I ground the toe of my shoe into a knobby tree root. “That’s okay. I would never ask you to do this again. And I’m sorry I put you in such a weird position at work, Reza.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, although a catch in his voice made it clear that he’d forgotten about the awkward conversation that awaited him the next time he saw Adam.
It was humiliating to have entangled my friends in all this. And I didn’t mean to tell Sue and Alyssa, and definitely not Elijah, about any of it either. But the problem with being temporarily out of my mind was that I was saying and doing all sorts of things against my best interests.
Because our branch was open Tuesday through Saturday, I had to work the morning after my disastrous Friday-night date.
I arrived late, even later than Macon, and everybody was already chatting and doing the morning prep.
Saturdays were our gossipiest days, so I went straight to scanning the overnight drop so I wouldn’t have to join in.
I was able to play it cool for about five minutes before Alyssa called me out.
Perhaps my unusual quietness gave me away, or perhaps it was my disheveled state.
It had been another night with little sleep and lots of sobbing.
I don’t remember what she asked—probably something as mundane as Are you okay?
You look a little fucked up , except Alyssa didn’t swear.
Whatever it was, my mouth unlocked. Everything spilled out in a torrent, except for the part about Macon.
But he was standing right there with everyone else, listening, and I just vomited it all out in front of him again.
Alyssa looked shocked. Sue looked skeptical. Elijah’s youthful brow was pinched with bafflement. At least we weren’t open yet, so there weren’t any patrons.
“But it’s okay.” I frantically scanned another stack of returns, trying to convey via my body language that everything was fine. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Let me get this straight.” Sue crossed her arms. “You and Cory are going to live as singles for a month. And then you’re getting married .”
“Yes,” I said.
She exchanged a concerned glance with Macon.
He shook his head once at her, slightly.
I often looked to the two of them for advice, but I couldn’t handle their opinions or judgments right now—especially not Macon’s, even though he was still being discreet about the part I had left out.
Sue watched my herky-jerky movements, and her tone grew merciful.
“I’m only wondering if a month is enough time for an experiment of this magnitude. ”
“It’s enough,” I said, perky and bright. “It’ll be fine. I’m fine, don’t worry.”
“See,” she said, “it’s statements like that that worry me.”
“That guy last night…” Alyssa lowered her voice as if there were still a single person here who did not know my most personal business. “You were going to sleep with him? This is about sex?”
I balked. Had I actually told them that? “No. I mean, yeah. But that’s only part of it.”
Macon had been putting the money in our register. At this, he stilled.
My ears rang. My stomach dropped. Macon had only known that I wanted to kiss him.
Date was the word I’d used: Cory and I were going to date other people.
Now I had all but confessed that I would have slept with him, too.
I crumpled—nearly fainted—into my chair.
If he’d thought about my actions, and surely he had, he’d already surmised sex had been on the table.
But maybe he hadn’t. Either way, my confirmation struck us both anew.
Alyssa didn’t seem to notice. “Does this mean you and Cory are polyamorous?”
“What?” I blinked up at her. “No.”
“That’s the literal definition of polyamory,” Elijah said. Literal meanings were important to him.
“It’s temporary,” I said. I wasn’t sure why the word sounded so jarring. I was in favor of polyamory for consenting adults, but it wasn’t something I had ever desired for myself. And it didn’t seem connected to my own situation. “Temporary,” I repeated.
Sue placed a hand on my shoulder and stared down Alyssa and Elijah until they retreated. She asked me quietly, “Do you need to go home?”
“I just need a minute,” I said. Breathed.
“Are you sure? It’s been a slow week. Macon can handle the desk.”
He still hadn’t moved. Nobody else seemed to have noticed.
I tried to give Sue a reassuring smile, but the smile wavered. Her grip tightened on my shoulder to give me strength.
By midday, Sue and Alyssa were hanging around the desk again.
I had become the main subject of interest, so interesting that neither of them noticed the misery radiating from Macon.
I was too inside my own head to resist their attention, so when they pressured me into creating a dating profile right then and there, I didn’t protest for long.
“‘Are your parents ugly?’” I asked.
Sue put on her reading glasses to scrutinize my phone. “Good lord. It really says that.”
The app I was signing up for required me to answer at least fifty algorithmic questions, although it recommended that I answer a few hundred or even a few thousand.
Supposedly, the more I answered, the better matches it would find for me.
I’d answered a few dozen so far. After the predictable lifestyle queries about sex and recreational drug use—some of which I’d read aloud to Sue and Alyssa, but all of which I’d answered privately—the questions had grown stranger.
I was reading everything aloud now, to great amusement.
“Go on,” Alyssa said. “Answer it.”
“No.” I clicked. “My parents are not ugly.” The next question revealed itself. “‘Do you believe in dinosaurs?’”
Sue huffed. “Only in this country do they need to ask that.”