Chapter 26
At first, things moved furiously fast.
They were already kissing and yanking each other’s shirts over each other’s heads when the door slammed shut. There was a kind of tripping, grapevine step they did—like a drunken waltz, almost, swinging wildly toward one piece of furniture, then another—as they continued to kiss and unbutton and unzip, making their stumbling way across the apartment, to Nick’s bed.
But then, when they reached the same place where they’d left off last—nearly naked, down to the thin fabric of underwear—Nick slowed down. But this time was different, and Sawyer understood. She searched his face, then slowed her own kisses, slowed her own urgency, and matched her breathing to his. They peeled off those final layers slowly, and kissed and touched and tasted each other’s bodies all over, with intense care.
When Sawyer finally felt Nick inside her, she gave a small gasp, but she never broke away from his gaze. He seemed to thrill at her gasp; his expression struck her as faintly yet delightedly smug—as though he had just gotten the last word.
But Sawyer knew the night was still young, they had many hours ahead of them, and he had most certainly not gotten the last word. She kissed him deeply and rolled on top, taking her turn at making him gasp.
Later, they lay tangled in each other, still intertwined.
“You’ll stay?” Nick asked.
“Wait—that’s it? We’re done?” Sawyer teased.
He laughed softly. But Sawyer could feel he wanted a real answer.
“Charles is in Chicago,” she said finally, not wanting to hide anything. “He left last Sunday.”
“Ah,” Nick said, with the slightest touch of cynicism.
“What?”
“So I have you on loan.”
“No,” Sawyer insisted. “I’m here.”
He didn’t respond.
A lingering doubt passed through her brain.
“I mean…unless a loan is all you want,” she added.
He frowned, and squirmed to get a look at her face where it was tucked under his chin. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know…” she murmured. “I just don’t want to assume anything about what kind of, um…relationship you want this to be. Maybe ‘relationship’ isn’t even the right word.”
“Ah,” Nick said. “More of that ‘musicians just wanna get laid’ dogma, I see.”
He was making fun of her, but there was a touch of bitterness.
She shifted, embarrassed, and shrugged. “I mean, there’s a lot of ground between friends, and hooking up, and…you know.”
“A commitment?”
Her mind suddenly flashed to Johanna, sneering as she said, ‘Committed’? You make it sound like a mental institution.
“Huh,” Sawyer said, musing on the memory. “That word does sound rather institutional and ominous, now that I think about it.”
Nick laughed. “Sure. OK. I grant you that.”
Then, after a moment, he turned more serious.
“But I’ve been pretty clear, I think,” he said. He paused and added, “I don’t want you just on loan.”
Sawyer smiled quietly to herself, happy.
But in the next few seconds, her mind moved beyond Nick’s bed, Nick’s room…and back to Charles. She closed her eyes for a moment and saw a flash of Charles’s face, felt a pang of the heartbreak for the past they’d shared together.
A long list unfurled in her brain—conversations that needed to be had, wedding arrangements that had to be canceled, the dividing of their things, the awkward tango of moving out.
It was likely to be messy. Not the kind of thing a guy like Nick would sign up for willingly. She recalled again what he had said at the Yale Club, when he’d laid out his rational approach to love and relationships with an air of cynical detachment that had downright stunned her.
“But, Nick…what about the math?”
“The math?”
“You know—the math. Weighing the risks involved in maintaining a boyfriend role in relation to me.”
Nick laughed a little.
“You said it yourself; I’m a bad bet in terms of your math,” she insisted.
“Sawyer,” he replied, “if I’d been applying my ‘math’ with you, we wouldn’t have ever gotten here in the first place.”
“What does that mean?” Sawyer asked with an innocent frown.
He twisted so they were looking at each other again. “I keep trying to tell you. This is something new. Something different. When it comes to you…all the math in the world goes right out the window.”
He pulled her close and tipped her chin to kiss her.
Sawyer spent the entire weekend at Nick’s.
She didn’t go home, not once, not even to get a change of clothes. She showered at Nick’s place (at one point, together—although this arrangement took the focus off of getting clean somewhat, not to mention all but ignored water conservation). He found clothes for her to borrow (“Huh,” he remarked admiringly, upon loaning her a Stones T-shirt, “and people always say Mick Jagger can’t get any sexier…”). He gifted her a toothbrush from Duane Reade, and propped it in the cup in the bathroom next to his own, the handles crisscrossed, the two brush heads facing each other as if in collegial conversation.
When they were hungry, they ordered in. Time became strange and elastic; in one regard, the weekend flew by, yet each moment felt full, as though it contained a lifetime. Neither had any desire to do much outside the apartment itself; there was nothing they would rather be doing than touching each other and soaking up the euphoria that came from simply being near each other.
They left the apartment exactly once, and took a meandering walk together. At Second Avenue and Third Street, they stopped in front of a large glass window belonging to a piercing and tattoo parlor. Inside the red-painted room, two girls who looked like possible NYU students were getting their noses pierced, while a glimpse of a room farther back showed an artist working on a young man’s back tattoo, the needle’s loud buzz faintly discernible through the glass window.
They meandered on, and took a walk through Washington Square Park, pausing to listen to a group of street musicians jamming with drums and a harmonica, then settling in to sit on the steps leading down into the park’s big circular fountain to people watch. Skateboarders whizzed recklessly around them, the wheels making heavy grinding sounds over the paving stones, while small children played in the fountain’s base as though it was one big urban paddling pool. A boom box competed with the street musicians, adding to the cacophony of boisterous noise.
Nick watched Sawyer watching the children splash one another, and grinned.
“How hot are you?” he cajoled.
“Not that hot.” She shook her head, reading his mind.
“OK. So we just run through the middle—just once, real fast,” Nick suggested.
“That water’s disgusting.” Sawyer laughed.
“C’mon!” Nick said. “On hot days like this, I’ve always stared at this fountain but never gone in.”
She gave him a wary look from the sides of her eyes, but already she was beginning to cave. There was pretty much nothing she could resist doing with Nick.
He fished in his pocket and pulled out a coin.
It was a subway token.
“Heads, I run in first. Tails, you run in first.”
“You can’t bet on a subway token,” Sawyer complained.
“Why not? This coin is worth more than most—a dollar fifty, not to mention an invaluable ride anywhere you want to go in our great city’s five boroughs.”
“You really oughta work for the MTA.”
“Heads, I run in first,” he repeated. “Tails, you run in first.”
“What about the side for not running in at all?”
“Sorry—we’ve run out of sides. Just the two,” Nick said.
“And…exactly which is which?”
“?‘New York City Transit Authority’ is heads,” he said. “Duh. And ‘Good for One Fare’ is tails.”
She smirked at him and rolled her eyes, then nodded for him to go ahead.
“Here we go.”
He flipped it, caught it, and slapped it onto the back of his left hand.
“Tails.”
“No way,” Sawyer complained. She reached for the coin. “Is that thing broken?”
“Go on,” he urged, gesturing to the spurting water at the middle of the fountain’s base.
Sawyer pretended to give him a murderous stare. He laughed and waved her on.
She stood up and smoothed down the oversize T-shirt she’d turned into a “dress” by cinching one of Nick’s work ties artistically around the waist.
“At least I’m wearing your clothes,” she pointed out. She glanced at the T-shirt. “And thank God this is black.”
She took a deep breath, then dashed nimbly down the remaining fountain stairs and through the middle of the fountain itself. She heard Nick laughing behind her as she shielded her face and squealed “Sorry! Sorry! Coming through!” to the children playing in the shallows.
When she reached the other side, she came back around on dry ground to where he stood, still laughing. She’d tried to run fast enough to avoid getting soaked, but her bangs were wet and plastered to her forehead, and water dripped off her hair onto her shoulders.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Are you kidding me?” he teased. “Who runs through a fountain in New York City? Do you know the kinds of pathogens and microbes that are probably in there?”
Sawyer gave him another murderous stare. This time she did not have to pretend.
“I’m kidding,” Nick reassured her. “That’s one thing you can count on, actually,” he said. “I don’t go back on my word.”
He handed her the token he’d flipped. “Here. You earned this.”
She shook her head. “That thing already took me on one ride today, thank you.”
“I’ll let you in on a little secret…coins don’t decide anything. People do,” he said. “Some part of you was dying to run in that fountain.”
“Yeah, yeah. A bigger part of me is dying for you to run in that fountain.”
He gave a Cheshire grin and tossed her the token, which she caught purely out of reflex. Sawyer rolled her eyes at him, but with a smile. She watched as he turned and ran into the fountain. When he got to the center, he stopped and stepped up onto the elevated circle in the middle, right in the center of the spurting jets of water, letting them drench him.
“Satisfied?” he shouted up to her.
She waited a long minute before responding.
“OK,” she shouted back. “Satisfied.”
By then the summer sun was directly overhead, beating down on the city without mercy. They were both dry by the time they made it back to Nick’s place, but they took another shower together, anyway.
By Sunday night, Sawyer had to face the truth: she had to return to her apartment before the start of the workweek.
Complicating matters was the fact that she had completely neglected the pile of manuscripts she’d promised Johanna she would read as part of the “increased responsibilities” she’d requested. She would have to play catch-up every night after work for the first few days of the week…and then use the second half of the weekday evenings to get ahead if she wanted to spend the following weekend at Nick’s again.
She explained the situation to him.
“All right,” he agreed. “Until next weekend. We’ve still got summer Fridays to kick things off.”
“Thank God for summer Fridays,” Sawyer said, already looking forward. Then she gave a slight frown as a new thought crossed her mind. “We’re running out of them.”
It was true. There were only two more left before Labor Day, when the publishing and advertising worlds of New York would go back to their regular workday schedules.
“You know, originally I was dreading this summer, stuck in the city,” Sawyer said. “Now it feels like it went too fast.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Nick said. “Together.”