Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
An hour later, I burst through the apartment door, hoping against hope that Carrie is still on my sofa, too hungover to make her way home.
Turns out I needn’t have worried—she and Sam are side by side smoking a bowl.
Carrie is infinitely more presentable than when I left her.
She’s freshly showered and back in her jeans, wearing an oversized sweater she’s stolen, I notice, off the back of my desk chair.
The table has been tidied away, the sheet is gone, her water has been replaced by a huge iced coffee. It’s like she lives here.
Sam looks as she always does—head to toe in black, her sleek, straight black hair falling to her shoulders.
As far as I know, she sleeps in her eyeliner.
People sometimes ask me what my roommate is like, and over the years I’ve learned I can sum up her entire personality in a single fact: she has microbangs.
She trims them to deadly precision using a laser tape measure.
“Were you making those fucking cookies yourself?” Sam says, cackling at her own brilliance. Even without the smell of weed gently perfuming our apartment, her slow blink would be a dead giveaway. Sam is very high.
“That took a lot longer than I expected,” Carrie says, emitting a perfect smoke ring with the tilt of her jaw. “So glad I didn’t go with you. No offense.”
“What kind of loser gets up at dawn after a rave and goes uptown to a bakery,” Sam muses.
“The kind of loser who made a pointless bet and lost it,” I say, throwing myself down on Carrie’s other side. She holds her ridiculously pearlescent glass pipe toward me in question, but I decline.
“So do we get to try them?” Sam asks.
“I told Carrie she wouldn’t get any if she didn’t come. I feel like I should stand my ground on principle,” I reply.
“That doesn’t apply to me,” Sam says, reaching for the box. “Hand them over.”
When I told Connor that I knew the girls would want to try some, he wrapped one up for his mom and then sweetly sent me home with the rest of the leftovers, something I’m extremely grateful for now that I know my two best friends have the munchies.
Sam and Carrie rifle through the box of half-eaten cookies, busying themselves for several minutes by breaking off little pieces and sampling each flavor with impressive speed.
“Good, I guess,” Sam says, chewing, then immediately deciding, “No, amazing. These cookies have changed me.”
“Same,” Carrie agrees. “It was absolutely worth Annie lining up all day.”
“I wasn’t lining up all day,” I tell them, segueing nicely into what I really want to talk about. “I was lining up for an hour. Then…”
Sam side-eyes me. “Then…?”
“OK, so you know that guy I work with?”
“No.”
“You do. The one I sit beside.”
“From the gallery?”
I feel the heat spread up my neck. “No, that’s Andy. I’m talking about Connor.”
“Try saying his name without looking like you’ve committed a crime,” Carrie says, grinning.
I clear my throat and continue. “So when I went to wait for the cookies…he was there.”
Carrie reanimates at this tidbit, her hand closing around my knee in a vise grip.
“Oh my god. Are you banging a guy from work?” Sam exclaims, her tone one of awe, or maybe revulsion.
“No,” I say, but my voice cracks, ruining everything. I try again. “Nobody is banging anyone. We’re just…” We’re just nothing. Why am I so embarrassed? “I don’t even know if we qualify as friends. We’re colleagues.”
“ ’Kay,” Sam says.
Carrie guffaws. “Colleagues don’t hang out on Sundays.”
“That’s the thing,” I tell them. “It honestly wasn’t planned. Or,” I pause, thinking. “I didn’t plan it. He just showed up.”
“Do you know what that sounds like to me? A date.”
“It felt like one,” I admit. “Later on, I mean. We went on a big walk through the neighborhood. He took me to a flea market!”
This detail feels particularly damning. You can’t just take a woman to a flea market and expect her not to get ideas.
Sam is quickly losing interest in this conversation. “Straight people are so corny.”
“Shut up, fake goth,” Carrie says, rolling her eyes. “You’d fucking love that and we all know it.”
Interestingly, Sam does not argue the point, but simply crosses her arms with a little humph.
“Keep going,” Carrie orders me, and I do.
I tell her about Connor showing up unannounced, how he brought me a coffee, how we got another coffee, how we wandered around the Upper West Side for hours. All the flirting.
“He likes you,” is Carrie’s official assessment when my story comes to a close. Sam has no opinion—she has left the room.
I shake my head. “He doesn’t.”
“He does,” she insists.
“He doesn’t, Carrie. He’s not interested.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I kissed him, and he told me not to do that.”
“YOU WHAT?” I have never heard Carrie’s voice reach those decibels. She says it with so much force that she launches herself off the sofa.
Sam comes galloping back through from her bedroom. “What happened?”
Carrie points at me. “She kissed her boss and he told her to stop.”
“You little slut,” Sam says, a grin on her face. “Lead with that next time, that’s way more interesting.”
“I need the particulars. What happened, how did it happen, what did he say exactly,” Carrie says.
I throw my head back and groan, covering my face with my hands. “I’m really embarrassed.”
“You should be,” Sam says, at the same time Carrie says, “Don’t be.”
“Gah,” I say, wishing I could scrub the humiliation right off me. How am I ever going to look him in the eye again? “He walked me to the subway and I was just getting a vibe, you know? And I thought fuck it, and I kissed him.”
“With tongue?” Sam clarifies.
My cheeks flame. “Umm.”
“Oh my god, she kissed her boss with tongue!” Carrie squeals.
It’s physically painful to have to say this part out loud. “That’s what stopped it. I kissed him and then tried to stick my tongue in his mouth and then he stepped back from me and said it wasn’t a good idea.”
Even Sam is struggling with the level of cringe. She’s biting on her knuckle, her hand balled into a fist.
“I just—” My gut twists at the realization that I called it so wrong. “I don’t know. He’s really nice, you know? He referred to us as a we at one point! He put his arm around me! I got confused.”
“Fucking hell,” Carrie says. She looks completely shell-shocked.
“How am I ever going to come back from this?”
“You aren’t,” Sam says simply. “You will have to move back to Canada.”
“Sam.”
“I’m kidding, don’t be so dramatic,” she says. “It’s fine. Just pretend it never happened. Pretend you don’t even know who he is the next time you see him. Kiss one of those other guys you work with, so he just thinks you’re a big slut.”
I look to Carrie, who has been quietly pacing. “Maybe he does like you,” she says eventually. “Maybe he takes the whole no-dating company policy thing seriously.”
“No one takes that seriously,” I argue. “We all know that.”
“I know, but, you have to admit it is a tiny bit messier when the person in question is your direct report. Really not a good look.”
“I guess,” I say. Maybe that’s it. Could that be it? Ben’s warning that Connor is against workplace relationships resurfaces. But I’m not convinced.
I was hoping to discuss this for the rest of the night, so I’m chagrined when Sam changes the subject and suggests some arthouse screening starting in an hour. A return to an earlier conversation, I think; Carrie seems to know exactly what she’s referring to.
“No,” Carrie says decisively. “I’m going home.”
Sam is not impressed with this response. She sniffs and retreats back to her bedroom—since we won’t do her bidding, she has no further use for either of us.
“Bye then,” Carrie calls after her, an edge to her voice. She turns to me and shrugs. “See you tomorrow?”
“If I make it through the night.” I shudder.
She gives me a squeeze, tells me not to worry, and then she’s gone.
I look around the empty living room. Something about the last few minutes felt off, though I can’t exactly put my finger on what. Sam left the room in something close to a flounce. Carrie, too, seemed displeased. What was that about?
It might just be that they have both reached the maximum amount of time they can tolerate in each other’s company—they’ve been together nonstop for twenty-four hours now.
After a rocky start to the weekend, it seemed like they were getting along, though what do I know? I’m just someone who kisses their boss!
The thought sends a fresh wave of shame through my entire body. I’m too jittery to sit still, so I start tidying, beginning with the clothes on my floor and moving through the apartment room by room until I’ve scrubbed the shower clean and organized the junk drawer.
At one point my phone pings, and I practically vault the sofa to get to it, in case it’s Connor texting to say sorry, you’re fired or maybe sorry, I’m gay, but I don’t know why I’d think that, because as far as I know he doesn’t even have my phone number.
Turns out it’s just Shannon, replying with a thumbs-up to a text I sent her two days ago.
“What’s the deal with your friend,” Sam says later, standing in my bedroom doorway.
“Jesus Christ,” I say, jumping back from my pile of laundry. The woman is as stealthy as a cat. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“I knocked.”
She didn’t. I resume my sorting. She folds her arms impatiently.
“So?” Sam repeats.
I pause, then turn to face her, my senses on high alert. It’s such an un-Sam question.
“Why do you ask?”
“She’s…interesting,” is all Sam offers.
I scan her face. “She’s—very straight.”
Sam smirks. “You sure about that?”
“Pretty sure,” I tell her frankly.
“Her loss,” Sam shrugs. “Anyway, I need her number.”
I stare at her, searching for some hidden motive.
Sam rolls her eyes. “Calm down. She just asked me to give her the details of Mel’s piercing studio.”
That, at least, makes sense. Carrie already has about eighteen holes in each of her ears. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn she’s planning more. I read out Carrie’s number. Sam types it into her phone, then salutes me.
“Please don’t terrorize my best friend over text message,” I say to her retreating form.
“No promises,” Sam says, her voice floating down the hall.