Back After This

Chapter Seventeen The Breakthrough

Chapter Seventeen

The Breakthrough

I needed to clear my head after this exceptionally good dinner, just gather my thoughts and steel myself for the road ahead. So the next night, when my to-do list was light, I decided it was a night to do nothing. It was pouring rain outside. The show was a success. People liked it. They liked having opinions about it . In fact, Paulo the embassy man may not have been impressed with me, but he had been written up on the website of one of our local magazines because everybody thought he was such a catch. They didn’t even know yet that he’d bowed out and was still fully available. Imagine when they heard!

Some dedicated members of Team Hot Waiter had managed to track down Will at the restaurant. They posted his picture, which did not reduce the number of people who referred to him as Hot Waiter.

Things were even pretty good at Palmetto. Julie was beginning, she told me, to receive compliments from Miles. Actual compliments, and not his usual “I’m glad this went better than last time”/“I think you’ve almost got the hang of it” rotation of back-handedness and other psychological warfare.

And so: time to do nothing. I got into my stretchiest, least judgmental shorts and my most comfortable and most well-worn T-shirt, and I stretched out on the couch with a glass of wine to watch Halls of Power, the recap of which I was scheduled to edit the next week, so I figured I might as well get my bearings. They had recently brought back a congressional aide who had supposedly died in a yacht explosion but turned up in Costa Rica. He now was seeking revenge on the president via a poisoned mango smoothie. All very on-brand.

I hit pause when there was a knock at the door. Since there had been no buzz, it was most likely my neighbor, who occasionally ended up with my mail or asked if I could water a couple of plants while she was away. But when I put my glass down and went to the door, it was Will. He was wearing a jacket, but he was soaked to the skin. His curls dripped rain on the floor outside my apartment door. Somebody must have let him in downstairs on their way in or out—if I had seen him in this state, I probably would have, too. “No breathing,” he said.

“What?”

“The thing you sent me. You weren’t breathing.”

So often, people say “my jaw dropped,” and they don’t mean it. It’s too bad, because if you are surprised enough under exactly the right circumstances, and if you are frozen in place, your jaw will actually drop. And when I realized he was talking about the file I had emailed him while we were talking about audio production, that’s exactly what happened to me. He had sat down somewhere and opened that file. He had listened to it, probably a lot of times.

And at some point—I could almost imagine him listening while eating Mexican food in his apartment with Buddy snoozing on the sofa—he had heard it. He had heard that the way the tape had been edited, all the breaths were taken out. While some people preferred it that way, I had always believed, rather stubbornly, that it sounded unnatural, and that the ear would subtly, somehow, register that something was wrong. His ear had worked like mine.

“No breathing,” I repeated.

The last thing I remember clearly is that it was me who pulled him in. I forget which of us shut the door behind him, or whether I pulled him to the side of the hallway where the closet was or he pushed me up against it. But there we were. That great mouth, that gorgeous mouth, was kissing me, raggedly dragging across my cheek, coming back to start again. “I’m sorry,” he said right into my ear, “I’m soaked.”

“No, it’s nice,” I said, feeling my own shirt start to stick to me. “I needed a shower.”

I lifted my knee to wrap my leg around his, and he slid his hand under my thigh. I stopped kissing him long enough to mutter, “You got it right, by the way,” and he laughed against my lip and said, “Oh, good.”

Oof. “Knob in the butt, knob in the butt, knob in the butt,” I sputtered, and the way he absolutely froze made me cackle. When I caught my breath I said, “I’m saying the doorknob is poking me in the behind and I need to scoot over like six inches.”

“Ah, okay, now I get it,” he said, and somehow together we cleared the doorknob without disengaging. He went to pull my shirt over my head, but as he took both sides of it, he saw the words on the front— Producers do it without credit —and started to laugh. “This is good,” he said, and then pulled it up and offme.

“I wasn’t really dressed for this,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter now,” he said, starting to tug at the waistband of my very comfy, very old shorts.

I would not have said I was a sex-against-the-wall person; in most of my prior relationships, I freely admit I was primarily a sex-in-the-bed person. This was not particularly by choice or because I refused it under other circumstances, but more because it didn’t tend to come up in other circumstances. Apartments are small and cramped, and as much as people like to talk about the kitchen counter, I could not reconcile that with the knowledge that the next day, I would be cutting an onion on that same surface.

The shower, yes, sometimes, but I always ended up with soap in my eyes or the soap dish poking me in the back. Floors so often mean rug burns, and couches are complicated from a cleanliness perspective. Justin used to throw towels over the couch to give it a try, but such an effort to make sure it wasn’t gross just made me feel like it was gross.

But perhaps I had simply run into an entire cookbook’s worth of unusually bad pancakes and one had finally flipped my way. Because there I was, with my shorts on the floor, with his hand moving down my side, with my leg around him, with wet clothes sticking to him until he (the pants) and I (the jacket and shirt) peeled them off and left them in a cold little puddle inside my apartment door.

I touched and touched and touched, but I kept going back to put my hands on the back of his head and feel his curls in my fingers, which I suppose I had been wanting to do since I saw him running down the street in front of my place. As my hand drifted down his chest, down his stomach, he stopped and looked at me, and now there was no question that both of us were very much breathing. He said, “I…”

“I know,” I said, and I pulled him toward me.

—

I was afraid I might have cracked my elbow when I abruptly got extremely happy and whacked it against the wall behind me. Will got a pretty gnarly scratch on his shoulder when my bare foot slipped on the wet floor and I grabbed on to him to avoid landing on my naked ass in my own front hall. (Worst 911 call ever.) A strand of my hair got caught, somehow, under the palm of his hand as he braced himself. I do have noises; the least impressive was “ow.”

But he did something with his lips on my belly that I swear I still don’t understand. He kissed the inside of my wrist with this strange…curiosity? He said, “You’re killing me,” which is the kind of thing that sounds terribly and wretchedly corny and obvious unless it is said directly into your ear by a hot naked person you like very much, in which case it is like being made Queen of the Universe, the All-Powerful GODDESS of sex, in which case it is very very good.

And then we were done, and we just stood against that wall making out like a couple of hormonal dopes for what seemed like about a year, but was in fact probably just long enough for me to catch my breath. I pointed him down the hall to my bathroom so he could manage the condom logistics (I had never gone off the pill, but nevertheless), and while he was gone, I stepped into my shorts and yanked my shirt over my head, noticing it was still damp from pressing myself against him like a decal on a car window. I looked at my watch and wondered what the exercise stats were going to say later. I half-expected to see a little high-five hand where the heart symbol should have been.

In my galley kitchen, the wine bottle was open on the counter. I got out another glass—oh, the simple pleasure of getting out another glass—and filled it. When I stepped out of the kitchen, Will was in the hall with my burgundy towel wrapped around his waist. “My clothes are soaked,” he said.

“You’re welcome to stroll around without any clothes on, if you want. The blinds are down.”

He may not have blushed, entirely, but it was a blushing kind of smile. “That’s very flattering, but I don’t think I’d feel comfortable nude-ing all over your furniture.”

“I’ve got you,” I said. I went to the very closet against which I had recently been efficiently ravished and took down a plastic tub from the top shelf. In it was everything belonging to Justin that I had found, here and there, mixed in with my things after I moved. I could have given it all back, and I probably should have, but on my list of priorities, returning his stuff was after everything else I could possibly do with my time, including rewatching all twenty-five seasons of SVU.

Lying on top of the box was a pair of swag sweatpants Justin had gotten from a conference called Podcast Pow! that we went to together in Tampa. Podcast Pow! was where I learned that although my vision of podcasting involved journalism and the like, large parts of it were being run by men in khaki pants and polos who were obsessed with passive income. Podcast of the Year at their awards ceremony went to a personal finance guy who accepted in a suit made of hundred-dollar bills. It made me feel like I was the only person there who was going to die broke, owning not even one apartment building, but hey: free sweatpants. I threw them over to Will, who unfolded them and looked at the word Pow! that was printed in purple along the lower part of the outside of the left leg. “Pow,” he said, and he looked at me.

“Try not to think about it,” I told him. He put the sweats on, and I took the towel from him and walked toward my bedroom. “Be right back.” I hung the towel back on the peg in the bathroom and rummaged in my dresser for the shirt I got when I saw Bruce Springsteen with my dad. It was big on me, so I figured it would be about right on Will. Was I hoping in some part of my dark soul that he would be impressed that I was the kind of person who went to see Springsteen? Obviously. I pulled it from the bottom of a drawer and went back into the living room, stopping along the way to throw his clothes into the small dryer that was one of my most treasured luxuries.

He had dug his phone out of whatever pocket it had been in, and he was just standing there, staring down at it, wearing Podcast Pow! sweatpants and looking much more appealing in them than they merited. “Hey,” I said, and he put the phone down on the back of my couch and turned to me. “Your clothes will be dry before too long.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I was just texting my neighbor, he’s going to take Buddy for a walk.”

“Ah, right,” I said, throwing him the shirt. “Well, then, you want to have a drink?” He nodded, and I went into the kitchen and brought back his glass. I wasn’t sure what we were doing. Were we talking? Were we canoodling? I felt surprisingly uncertain for someone who had so recently had my earlobe in his mouth. So I sat on the couch with my back to the arm and my knees pulled up in front of me. He sat on the opposite end, but he leaned forward and put his hand behind my feet to coax my legs out straight. We ended up mirroring each other, drinking wine, with his feet against my hip and his free hand resting on my thigh.

“So you figured out there weren’t any breaths,” I finally said.

He laughed, which made the wine wobble in his glass. “Eventually, yes. At first, I was trying to figure out something about what you were saying. And then I decided to turn it way way way up, until I was afraid I was going to blow out my eardrums.”

“Don’t do that,” I said. “I have to have my hearing tested every year.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He took a sip. “Anyway, when I turned it up in a totally responsible way without damaging my hearing, I felt like the words were, I don’t know, sort of coming out of nowhere. Everything seemed a little robotic. At first I thought you had clipped a millisecond from the beginning of every sentence, that was my first guess. But that didn’t make a lot of sense. And then it came to me. No breathing.”

“And as a result, you got laid on a rainy Wednesday.”

He shrugged. “What can I say? Not everybody likes flowers.”

“Well, you did the right thing coming over immediately. I’m sorry you got soaked, though.”

“Totally worth it.” He looked at the TV, which was running a screensaver shot of a meadow. “What were you watching?”

“Ah, it was Halls of Power, your flu binge,” I said. “It’s very exciting. They brought a guy back from the dead. Remember the aide who died in the yacht explosion?”

“He’s alive?”

I nodded. “It turns out that a few seconds before the yacht exploded, he climbed inside a metal trunk.”

“So naturally he was fine.”

“Trunk floated around for a while, he opened it and crawled out, and he was picked up by a passing Scandinavian tourist on a WaveRunner.”

“You know, that’s what I was going to guess.”

I filled him in on several different ongoing plotlines as he started to trace circles and swirls on my leg with his thumb. Finally, I put a hand to my stomach. “Are you hungry?” I said. “I have to tell you, I’m sort of starving.”

“I could eat,” he said, so I got up and went into the kitchen, and he followed. I opened the fridge. “I have leftover Thai, I have some spaghetti that is probably a little too old, I have…I need to go grocery shopping, actually.”

“We could do takeout, except that it’s still pouring rain, and I try not to ask people to go out in this.”

“Agreed,” I said. I opened an upper cabinet. “Ooh.” I pulled down a box that would be instantly familiar to nearly anyone who grew up anything like I did. “You want mac and cheese?”

He nodded solemnly. “I think we have to.”

So we ate standing in the kitchen, talking about Buddy and my sister and Will’s sister. He made fun of me for putting Frank’s RedHot on my mac and cheese, but I made him try it, and after he did, he shook the bottle over his own bowl, muttering about how he usually doesn’t even like hot sauce. We put the dishes in the sink, and I took both his hands, and I walked backward through my apartment to my bedroom praying I wasn’t going to trip over anything, and I miraculously didn’t. We sat on my bed, and we peeled off our shirts for the second time in two hours, and he felt as good dry as he had just out of the rain.

Again, I like a bed. The hall had been a fast dance with no choreography, and it had happened all at once without a break to breathe, and that was very, very good. But this was good, too, pillows and space, with my top sheet tangling around my foot. I like the mix of working hard and hardly working, if you will, and at one particular moment when I was hardly working and I stretched my arms above my head and touched my headboard with my fingertips, that was, for whatever reason, the moment when I thought, Oh, uh-oh.

I had promised to give Eliza’s plan a real chance, but as he settled his weight on top of me, he said, into my ear, “Pow,” and we both laughed, and I didn’t know if I could.

I didn’t intend to fall asleep after with the lights still on, but we lay there for a while, talking about the penny-sized birthmark on his shoulder and the burn scar on the back of my hand from the time I touched the side of the oven while taking out a pan of frozen French fries. Between stories, we lay there breathing, facing each other on my pillows and tangling our fingers. And then I suddenly opened my eyes and looked directly into his dead-asleep, still very appealing face, his mouth pink and full. His index finger was crooked around mine.

—

In the morning I made coffee, because coffee is always the right move. The coffee was good, and the small talk was above average, and finally he looked at me and said, “Is your guru going to be mad at you? For this?”

I shook my head. “I don’t intend to talk to her about it, so no. I had a second date with the doctor I told you about, so I think she’s focused on that.”

“Ah, sure.” I couldn’t quite read the look on his face, but then he smiled. “This was really fun.”

“It really was. Definitely the most fun I’ve ever had teaching anyone about editing audio.”

“Yeah.” He started to extend a hand toward me like we were going to shake, and then he stopped himself and leaned forward and hugged me, just for a second, and it made me laugh. “Fun,” he said again. “This was fun.”

“Absolutely, yes.”

“I’m going to go,” he said. “I should take care of Buddy.”

“Roger that,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll bump into each other soon.”