Chapter III
III
“Do you feel like you’re in a fever dream?” Reid asks. He neatly folds a piece of lettuce back into his sandwich. “Because I do.”
“I absolutely do,” I say.
We’re in Bryant Park, sitting at one of the green cast-iron tables that look like dollhouse set pieces.
The heat from yesterday is holding on, but we’ve managed to find a slice of shade in the shadow of the library.
Today I’m in an outfit that won’t show sweat: a navy cotton dress that hits right at my upper thighs, my hair twirled up into a claw clip.
Reid’s jacket is off and his sleeves are rolled up, but his tie is still knotted around his neck.
He barely seems to notice the heat, though.
I realize I’ve known him for under twenty-four hours, but those twenty-four hours have been some of the hottest on record, and I have yet to witness this man perspire.
I watch the long lines of his body settle back into his comically tiny chair.
Before Reid left the party last night—twenty minutes later than he’d needed to—we exchanged numbers and made plans to have dinner tonight. But he’d called me this morning and asked if I wanted to meet him on his lunch break too.
I don’t want to wait until seven to see you, he’d said.
I’d intended to spend the day finally preparing for the upcoming semester and catching up on the required reading I’ve failed to do—but this invitation made those things feel impossible.
“How’s Nisha holding up?” Reid says now.
“We’re hoping she’ll make a full recovery by 1994.”
I’m proud of how Nisha kept her cool last night.
After she retrieved us from the bedroom, she dried off her face, touched up her eyeliner, and headed back out into the party.
We found Jeff Buckley sitting on the floor of the living room, leaning against the couch and thoughtfully nursing a beer, surrounded by wide-eyed acolytes.
The scene brought to mind a sixteenth-century painting my mother discovered in a dusty garage in Jakarta, one depicting a young, svelte Buddha lounging underneath a banyan tree, encircled by his lotus-posed followers.
The Buddha was rendered in gold leaf so pure that, according to the dealer who sold it to her, centuries of aspiring art thieves had attempted to scrape the pigment off and sell it.
None succeeded, due either to some ingenious preservative mixed into the paint or good old-fashioned karma, depending on the eye of the beholder.
In the few minutes we spent observing Jeff on the floor of that party, he didn’t speak once, though all conversation was subtly directed toward him.
His eyes alighted on me—he saw everyone, I think—but they seemed to look right through me, like he had access to another higher vibrational plane of existence.
I didn’t particularly like the way it felt.
When Nisha worked up the courage to crawl over and tell him she was a fan, he finally spoke.
I couldn’t hear a single word they exchanged, so my transcript comes directly from Nisha, who recounted it to me at least three times on the walk home, and then again this morning, when she burrowed into my bed and, with the clarity of retrospect and soberness, burst into tears of overwhelm.
Nisha: I’m a huge fan of yours.
Jeff: That’s lovely to hear. I appreciate it.
End scene.
“It’s nice that the whole ‘don’t meet your heroes’ thing doesn’t apply to Nisha’s experience. That she doesn’t regret it,” Reid says now.
“Have you ever done that?” I ask. “Met your heroes, I mean.”
He considers this for a moment. “Maybe not a personal hero, but my mom stayed friends with a few of the musicians she knew from Laurel Canyon, even after we moved out to Altadena. Some of them were really famous. One time, I think when I was four or five, Stephen Stills came out there to spend the day with us. He picked lemons from the tree in our neighbor’s yard and made us lemonade. ”
“How was that?”
“He put, like, half a pound of sugar in it, so I had a great time.”
I laugh. He gestures to the plastic cup I grabbed from the deli along with the sandwiches I’d picked up for our lunch.
“How’s that?” He peers into my drink.
“Want to try?”
He leans across the table just enough to grab the straw with his teeth while I hold the cup for him. I watch the strong lines of his throat work while he swallows, his eyes trained on mine.
This, I think, is the most intimate thing I’ve done with anyone in a long time. Maybe ever.
He sits back down. “Better than Stephen’s.”
“Thanks. Tropicana is responsible for the recipe. But I did dispense it into this cup myself.”
“You’ve got a bright future ahead of you.”
“How lucrative a field is drink-dispensing, do you think?” It’s a dumb joke, but he laughs anyway.
I’ve never made a guy laugh this easily, and it feels so right, like the click of a shutter that captures a singular, impossible moment.
I sigh. “Well, good, because I can feel my job prospects diminishing with every passing minute.”
“Why’s that?” His face goes serious.
“School is . . . tough for me right now. I haven’t done a single thing to prepare for this semester. I keep putting it off, saying I’ll do it tomorrow. I don’t even remember what classes I signed up for.”
I wasn’t planning on dragging school into this conversation.
I don’t want him to think that I’m a slacker, or that I’m not grateful to go to NYU.
But there’s something about the way Reid is looking at me that makes me want to open up, to share this small, seemingly manageable thing that’s somehow become gargantuan and swallowed me in anxiety.
“What do you have to do to prepare?” There’s no trace of judgment in his words. Just a matter-of-fact question to gather information and see what we can do with it. It instantly makes me feel calmer.
“I need to look over all my syllabi and then buy books. That’s probably the most pressing thing.”
“Why don’t we do that tonight? I can meet you at the NYU bookstore after work. Or wherever you get your books.”
“Really? You would do that with me?”
“Yeah, of course. When I was in middle school, I went through a pretty serious procrastination phase, and the only thing that got me through it was when my mom would sit down at the kitchen table with me while I did my homework. She didn’t even help, unless I asked for it.
Just her presence, her sitting there with me, was enough. ”
I must be looking at him for too long, or with too much sincerity, because at some point, he asks if I’m OK.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s just, like, the nicest thing anyone has ever offered to do for me.”
A furrow forms between his brows. He leans in toward me, so close I can see that his eyes are not really brown but terracotta, shot through with pale gold flecks.
“I don’t like that.” He says it earnestly. I can feel his warm breath drape across my mouth. Closer, I think. More. “I want people to be nice to you.”
I’m touched by this show of simple, righteous indignation. Is he starting to feel protective of me?
I don’t respond, too overwhelmed. I think Reid senses this. He stands, sweeps all our wrappers into the paper deli bag, then reaches out his hand for mine.
I walk him the three blocks back to his office.
He keeps hold of my hand as we navigate around the crush of suits and tourists milling around Midtown.
I leave him at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to his building—it’s imposing, faceless, and it makes me sad to think of him buried in there, another cog in a machine that’s too big for me to understand—but he nobly puts his jacket back on, straightens the lapels, and rearranges the cuffs of his shirt.
Before I leave, he kisses me on the forehead. “See you tonight.”
“Grisham, Steele, Crichton.”
“Steele,” I say without pause.
“Wow. Not even a little bit of hesitation.”
“If I can only read one author for the rest of my life, they need to have a healthy catalog. She’ll keep me entertained. OK, here’s one for you: Stephen King, Jay McInerney, Thomas Hardy.”
“Doesn’t Jay McInerney only have, like, two books? I’m going with Stephen King.”
I shiver. “I’d go with Thomas Hardy. I can’t do horror.”
Reid and I are deep in the stacks at the NYU bookstore.
After lunch, I went home, opened up the envelopes that had been inflicting so much misery upon me for the last week, and discovered that, actually, now that I’ve faced it, I could sort of look forward to my first day of classes: Brit Lit at noon and a portraiture workshop at three.
My sophomore-year self had looked out for my junior-year self, keeping my mornings open until eleven at the earliest and my Fridays free, other than a Psych 101 lecture at one that I could skip a couple of times if I wanted to, or at least bury myself in the back of the cavernous lecture hall unnoticed by the professor.
When we got to the bookstore, Reid and I collected all the titles I needed surprisingly quickly.
Works well with others, I thought, watching him scan my list and navigate between each section of the store.
Never in my life have I found efficiency so sexy.
We’ve rewarded ourselves with a trip to the quiet basement.
It’s near closing time now, and only two or three other people are down here, loitering around the memoir section, too engrossed in their own browsing to notice us.
Reid is walking ahead of me, but now he turns, gives me one of those upside-down smiles that I’ve started to collect like currency. “Really? No horror?”
I rebalance the pile of books under my arms. Wordlessly, he holds his hands out and does a little beckoning motion with his fingers. I give him the pile, which he carries easily against his side.
“Yeah.” I follow him farther into the stacks. “When I was ten, I caught a few minutes of Psycho on TV, and it scared the shit out of me. After that, I had to shower with the curtain partially open. I really wanted my mom to sit with me in the bathroom, but she’d never coddle me like that.”
“You still showering with the curtain open?”
I laugh. “No.”
“Ah. Too bad.”
And now I’m imagining Reid leaning against my bathroom sink, fully clothed, watching me naked with water streaming over my body. The look in his eyes is satisfied, smug. He reaches out to run his knuckles across my nipple, then across my hip, lower to my thigh . . .
Reid—the real Reid—interrupts my fantasy. “OK, so we won’t be watching Misery together. How do you feel about supernatural stuff?”
He pulls the corner of a book off a high shelf, considers it, then slots it back into place.
I have no idea which section of the store we’re even in now.
I’m too focused on the way his shoulder blades shift underneath his white shirt when he reaches for a book, how his scent flares and intensifies in this enclosed space.
“I’m OK with supernatural stuff. I’m not scared of monsters; I’m scared of humans.”
“So maybe there’s a chance you’ll like my screenplay.” He says this to the shelf, like he’s too shy to address me directly.
“You wrote a fantasy script?”
He laughs. “You seem surprised.”
“I just didn’t know you were that kind of nerd.”
“I am one hundred percent that kind of nerd. But this isn’t, like, Lord of the Rings high fantasy.
My brain doesn’t work that way, unfortunately.
I’m thinking of it as a dramedy with fantastical elements.
” He glances at me and I smile, waiting for the elevator pitch.
“A guy moves in with his girlfriend and discovers that her roommates are vampires and she’s their human familiar. But he can’t tell her he knows.”
“Secret vampires!”
“Think The Lost Boys meets Moonstruck meets Slacker.”
“I honestly don’t know what that means, but I would love to read it, if you want me to.”
“Of course I want you to.”
We’re at the farthest end of the stacks now, crowded against the wall.
He turns to face me. Slowly, he puts my books down on the floor, freeing himself up for me.
With one more step, I wrap my arms around his waist and press my nose against his shirt, and he encircles my shoulders in his lean, strong arms. All those movements happen at the same time, a bow tying itself.
We hold each other like that for a moment, and then I tilt my head back to look up into his face.
“If you read my screenplay, can I see some of your photographs?” he asks.
“What do you want to see?”
“Anything you make, I want to see.”
“OK. Deal.”
His hand reaches up to cup my face, the tips of his fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of my neck again.
He rubs his thumb against my bottom lip.
Once, I read in Cosmo that if a man keeps looking at your mouth, it means he wants to kiss you.
What does it mean, then, if he presses the pad of his thumb between your lips?
What does it mean when you close your lips around his thumb and take it into your mouth?
When you look up into his face and the glassy look in his eyes makes everything inside you coil tightly, begging to be teased and released?
He pulls his thumb out of my mouth with a wet pop. The sound is audible and filthy inside the quiet room.
His eyes scan between mine, seeking something—something more. Of me.
When he speaks, his voice is low. “Should we go to dinner?”
I forgot we’d planned to eat at Cafe Mogador—an East Village institution that Reid absolutely needs to go to before he leaves—and that, up until three minutes ago, I was really looking forward to introducing him to the stunning beauty of their hot, crispy falafel.
But that was before I knew what his skin tastes like. Before I knew how he looks at me when I have him in my mouth.
“Let’s not go to dinner,” I say.
His hands drop to my chin, my neck, my shoulders. I know he’s taking his time with me, making sure I feel secure, but if he doesn’t kiss me right now, I think that I will die.
Finally, I get his lips when they graze behind my ear—soft and full, with the barest press of teeth.
I feel his breath skate down my neck. “Deal,” he says.