Chapter Nine
Yael walks home, even though it’s gray and raining again. Just spitting, but she’s essentially resigning herself to recondition her hair tomorrow morning, because there’s no way she’s getting a third day of curl definition after this.
She stayed behind for fifteen minutes after Ravi left, intending to finish shelving out of spite. But even when she switched chairs, she couldn’t quite steady herself on her toes.
She couldn’t quite steady her breathing, either, and that’s why she forced herself out into the nearly twenty blocks of fresh air.
Absently, she curls the fingers of her right hand into the left sleeve of her raincoat, dragging them lightly over the pulse point of her wrist.
God, is she really that touch-starved? All this over the barest moment of hand-to-arm contact?
Except it’s not only that, not really. She can feel Ravi’s eyes on her mouth, as warm as his fingers were. The smell of him—bright and smooth, not unlike her favorite candle. Sandalwood and citrus.
Yael tries to blot him from her mind for the rest of the way home. She looks at the masses of wet leaves collecting at street corners, listens carefully to the sounds of cars and people that bracket her from Twenty-First and Twenty-Third Streets.
It doesn’t really work, but at least Charlie has his drinks with Shane tonight, which will probably last to her bedtime and beyond.
Yael feels like her thoughts are written on her face in neon lights, and she doesn’t think she can face Charlie right now.
She tucks herself into a quiet apartment, hangs up her outerwear, and switches to her slippers, then goes to put on some tea.
There’s food to cook, but there are also leftovers, and tonight Yael is definitely on the path of least resistance. Lord of the Flies waits for her on the coffee table, three-quarters read and sticky-tabbed to oblivion, and she turns on a ContraPoints video that she’s already seen.
She manages a blissful twenty minutes thinking of nothing but the philosophical and political ponderance of shame unfolding on the screen in front of her before reaching for her phone.
The first notification is a message from Kevin. Yael smiles into her sip of tea. If she can’t abate the feeling in her belly, well, she may as well give it a new target.
To: Elle Rex
RE: Not Work Thread
Looks like you’re number one in Books now. Did you do anything to celebrate?
To: Kevin Kissoon
RE: Not Work Thread
Unless you count being distracted at work and then eating yesterday’s leftovers directly out of the Tupperware, no. Maybe I’ll do something with my roommate before my coworker’s drag show this weekend or treat myself to a fancy drink and a canelé on my way to work tomorrow. Did you do anything?
To: Elle Rex
RE: Not Work Thread
It’s your win, not mine.
To: Kevin Kissoon
RE: Not Work Thread
Now who needs to learn to take a compliment? You’re a part of the Sophomore English Agenda team of two.
To: Elle Rex
RE: Not Work Thread
Ha. Fair. Regardless, I didn’t do anything, either. Maybe I’ll get myself a treat tomorrow, too.
It’s kind of been a weird day for me.
To: Kevin Kissoon
RE: Not Work Thread
It’s been a weird day for me, too.
To: Elle Rex
RE: Not Work Thread
Do you want to talk about it?
Does she? What would she even say? There’s someone I see at work who I’m not allowed to want. Who I very deeply am not interested in wanting. And today, nothing happened between us. Except it was a very heavy, intense nothing, at least for me, and I’m trying to remember that I still don’t want him.
She doesn’t really want to talk to Kevin about nothings that happen between her and someone else, though, mostly because the thought of listening to him talk about his nothings or somethings makes her feel a little bit nauseated.
There’s also the fact that, underneath the Ravi stuff, there’s a much deeper sense of dread building, the kind that she’s never unpacked with anybody but her therapist. Who is currently on parental leave, so she hasn’t unpacked it with anybody at all in the last two months.
Yael stands, puts her container in the dishwasher, and retreats to her room.
To: Kevin Kissoon
RE: Not Work Thread
I’m not sure. Do you want to tell me about your weird day?
It takes him a few beats longer to respond to this one. Maybe in the time she spent thinking, he’d walked away from his phone. Or maybe he was deciding whether to share, too.
To: Elle Rex
RE: Not Work Thread
There’s not much to say. Just dealing with someone who doesn’t like me very much, and I can get kind of stubborn, and I don’t think I handled it well today.
To: Kevin Kissoon
RE: Not Work Thread
Have you tried showing them a picture of Squirtle? Once they know you’re a dedicated and loving father, they’ll have to come around.
To: Elle Rex
RE: Not Work Thread
That made me laugh. Don’t think it would work on her, though.
Your turn?
To: Kevin Kissoon
RE: Not Work Thread
I think it might be too hard for me to talk about over email, honestly. I’m sorry.
To: Elle Rex
RE: Not Work Thread
If that’s a brush-off, that’s totally fine. But if it’s not, we could call. Only if you’re comfortable.
Yael lifts her head at the sound of the apartment door closing. Charlie’s home, then. A little earlier than expected, which if it was his choice is a good thing and if it wasn’t …
She sends him a quick text: In my room. Hope just drinks was fun. Happy to come out if you need. He hearts the message, sends back I made good choices tonight. Sanaa would be proud and then, to her relief, Yael hears the TV turn on low.
To Kevin, she starts to type I can’t, my roommate’s home, but then she holds down the delete button.
It would feel really good to talk about it, actually.
And who’s safer than Kevin, who doesn’t even know her real name?
If he wants nothing to do with her after this, she’ll be hurt. Badly, even. But, well, she’ll survive.
Okay, she types, but my roommate is home so I’ll have to whisper. She adds her phone number and hits send.
Not a minute later, her phone lights up with his call.
Yael takes a deep breath before answering. “Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” Kevin says back, his voice gruff and soft. Her heart squeezes at the sound—he’s so real, pressed to her ear like this.
“You’re whispering, too,” she says.
He laughs quietly. “You sure you’re not the superspy?”
Yael smiles, staring at the Kehinde Wiley print on her opposite wall.
“Shut up.” She tries not to be disappointed, but she is, a little bit.
In a whisper, his accent comes through to her, but not much else.
She wants to know just how deep his voice is.
If it’s gravelly or smooth. It’s not fair that he has this advantage over her.
Although he only knows her radio voice, she supposes, and that’s not really her, either.
“Suresh is in the living room,” he says. “And the guest room is on the first floor.”
“Your room,” Yael says.
He laughs again. “Yeah, still getting used to it.”
“So,” she says.
“So,” Kevin parrots. “Your weird day…”
“I thought this would be easier than typing, but I don’t know.… It feels—” She cuts herself off. Intimate. It feels intimate to be sitting on her bed, even atop her covers, even with all the lights on, whispering to him. “You feel so real like this,” she says, repeating her first thought aloud.
“I’m real over email, too,” Kevin says.
“I know, I know. It’s just—”
“I get it,” he says. “We don’t have to talk like this if you don’t want to.”
“It’s just scary. But I do want to.”
“I scare you?”
“No,” Yael says. The idea that you’ll stop talking to me scares me.
But she can’t say that, or it’ll put too much pressure on him to pretend things are okay even if they aren’t.
And if they aren’t, she would much, much prefer to know sooner than later.
“I’m going to try; I just need a moment, if that’s okay. ”
“Definitely okay,” he says.
There’s dead air for fifteen seconds. Yael knows, because she counts them. And then she says, “I’m not really good at letting myself enjoy good things when they happen.”
She pauses, unsure where to start, and Kevin makes a sound that she takes to mean I’m listening.
“I want to say first that I’m pretty stable, compared to how I used to be.
But I have bipolar two which means that sometimes I get hypomanic, which can look like intense stress but can also be, like, clinical-grade euphoria.
Like I am at this heightened state of feeling good for a while, just buzzing, and it can make me fun and funny and productive with almost no exhaustion.
So, honestly, when it shows up like that, it never actually bothers me.
I never really reported it as a symptom, or it wasn’t recognized as one—whatever—so I had the wrong diagnosis for a long time.
But it’s only for a few days, and then for me, it always gives way to a depressive episode, and that is a lot less fun.
“Post-hypomania, the episodes tend to be a lot more intense than my normal depression.” Yael gives a short laugh.
“I guess that’s what I meant by it getting scary in my brain sometimes.
I’ve gotten better at catching it early, so it doesn’t get so bad, but yeah.
It makes trusting myself to enjoy the high of a day like today like a normal person kind of difficult.
“It’s not like … like I’m not functional. It just makes things hard for me, sometimes. I’m not sure if I’m explaining myself very well,” she says.
“You are,” Kevin says, and it’s almost startling to hear his whisper again. “I think I understand what you mean.”
“Yeah?” Yael scrapes out, her throat thick.