Chapter 3
Eve and Shannon and some of their college friends go away for a weekend.
It’s some sort of coed bachelor/ette party; Danny is fuzzy on the details.
On the first night of Eve’s absence, Danny is lying in bed working, which he knows is bad for his sleep but so is everything.
He keeps checking his phone to see if she’s texted him.
Obviously she’s superbusy and he shouldn’t be weird about it.
But what if Fletcher is there and she has fallen rapturously back in love with him?
What if she’s currently realizing she is so much happier single?
What if the degree to which Danny is overthinking all of this is a sign that he should end things because he cannot possibly keep feeling this unhinged? What if!
Right before Eve left, Danny spent the night at Eve and Shannon’s apartment, and there was a cockroach in a glue trap.
Eve dispatched it with no-nonsense efficiency; putting the trap in the trash, taking the trash to the curb, replacing the trash bag, and washing her hands.
Danny stood against a wall the whole time trying not to look like someone who could feel a hundred little legs scuttling over his skin.
“You’re so funny,” Eve said. “You’ve lived in New York for six years.”
“Let us not acclimate to the will of the cockroach,” Danny said.
“Doesn’t Montana have bugs?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Also, I’m very brave about rats, so. Can’t win them all.”
He keeps thinking about this and wondering if he is a fake New Yorker, or if Eve thinks he is.
So those are the things running through his mind as he tries to write this code. Would you believe—it looks very bad. Inevitably, someone else on the team will give him shit about it when they can’t understand what he was trying to do. He leaves a comment to really show them who’s boss:
// DA
// This works but is garbage :)
He sends Eve two memes on Instagram, and then he finds a third that’s funnier than the first, but he feels he has already used his allotted messages for the night.
He should not let her know that he has nothing better to do on a Friday than write code and think about her.
He saves the third meme to send after an appropriate interval.
He rereads their most recent text exchange:
Eve: getting on the plane oooo
Danny: Have fun! May all your dreams come true, etc
Eve: give new york a good-night forehead kiss for me
Danny: I wouldn’t want to lead her on
Eve didn’t respond to the last message. Which is fine, fair; this was a goodbye conversation anyway, and maybe she just couldn’t think of anything to say.
Or! Maybe conversations about leading people on are particularly fraught for Eve because she’s worried she’s leading Danny on because while she’s enjoying the relationship-ish aspects of their dynamic, she does not actually want a relationship.
Danny shuts his laptop and puts his phone on Do Not Disturb on the other side of the room. Then he wonders if Eve will see the Do Not Disturb and think Danny has gone to bed at ten thirty on a Friday like an octogenarian. He turns Do Not Disturb back off and powers down the phone instead.
“You are literally losing it,” Danny says. He flops back onto his bed and presses the tips of his fingers against his eyelids. “You are genuinely fucked.”
It should not be this hard. That’s Danny’s prevailing sentiment. When you know, you know—that’s what people say, but Danny does not know anything at all.