NINE
Murph still lived in the same Tribeca loft I remembered from that long-ago Halloween party, except now he had the whole gorgeous place to himself.
As a thirty-five-year-old bachelor with no kids (that he knew of) and no obligations except to the international law firm of Parsons Valentine & Hunt LLP, this was doable on his salary of three hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. Before bonus.
Murph opened the front door and stood aside to let me in.
I took a few tentative steps into his apartment.
When I turned around to say “Nice place,” he was leaning down and coming in toward my face at an angle that made me think he was going for my cheek.
But as I tilted my face to the side, I realized I’d guessed wrong, and his lips landed half on my mouth and then skidded wetly off to the left.
“Whoops.” He laughed.
I laughed, too. We broke apart awkwardly. I took a deep breath in and said, “It’s been a while.”
Murph gave me an odd look, so I clarified quickly, “Since I’ve been here, I mean.”
“Not since that Halloween party I threw back when we were first-years,” Murph said. So he remembered. “Not to brag, but I’ve got to say that party was pretty legendary.”
I smiled. “It was.”
“So,” said Murph, gesturing around the living room. “Want the grand tour?” he asked me.
“Sure.”
He remained in one spot and pointed around the enormous space. “Office, kitchen, living room. Bathroom’s over there, bedroom’s through there.”
I nodded. “Very nice.”
It was nice. I could easily imagine Murph living his life here.
I noticed his bookshelves first. They were hard to miss.
They reached from the floor to the ceiling—crammed to overflowing, with books jammed spine in, spine out, lying facedown, any way they would fit.
Had Murph actually read all these? Personally, I didn’t like to display any books in my living room that I hadn’t actually read. It seemed, somehow, dishonest.
In the center of the living room sat a battered and fraying beige sofa that would have been at home in a frat house.
On the opposite wall was mounted a brand-new, state-of-the-art, jumbo-screen plasma TV.
I smiled. This was the kind of contrast common to thirtysomething bachelor apartments in Manhattan.
“Sit down, make yourself at home.” Murph walked backward to the stainless-steel kitchen. It looked a lot like the one in my own apartment. Spotless. “You want something to drink?”
What I wanted was a gin and tonic, light on the tonic. But I had to pace myself. My face sometimes flushed a deep red after about two drinks, especially when I was nervous, and I didn’t want to spend my evening worrying about the dreaded Asian Blush.
“Just some water would be good right now,” I said.
He filled a tall drinking glass with water and ice, and walked it over to me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem.” As he walked back to the kitchen, I looked down at my hands. They were shaking a little. Get a grip! Don’t blow it! I held the glass firmly between my knees to silence the ice cubes.
Now that I was actually—finally—here in Murph’s apartment, I was beginning to second-guess myself. We had been friends and colleagues for so long that this felt incredibly surreal, a little dangerous.
I perched on the very edge of Murph’s sofa and glanced down at the ancient fabric as casually as I could, looking for beer stains—or worse. Finding nothing too alarming, I settled back against the cushions. The couch was surprisingly comfortable.
Something soft and warm rubbed against my leg. Startled, I looked down and saw a small gray cat with four white paws staring intently at me.
I froze. Murph had a cat? I was a dog person myself.
Murph was rummaging in the freezer for more ice.
The cat was still regarding me.
“Oh, you have a cat?” I asked, keeping my voice as neutral as possible.
“What?” Murph spun around. “Oh, yeah, him. He’s my sister’s cat. I’m pet-sitting for her while she and her boyfriend are in Costa Rica.”
“Oh. Pet-sitting,” I said. I reached out and gave the cat a tentative stroke. “What’s its name?”
“Steve Buscemi.”
“Steve Buscemi?” I repeated. “That’s his name?”
He laughed. “Well, my sister calls him Mittens. But, I mean, I wasn’t going to live with a cat named freaking Mittens for a month. So I temporarily renamed him.”
“Why Steve Buscemi?”
Murph shrugged. “He’s small, but he’s really tough. And my sister found him in the alley next to her local firehouse. Did you know Steve Buscemi used to be a fireman before he got into acting?”
“Yeah,” I said. This fact had always impressed me, too.
I stroked Steve Buscemi, and he purred beneath my hand.
Murph was making himself a drink. Then he switched off the kitchen light and made his way toward me. Most of the light in his apartment had been coming from the kitchen, so the room was now noticeably dimmer. Yet it wasn’t quite dark enough to remark upon. I smiled.
Murph knew exactly what he was doing.
Now he lowered himself down next to me on the couch. My stomach tensed, and I suddenly felt very warm. I glanced at his drink and envied him. He was having what looked like a gin and tonic.
“So,” he began, turning to me.
“So,” I repeated.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said quietly.
“So am I.” I took a tiny sip of water, not because I was thirsty, but to buy myself a few seconds. Now that we’d been delivered from the noisiness of the bar into the utter privacy of his apartment, I was lost. I was so pathetically out of practice at this.
For the first time in a long time, I was actually at a loss for words. I was just very, very conscious of Jeffrey Devon Murphy sitting an inch away from me on his couch.
Steve Buscemi leapt onto the sofa and padded across my thigh and into my lap, his tiny paws sliding a little on the slippery plane of my leggings. I scratched behind his ears, grateful for the distraction.
Murph laughed and said, “He likes you.”
He likes you. For some reason this made me think of the childhood game he loves me, he loves me not that my friends and I used to play at recess.
We’d rid countless daisies of their petals, one by one.
We’d also played a similar game with an apple, where you twisted the stem around and around as you recited the alphabet, and whichever letter you were on when the stem came off was your future husband’s initial.
First initial or last? I’d asked the older girl who taught me the game, but she didn’t know, either.
Even now, at thirty-three, I couldn’t eat an apple without reciting the alphabet and twisting off its stem.
Murph set his gin and tonic on the table. I snapped to attention. Here we go. I smiled to myself, tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear, wetting my lips, trying subtly to push Steve Buscemi out of my lap and onto the floor.
But Murph stood up and walked away.
“Anything special you want to listen to?” he asked, his face bathed in the glow from his laptop.
I shrugged. “Surprise me.”
After a couple of quick clicks of the mouse he sat back down next to me on the couch, almost imperceptibly closer this time.
I smiled in recognition as the first few unmistakable cool bass notes from “Son of a Preacher Man” filled the room.
“You remembered,” I sighed, and then immediately wished I hadn’t.
It was a naked admission of how well I remembered that long-ago night here at Murph’s apartment, when I’d felt his warm breath on my neck and shoulders, his lips and late-night stubble on my bare skin.
I wondered with a shudder if Murph had any idea how many times I’d recently replayed that memory in my head.
I waited a beat. But Murph surprised me by not gloating, not pointing this out at all, as if it had been the most natural thing in the world for me to say.
I began to relax a little, resting my head back against the cushions. I was aware of my long shiny hair fanning out gently along the top of the couch the way I knew it would. I murmured, “This is a great song.”
“The best,” he agreed.
We sat there together in the semidarkness and listened without speaking to the perfection that was Dusty Springfield—the husky notes hanging thick and low in the air, the high notes curling upward into the stratosphere.
I was still petrified about what would happen next.
It had been such a long time since I’d been in this situation, with anyone, let alone with Murph himself, the most dazzling of all of the golden boys I knew, the heir most apparent, who’d been the source of all my consternation, who’d been keeping me up at night.
I closed my eyes. Please, please don’t screw this up.
I finally worked up the resolve to turn my head toward Murph. When I did, he was already looking at me. He reached over and stroked my cheek very gently with his fingertip, and it felt so good that my eyes nearly filled.
Oh, sweetie, you are in trouble, I thought to myself.
And then he flashed me a smile, and it was such a specific smile, so perfectly disarming, so well calculated, that I couldn’t help it, I actually giggled—because I was nervous, because I needed to break the tension of the moment, and also because it struck me as sort of funny, this very particular, sideways smile that I knew must have closed the deal for him on many a previous occasion.
Murph’s expression grew solemn again. He looked at me for a long moment, and I thought happily that there was absolutely nothing else like it—this moment when you know for sure he’s going to kiss you.
I tilted my face toward him at the same second he bent down toward me, and his kiss was so soft and so gentle that I would have been hard-pressed to pinpoint the precise instant when our lips actually touched.
Then we were kissing in earnest. Murph pressed one hand against the small of my back and with the other gently traced the curve of my shoulder.
I felt a delicious shudder. Goose pimples rose on my arms. It had been a very long time since I’d felt like this.