You

by Caroline Kepnes

  And just like that, you’ve made my day. I wrote back to you short and sweet:

  Dear Beck, I’m buying you six drinks tonight. Joe

  You loved it and I got a smiley face and we have a date tonight—yes!—and I’ve made all the right moves—yes!—and I put the typewriter I took to bed back in its place and my hair looks good today—yes!—and Curtis is working tonight so I don’t even have to close up—yes!—and Peach is out of the picture—yes!—and I cum so fucking hard for you, Beck. Who knows? Maybe tonight, it happens. I go all the way to your neighborhood and buy two cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery. They smell fucking good and I want them but I am a good boy, Beck, and I have ideas about what to do with all this icing.

  BUT then . . . then. We’re supposed to meet at nine and you call me at 9:04 and you are breathless, on your way uptown. It’s a long story, you say, but Peach is alone at home, and she thinks someone broke in because the furniture on the terrace has been moved around. You sound like her in this state of panic. “Joe, listen to me.” You persist. “Whoever broke in shifted her chaise.”

  I interrupt. “But they didn’t steal the chair?”

  “No,” you say and you sigh. “But someone broke in, Joe. She’s scared.”

  “Of course,” I say and you go on but it’s not as dramatic as you’re making it out to be. I didn’t break in and I didn’t move her chaise. I used a service key I found at the party. And I didn’t steal anything. I’m more like Santa Claus because I brought an acrylic jacket for that Bellow, so the bitch should say thank you.

  “Peach says sorry,” you swear to me. “She feels horrible but she is just terrified of having a stalker again.”

  I won’t even dignify the word again and I can only imagine the horror stories Peach has spun in years past.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say and I sound like I mean it and I tell you to be safe and you like me. I forgive you. I do. You’re a loyal friend and chaise is not your word, it belongs to Peach. I eat both cupcakes and the icing is stale and it would taste so much better if I were licking it off your tits. You tweet a photo a little while later. There are mini cupcakes much smaller than my big Magnolia cupcakes on those bright plates and a giant bottle of bullshit candy cane vodka. You write:

  #Girlsnightin

  There’s no way you could know about my cupcakes. But sometimes, I wonder.

  18

  YOU do make it up to me the next day. But it’s not over six drinks and two cupcakes in a dark bar. Instead, we meet for lunch and you tell me all about Peach’s depression, her loneliness. We’re in sexless Sarabeth’s drinking water (also nonsexual), and sampling artisanal jams (supremely nonsexual), and all you want to talk about is Peach (fully asexual). You feel responsible for her because she doesn’t have any family around and we’re only supposed to go to places like this after we have sex and I can’t figure the logic in any of it.

  “She’s perpetually an orphan,” you tell me.

  “But, you don’t have family around either, Beck,” I try.

  “I know,” you say and you pick at a popover. “But I left home. It’s natural. Her family left her. It’s sick. They literally all moved to San Francisco the second we graduated.”

  I’m not surprised and you move on to bitching about Blythe and I listen and I nod and I listen and I nod and I eat a fucking popover and you go in the bathroom and e-mail Peach:

  I just have to say, Joe is an insanely good listener. Don’t lose faith in people!

  Peach writes back a lot, suspiciously fast:

  That’s so sweet! Don’t be hard on him, Beck. He sounds like he has potential. I was telling my yoga teacher about your Joseph and she compared him to Good Will Hunting. Is he any good at math? Anyway have fun at lunch! I hope you took him somewhere nice! You are a doll for checking in and please rest assured, my faith in humanity is completely restored. I love being single. We are too young to be tied down, for sure. Have fun with Joseph! I bet he’s learning so much from you and that’s awesome!

  You come back to the table and ask me if I liked math when I was little. I tell you no and when I ask you why you are asking me about math, you shake it off and go back to bitching about Blythe. We get more coffee and I’d like this all so much more if it was happening after we sealed the deal. I can’t kiss you good-bye in the middle of the day and what if this is your way of putting me in the friend zone? Is there a friend zone or is that a myth? Does the smart chick end up with Good Will Hunting? I can’t remember.

  When we part ways outside of Sarabeth’s, we hug like cousins and you’re not as close to me as you were the night we almost built the bed together.

  “This was fun,” you say.

  “What are you up to later?”

  “Girls’ night.”

  “But you had cupcakes with the girls last night.”

  You caught me and you’re cute. “Joe, have you been stalking my Twitter?”

  “A little,” I say and maybe I could kiss you. It is kind of cloudy, like fall in Hannah.

  “Well, the thing is, last night was Peach night and tonight is Lynn and Chana night.”

  “Maybe tomorrow night?” I say and begging you is the opposite of kissing you. I should have let it go.

  “I really have to write tomorrow night, but we could get together earlier. Lunch?”

  I agree to lunch and you’re gone and it’s a long walk to the shop and I’d like to hate Tucker Max and Maxim magazine and Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia and think that women aren’t as simple as they’d all have you believe. But right now, I almost have to steal a move from the Frank T.J. Mackey playbook Seduce and Destroy because I am screwing up. Not fucking you that night I built your bed, not, at the very least, trying to fuck you was clearly a mistake. I am screwing this up, and it’s the greatest mistake of my adult life. I didn’t even kiss you after I listened to you overanalyze your life for five hours. I suck, royally, and you might think I’m putting you in the friend zone.

  And it’s the worst kind of domino effect because we do have lunch the next day at some new place you say “is supposed to be as yummy as Sarabeth’s.” Again I don’t kiss you afterward and what do you want the day after that? You want brunch. What’s the only thing more sexless than lunch? Brunch, a meal invented by rich white chicks to rationalize day drinking and bingeing on French toast. And you don’t even drink when we get brunch and pretty soon we’re going to places where they don’t even have waiters. You’re into this fucking deli where you stand in line with nine-to-fivers who read Stephen King on their iPads while they wait for their turn to order their sexless green salads, fucking beans and dressings and scallions and onions (Red or white? Grilled or raw?), for fuck’s sake people, it’s a SALAD. Stop overthinking it.

  You’re not on the outs with Peach but you’re not under her spell the way you were and I get it now that you like her because she’s obsessed with you. Lynn and Chana love you, but they don’t think your shit smells like roses. You like to be rocked and lullabied and sedated and our conversations about your short stories and your classmates always end with me telling you how special you are, how talented, how jealous they all are, how clearly better than them you are and you get taller as the clear disposable plastic salad bowl gets emptier and I mean it when I say it and you’re lucky that what you want to hear is what I actually think:

  “Beck, you’re really talented. If you weren’t they’d all just shrug.”

  “Sometimes the best writers get hated before they get loved. Look at Nabokov.”

  “I’m not competing with you, so I’m comfortable telling you I think you got it.”

  And you do. When I lie on my couch listening to you go on about Blythe, I feel like I’m living inside of you, through you. I know what it’s like to be you and you’re right. Blythe does hate you. But hate suits you, inspires you. You rage, “She’s a little ball of anger and antidepressants who doesn’t speak to her mother, her sister, her father, his wife, or her roommate or her fucking cat or a
ny of the many guys she fucked last week.” You break, you breathe. “I mean, Blythe calls herself a performance artist—a prostitute is what we call that in the real world. She has a webcam service that she calls art.”

  “In other words she’s a ho.”

  “Thank you, Joe.”

  “You’re welcome, Beck.”

  You go on. “And she hates me for being from Nantucket and liking poetry.”

  “So fuck her, then.”

  I try to help you move on, but you don’t know why she hates you and it’s all you want to talk about.

  Every.

  Fucking.

  Night.

  And it would be easier if these talks were happening on a park bench or your stoop or your sofa or your bed that I assembled but they’re happening over the phone. And I can’t smell you over the phone and I feel like a 1-900-Build-Me-Up hotline you call to feel good about yourself. You don’t treat me like I’m your guy; you go to drinks with people from school and call me after the drinks and you don’t act like there’s anything weird about the fact that you didn’t invite me to go along. I’m your phone bitch and I don’t like it. You don’t want to know about my day. You always ask me in the polite obligatory way.

  “So how was the shop?”

  “You know, shop’s the shop. It was okay.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  And then I wait for you to want to know more about me and my day but I always cave and say, “So about you? How was school?”

  But I can’t do it anymore. It’s time to save us and it’s my job to keep us afloat.

  “Hey, Beck.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s go out?”

  “Oh, I’m in my pajamas and I have class.”

  “No, no. Let me take you out next week.”

  There’s a pause and you forgot how much you want to fuck me and you’re trying to live by Peach Laws: no guys, just stories, but you do want me or you would have made an excuse by now.

  “Well, when did you want to get together?”

  “Friday night,” I say. “No parties. I want to take you out.”

  I can hear you smiling somehow and you say yes and then you say yes again and it’s okay for me to tell you that I read your story “Dust Bunnies” about the summer you worked as a maid. It’s okay for me to tell you my favorite parts—of course I liked it when the daddy of the house tried to get with you in the laundry room.

  “Oh, you know that’s not me in the story.”

  “But you told me you worked as a maid one summer.”

  “True, but I didn’t throw myself at the men in the house,” you say and no wonder Blythe resents you. You are not a stalker and Benji will always be wrong, but you do covet, innocently, only because you’re not comfortable in your skin, not yet, but I’m going to help you. You continue, “Joe, I can’t say it enough, the level to which I would never have gotten myself into that situation. It’s fiction.”

  “I know.” I don’t know.

  “I’m not some townie whore. It’s a made-up story.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t go after married rich guys.”

  “I know.”

  “So where are you gonna take me, Joe?”

  YOU’RE happy I refused to tell you because it’s not often in life that you get all dressed up and have some place to go without knowing what that place is exactly. You’re in a long pale pink skirt with two giant slits and you’re wearing high-heeled brown boots—new, for me—the slits are so high I can almost see your panties and you have on a loose brown sweater that will be so easy for me to peel off of you. Your body is an offering, a payment for all those hands-off phone calls, those lunches. Your bra is pink, hot pink, so that I don’t forget about your tits under your sweater, not for one second. When I hug you I smell flowers and laundry detergent and pussy juice and I wonder how hard you had to go at your pillow and I’m proud of myself for not checking your e-mail for two solid hours so that I could give us all the suspense we need and you’re about to tell me fuck this date, come upstairs and I pull away. It has been so long, Beck. And while you are always adorable, you’ve never gotten this dressed up for me. Tonight you care what I think. We aren’t going to see your friends and nobody’s taking your picture and posting it on Facebook. Your body and your hair and your lips and your thighs, everything, is for me. Ever since that night I built your bed, you have forced us into asexual, sunlit spaces. I finally have you in the dark and you’re not hiding from me anymore and I’m gonna make this last as long as I can. I love this. I love you.

  “Let’s go,” I say, and I take your hand and your hand is good in mine and we walk in silence and it turns out that there is something to all those fucking talks on the phone because there’s glue here now, between you and me, and we’re both surprised at how well we know each other and I squeeze your hand and you look at me and I hail a cab and one arrives because this is the way it’s gonna be for us from now on.

  “Where to?”

  “Central Park,” I say.

  “Omigod, Joe. Really?”

  “Where they keep the carriages.”

  You squeal and clap and I did well and I wasn’t sure because part of me thought you don’t get cheesier than a horse-drawn carriage but in the end, it’s been almost two weeks since our IKEA night and I wanted our nocturnal reunion to be as hot as possible. The cab sails uptown and we’re there faster than I thought possible and this time, I get out of the cab first. And this time, I run around to your side of the car and open the door for you. I offer my hand. You take it. The cabbie checks you out. I tip him. And before you know it, you and I are side by side in the horse-drawn carriage, nestled like lovebirds.

  “This is bold, Joe,” you say and you move closer to me, again.

  “Those slits are bold,” I say and you spread your legs the tiniest bit and you want my help and I’m sliding my hand over your thigh and you’re turned on (the trot of the horse, the color of the leaves, me) and you whimper slightly and I get there. Lace panties, dewy with you and you whimper again and push just a bit toward my hand and I get under your panties and you’re a pillow-soft warm pond just for me and you say my name and I hold my hand there, just taking you in and you kiss me on the neck.

  “Thank you.”

  “No, no,” I say because I can’t make words right now. I’m too fucking happy to talk. The talking portion of the story of you and me is done and I use my other hand to move up and take your shoulder in my palm and we stay like that with eyes closed, taking each other in—your hand moving up my leg, painfully, beautifully slow—and you don’t even know what comes next and this is the best two hundred bucks I ever spent in my life. Thank you, horse.

  SO Benji was right. You do like your luxury. And I realize that I do too. We’re tucked into the darkest corner of Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle and I own you and I’m torturing you, being so close to all these empty rooms, all these soft beds, and I’m not taking you to bed, not just yet.

  “Oh come on,” you say. “We’ll steal a key from the maid. I’ve never done anything like that.”

  “What is it you want to do in there, young lady?”

  “You know what we’re gonna do in there, Joe.”

  “Yeah?”

  You nod and you’re nibbling my ear and if I asked, you would get down under the table, here, now. But I don’t ask because I want your mouth on my ear. Your hands are on the move, prowling over my belt, that’s right, there’s room under there, that’s right, that’s your hand, that’s my shirt. Pull it out, yes. You’re reaching and you’re wanting and you’ve got me in your hand, home, and they need a new word for hand job because this

  Is.

  Magic.

  You’re a ball of want and I have to open my eyes and see something unsexy or I’m gonna blow it and the room feels bright in the dark. I’ve never felt so safe as I do in your hands. I kiss you and you kiss me and this was well worth the wait and your magnolia is gonna tak
e me in, won’t be long now, you’re sopping wet, ready.

  Nobody is watching us. Nobody is mad at us. Nothing is wrong with us. The waiter in the red jacket who brought us two tall glasses of ice and two cocktail napkins and two small glasses of cold vodka was respectful and good. The drawings on the walls are good, just like they were when I saw them online when I was figuring out where to take you on my golden chariot to train your brain into thinking of me as your passport to money and leather banquettes. I make less than every dude in here, including the waiter.

  “Joe.”

  “Beck.”

  “I want you. Now.” You sound all gooey and warm.

  But a fucking waiter approaches, slow, mannered. “Excuse me, sir.”

  “Huh?”

  You pull away and cross your legs and bite your lip. Are we getting busted for PDA? He bows, slightly. “Miss, are you Miss Beck?”

  “I’m Beck,” you say and the waiter is confused. “Yes, I’m Miss Beck. What’s wrong?”

  Everything.

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt but you’ve received a rather urgent phone call from Miss Peach.”

  “Oh God.” You cover your throat and it’s over. You’re not safe anymore.

  He looks at me and I nod. He goes and you’re tearing into your purse and all that we just did is melting faster than the leftover ice cubes.

  “That’s weird,” I say and you’re still rummaging. You carry too much shit around.

  “I can’t find my phone.”