by Daniel Riley
“Are you saying that you think you might be gay?”
“No! God! I’m not gay…I don’t know. Will. I just…I don’t know what’s going…It was something that just, the entire thing was completely different than anything else.…I’m not even talking about the sex. I just felt…I don’t know what I’m saying. I felt nothing for the other two. I felt nothing, I felt weird but not so guilty or bad about the other two. I just didn’t think about them for a minute afterward. But this one…it fucked me up.”
“Fucked you up how?”
“I just…I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve thought about it constantly…”
“You fell in love.”
“No! Christ. No no no.”
“You said you felt guilty about Adrien Green. The other day…”
“Not…that’s not…”
“After the museum, in the park…that guilt. All that Catholic volcano shit. But it was actually…”
“All those things that happened to me, the new things. And the staying up all night, that wasn’t…it just…I don’t know what I’m trying to say to you! I’m so sorry. I’m so so fucking sorry for not telling you at dinner. But I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to do I don’t know what to do…” She was gummy-mouthed, the skipping record again.
“Whit, we don’t lie to each other. What is happening? This whole thing, the whole point of it was that we’d be straight up, that we wouldn’t pull this shit on each other.”
“I know. And now you know…”
“But how do I know that’s it? How do I know what’s real and what isn’t?”
Now he was the one who was rocking a little. His eyes were locked on the top of her head. She still had her head between her knees, and she was wiping her nose with her forearm.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” he said.
“I just hadn’t figured it out yet,” she said. “I didn’t know what to make of.…And then when you said you hadn’t had a third, I didn’t know what to do. I just knew I couldn’t tell you then.”
“And so you broke the deal.”
“I didn’t know how to say it. I still don’t know how to say it.”
“So you just straight up lied.”
“No, no—at dinner, I said two guys.”
He looked at her and she made the mistake of looking up at him. She shouldn’t have said it again, she shouldn’t have underlined the calculated loophole.
“This is so fucked,” he said. “You lied and then you kept lying and then you accused me of all sorts of bullshit on top of everything else to make yourself feel better about what you’d done and how you’d withheld it. To try to drag me down into it with you.”
“You fucked Jenna!” she said. “You betrayed me, too. Don’t put this all on me.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, shaking his head softly, calmly, sadly again. “I just said that to get you to fess up. I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do a goddamned thing, because I never fucking would. I swear on everything in my life and yours. You just weren’t going to tell me unless I said it.”
She saw something in his face that convinced her unequivocally. She knew he hadn’t done it. She’d known deep down all morning. She crumpled further into herself. She was weeping this time, the heaviest tears yet. He let her bob there in heaves and sobs.
She heard him moving from the living room to the bedroom. She was so exhausted. She wanted to die, but first she needed to sleep. She stood up to join him there, and she saw him smile at her softly for the first time in an eternity. But as she approached the threshold, he gave the door a shove, and it closed with a click in her face.
She heard music coming from the bedroom. The door was still shut. She’d lain down on the couch with a pillow over her face to shade the blaring sunlight, but hadn’t been able to sleep. Her laptop was in the bedroom and so she couldn’t even catch up on queries from work—not that she would’ve been able to draft a cogent email anyway. It was all her fault, she knew. It was her body’s fault and her mind’s fault. Her head hurt badly. She was on the other side of being drunk again. She poured herself a glass of water in the kitchen and collapsed on the couch. She was a part-time corpse now who lived in a perpetual hangover state.
It had been well over an hour of failing to nap by the time the music started through the wall. He never ran his music player anymore. It had been years since she’d heard music through the tinny speakers of his laptop. In fact, she could’ve sworn he’d blown out those speakers last year and refused to pay to get them repaired. Maybe it was coming from his busted phone. She knew he subscribed to one of the streaming services but rarely used it. It was one of those recurring monthly charges he always talked about needing to eliminate. At least she’d assumed he still subscribed. But did they know anything for certain about each other anymore?
No, she knew these songs. What was coming through the wall was older—the stuff from high school and college and the years right after they’d graduated, the years when they’d imprinted one another’s music onto each other’s brains. The result of having run a cable from one laptop to the other that first summer to make mirrors out of one another’s catalogs. In which case, maybe it was her speakers. Maybe the music was coming from her laptop, not his.
The thought made her heart flutter. The thought made her feel like she might faint.
She stood up and quietly moved toward the door. She heard him scrounging around on the other side, packing maybe. Packing instead of reading the open tabs on her laptop. Had he been able to sleep? Or had he been awake this whole time? She didn’t want to barge in just yet. And so her feet carried her through a series of moves her mind was entirely indifferent to. She ate some almonds. She drank some more water. She adjusted some framed photos of La Sagrada Familia on the wall. She walked circles in the living room, into shadow and then into light. She sat back down on the couch. The music was louder now. She knew every inch of every song. It must’ve been her laptop. They’d seen so much of the music live together. At the Mercury Lounge. At the Bowery Ballroom. At Terminal 5. She’d taken those shows for granted. She’d never perceived them to be things she’d never have again. Experiences that could burn up and blow away. She puddled up on the couch again and closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing so as not to throw up.
She heard the toilet flush off the bedroom. It roused her alert. She thought of her laptop and her heart spiked again, making her head hurt with the pulse. She couldn’t just sit out here forever. She couldn’t take it any longer. She knocked on the bedroom door and then opened it delicately.
The blinds were drawn and it was dark in a way she thought it never would be again in the apartment. Will folded a shirt and placed it in his bag and then looked up at her. The rictus had returned to his face and it made her feel like they’d never met before—like he was looking at her as though she were a stranger. It made her dizzy. It terrified her. She read his face in the instant as a sign of being, at best, heartbroken—at worst, indifferent.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He looked back at her again with that blunt vacancy.
“I’m sorry, Will,” she said.
“We’re officially on a three a.m. flight. Seats confirmed.”
“Okay…great…” she said, trying to lock his eyes. “Listen, I need you to know that I’m so—”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “I’m sorry that you’re going through what you’re going through. I’m sorry that I’ve put you in this position.”
“You haven’t put me in a…it’s not a big thing. I shouldn’t have kept it to myself, but it’s nothing.”
He looked up at her. “I just don’t know if that’s true. If it were nothing, you would’ve mentioned it. You would’ve said it right out, and we would’ve had a big laugh like we did about the others. Those were nothing. I could tell. They were obviously as meaningful to you as mine were to me, which was…not. And that’s why you were able to talk about them, to laugh
about them. Those were about sex—that was it. But you couldn’t tell me about this one.”
“I don’t know why,” she said, swallowing. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know why. I just don’t want you to think this is a bigger deal than it is, okay?”
He nodded. He leveled his eyes at her. He inhaled and then spoke it so casually that it caught her off guard. “Who was it?”
“What?”
“Who was she?”
“Nobody. Some girl who came by the set for one of the days of shooting.”
“Some girl.”
“A woman, I dunno, she’s mentored a bunch of the writers on our show.”
“A writer. A big-deal writer.”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“You guess so.”
“Yes…she’s a big deal. She’s a very talented writer and she’s helping all these other writers.”
“And so you just…hit it off? How did she know you were available?”
“She was direct. She came up to me after we wrapped for the day. Asked if I wanted to get a drink. I was busy, but I thought it might be about pitching something to the—”
“But it wasn’t. You knew it wasn’t.”
“I knew it probably wasn’t.”
“You were busy, but you went anyway.”
“We had a drink, and then another, and nobody ever had to say anything.”
“You brought her back to the hotel.”
“I went to her apartment. It was closer. We had another drink. I played with her Weimaraner.”
“Just like that,” he said.
“It was nothing to her…” she said, swallowing again. “It was easy, it was casual, it was nothing. That was the whole thing. There was nothing special about it.”
“Except of course there was.”
“I mean, there was nothing special about it for her. It was just…routine for her.”
He looked at her blankly again. “Did she know it was your first time?”
She looked right back. “She understood what the situation was.”
“And so she got what she wanted, and then moved on,” he said.
“I guess so,” she said.
Will nodded slowly. “Meg…” he said.
“What?” Whitney said. She swallowed hard.
She stared at him across the ocean of blond hardwood. He saw the reaction in her face. Of course it confirmed everything.
“Meg Herrera,” he said.
“Right…” Whitney said.
“Her production company’s involved,” Will said. “So she has lots of ideas, lots to share with you guys all the time, right? And so even if it didn’t mean so much to her, she’s helping shape the show, and so has to be in touch a lot afterward. She has to send lots of emails and you have to send lots of emails back—to Meg, I mean.”
Her vision actually whited out. She hadn’t fainted, because she could feel her feet on the ground, and her legs beneath her hips, and the cold clam of her palms. But her sight was all powder.
“I went to check on the status of our flight and accidentally opened your laptop instead of mine, and your email was up,” he said. “There were a handful of unread emails at the top.”
“And so you went ahead and read them.” She had said it or she hadn’t. She couldn’t distinguish between what was happening inside and outside her skull.
“There was a little 73 next to her name. And just a few words in the preview of the email.”
Whitney had collapsed into a pretzel on the floor. It had made an enormous noise. Her head had fallen against her chest, and her legs were bent out to the sides like they might be broken.
“I don’t think you’d seen the latest one yet, but its first few words probably won’t come as a surprise.”
“Will.”
“Care to know what it said?”
She lifted her head and looked up at him.
“Hmm?” he said.
“No.”
“Okay, cool. Let me know if you’re curious. Sounds like you won’t be totally surprised by the sentiment, either way.”
Whitney felt the hot tears on her face.
“The previewed part wasn’t actually that bad,” Will said. “All it said was: Three weeks?? You’re going to make me wait three… That could mean anything, right? That could be feedback on a script, an answer from your boss—any number of plenty reasonable things, really.”
She looked up at him with tears in her eyes.
“But I didn’t answer you a minute ago, did I?” Will said. “I probably did click through, huh?”
“Will.”
“I didn’t read all of them. Given that there were 72 emails before this one. But I can confirm: the latest doesn’t deviate much from the previous…from what she’s been sending, or from those responses of yours at four a.m., five-thirty a.m. No wonder you’re so tired all the time, sweetheart.”
“I didn’t ask for this to become a thing,” she said. “I didn’t know it would turn into this.”
“Of course you did,” he said. “You absolutely did. This whole fucking thing was literally your idea.”
“I mean, I didn’t ask for this situation with this woman.”
“With Meg. You can say her name. We’re finally getting to a place of legitimate transparency. At least I think we are.”
“After it happened, she sent me an email. I didn’t know what to say.”
“You didn’t need to respond.”
“I work with her on this thing. There might be things in the future. She’s a big deal. I didn’t want to slam any doors shut.”
“People don’t respond to emails all the time.”
“I didn’t want to be rude.”
“God love you,” Will said. “I’m so glad you didn’t hurt Meg’s feelings. We both appreciate that, me and her. But obviously her a little more than me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”
“So, what, then?” he said.
“So, it ends,” she said. “I don’t talk to her again.”
“Is that so easy? Wouldn’t it be more rude now to just cut it off? After 73 emails? After all, she seems fairly eager to have her tongue on your clit again ASAP.”
“Hey…”
“Oh, please. Her fucking words, not mine. I love how quickly you turn into a scandalized little prude when it suits you.”
“I was just trying to…I don’t know, Will. I don’t know about anything anymore.”
“Here I was suspecting Jack,” he said. “Poor sweet simple Jack. When you dozed off before he got here, there was this slew of texts for you from a number I didn’t recognize. Figured it was him. Figured something was going on between you two. I almost feel bad about what I said to him. Good Jack. Honest Jack. Unless it was him, after all…”
She was still on the floor. “I haven’t checked my phone since I plugged it in.”
“It doesn’t matter. It couldn’t be more explicit than what she wrote you in those emails.”
“I didn’t ask for it. I don’t care about any of that.”
“But Whitney, you do. Do you not realize that your responses are in there, too? That this isn’t, like, a one-sided shoebox of letters?”
“I was just…I was just playing along. I had sex with a woman. That’s it. So what?”
“That’s right,” he said. “So, what? What now? What the fuck are we supposed to do?”
She stared at him.
“What does this mean?” he said. “What are you actually saying?”
Her eyes were closed, but she picked at her cuticle, picked it to the point of blood.
“Hey!” he said. “What am I supposed to do with this, Whit?”
Will moved to the kitchen and poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey. He halved it in two long gulps as he walked back to the couch. She was staring aimlessly across the street at the roofs of the other buildings, to the drying lines. The sun was brighter still through the windows. When he got back, her face was wet and streaked with sa
lt and bright like a sidewalk after a spontaneous shower.
“So is this it, then?” he said, so plain it made her choke. “Is that all there is for us?”
Her face spoke for her, the horror in her mouth and eyes. “Of course not…what are you talking about?”
He’d done it purposefully, hadn’t he? He’d done it to hurt her in a new way. She stood up and threw herself at him, grabbing his body, her limbs out of control, seizing his shoulders and arms and knees with every last appendage available to her, grasping for any point of contact. “I love you. I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you. God, Will!”
“But is this all supposed to be okay now? What are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know…I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know…”
“Besides the lies, besides the deception, besides the fucking emails behind my back—what is it that made you not tell me? Why couldn’t you tell me? Why couldn’t you just say it and then move on from it?”
He drank again. He was asking the essential questions but he was sublimely still. It terrified her. She shook her head slowly again.
“This all makes sense when you start to think about it, right?” Will said. “Why you wanted the break in the first place, I mean. Why you wanted 1-2-3, why you were resisting everything, why you couldn’t imagine being engaged. What you needed in the meantime…I just wish you’d—”
“That’s not true,” she said, grabbing hold of him again, searching his face for his eyes. “That’s just not true at all. Please don’t make me feel worse about this than I already do. It’s not like I’ve been living with this desire for years, or something…it’s something that just happened.”
“I don’t believe that. I just don’t anymore. I read those fucking emails. Did you forget that again? The lying’s over, okay?” he said, and she pulled away from him slowly. He understood so much more than she probably even understood herself. “How long have you been feeling this way? Just tell me. Please. Whitney. There’s nothing else to hide anymore. There’s just two people left.”
“But there’s one person who’s the same and one person who’s fucking changed. And I don’t know what to say to you about it. I don’t know what this was about—or why.”