The Lies That Bind

by Emily Giffin

  “Are you coming to bed?” I say. “It’s so late.”

  “Yes,” he whispers, then undresses down to his boxers and T-shirt. He climbs into bed beside me.

  Several silent minutes pass before our bodies and breath come together in the darkness. My eyes closed, I wait for him to kiss me or make some kind of a move. Do the things that people do when they go from a bar to a bed together. But we don’t do any of that. We just drift to sleep, my cheek on his chest, his arm around me, as if we’ve known each other forever.

  As the morning light works its way through the slats of my vertical blinds, I awaken. It takes me a few seconds to remember him. I hold my breath before slowly rolling over, wondering if he’s gone, half hoping that he is, if only to avoid the awkward morning-after routine.

  Yet when I see him, still sleeping, with the covers pulled up to his chin, I’m overwhelmed with relief. There’s something so peaceful about his face—the way his lips are barely parted and his bangs fall across his forehead. He has good hair—the silky, shiny kind that I’ve always considered something of a waste on a guy. As I contemplate reaching out to touch it, his eyelids flutter open. He looks at me and smiles, his face lighting up. I smile back at him, nervous but excited.

  “Good morning,” he says, his voice gravelly, sounding like a man who was drinking in a bar just a few hours before. He reaches up and runs his hand through his hair as if to straighten it, but ends up making it messier.

  “Good morning,” I say, my heart racing.

  I wait for him to speak, but when he doesn’t, I say, “So. I still don’t know your name.”

  “Wait. Are you asking me for real this time? Or is this another head fake?”

  I smile and tell him I’m ready now.

  He clears his throat, then swallows, his face growing serious, the suspense building. “It’s Grant,” he says.

  I silently replay the one syllable, thinking that it fits him. Classic but unexpected. Simple yet strong. Positive connotations abounding. Granting a wish. Receiving a grant. “Grant what?” I say.

  “Grant Smith.”

  “I like that,” I say, both of us frozen in place, curled-up mirror images of each other. Close enough to touch if one of us extended our arms. But we don’t.

  “Okay. Let me guess your name,” he says, chewing his lip in exaggerated concentration. “I bet you have one of those feminine names that ends with an eee or ahh. Something like…Sophia…Emily…Alyssa.”

  “Wow,” I say. “You’re actually right….Three syllables. Ending in an eee sound.”

  “What is it?” he says. “Tell me.”

  “Cecily,” I say, wondering why it feels as if I just shared an intimate secret.

  From under the covers, his hand finds mine. “Cecily,” he says. “And to think I was worried…”

  “Worried about what?” I ask, our fingers now lacing together, my heart thudding harder.

  “Worried that I might not like it.”

  “And why would that matter?”

  “Because,” he says. “I have the feeling I may be saying it…a lot.”

  “You do?” I ask, my cheeks on fire.

  “Yes, Cecily,” he whispers. “I do.”

  * * *

  —

  Less than an hour later, we are sitting in a bright, bustling diner on Second Avenue. Between us on the table is a New York Times he bought at the door and two cups of coffee our waitress just poured. We are waiting for our omelets—his Greek, mine plain cheddar.

  I stare over at him across the steam rising from our mugs, marveling at how seamless the transition from bed to booth has been—with not a single uncomfortable moment. Not when we got up and took turns in the bathroom. Not when I told him I didn’t have a spare toothbrush, but he was welcome to use mine (he did). Not even when Scottie called on our way out the door, and I made the mistake of picking up the phone as he pummeled me with yes-no questions, and I informed him that no I wasn’t alone; and no it wasn’t Matthew; and yes he was cute.

  “So. Tell me about yourself,” I say to Grant, wondering how I can feel like I know someone so well when I actually know nothing about him.

  He nods as he pours cream into his mug and stirs. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything,” I say. “Everything.”

  He crosses his arms, then rests his elbows on the table, leaning toward me. “Nobody really wants to know everything about another person, do they?”

  I can’t tell if he’s being cagey or coy, so I say, “Good point. Just give me the basics.”

  “What’s basic?” he says.

  “You know…How old are you? Where’re you from? Do you have any siblings? That kind of stuff.”

  He nods, takes a sip of coffee, then tells me he’s thirty, from Buffalo, and has a twin brother.

  “Oh, that’s cool,” I say. “Identical or fraternal?”

  “Fraternal. But we look a lot alike….That’s what people tell us, anyway.”

  “Who’s older?” I ask.

  “He is. By four minutes.”

  I nod, then ask where he went to college, as it occurs to me that maybe he didn’t go at all.

  “Stanford,” he says.

  I raise my eyebrows and say, “Wow. Impressive.”

  “I had a basketball scholarship….Don’t be too impressed,” he says with a smile. “What about you? All the same questions?”

  “I’m from a small town outside of Milwaukee. I went to the University of Wisconsin for college and grad school….I have an older sister and a younger brother.”

  He nods, sips his coffee, and says, “Middle child, huh.”

  “Afraid so.” I smile.

  “Are you close? To your family?”

  “Yeah. Very. I miss them a lot. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here,” I say.

  “And? What are you doing here?”

  “I came for a job.”

  “What do you do?”

  I hesitate, thinking that I never know whether to say that I’m a writer or a journalist or a reporter. Writer feels too vague; journalist sounds self-important; reporter seems somewhat misleading—too hard-nosed and gritty to describe what I do at this stage of my career. I avoid it altogether and simply tell him I work for The Mercury.

  “Aw, you should’ve told me sooner,” he says, glancing down at the Times. “I wouldn’t have bought your competition.”

  I laugh and say, “Yeah. We’re big rivals…neck and neck with the Times.”

  “Hey, I like The Mercury.”

  “All the news that’s not fit to print?” I say, the joking tagline my friends and I have given our tabloid employer.

  He laughs and says, “Well, you gotta start somewhere, right?”

  I shrug because I’ve been telling myself that for a long time now, though I have yet to move up the ranks. “What about you?” I say. “What do you do?”

  He tells me he’s a trader, and for one second I picture North American fur traders, like the kind you’d see in a junior high textbook. Then I realize he must mean Wall Street. “As in stocks?”

  “Yeah. Domestic large cap.” He sighs, his expression changing completely, becoming darker. “But I’m hoping to make a career change soon.”

  “To do what?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I’m still figuring that out….I’m still figuring a lot of things out, actually.”

  “Such as?” I ask as breezily as I can.

  “You know…what I really want to do with my life…where to live…stuff I probably should have figured out by now…” His voice trails off, worry lines appearing on his forehead.

  “Where do you live?” I ask, though it occurs to me he could be talking in broader terms. As in which city.

  He tells me he’s between apartments. “I was in Brooklyn…
.But I’ve been crashing with my brother…on his couch…in Hoboken….”

  “Ohhh. Now I get it,” I say. “My bed is better than his couch? I see how it is.”

  He laughs and holds up his hands, palms out. “Yep. You got me. Busted. I was just using you for your bed. I saw you at the bar last night, and I thought—now, there’s a girl with a good mattress. Firm, but not too firm.”

  “Hey, that’s cool,” I say, smirking back at him. “You’re welcome to my mattress anytime.”

  * * *

  —

  After we eat, we linger for a long time over coffee and the paper, reading it together, passing sections back and forth, doing the crossword in record time, and discussing everything from entertainment and sports to politics and literature. He loves books as much as I do, becoming animated as he talks about his favorites. He mentions a few authors that lots of guys seem to love—Irving, Updike, Kerouac, Salinger. But then he throws a curveball with Anna Karenina.

  “Seriously?” I say, because it’s one of my favorites—and obviously also very romantic. “Or is that a line?”

  “You want a line? How about this one…” He clears his throat and leans toward me. “ ‘I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.’ ”

  I feel myself melting inside, goosebumps rising everywhere. But I play it cool and say, “Quoting Tolstoy could just be part of your act.”

  “Yep,” he says, grinning back at me. “And to think I usually have to quote Tolstoy before I get in a girl’s bed.”

  * * *

  —

  When we finally leave the diner, Grant asks if I’d like to go for a walk. I tell him I’d love to. So we head west, circling the wrought-iron gates of Gramercy Park, then wandering down through the Flatiron District into Union Square. Once there, we stroll around the ground floor of Barnes & Noble, perusing the new releases, then cross back into the square, where we sit on a bench and people- and dog-watch for the longest time. I can tell that both of us are stalling, putting off saying goodbye. But at the same time, we are both fully present in the moment. At least that’s the way it feels to me.

  Eventually though, it’s time to go, and we stand and head west toward his PATH train on Fourteenth Street. When we get there, he turns and looks at me, his face serious.

  “So,” he says, one hand on the metal rail leading downstairs to the station. “Will I ever see you again?”

  I glance at the illegible graffiti scrawled on the wall behind him, then look back into his eyes. “Do you want to see me again?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I do.”

  “Good.” I reach into my purse, tear the corner off a random brochure, find a pen, and write my home and cell numbers on it. “Here,” I say.

  He takes the paper, folds it in half, and puts it in his back pocket. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “That was fun.”

  “Fun?” he says. “C’mon, Cecily, you’re a crossword whiz. Surely you can do better than ‘fun.’ ”

  I smile again, then tell him that our time together was completely unprecedented.

  “How so?” he presses, staring into my eyes.

  Now a bit dizzy, I say, “Well…I’ve never been that spontaneous. I’ve never shared a bed with a complete stranger. I’ve never felt such an instant connection.”

  “That’s a better answer,” he says. “And I agree. With the last part, anyway.”

  I smile, then say, “Oh, so you have shared a bed with complete strangers?”

  “I have. But not like we did.” He gets a funny look on his face, then says, “I really liked it.”

  “Me too,” I say.

  “I like you, Cecily.”

  “I like you, too…Grant.”

  He stares at me a second, then gives me a quick, unceremonious side hug before turning and disappearing underground.

  * * *

  —

  I call Scottie back as soon as I get home.

  “Give me the scoop, ho!” he shouts into the phone.

  “I’m not a ho.” I laugh. “Nothing happened. Not like that anyway.”

  “Some guy spent the night and nothing happened?” Scottie says.

  “I swear,” I say, walking over to my sofa and collapsing onto it. “We didn’t even kiss.”

  “But you said he was cute?”

  “He is cute. He’s more than that….He’s beautiful…a tall, dark, and handsome cliché. Your type, actually,” I say, thinking that I usually go for blue eyes and blond hair. Like Matthew has.

  “Who would be his celebrity doppelgänger?” Scottie asks, one of his favorite questions.

  “Umm…That’s hard….I’ll go with…Goran Višnjić.”

  “Goran who?”

  “You know…the hot Croatian doctor on ER.”

  “Ohh. Damn.” He whistles. “You mean Dr. Luka Kovač?”

  “Yeah. Him,” I say. “They both have that brooding thing going on.”

  “Then why in the world didn’t you hook up with him?” Scottie says.

  “It just wasn’t like that,” I say, trying to articulate the mysterious thing that transpired between us without sounding completely cheesy. “It was…I don’t know…deep.”

  “Deep?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yet at the same time…really simple and sweet. I don’t know. It’s hard to describe….Like, we barely said anything to each other at the bar. We just sat there together. It was really comfortable and nice. But also exciting. And then he ended up walking me home…and then we just got in bed and went to sleep. Like we’d been in bed together a hundred times before.”

  “So are you not attracted to him?”

  “I am very attracted to him.”

  “Like, butterflies and fireworks kind of attraction?”

  “Yes. All of that,” I say, getting those feelings just thinking about him.

  “More than you were to Matthew in the beginning?”

  “Totally different. Well, I guess I shouldn’t say totally different. You know I liked Matthew a lot in the beginning, too,” I say, struggling to explain, thinking of the night Matthew and I met. We were at a rooftop party thrown by some trust fund kid who worked at my paper and also went to high school with Matthew. So there were mutual friends—and context—whereas last night had no frame of reference. Grant and I were both alone. It was the middle of the night. We were just…existing beside each other. I babble some of this to Scottie now and then say, “Honestly, my mind is a little bit blown.”

  “Okay. I’m going to need to look this guy up on the Internet,” he says. “Full name, please.”

  “Grant Smith,” I say, glancing over at my unmade bed, remembering the moment he told me his name.

  “Ugh! Smith?” Scottie says. “That’s going to be tough. What’s his number? I’ll try a reverse phone number look-up….”

  “Um…well…I didn’t get his number…” I say, bracing myself.

  Sure enough, Scottie unleashes a mini tizzy. “Wait, what?” he says. “Have I taught you nothing?”

  “He has my number—”

  “But you’re supposed to get his number. Then make him wait. Remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah…I know…but I don’t want to play games this time,” I say, remembering those endless courtship maneuvers with Matthew, culminating with my tacit ultimatum, also masterminded by Scottie.

  “Fine. But what if he’s playing games of his own? I mean, don’t you think it’s a tad shady that he didn’t give you his phone number? After you spent the night with him?”

  “Shady how?” I say.

  “Player shady.”

  “He’s not a player, Scottie.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Becau
se he didn’t even try to kiss me.”

  “It’s called the long game.”

  I laugh and say, “No. It’s not a long game or a short game. Because there are no games.”

  “Okay,” he says. “If you say so….It’s still a little strange, though….Wait! Could he be gay?”

  “No,” I say, nipping Scottie’s everyone’s-on-the-sexuality-spectrum tangent right in the bud.

  “And you’re sure he’s into you, too?” Scottie asks, as only a best friend can.

  “Yes,” I say, getting an intense flashback to Grant’s voice and hands and eyes. “Pretty darn sure.”

  “Well,” Scottie says. “This is quite the development.”

  “Yep,” I say, letting it all sink in a little more.

  “So does this mean you’re over Matthew?”

  I let out a long sigh because I’ve actually been thinking about this on and off since I left Grant at his station. “I don’t know…maybe….Does that make me shallow?” I ask, feeling a strange combination of uneasy and liberated.

  “Maybe a little shallow,” Scottie says. “But who cares?”

  “I care,” I say. “I don’t want to be that girl.”

  “What girl is that?”

  “The one who falls into a rebound relationship because she can’t be alone,” I say.

  “Hey,” Scottie says. “There are worse things than hot rebound sex with Dr. Luka Kovač.”

  I laugh and say, “Maybe.”

  “And then you can get all that out of your system and move on back to Wisconsin.”

  “Or,” I say, “you can move to New York.” I start to say the rest—that it is high time he came out of the closet to his parents. But I don’t. Because for one, Scottie already knows this and is tortured enough by it, and for another, he is that friend who would much rather give advice than receive it.

  “No can do,” he says. “I like trees and, you know, clean air.”