Roomies

by Christina Lauren

  We walk a few blocks to Taboon, and even though there is a line of at least ten parties waiting outside, Calvin shakes hands with a man at the door, who points us to a table in the back. I follow, noticing how heads turn slightly when the Irishman casually slips out of his tailored navy blazer and folds it over his arm.

  When he pulls out my chair for me, I ask, “You knew that guy?”

  “Juilliard.” Calvin makes a faintly sour face. “Brilliant cellist. He’s not had the best luck since.”

  I feel the impulse claw its way up my throat; the desire to help every stray. But no matter how amazing Robert is, or how elaborate his orchestra is for the modesty of the Levin-Gladstone, he can’t hire every out-of-work musician we meet.

  Still, even if I suppress it, Calvin reads the reaction in my eyes and it softens the tight line of his mouth. “He’ll land on his feet. Maybe we can help, down the road.”

  We.

  Down the road.

  I swallow thickly, working to give a neutral shrug. In unison, we look down, scanning the menu, and butterflies land in my stomach, tensing.

  A proper date.

  We’ve had so many nights on the couch eating takeout. So many happy hours spent with Robert and Jeff or even Lulu before we head home together. What about tonight makes this . . . different?

  Calvin looks up at me. “Want to share the cauliflower starter and the branzino?”

  Holy crap, I love having a decisive eater as a husband. “Done.”

  He slides his menu onto the table and reaches over, taking my hand. “Have I said thank you?”

  This makes me laugh. “Once or twice.”

  “Well, I’ll say it again, just in case.” His eyes take on a glassy, sincere glow. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Of course.”

  After a little squeeze, he lets go of my hand and sits back to smile up at the waiter who’s materialized at the table. This married game we are playing sure does seem easy, and Calvin sure does seem sincerely dedicated, but I get these tiny pulsing flashes of awareness that remind me I don’t really know him all that well. I’ve memorized his face—the olive skin, the greenish eyes, the perfectly imperfect teeth—but his brain feels like a mystery still.

  We order our shared dinner, and he turns to pull something out of the inner pocket of his blazer, producing a small pink box. “For you.”

  I am the worst about accepting compliments and gifts, so as expected, Appalland makes an appearance and I stammer out a few things that vaguely translate into Oh my God, you’re so ridiculous, how dare you.

  Inside the box is a delicate gold claddagh ring, and a storm erupts inside me.

  “I realize it seems stereotypical to wear these,” Calvin says through my stunned silence, “but we do. Please don’t think I’m being trite. This doesn’t just represent love—with the heart—but I suppose we think of the hands as friendship, and the crown as loyalty.” He makes a self-deprecating little grimace as he slides it on my right ring finger, exposed from the cast, with the point of the heart toward the wrist. “Like this, it means you’re in a relationship.” With a smile aimed at my hand, he fusses with it a little, twisting it straight on my finger. “Normally, because we’re married, you’d wear it like that on your other hand, but you’ve got the wedding ring there.”

  I’m so afraid of saying something inappropriate or flippant that I don’t say anything, I just touch it with the fingers of my left hand and smile up at him.

  “Do you like it?” he asks quietly.

  This is where I could so easily reveal that I’m completely infatuated with him, and that his giving me a ring has essentially Made My Life Complete, but I just nod, whispering, “It’s so pretty, Calvin.”

  He leans back, but the vulnerability doesn’t entirely leave his expression. “Do you enjoy watching me in rehearsal?”

  An indelicate snort escapes. “Is that a serious question?”

  He gives that self-deprecating grimace again. “Well, yeah. Your opinion is the one I value most. Your advice is . . . everything.”

  This leaves me momentarily stunned. “I love watching you rehearse. You’re spectacular—you have to know that.”

  The waiter brings our wine, and we each take a sip to approve the bottle, thanking him. Once he’s gone, Calvin looks at me over the rim of his glass.

  “I think Ramón and I sound great together, yeah.” He bites his lip thoughtfully. “But—I mean—the entire time I’ve been here, I’ve wanted this—exactly this. Did I ever tell you, once Possessed debuted, I would play the music alone and imagine being in the production?”

  Something squeezes my heart in its fist. “Really?”

  He nods, quickly swallowing another sip. “After I graduated, I thought something like this would come. I thought that break was only a few months off. Or I would run into someone at a party, and give them my information and hope it would change everything. A year turned into two, and two turned into four, and I wanted to be on Broadway so much I just stayed. I really screwed myself, I know I did.”

  “I can completely see how that would happen, though.” It’s like me with the book, I think. I expect the idea to sprout tomorrow, next week, in a month. And here I am, two years out of graduate school with nothing written.

  “So, I suppose what I mean is that this is so obviously worth it to me. Whether we are only friends or . . . you know. I want this marriage to be worth it to you,” he says gently, “and I’m not quite sure how to make that happen.”

  Whether we are only friends or . . . you know.

  Whether we are only friends or . . . you know?

  My brain is on a loop, barricaded from working past what he’s just said in order to help assuage the guilt I can tell he’s feeling. The reply We could start having regular sex is so close to the surface. So close.

  I take a few deep gulps of wine and wipe my hand indelicately across my mouth. “Please don’t worry about that.”

  “I could help you think about your book?”

  I get that sinking feeling in my stomach that I always get when I imagine opening my laptop and working.

  We could have sex tonight.

  I take another deep drink of wine.

  “I’ll try to think of something,” he says quietly.

  seventeen

  Calvin and Ramón’s first performance is on a Friday.

  When I find him tying his tie in front of my bedroom mirror, he looks calm and rested—but I know it’s a sham, because I heard him pacing most of last night.

  “You ready?”

  He nods with his bottom lip trapped savagely between his teeth. Smoothing the tie down his chest, he says, “What do you think? Do you think I’m ready?”

  He’s said my favorite word of his—tink—twice in one sentence, as if I need to be further charmed.

  “I tink you’re going to be amazing.”

  He meets my eyes in the mirror. “You tink you can give me shit for my accent?”

  “I tink you sort of like it.”

  He turns, and for ten seconds, we stand there like this, staring at each other. We’re maybe a foot apart; I can see his hands shaking. He’s been waiting his entire life for this moment.

  “Tell me something I need to remember tonight.”

  He seems to need something to focus on, some advice to loop through so that he doesn’t spiral downward in nerves for the next two hours. I reach out, fidgeting with his tie. “Don’t rush through the bridge in ‘Only Once in My Life.’ Make sure to breathe in the opening solo of ‘I Didn’t Expect You,’ because you hold your breath sometimes, and I think the notes come out looser when you remember to breathe.” I think for a few seconds in his absorbed silence. “Trust your hands during ‘Lost to Me.’ Don’t be afraid to close your eyes and feel the notes. When you do that, it comes out like water easily moving over a stone.”

  I slide my hands from his tie, over his chest. I can feel his heart pounding.

  Calvin lets out a long, slow breath. �
��You should see the way you glow when you’re talking about music. You just—”

  I laugh, interrupting him. “We’re talking about you right now.”

  He tilts his head, bending his arms so that he can capture my hands in his. “Are we?”

  I blaze over this. “You’re ready, Calvin. No question.”

  He glances at my mouth, and a fire seems to start low in my belly. It feels like the kind of scene where I step forward, he steps forward, a kiss happens, something sweet and slow, born of feelings that have been building for months.

  But oops, that’s just me. We’ve been fake married for just over three weeks, which means we only have eleven months left of the charade. We’ve managed to find an easy balance. No use complicating things.

  Even three hours before the performance, the theater is mobbed outside, and we slip in the side entrance. I looked earlier on StubHub, and tickets to see Ramón tonight were over six hundred dollars for the far-back balcony seats. Calvin is doing a good job looking relaxed, but even his calm facade has cracks in it: he keeps fidgeting with his tie.

  Backstage is all motion and bustle. Calvin looks for his new buddy, but Ramón is in for makeup and able to offer only a final smile of support before Calvin is tugged away by a stagehand.

  I give him a tight hug, a kiss on his smooth cheek, and then he’s out of my sight. I won’t see him until after the show. Instead, I’ll be up front for most of the night, selling T-shirts. Sad trombone.

  But I do get to sneak away and watch from the back. As I slip in, I wonder whether, in ten years, I’ll hear a riff or an opening chord to one of the songs and be transported back immediately to this time in my life. It makes the shadow thought follow—what will I feel when I think of these times? Will I think, Wow, those were the hardest days, trying to figure out who I was? Or will I think, Those days were so easy and free, with so little responsibility?

  I’ve had the thought almost without realizing it—the encroaching awareness that I feel settled but in truth can’t see my future at all. I have a temporary job, a temporary marriage. Will anything ever be permanent? What the hell am I going to do with my life? I only get one shot at this, and right now, I’m finding my value only in being valuable to others. How do I find value for me?

  Calvin told me to do something with my brain, but how? Threads of ideas appear on the edge and are gone as soon as my fingers settle on the keys. There’s no connective tissue to string them together, no skeleton to hold them up. I want to live my life with the intensity I see on the stage up there, want to feel passionate about something in that same way. But what if it never happens for me?

  My train of thought is derailed when the skyscraper set is shifted into place, the lights dim, and Ramón steps into a spotlight, center stage. He’s already a giant in person, but on the stage he is towering. His dark hair is combed back from his face. His eyes are nearly black, but luminous all the way to the far reaches of the theater. I can tell his chest is rising and falling in excitement, and from nearly every body in my immediate vicinity I sense the vibration of static, the urgency of anticipation.

  I suck in a deep breath; my heart is in my throat.

  I can’t see Calvin, but I hear the second he strums the opening chord of “Lost to Me”—one of the biggest hits from the soundtrack. Without having to see him, I know he’s taken my advice and closed his eyes. The warm, honeyed melody rolls up the aisle like a wave of light.

  It is sublime.

  The crowd shifts in unison; a spontaneous smattering of applause breaks out and then it grows: For a few moments, the audience is thunderous with surprise and approval. For Calvin, for Ramón, for the risk and beauty of the guitar and the salty richness of Ramón’s baritone lifting the weight of the music up over his shoulders and launching it to the depths of the theater. My vision wavers, spotted with vibrating dots of light. I don’t know what it is about Calvin’s playing; listening to this feels so different from listening to Seth. And not just because of the instrument. Calvin’s music gives an aching sense of time passing, the pain of finding love twice in a lifetime, of losing it in intervening years. It’s exactly the way the story needs to unfold through music. It feels nostalgic . . . I’m already regretting the end.

  When the final curtain falls, there isn’t just a standing ovation, there’s a stomping one. I have the sense of light fixtures shaking, dust trickling from cracks in the walls. I have to rush back out to the lobby—we sell out of T-shirts tonight for the first time—but before I do I swear I catch Calvin’s eye as he stands to take his bow.

  Backstage there is champagne overflowing, and a hundred bodies trying to get to our stars. After the merch booth has closed, I join the melee, but am nudged to the middle of the mob, and then the back, where I stand on my toes to watch person after person embrace my husband. Jeff’s words from our pseudo-poker game rise to the surface of my consciousness and bob there, refusing to be silenced. This is the very definition of being a supporting character. But I don’t really mind that I’m this far away—I can still see the smile on his face as bright as a spotlight, and his joy seems to vibrate across the distance. Surely everyone knows what a big deal this must be to him, but I still look at him and remember the subway musician hunched over his guitar, sitting on a narrow stool, guitar case open at his feet. And now here he is, wearing a suit, standing beside Ramón Martín, and getting the praise and adoration of an entire cast and crew. I’m still on the sidelines, but I helped make that happen.

  After each person approaches, Calvin looks up, searching. I think he’s trying to find Robert; he gives his hunt a tiny flicker of attention before he looks back down to the person in front of him, thanking them, embracing them, listening to their praise. And then he looks up again.

  Robert finds him, finally, and the two men embrace, clapping each other on the back. But again, when Robert pulls away, Calvin looks up and only then

  only when Robert points

  only when Calvin grins so wide

  do I realize he’s been searching for me.

  Calvin’s expression clears, and he pushes through, making his way over. The crowd parts to let him by, and I barely have time to appreciate his Officer and a Gentleman marching approach before his arms are around my waist and I’m lifted off the ground.

  “We did it!”

  I laugh, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. He is warm, his back is damp with sweat, and his hair tickles the side of my face. “You did it.”

  Calvin murmurs, “No, no,” over and over, and then starts laughing. He smells like aftershave and sweat, and I can feel his smile against my neck.

  “How was it?” he asks, voice muffled.

  “Holy shit. It was . . .”

  He pulls back to look at my face. “Yeah? Did you get to see me? I thought I saw you at the very end. I tried to find you.”

  I am so proud, I burst into tears.

  This makes him laugh even harder. “All right, all right, mo stóirín. Let’s go have some champagne.”

  eighteen

  Rolling over, I straighten my legs and push my hair out of my face. A hammer inside my cranium bangs against my skull in protest.

  Do not move, it says.

  The sunlight beaming across the bed feels like it’s coming from a star just outside my window. Calvin’s groggy moan reaches me from the other side of the bed.

  The other side of the bed?

  I sit up, jerking the sheet across my bare chest, and my world tilts in a heaving, nauseating lurch.

  Oh.

  I’m naked.

  I’m naked? I pull the sheet away from Calvin’s facedown form . . . and . . . he is also naked.

  The visual reminder is quickly chased by the more physical one: I am sore. Oh my God sore. What the hell did we do sore.

  He presses his face into the pillow. “Mmmmph. I feel like I marinated in beer,” he says, words muffled. And then he twists, looking over his shoulder, staring down at his body: “Where are my clothes?”
r />   “I don’t know.”

  He looks at me, and seems to surmise that I am equally naked under the sheet. “Where are yours . . . ?”

  I keep my gaze carefully diverted from his muscular backside. “I don’t know that, either.”

  “I think . . . I think I’m still wearing a condom.” He rolls over and I get an eyeful of impressive morning wood before my gaze shoots skyward again, fixed on the ceiling.

  He is, indeed, still wearing a condom.

  With a whimper, he slowly peels it away and bends, dropping it in the trash bin near my bed. He rolls back, and the resulting silence pulls my attention over to his face.

  He’s grinning. “Hi.”

  I think my cheeks are going to melt under the heat of this blush. “Hi.”

  Saturday morning, late February, in my bed with Calvin McLoughlin. My bed. I have located myself in time and space but I still have no recollection of how we ended up here.

  He scratches just below his eye. “Don’t be surprised, okay? But I think . . .” He looks around at the mess of my bed. “I think we finally consummated the marriage last night.”

  “This theory is supported by the obnoxious hickey on your shoulder.”

  He turns his head to check for himself, and looks back at me, impressed. “Do you remember . . . anything?” he asks, squinting at me through one eye.

  Inhaling deeply, I think back.

  Champagne at the theater.

  He crossed the room, and everything inside me turned into tiny golden bubbles.

  Dinner with about fifteen others.

  Wine. Lots and lots of wine.

  “Dancing?” I ask.

  He hesitates. “Yeah.”

  More drinks and the deep pulsing of music.

  Being tugged onto the dance floor. Calvin pulling me right up against him, his hands bracketing my hips, his thigh sliding between my legs. His mouth just below my ear, saying, I can feel the heat of you. Is it the drink, or is it me?

  And then: watching him trip toward the bar and calling after him, No more shots!