by Tia Williams
“Jenna.” His voice was muffled, weak.
“Hmm?”
“You’re sick. I had no idea.”
“Neither did I,” she said with a quivery laugh.
“Hashtag fetal position.”
They held each other for a moment, trying to recover. “I like you,” said Jenna.
She felt Eric smile against her neck. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Really, really intensely.”
“Well, I love you really intensely. It’s the only reason I allowed that bondage shit.”
He rolled over on his back and brought her with him. She burrowed into his chest, he kissed the top of her head, and they clung to each other till morning. Give or take a dozen inspired positions, they didn’t move for two days.
Jenna thought that if she ever slept with Eric, it would kill the excitement, dissipate the tension. But the opposite happened. It was an ending, but also a door opening. And the two of them plummeted through it, the weight of their obsession propelling them down, down, down.
CHAPTER 19
On Monday morning, Jenna strode into her office exactly on time, greeting everyone she saw with a delighted, “Hiyeeeee!” She all but skipped into her office and sat behind her desk with purpose. She flipped open her laptop, stared into the screen with concentration, and began typing. If anyone of her coworkers saw her, they’d think she was in the middle of writing one of her Just Jenna columns.
In actuality, she was gazing dreamily into a totally blank screen, typing what amounted to: “SKSL;ALKDJA;OEIJTOEPGIJPOGJOPINGONGNOG.” She had one thought on her mind, and it had nothing to do with StyleZine.
She’d slept a total of six hours since Friday, was bruised everywhere, but she’d never felt more vital. Jenna caught a glimpse of the deliriously happy woman in the blank laptop screen and was dumbfounded. Somehow, she’d found a best friend, a lover, and a soulmate—all in the same unlikely person. Eric stilled and stirred her. And they’d spent the entire weekend proving what they’d previously suspected; which was that they were made for each other.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much pure, concentrated fun.
All they did was have sex and laugh, and take baths, and then get really deep (they traded secrets, fantasies, nightmares, hopes for the future), and then have sex and laugh again. Then they’d order takeout and barely eat it because having sex and laughing was more urgent. Since it was Eric and Jenna, most of this happened with Turner Movie Classics on in the background.
It was like she’d left her personality in a cab somewhere years ago, and he’d found it, dusted it off, and delivered it to her doorstep wrapped in a red velvet bow. She felt alive, understood,—and drop-dead sexy.
Jenna didn’t know friendship and lust could collide so violently. The orgasms! She’d had amazing ones with Brian, but they were self-conscious. At twenty, thirty, she was too aware of what she was doing. The positions, the hair choreography, her sounds, the aesthetics of her body. She’d curve the small of her back to make her ass look lusher, or poke out her chest. When she laid on her side, she’d always thrust her top hip upwards to create the illusion of Vargas Girl bodaciousness. Her goal was to be his fantasy. But at forty, she lost herself, with no regard for what she looked or sounded like. She just felt. Hard.
Jenna took a sip of her coffee and then paused, a euphoric smile creeping across her face. She heard Eric outside her office.
“I know, but wait… I have to talk about a reshoot with Jenna really quick. Five minutes.”
They didn’t have to reshoot anything!
Eric burst into her office with his camera.
“I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages,” she breathed.
He peered out into the hallway. Then he looked at Jenna, put his finger to his mouth, and shut the door.
Eric came around her desk, gripped her by the tops of her arms, pulled her out of her chair and kissed her. For .2 seconds she was too stunned to kiss him back, but then she melted into him. She flung his arms around his neck, and despite it being nine am in Jenna’s office, they were making out like it was three am in Jenna’s shower. They backed up against her desk, and then, never breaking their kiss, clumsily toppled onto it together, Jenna on top of Eric. Magazines slid to the floor, her framed picture of Diana Vreeland went flying.
They paused to breathe. Eric smoothed Jenna’s curls back, holding her face above his.
“Good morning again.”
“Good morning, Erique.”
Just then, they heard a hard knock on her door and bolted upright. Scrambling off of each other, they jumped into the appropriate chairs.
“We’ll be right out,” called Jenna. “Umm…just reviewing a clip!”
“My bad,” called Jinx. “I’ll stop by later.”
Behind her desk, Jenna held her hand over her heart and closed her eyes. “That almost gave me a stroke,” she said. She whipped out a compact and peered into it, fixing her kiss-smeared lipstick. “Eric, I’m nervous. Do you think they’ll notice something’s different about us? Do I look normal?”
“You look well-fucked.” Eric allowed himself a lazy grin. He leaned back in his chair. The truth was, everything about her looked different. At least, to him.
“What are you staring at? Not another hickey? Hold on, I have concealer somewhere.”
“No, it’s not that. Jenna, I…I don’t know how to do this. How do I go out there and pretend that I don’t worship you?”
She beamed. “You worship me?”
Eric nodded. “A lot.”
“I know the feeling,” she said. “You’re my new religion.”
“Amen.” He leaned over the desk, kissed her, and said, “Open the door so we don’t look guilty.”
She launched out of her seat, flung the door open, and looked out into the hallway. Inside her office, Jenna and Eric were in the throes of afterglow—but out there, it was business as usual. Girls were hanging out by Jinx’s cubicle, listening to her discuss in near-weepy detail her Friday night run-in with her ex. Darcy was storming down the hallway on her cell, mid-rant, and gave Jenna a head nod. Jenna waved, feeling totally naked.
Darcy had warned her to stop being so chummy with her son, and she’d just had nonstop sex with him for two days. Eric needed to get out of her office. But…maybe he could stay for five more minutes. How would she know they that weren’t having a professional conversation? And what can she do about it anyway, thought Jenna. Fire me? I’m bringing her too much traffic with The Perfect Find. If I want to be office besties with Eric, Darcy can pout about it, but what could she really do?
Jenna was playing with fire. And it was so exhilarating.
“Just stay for two more seconds and then walk out nonchalantly,” she whispered, tip toeing to her desk.
“Two seconds,” agreed Eric. “You know, I had an epiphany this weekend. Well, I had a lot of epiphanies, but one of the main ones? I’m addicted to watching you come.”
“You’re what? Oh my God.” She covered her face with her hands.
“No, it’s incredible. You know how old people in Brooklyn pull out plastic chairs in front of their buildings at night, to watch the sunset? I could literally pull out a plastic chair to watch you have an orgasm. Like go get popcorn and sit back and enjoy the majesty of it. You turn like thirteen different shades of pink and tremble like, I don’t know, a little bunny. And then you look at me like I’m Superman.”
Both embarrassed and flattered, Jenna dropped her head onto the desk and tried to muffle her giggles. When they’d subsided, she looked up and said, “Eric Combs, you’re insane. And very sweet. And now I’ll be self-conscious forever.” She shook her head. “I had an epiphany, too. I always assumed that the older woman/younger man sex dynamic would be an inexperienced guy with the woman as teacher. Like a ‘yes mommy’ kind of thing.”
“I do have scarf burns on my wrists.”
“I’m a little embarrassed by that, in the light of day.”
“Y
ou’re embarrassed?”
“Anyway,” continued Jenna, “that’s not how we are. You’re only twenty-two; why can you locate a G-Spot when men twice your age can’t find it?”
“Umm, I think that was a happy accident,” he said, with barely-disguised pride.
“At your age I had no idea what I was doing.” She put her chin in her hand. “When did you lose your virginity?”
“This is an awkward line of questioning.” He grimaced. “I was too young. My thirteenth birthday. But it was all Tim’s fault.”
“Thirteen! I was nineteen!” Jenna was floored. “Wow, when you were thirteen, I was twenty-nine. Older than you are now.”
“When you were nineteen, I was three. What if in college, a psychic had told you that your…wait, what am I?”
“My kindred spirit?”
“What if a psychic told you that your kindred spirit was a toddler enrolled in Sunny Sunflower’s? You just had to wait for him to grow up?”
“I would’ve dated shallowly for a couple decades, and then found you the second you turned eighteen. Wearing a microscopic, short Burberry trench and La Perla lingerie underneath.”
“That’s so you. Also, I hadn’t even heard of a G-spot at eighteen, so you would’ve gotten your cougar fantasy.”
“What if we were the same age?” wondered Jenna. “What if we’d gone to high school together?”
Eric exhaled. “You and me in high school? I can’t imagine feeling like this, then. It would’ve saved me years of runner-ups. You never would’ve met him.” He half-smiled. “To get to love you through your twenties, your thirties, through everything? I’m sad I didn’t get to do that.”
“Don’t be sad.” Jenna rubbed her foot against his leg, under her table. “If we’d met when I was younger, it wouldn’t have happened this way. I hid myself.”
“I would’ve seen you.”
“I wouldn’t have let you.”
“You wouldn’t have had a choice.” Eric’s eyes blazed. “I could be fifty, you could be thirty. We could both be eighteen. Our ages don’t matter. I can think of ten strong reasons why a woman like you should be outside of my reach, and yet…”
“And yet here I am.”
“When we met didn’t matter. We’re inevitable.”
They sat, the space between them in the tiny office charged—that word, “inevitable,” hanging in the air.
This is how Terry found them seconds later, when she knocked on the open door and barged into Jenna’s office.
“Oh hey, E. Jenna, I’m writing about swimsuits, and I can’t figure out how to speak to thong cut bottoms without sexualizing…” She stopped, looking from Jenna to Eric. “You two look weird.”
Jenna flinched. “Weird?”
“We look weird? You’re wearing neon suspenders.”
“No, you look wired or something. Like you’ve been doing blow.” She lowered her voice. “You have some?”
“Should you really be talking about coke with Darcy’s office right across the hall?”
Eric snorted. “Seriously? Her dealer lived in one of our upstairs bedrooms for nine months when I was twelve.”
Jenna and Terry gasped.
“Her what? I knew she was a cokehead. No one’s that intense at 9am, and she never eats! Tell us more! What are her Netflix favorites? Does she…”
“Terry,” interrupted Jenna, “let me wrap up this meeting, and then I’ll help you with your copy.”
“Cool.” She headed out the door, but not before saying, “You guys really look weird. Like you were out all night and just rolled into the office. Was there a party I missed?”
“If this woman ever let me go anywhere with her, you’d definitely hear about it.”
“I’ll stop by in a sec, Terry.”
The blonde blew them both a kiss and disappeared. Jenna and Eric both slumped down in their chairs.
“Did I really say that thing about the dealer? I just broke like fifteen personal office codes of conduct,” he said. “I should go now, right?”
“Probably,” Jenna whispered. “But speaking of codes of conduct, let’s make some rules about how this is going to go.” She leaned forward, clasping her hands together, trying to look official. “Because everything’s changed, and we can’t afford to get messy.”
“Right, the way we act in here is make-or-break.”
“Rule one. If you aren’t holding your camera, if it isn’t obvious we’re working, we’ll limit our conversations to no longer than five minutes.”
“Five? Word?” He groaned. “Okay, five.”
“If we really need to talk, we’ll sneak outside of the office. Separately. Or…I know! Our fashion closet is getting full, so the janitor gave me keys to an empty closet on the 10th floor. I’ve been keeping pieces in there. Maybe we can meet up there sometimes.”
“Make me a key!”
“No way.”
“Come on. It’s so sneaky. You know you want to.”
“Fiiiiine.”
“God, you’re easy. I have a rule. If everyone wants to think I have a crush on you, let them. Just reinforce that I’m like a little brother to you.”
“Okay, brotha,” said Jenna. “Also, we should never, ever have sex in the office. Too risky.”
“That rule’s dumb. Isn’t office sex one of the perks of sleeping with your coworker? Don’t you watch network TV?”
“We can’t,” said Jenna. “Too risky.”
“Fine. What else?”
“That’s it. We’ll just become brilliant actors and pretend that we’re not…whatever we are. Agreed?”
They shook on it. When he was halfway out of the door, Jenna stopped him and he turned to face her.
“Are we crazy? Are we really going to try to pull this off?”
“Could you stop now?” he asked. “Even if you wanted to?”
“Not a chance. You?”
“Never.”
It was just the cosign that she needed. Eric had become necessary to her. Her post-Brian brain was telling her to run from feeling this attached to someone, but it was too late. And the sneaking around, the hiding—it might not have been ideal, or respectable, or smart, but it was thrilling.
And she would take him however she could get him.
CHAPTER 20
“And up next,” shouted an Australian-accented woman over the loudspeaker, “Miss Koko’s four-year-olds in a jazz hip-hop number to ‘Moves Like Jagger!’”
The Brooklyn Academy of Music auditorium exploded in applause. It was a blustery Sunday morning in December, and Jenna and Billie were forty minutes into the Maddie’s Movers Dance Academy’s holiday recital—a show that ranged from preschool age to high school seniors. They were nowhere near May’s five-year-old class. The first ten minutes were adorable, but after the endless parade of migraine-inducing neon costumes, onstage meltdowns, and antsy siblings staging a revolution in the aisles, the parents were ready to take a loss on the tuition fees and mainline margaritas at Café Habana up the block.
Even Billie was fighting back yawns. For Jenna, though, the entire spectacle was wannabe-mommy heaven. She was the most enthusiastic audience member, whooping after each number and even playing hand-clapping games with the toddler sitting next to her.
She’d shown up wearing a tee shirt emblazoned with May’s be-dimpled face. Above the pic, in hot pink Helvetica, screamed the words “DANCE FOR YOUR LIFE, BABY GIRL!” Jenna had ones made for Billie and Elodie, too. Billie was wearing hers, but Elodie was late, as usual.
“That child makes my uterus ache,” said Jenna, pointing onstage to a tiny, light brown girl with curls, doused in a pint of glitter.
“A total doll,” said Billie, eyes locked on her phone. She was live-texting the recital with Jay, who was in Philly, teaching a weekend poetry seminar.
Jenna looked around. “I feel like every child here looks just like her, though. Ethnically ambiguous.”
“That’s because Brooklyn is the interracial couple capital of
the world. Jay and I are one of the only fully black families at May’s school. At her last birthday party, she had nine kids there, and they were biracial in every combination. Vietnamese-Mexican. Ecuadorian-Indian. Mongolian-Black.”
“Not Mongolian-Black.”
“Swear. And they actually had the nerve to name their son Genghis-Jermaine.”
The “Moves Like Jagger” routine finally drew to a close, and the crowd clapped. Jenna let out an enthusiastic, “Woo-hooo!”
“Time for a brief intermission,” screamed the Australian voice.
“Hurry back, because up next, we have Miss Lauren’s fabulous five year olds in a Riverdance routine to “We Found Love!”
Just then, Elodie stormed down the left side of the auditorium, wearing a massive faux fur coat, blackout sunglasses, and a Celine bag the size of Rhode Island. Her signature long, ropy braid was twirled into a side bun. She squeezed down Jenna’s row and plopped down in the seat next to Billie.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she announced. “I can’t accept how freezing it is out there. Like, to whom do I register my displeasure?”
“You okay?” asked Jenna.
“No. I’m hungover, sleep-deprived, and I’ve plateaued after two weeks on my diet. I have no patience for anything that isn’t a bagel.”
Billie gestured at Elodie’s ensemble. “This is a dance recital, what the hell are you wearing?”
“Diahann Carroll Officiates A Gay Wedding in Aspen,” cracked Jenna.
“I haven’t been home since my charity event on Friday. I slept with that Morehouse dentist.”
“The one you said looked like a flying monkey?” asked Billie. “Everyone wants to find their Jay Z, but no one’s willing to date ugly dudes.” She shimmied out of her fur. “I stayed with him in his suite at the Soho House. And he made love to me, which was weird. I don’t want soft, meaningful sex with a stranger. Throw me around the room. If there are no rug burns, it didn’t happen.”