by Tia Williams
“What do you mean?”
“What I want with you, you can’t give me right now.” Jenna saw Eric stiffen, as if preparing for a blow. “You asked me to admit it on the pier. And I couldn’t. Because what I want is unrealistic,” she said. “I didn’t want to burden you with my silly fantasies. But the truth is, I’d love to marry you. I want a little me-and-you. A baby with your height and…. and my taste in accessories. And I know it can’t happen, but I think about it every fucking day.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Eric. “Nothing you could say would be a burden. It feels like shit when you realize the woman you thought you were making happy is keeping a massive issue from you. I felt ridiculous at that party.”
“I’m sorry for that,” she whispered.
“Do you…should we…maybe we could, like, could have a baby.” Eric could barely form the sentence.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Why not?” he said, grasping at straws. “People procreate in weird circumstances all the time. Look at my horrible mother. I turned out fucking incredible.”
“There’s no way, at this stage of your life, that you could be a father.”
“I could! I like kids. What if we had one like May, can you imagine?”
“Honey, be serious. You couldn’t handle it.”
As much as he wished it weren’t true—he had to agree with Jenna. He smoked weed constantly, ate pizza for every meal, watched too much PornHub and went out every night he wasn’t at her house. These were not dad-ly qualities. His main two focuses were his career and Jenna—the rest of his life was one massive question mark. When he had a kid, he wanted to be established.
He wanted to approach fatherhood with thoughtfulness and dedication. He wanted to be an ABC Family sitcom dad. And until he felt like he’d be great at it, he shouldn’t do it.
“No, I couldn’t handle it,” he said, quietly. “There’s no way I could have a baby. How? I can’t even fold my laundry.”
They lapsed into fraught silence. Eric could feel her slipping away, and couldn’t bear it—so he tried to distract them from the heaviness of the conversation.
“I can’t believe you’re in my room. This is mad surreal. Like in a one-of-these-things-don’t-belong way. Like if Joe Biden appeared in one of our editorial meetings.”
“Speaking of StyleZine,” started Jenna, “we won’t be there forever. Let’s say something huge comes out of South by Southwest for you. Let’s say I get this job at Fordham. If we didn’t have the Darcy issue anymore, what would happen to us?”
“We wouldn’t have to be a secret.” He shrugged. “We’d just be together. We’d just…hang out.”
“Just hang out?” Jenna felt on the verge of madwoman laughter. “Eric, when you’re with me do you reflect on us at all? Or is this just a fun adventure?”
“Of course I’ve thought about this.”
“Then where do you see us a year from now?”
He paused. “Umm…can I get back to you?”
“See?” said Jenna. “It’s been easy for us to blame Darcy, like we can’t fully be together because of her. We act like Darcy’s the villain, but…”
“She is the villain.”
“She’s a villain, but she’s not the villain. Bad timing is.”
Eric snorted. “Bad timing never flashed her boob to Dave Getty’s dad at his bar mitzvah.”
“Is everything a joke to you?” Jenna was suddenly, blindingly angry. “No, that really happened!”
“You can’t just wisecrack your way through life, Eric! At some point you’ll have to grow up.” She slid off of the desk and started pacing. “I can’t do this.”
Eric followed her. “Do what?”
“I can’t just ‘hang out’ with the love of my life. It would never be enough.”
“Enough for what?” Eric’s voice was hectic.
“I’ll be forty-one in five minutes. And then forty-two, and forty-three, and you’ll still be in your mid-twenties. Who knows when you’ll be ready to settle down? You have no idea what it’s been like. Being so in love with you that I’m willing to let go of something so vital to me.”
“I didn’t know being with me was such a sacrifice.”
“That’s not what I’m saying!”
“Jenna, what are you saying?”
“I think we need to break up.” He stared at her in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” she said, clutching her stomach. Looking at him was making her dizzy. Her heart, the emotional, unthinking part of her, was desperate to stay—to lock herself in a room with him forever—but her brain knew she couldn’t.
“You really want to break up with me?”
“Nothing’s worse than the idea of me without you,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t even know how I’m going to survive. You’re everything.”
“Then…why…what…”
“Eric,” she whispered, her heart breaking.
“How am I gonna get through the day? What’ll I have to look forward to? What purpose will I have? I mean…who else even knows me?” His face crumbled.
“Don’t,” she sobbed, moving toward him. He stepped backwards, crying and furious about it. Embarrassed, he swiped away the tears before they had a chance to fall.
“What was the point of falling in love with you if I couldn’t keep you?”
“Don’t you think I feel the same way? But Eric, I’ve wanted a baby my whole life.”
“Fuck babies. I just want you.”
“I want you too, but love isn’t always enough.”
“What else is there?”
“Life! Let me ask you something. We’ve been hiding from Darcy, but I still tried to introduce you to my world. You know my best friends. You even know May. But I’ve never experienced your life outside of me. I’ve only met Tim once, because I forced you to bring him to my house. All those clubs you go to, the parties, the concerts. Darcy would never be at any of those places, and yet you never asked me to go. You clearly don’t see me fitting into your world either.”
He threw up his hands. “You’re breaking up with me ‘cause you wanted to go to a Lil Wayne concert?”
“Eric!”
“No, don’t you see how stupid this is? Love is all that matters. You and me.”
“That’s a very young way of thinking.”
“Now I’m immature.”
“You’re inexperienced.”
“Okay, voice of experience. Why don’t you explain to me what it takes to sustain an adult relationship. Since your big-girl instincts worked out so well for you before.”
“Excuse me?”
“Is this about Brian? Is this your way of getting rid of me to go back to him?”
“You know there’s nothing between us!”
“Yeah okay,” he said, not fully believing her. He shook his head, trying to understand what was happening. “Was this always the plan? Was it just my job to fuck you till you got your swagger back? Till you felt hot enough to go get the forever guy?”
“Don’t do this.”
“No, tell me. Who exactly do you want? Break down your after-Eric plan. Is it like, a Wall Street nigga? Engagement in four months, pregnant six months after that? A wedding in the Times, an Upper West Side penthouse and the PTA? Will that make you happy? No, you’ll be bored and repressed and stuck with some bullshit ass suit you can’t talk to, who’ll never see you, who couldn’t even begin to know how to make you come till you fucking cry. I’m your air, Jenna. Me. I know where you live.” He pushed her in the chest with his index finger, hard, just over her heart. She stumbled backwards.
“Are you done?” she asked.
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Look at me, goddamnit, and stop trying to hurt me.”
Eric glanced at her, and then focused on some unknown point on the floor.
“You do know where I live, so you know better than that. All those things—the house, the PTA—I wish I could have
them with you,” said Jenna. “An after-Eric plan? I’m not leaving you to go find someone else.”
Eric looked genuinely confused. “Well, where are you gonna get the baby from? CVS?”
Jenna’s whole body slumped. She couldn’t explain her plan, because she had no idea what it was. “I love you so much, Eric. But you’re not ready for what I need.”
Eric exhaled, defeated. Jenna watched him turn this over in his head.
“Could I beg you to stay?”
“You could,” said Jenna. “And I would. But I’d always feel like something was missing.”
“That’d kill me,” he said, his voice barely audible. “I wish I could be everything you want.”
“You are. Just twenty years too early.”
Backing up, Eric sat down on the side of his bed and put his face in his hands. “This doesn’t feel real.”
He went completely silent for minutes. “Say something,” she pleaded.
He looked up. “People search in vain forever to find what we’ve got. I don’t know shit about anything, Jenna, and I might be inexperienced, but I know you’ll never love anyone like you love me.”
“I won’t,” she whispered.
“And yet you can leave me so easily for a baby you don’t have and a husband you’ve never met. I’m here, I’m real, and I just lost to a goddamned fantasy. I must’ve never really had you at all.”
There was a blank concentration on Eric’s face, like he was already attempting to erase Jenna from his memory. He didn’t want this pain. He couldn’t take it on. “You should go,” he said.
Jenna nodded, eyes cloudy with tears. She couldn’t expect him to understand. She started roaming around the room, looking for her clothes. After about ten seconds, the realization of what was happening hit Eric—and he bolted over to her, crushing her against his chest. She locked her arms around him, weeping.
“You are my insides,” she rasped. “You have to know that.”
“Don’t go yet,” he said, his voice anguished, choked. “Stay with me. Just for a little while. I can’t let you go yet.”
They climbed into Eric’s bed, the one he’d slept in since he was a child—and they curled up, spooning in the fetal position. Over the next two hours, they lay there lost in unified, but silent despair. As the truth of their disentanglement—that they weren’t going to have each other anymore—became real to them, the sting sharpened by the minute. The next day, Jenna would have faint bruises on her arms from how tightly Eric held onto her.
Eric’s scars weren’t the kind anyone could see.
CHAPTER 31
The next morning, Darcy sent an email to the staff ordering everyone to gather outside her office at noon. She offered no details, just that it was an emergency mini-meeting before the regularly scheduled editorial meeting at two. So, at twelve, the entire staff awaited her in a cluster in the hallway. Their boss never did this; they had no clue what she wanted.
Jenna and Eric stood five people apart. No one could tell they were destroyed. Concealer covered the tiny, angry-red broken capillaries on Jenna’s cheeks from hours of weeping. Eric wore a snapback emblazoned with “Brooklyn” pulled low, to hide his swollen, raw eyes.
Everyone around them was buzzing—was this about a new hire? A fire? But Jenna and Eric were so lost in their misery that their surroundings barely registered.
When Darcy finally emerged from her office, she was practically vibrating with intensity.
“So, folks, there’s a theft in our midst. Someone’s been stealing from the tenth floor fashion closet. I’d put thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry that I borrowed for the gala in there, and it’s gone. And little things have been turning up missing. A clutch, a bag of earrings. It could have been someone on the building staff—a cleaning lady, a security guard. But it also could’ve been one of you. I’ve seen junior editors steal pieces borrowed for shoots, selling them to stores for profit.” She threw her shoulders back, and adjusted her pale pink, peplum blazer. “If you know anything, I urge you to speak up now.”
Everyone glanced at each other and then shook their heads—except for Jenna and Eric, who were barely listening.
“Jenna, you’re up in that closet constantly. You’re sure you haven’t seen anyone hanging around up there?”
“On the tenth floor?” asked Jenna foggily, as if awakened too early from an Ambien-laced slumber. “No, I haven’t.”
“Well, last week, I installed a security camera in the fashion closet so we could catch the thief. Hopefully there’s something on the footage.”
Jenna snapped out of her daze, every molecule in her body jerking to attention.
A security camera? In the tenth floor fashion closet?
Her heart pounding in her chest, she glanced over at Eric with wide, horrified eyes. He was frozen solid, his face a mask of shock, like he’d just been sucker-punched—which he had, really.
They’d just had sex in there. The day before.
“Jinx, I have a job for you,” said Darcy. “The footage streams to a secured website; I’m going to give you my password, and I need you to scan through the past week. See if you can find out what unsavory activity has been going down in there.”
“Ooh fun!” Jinx rubbed her hands together and hopped up and down.
Jenna’s hand traveled to her throat. Darcy knew. She’d found out about them. This was a trap, her revenge. And now she was sending Jinx to watch Jenna fuck her son.
“Jinx, you can tell us what you find at our two o’clock editorial meeting. You’re all excused.”
Darcy breezed back into her office. As the photo editors, the writers, the interns, and the sales staff dispersed back to their cubicles, they all wondered if the thief was among them.
Jenna and Eric lingered in the hallway, staring at each other. They would be outed, and in the most lurid, detailed, mortifying way. The moment they’d been dreading was here, and it was about to be worse than they’d imagined. Jenna felt pure panic, like an animal caught in a trap—her feet wouldn’t move. Finally, Eric nodded toward her office and stiffly, slowly, she walked in that direction.
Before heading to his own desk, Eric stopped in his mother’s doorway. Darcy looked up, and regarded him with unmistakable triumph.
“Anything you want to tell me?” she asked, taking a sip from her rum-spiked latte.
He eyed her with a baffled, confused expression, as if searching for signs of humanity in a table lamp. Finally, he let out a bitter laugh, pulled his brim down even lower and walked away.
Jenna leaned against the inside of her closed office door, rigid with bone-deep mortification. She replayed every second of her and Eric’s last sexual encounter in the fashion closet, forcing herself to see exactly what Jinx was going to see—when her phone buzzed.
iMessages
Jenna Jones
April 27, 2013 12:11pm
Eric: She’s not the villain?
Jenna: HOW’D SHE KNOW? Where did we slip?
Eric: It doesn’t matter. Start packing. This is our last day here.
Jenna stared at the phone until her eyes unfocused. Slowly, she slid down the door until she landed on the floor. There were two more hours until the meeting. Nothing to do now but wait.
At two o’clock, the StyleZine staff filed into the conference room. Jenna and Eric sat next to each other—which they never did—but they had an unspoken need to be a united front. Darcy sat at the head of the table.
Jinx came in dead last, blushing furiously. Casting her eyes downward, she took a seat at the far left hand corner, three empty chairs away from anyone else.
Darcy told Karen that she’d be running the meeting today—and then she proceeded to address every aspect of the site in painstaking detail. Editorial meetings were never longer than twenty minutes, just a quick run-through of the content everyone had planned for the site that day. But today, they were fifty minutes in, and Darcy showed no signs of wrapping it up.
Darcy was unusually a
nimated, uncharacteristically interested in everyone’s updates. She wasted time asking needless follow-up questions, micro-managing each of their assignments.
Darcy even took a call a half hour into the meeting. She was torturing Jenna and Eric.
And they took it, because they had no choice. Eric was slumped so far down in his chair he was halfway under the table. His body language was all insolence. Next to him, Jenna sat lightning bolt straight, hands folded like a parochial school student. Overcompensating for her anxiety, she had a brilliantly worded response for every one of her Darcy’s time-sucking inquiries.
And poor Jinx was in hell. She was always in the midst of some dramatic personal crisis, but right now she looked to be in the early stages of a panic attack. Hiding behind her thick curtain of wavy black hair, she mumbled all her answers, her face on fire. She stared at her hands and picked at her yellow glitter nail polish.
Their co-workers were thrown off by the obvious tension. Why were the four of them acting like they had personality disorders?
Finally, after an hour, Darcy folded her arms across her chest and said, “Time to figure out this theft business.”
Jenna let out a tiny sigh. Here we go.
“Jinx, did you scan through the footage?”
Everyone turned their heads from Darcy to Jinx. Jinx nodded, pursing her lips together.
“Well, what did you see?”
She opened her mouth and closed it, twice. Her cheeks and chest flushed even redder.
“I’m asking you a question.”
Jinx shook her head. “I didn’t see anything,” she said.
“It’s obvious you saw something. You’re all shaken up.” Darcy gestured around the conference room. “Was it one of them?”
Silence.
“You’re sweating,” said Terry.
“Who was in the room?” Darcy’s voice was clipped, severe. “You better answer me, Now.”
Jinx glanced across the table, in Jenna and Eric’s direction.
Suddenly, everyone’s eyes were on them—shocked, disbelieving eyes. Jenna’s face felt as hot as Jinx’s looked. Eric swiveled his cap to the back and folded his arms across his chest.