by Claire Adams
“It’s nothing,” I say, but even I’m not convinced.
“Oh,” she says. “I know what it is. This is about last night.”
“Well…”
“May I ask why it bothered you that I was kissing Mike?”
“Mike?” I ask. “Isn’t he your friend from town?”
“Yeah,” Leila answers. “He was just having one of his moments and badgered me into letting him know if he was a good kisser or not. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing,” she says. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
“What was your question?”
“Why does it bother you that I was kissing Mike?” she repeats.
“Why would it bother me?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
I sigh.
Am I really going to do this? Wrigley is a perfectly wonderful woman: totally out of her mind, but still, very much my type. Am I really willing to risk that for someone I hardly know?
Of course, I hardly know Wrigley, but that’s neither here nor there.
“I just didn’t know you were home,” I answer. “When I came in, I realized that I was probably intruding on something, but my phone rang before I could get out of here.”
“Oh,” she says. “So it didn’t bother you that I was kissing someone else?”
“Why would it?” I ask.
This is painful.
“I don’t know,” she says. “We almost, you and I, you know…”
She trails off; her newfound discomfiture is hardly helping things.
“What?”
“Okay, I didn’t black out that night,” she says. “After your friend came out of your room wearing—or not wearing…whatever—I kind of wished that I had, but—is this too weird?”
She’s talking really fast, and it’s a few seconds before I realize she’s just asked me a question.
“Is what too weird?”
“Talking about this,” she says. “I know you and that Wrigley chick have a thing and all that. I just don’t want to make things uncomfortable between us for the next couple weeks.”
That’s actually a pretty solid idea. She’ll move, and I’m sure I’ll be over her in no time.
“I think I’m in love with you,” I blurt out.
That was stupid.
The remote falls from her hand and it looks like her jaw is trying to follow it.
“You’re what?” she asks.
“You know what? Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything. You got some big news today, and I think that’s what we should be talking about.”
“You’re in love with me?” she asks.
“Well, I…”
I stammer a bit, but I have no words to follow the string of unintelligible noises.
“When did this happen?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Look, can we just forget that I said anything?”
“I just got a new job, and I’m going to be moving,” she says, putting her hands to her temples.
“Yeah, let’s just forget I said anything. I’m thrilled to hear about your—”
“Are you sure it’s not just a proximity thing?” she asks. “I know sometimes people—”
“Oh, let’s just drop it.”
She peers at me, and I can’t bring myself to return the gaze.
“You are—seriously, why didn’t you say something before? You know, maybe while I was drunk and throwing myself at you?”
“Well, I—”
“Wait,” she says, “that’s right. There was a naked woman in your room at the time.”
She starts laughing, and I want to kill myself.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “This really isn’t funny.”
She’s still laughing.
“Okay, well, I’m going to go now, but yeah, congratulations on the job.”
“Dane, I’m so sorry for laughing. It’s a nervous thing. I’m really not trying to laugh at you.”
“Really, it’s fine,” I tell her, and turn to go back to my room.
“I wish you had told me,” she says.
I stop.
“I have feelings for you, too, you know?”
“Yeah?” I ask.
I’m no good at this whole vulnerable thing.
“Yeah,” she says. “After that night, I realized that I’ve been really attracted to you for a while. I’m pretty sure that’s why I hated you for so long.”
“So you hated me because you like me?”
“I’m a girl,” she says. “That’s kind of how we roll. You guys do it, too, you know. That whole pushing girls down in the sandbox cliché; that’s the same thing.”
“Yeah, well, good talk.”
“I really wish you said something.”
She’s still talking.
Why are we dragging this out?
“I wish I said something, but I’ve got this new job and I don’t see any way this is going to work, Dane. I wish we just—”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “You don’t owe me anything. I should have said something sooner and I didn’t. That’s the way it goes sometimes.”
I turn the knob on my door.
“Are you going to be all right?”
That has just become my least favorite question ever.
“Yeah,” I answer. “I’ll be fine. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
I’m half-expecting her to say something else, but she’s silent. So I push my door open and can’t get it closed behind me fast enough.
Well, at least I have something to tell Wrigley, although I can’t imagine this is going to be the best first day of a relationship she’s ever had.
Chapter Fifteen
Coming Down
Leila
Mrs. Weinstock didn’t fire me after everything that happened yesterday, so I guess I’m here until I give them some kind of notice. That’s not really what’s on my mind, though.
Work is a blurry mass of emotion, none of which stays in one place long enough to really sink in. I wanted to tell Dane that I felt the same way about him, and I guess I kind of did, but that doesn’t change anything.
On the bright side, I’m so distracted that I barely notice it when Kidman asks me if I’d like to grease up his paper tray, and before I know it, I’m done for the day.
I don’t want to go home, but I can’t stay here. Knowing Dane, little though I do, I can only imagine that if he is home, he’s probably got company.
I’m just going to have to get over that, though.
I would call Mike, but I can see that only making things even less comfortable with Dane.
Why would he wait until the last possible minute to tell me that he has feelings for me?
By the time I get home, I’m too emotionally drained to worry about whether Dane’s in there or not.
I get into the apartment, and if he’s home, he’s in his room.
That’s fine by me.
Drained though I am, there’s no doubt that seeing him right now would be enough to send me off some kind of edge.
I can’t think about that right now, though. I only have a couple of weeks before I start at my new job, and I need to find somewhere to live.
If worse comes to worse, I can commute for a while, but that’s going to be a long drive. Like most people in Manhattan, I don’t have my own car, so I’d have to rent one; it’ll be so much easier if I can find somewhere before then.
I pull out my phone. If there’s one thing Mike knows, it’s how to annoy the crap out of me. If there are two things he knows, they’re how to annoy the crap out of me and how to find a killer deal on an apartment.
“Hello?”
“I got the job.”
I go on to tell him the finer details, and before I can even ask, he’s already installed himself as head of the apartment-finding committee.
Now Mike: Mike has a car. It’s a beat down hunk of junk, but it runs. Tomorrow is Saturday,
so the planning section of the conversation goes by quickly enough.
It’s when he asks what I’m going to do about Dane that things start to unravel, or rather, that I start to unravel.
I make a quick excuse and hang up, but just hearing the name has me in a tailspin. I don’t know why I’m crying so hard.
* * *
It’s 6 in the morning when my phone rings.
I let it go to voicemail and have a brief, magnificent fantasy of falling back to sleep and not waking up again until I’m no longer tired, but that dream is cut short as the phone rings again.
“What?” I answer.
“Rise and shine,” Mike says. “It’s time to find you an apartment. I’m downstairs and ready to go.”
“It’s too early,” I tell him, but I know it’s not going to make any difference.
“I brought coffee and donuts,” he says. “If you’re really nice to me, I might even let you have some, now get your ass outta bed and let’s get going.”
I go on to make a very compelling argument about how nobody’s going to show us apartments this early in the morning, but he’s already hung up.
Grumbling, I get out of bed.
Mike didn’t leave me time to take a shower, so I put on some deodorant and hope I don’t feel too disgusting by the time the day’s out. I don’t really like my chances.
When Mike said he was here, he meant parked in the garage down the block. It’s a bit early, but there are already people on the sidewalks, nearly all of them talking on phones. I can’t help but wonder how many of them are actually talking to someone and how many are just talking into the air, trying to appear like they’re a lot more important than they actually are.
I might be a little cranky.
I’m not even to the parking garage when I hear Mike’s voice echoing through the structure. He’s arguing with someone about whether parking on the line is “in” or not, and from the sound of it, it doesn’t seem like he’s winning.
I follow the ruckus and eventually find Mike standing at the back of his car, up in the face of the parking attendant, and the problem is easy enough to spot.
Mike didn’t pull into a space and take a little more than his share of the spot; he’s parked behind two cars, blocking them in. He’s trying to advance the argument that because one of his tires is on one of the yellow lines, he’s technically not parked illegally.
“Lei, you’re here,” he calls over the attendant’s shoulder. “Let’s get the fuck out!”
I hurry to the car and get in. The parking attendant is still shouting profanity at Mike through the window, but as soon as Mike starts the car, the man backs off.
“Yeah, I didn’t know how long I was going to hold him there with that bullshit,” Mike laughs. “Your coffee’s in the cup holder on the right. You drink it black, don’t you?”
“I don’t even care right now,” I tell him, and pull the lid off the cup.
I pour about half the cup of coffee down my throat. It’s a good thing the coffee is cold.
“So, I stayed up until 4 in the morning looking at places, and we’ve got some options. There are a few in town and a few out of town. Which would you like to check first?”
“You didn’t make any appointments?”
“Who’s going to take an appointment in the middle of the night?” Mike asks. “It’s Jersey. People there don’t have plans. They’ll be so thrilled that a New Yorker is in town they’ll roll out the red carpet.”
Mike’s one of those New Yorkers. He’s of a special breed that thinks no one outside of the five boroughs has anything important to do. That, mixed with the already sizeable God complex, and they just might kick us out of the state.
We’re on the road for a long time, longer than I would have thought.
I made sure to look at the clock as we were leaving, and it’s already been almost three hours. There’s no way I can make this kind of commute.
“What kind of brokerage houses do they even have in Jersey?”
“They have brokerage houses everywhere,” I tell him. “The only difference is that in New York, if someone on the floor pisses you off, you can hunt them down before they’ve had a chance to leave the state.”
“So, what’s the deal with you and Dane? I kind of got a vibe from you last night.”
Mike and his stupid vibes.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “Just drive. You know where we’re going, right?”
“You know the guy’s in love with you, right?”
I look over at him, my eyes wide.
“What?” he asks. “It’s not like it wasn’t obvious the way he was carrying on the other night when he walked in on us kissing.”
“You didn’t seem to have any useful theories on it then.”
“Yeah, I had a little time to think about it, and the more I did, the more I realized that he had the same look on his face when I found my date for senior prom under the bleachers getting felt up by Bill Rodman.”
“I’m moving,” I tell Mike. “That kind of trumps everything else.”
“You’re not into him, then?” he asks.
I don’t answer, but that’s an answer in itself.
“You like him, too,” he says. “J’accuse!”
“J’accuse is back, huh?” I ask.
“Are you going to tell him?” Mike asks.
“Nope,” I answer. “There’s really nothing to tell. I have a new job in a new city—a new state, even. It doesn’t really matter whether I like him or not.”
“So you do like him?”
“Haven’t we established that?”
“I was talking out my ass,” Mike says. “Could you reach in the glove compartment and grab me the map that’s in there?”
I open the glove compartment, but all I find is a small bag of pot and a half-empty bag of corn chips.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s seriously the second decade of the new millennium. People don’t use fucking paper maps anymore. Could you pass me that bag? I think I’ve got half a joint stuffed in there somewhere.”
“I’m not letting you drive me high,” I tell him, and close the glove box.
“Killjoy.”
We’re on the road for another half hour, and Mike seems incapable of talking about anything other than my situation with Dane. I’m really not in the mood.
When we finally take an exit, Mike pulls the phone out of his pocket and hands it to me.
“Pull up the GPS,” he tells me. “I’ve got everything programmed in there.”
I will say this about Mike: he does come prepared. I really wish he hadn’t come prepared with the bag of weed, though.
We follow the automated voice into the first apartment complex, and I have the strangest moment. I’ve been in New York City so long that when I think of an apartment complex, I think of one building with only a few parking spaces out front that are always filled, crammed to the rafters with every brand of crazy person there is.
This place, though. It kind of reminds me of home.
It’s not the nicest place in the world, but the grounds are well-kept and I don’t see any crime scene tape, so I’m already excited.
“And now we wait,” Mike says as he pulls into an open parking spot.
“We wait?” I ask. “Why?”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, “their office doesn’t open for another hour. So, when are you going to tell Dane that you want him to split you like a tree trunk?”
“Split me like a—you have a problem, Mike, seriously.”
“It’s not like you didn’t already know,” he tells me. “I saw the look on your face when you realized he was there.”
“I was startled,” I rejoin. “You should have seen your face. Your mouth was open so wide I could see your wisdom teeth.”
“Whatever,” he says. “I’m talking about after the initial shock. You looked like you were going to—”
“Can we please talk about something else?” I ask. �
��Have you had a chance to try what I told you?”
“What? You mean completely changing everything about the way I kiss?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Eh, a little bit. I don’t know if I just got magnificently better at it, or if I’m still as terrible as ever, but we weren’t kissing very long.” He leans over, grinning, and nudges my arm, saying, “If you know what I mean.”
“Oh, God.”
We sit there for a while, and I continue to dodge his questions about Dane. When the office finally opens, we go in and talk to the manager. She takes us on a tour and it simply doesn’t compute that I can get a two-bedroom apartment with a decent floor plan for under $1,000.
I really haven’t been living in the city that long, but that kind of freaks me out.
I’m ready to sign the papers right now, but Mike steps in before I can commit to anything and tells the woman that we have a few more appointments today, but we’ll let her know.
By the time the day’s done, I can hardly remember what that first apartment looked like.
“So,” Mike says as we’re on our way back to New York and all the insanity those two words juxtaposed entail, “you’re really not going to tell me what you’re going to do.”
“Nope.”
I don’t want to tell him that, with every new apartment we looked at, I was making a mental note of which room would be mine and which one would be Dane’s. I admit it, I like him and I don’t want to leave him, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to share a bedroom with him either.
Mike drops me off in front of my building and we make plans to get together tomorrow and decide which place is going to be the right fit.
I’m not looking forward to walking into that apartment and having to try and think of a way to approach Dane now that it’s all out in the open, but I don’t get the chance. As I come up the stairs, Dane’s coming out of the apartment.
“Don’t lock it!” I call.
He jumps a little, but nods and opens the door.
When I get up to him, my every thought is of walking right by him, but I stop.
“Dane, I wanted to talk to you about last night,” I tell him.
“Could we not do this?” he asks. “I’ve already humiliated myse—”
My lips are pressing into his and I’m pushing him backward through the open door to the apartment. He’s stunned for a moment, but in a flash, he’s kissing me back and chills are running throughout my entire body.