“Hi,” I say.
He hesitates on the other end of the line. “We need to talk tonight.”
“You talked to Mindy.” It’s not a question.
“Yeah, she called me. It’s . . . wow.”
I exhale and focus on picking at a piece of cat hair on my bedspread.
“I’ll be there tonight,” I say. “I’ll get pad Thai from Ngam. And wine. Do you want red or white?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No, really, I don’t mind picking something up on my way over.”
“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” he says quietly. I can’t quite read the tone of his voice. “I’ll see you at seven.”
Something about the click of the phone when he hangs up makes my eyes water.
Two hours later, I show up at his apartment with two steaming tubs of pad Thai and a nine-dollar bottle of red—I splurged. I rise up on my toes to give him a kiss when I walk in, but he doesn’t kiss back the way he usually does.
I try to go through the pleasantries of polite conversation: how are you, how was your day, how was work? He responds with monosyllables. I don’t know what to say. I spoon the noodles onto two plates and uncork the wine in silence.
“Sasha, we need to talk about Mindy,” he announces.
I give him a plate and a glass and sit on the bar stool next to him. I slosh my wine around.
“Why didn’t you tell me you slept with her?” I ask quietly.
“I thought you knew.”
“She never told me. All these times we’ve talked about her—you never brought it up.”
He stares, opens his mouth to say something, and closes it.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you hadn’t heard. It never came up. It didn’t mean anything to me. It was just sex.”
I’ve heard that before. It still hurts the second time around.
He shakes his head, twisting a fork into the noodles and shoveling a bite into his mouth. I tell him what happened in Starbucks this morning. I don’t want to throw Mindy under the bus with the story, but I have to tell him how terribly she reacted.
“Adam, I could lose my job. Mindy is furious at us.”
Bizarrely, he doesn’t seem fazed. He swallows his wine and shakes his head. “No, she’s not. She’s fine. Excited, even.”
“She hates me. She already tattled on us to Bliss, and now Penelope wants to see me tomorrow.”
“When she came by my office today to tell me about the baby, she was in a really good mood,” he offers.
He grins. Wait, he’s happy?
“You know, it’s weird,” he says. “I was freaking out. I mean, Mindy meant nothing to me. Nice girl, but, you know, no real chemistry there. And it’s not like this is ideal timing, or the ideal person. But, well, everyone I know is settling down and doing this whole kid thing. I wanted that someday. It’s just working out differently than I thought it would.”
“I can’t exactly imagine you with a baby in this apartment.”
“Why not?” He shrugs.
I glance around at the sparse furnishings, the minuscule kitchen, the two empty six-packs by the door waiting to be recycled.
“You live in a fourth-floor walk-up? And it’d be a pain to drag a stroller up here?”
“I could move,” he says simply.
I stare across at the exposed brick wall, wishing it contained some sort of answer written there that would help me make sense of all of this. Adam’s from the South. People have babies young all the time there. And it’s not even like thirty-three is too young to have a kid. It’s just . . . he’s Adam. He’s mine. And a baby doesn’t fit into that.
“This is insane,” I tell him, reaching for my wine. It’s too dry and woody to swallow in gulps, the way I want to. I don’t even know how to pick out wine. Another thing that Adam learned in his twenties that I haven’t yet.
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you tonight. About where this is all going.”
“It’s going straight to a sitcom,” I joke. “Like one of those shows you see advertised on billboards that get canceled after one season. Like, the zany chronicles of a matchmaker watching her boyfriend struggle to raise a baby with her favorite client.”
He’s silent. He doesn’t return my playful look.
“I meant where we’re going. We need to talk about us.”
“Oh.” I put my fork down.
He angles toward me on his bar stool, resting his hand on my knee. He clears his throat.
“Sasha, you’re a great girl,” he begins.
I feel woozy. I know where this is going, because I’ve delivered this exact same speech to dozens of people on the phone after my clients lost interest in them. Adam reels off a string of my good qualities: I’m “so hot,” allegedly, and also driven and charismatic. I know the next word in the sentence is going to be “but,” followed by a carefully crafted excuse designed to soften the blow to my ego while simultaneously shifting the blame away from him.
“But I just need to focus on what’s going on with Mindy and the baby right now,” he explains, stroking my knee. “I’m not in a position to be a good boyfriend to you.”
I feel like an idiot. I had assumed that nothing would have to change between us—Mindy would raise the baby herself. Hadn’t she told me this morning that she didn’t want anything from Adam? I bite my lip and look away. The tears I’ve been holding in all day trickle out from the corner of my left eye, and I brush them off my cheek.
“That’s not true,” I protest. “You’re fantastic.”
He spins the bar stool away from the counter and leads me to the couch, where I snuggle up with my back against his chest like we do when we watch movies. He strokes my hair and kisses the top of my head, like I’m some pet.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers in my ear. “But I have to give Mindy a chance. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life if I don’t.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, thankful that he can’t see the tears brimming up from his perspective. I don’t quite know how I got here—dumping a potential fiancé one day, getting dumped the next. I still feel shaken from what happened with Jonathan; it’s too much to process Adam leaving me, too. I feel like the Titanic, Mount Everest, and the Empire State Building dropped their combined weight on my chest. I shift on the couch to face Adam.
“I’m not asking you to give up your baby for me,” I say, speaking slowly so my voice doesn’t shake. “But that doesn’t mean you have to give up on us. You never wanted to be involved with Mindy. You said it yourself after your date.”
He considers this, staring down at the stupid, ratty college couch Mindy hated. He bites his lip, his dark brows knitted together. “I don’t know what to tell you, Sasha. Don’t get me wrong, you and I have had fun.”
“Nothing has to change,” I plead. “We can still be together.”
I know our time together was short, but it mattered to me. I felt like I could be exactly myself in front of Adam in a way I’ve never felt in front of any other guy—not Jonathan, not any of the boys I knew in college, not any of the hundreds of men I’ve faked my way through conversations with as a matchmaker. This is real to me.
There was a morning not too long ago, a Sunday, when the sun creeping in through his bedroom window woke me up before he stirred. We had nothing to do all day but stay tangled up in the white bedsheets, his hand on my ass while he told stories and made me laugh. I knew it was going to be a blissful day, but for now, I could just watch him sleep. His lips were parted slightly and he made the softest of baby snores. His body was so warm next to mine, and there was a natural space between his bicep and his chest for me to snuggle into, so I did. I laid my head on his chest and listened to the easy rhythm of his heartbeat. There was a moment, a minute before he woke, where I just knew I could do this forever. I tunneled into the future, and it wasn’t terrifying, the way it was with Jonathan. It was calm. Comfortable. Happy. I know it’s too early to love him, but I think I do anyway.
I reach a hopeful hand toward his thigh.
“This doesn’t have to be the end,” I beg softly.
He looks at me so tenderly, I could shatter. “You knew it had to be like this. Didn’t you?”
I can’t form words, just a mortifying sniffle.
“You’re so young, Sasha. You don’t know what you really want yet. I’m not it, trust me.”
“That’s not fair. You can’t tell me what I do and don’t want.”
He’s treating me like a child. I get that a relationship with him would have its challenges—of course it would. I knew from the beginning that pursuing Adam would be complicated. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to give it a try. He was worth chasing and he’s worth hanging on to.
“Maybe one day, things will be different,” I suggest, wiping at my nose. “We can pick up where we left off.”
Adam closes the space between us on the couch, gazes into my eyes, then tucks the pad of his index finger under my chin. He kisses me softly.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I’m so sorry.”
When he kisses me more deeply this time, a searing pain erupts in my chest. I weave my fingers through his hair tightly. I don’t care if I pull too hard. He caresses my cheek with one hand and pulls me closer with the other, grasping insistently for me. Adam’s mouth on mine is hot and passionate. He kisses a trail down my neck, and I gasp at how good it feels. I slide my hands over his shoulders, then his back, feeling for the tense muscles there. I can’t believe this is the last time.
I feel the sturdy warmth of his palm on my chest. His fingers skim the edge of my bra through the thin cotton of my shapeless black dress, then slip under the material to graze my skin. He breaks away just long enough to push the dress up over my hips and tug the garment over my head. I let him, then rush forward to undo the buttons of his shirt. I want to be with him forever, but if I can’t have that, I want to be with him right now. It’s not enough, but it’ll have to do. And maybe, just maybe, this will remind him that we’re right for each other.
Afterward, he holds me. His feet hang off the arm of the couch.
“I think I love you,” I mumble into his shoulder.
“I know.” He sighs into my hair.
It doesn’t change anything. When I’ve gathered up all the comfort I can from his warm, bare skin, I get up, find my dress, and start putting myself back together. He slips into pajama pants and ties them low on his hips. I leave my dinner on the counter. He picks up my purse from the floor and hands it to me. In the doorway, he starts to kiss me again, but I pull back first. If I don’t tear myself away now, I never will.
“Goodbye,” I say.
He echoes my words, then closes the door and lets me disappear down the hall. I push open the creaky door to the staircase and take the three flights down quickly.
I still feel shaky when I exit onto Twenty-Sixth Street. I walk east across Manhattan, pausing at every pizza place I pass. I’ve barely eaten anything all day, and hunger gnaws at the pit of my stomach. When I’m close to home, I buy not just a slice, but a whole box.
Back at my apartment, I call out for Caroline, but there’s no answer. She’s not in the living room or kitchen. The bathroom down the hall is empty. There’s no light streaming out from under her bedroom door. Not even Orlando comes to greet me, and he always pokes his head into the living room when he hears me come in. Always. My phone, which constantly buzzes with Bliss emails and dating app notifications, is suspiciously quiet.
I am alone.
I rest the pizza box on the ottoman in front of the couch and eat a slice oozing with cheese and grease. It’s so oily that by the time I finish one slice, my fingers are slick and my skin feels slimy, but I keep going. By slice two, Orlando emerges to sniff at the box. I click my tongue and tap the empty space next to me on the couch hopefully, but he gives me a look of quiet disdain and stalks past me.
By slice three, I start to see the problem with matchmaking: nobody really knows what they want. Adam said he wanted to have a little fun before settling down. He said he wasn’t interested in dating a JAP. And here he is, two months later, dumping me to have a baby with the queen of JAPs, Mindy Kaplan, who once admitted to me that she still wears her Camp Ramah sweatshirt from 1997 to bed sometimes. Mindy told me she wanted a suited-up finance guy. Adam couldn’t be further from that. I could interview people all day about what they’re looking for in a match, but humans are just so damn unreliable.
Wretched Gretchen’s downfall, in the end, is that she’s trying to engineer herself a husband through sheer force of will. She thinks if she can quantify and calculate her ideal match, he’ll wander into her life. In reality, her lengthy checklist covered it all, really, except for the messy, magical bits—the things that make you fall in love. People are more than the sum of their parts.
Then there’s Caroline, who’s sure she knows what she wants: a boyfriend, duh—that’s how she would say it, rolling her eyes. She desperately wants someone to give her love to, but it hasn’t occurred to her yet that not everyone she meets is worthy of it. She’s learning, I guess. We all are.
I used to think I wanted Jonathan: normal, successful, all-American Jonathan. It turned out that I just liked the idea of him—the package he came in, but not the actual brain and heart and soul that made him a real person. And that’s the problem. Jonathan was the dream guy who failed me. He didn’t know he wanted me till it was too late. Adam was never supposed to be mine, but I wound up wanting him the most. And maybe, even though I’d never admit this out loud to him, I just liked the idea of Adam, too.
Bliss taught me to believe that finding your dream partner is the hard part—hard enough that it’s worth forking over $700 a month to a crew of so-called experts. But the hard part, I’m learning, is reconciling your dream guy with the stark reality in front of you. They don’t always match. Maybe they never do.
The next afternoon, I’m trudging down First Avenue past the sketchy massage parlor, the Chinese takeout joint, and the falafel place on my way to the Bliss brownstone when my phone rings. Caller ID shows an unfamiliar number with a New York area code, but I pick up anyway.
“Sasha? It’s Diego. How are you?”
I mean, awful. But he doesn’t need to know that. I step over a pile of dog shit (at least, I hope it’s dog shit) on the sidewalk and try to sound chipper. “Great, how are you?”
“Fine, thanks. I’m calling because I’d like to offer you the position at Esquire.com. I can give you thirty-five thousand a year, plus benefits.”
He’s kidding. He must be kidding. He’s not kidding? I got the job?! The salary is nothing to be thrilled about, but it’s the most anyone has ever offered me for anything. I doubt I’d make quite that much in a year at Bliss. It feels like winning the lottery.
“Thank you! Wow. This is amazing.”
“I’m sure you’ll need some time to think it over,” Diego begins.
“No, not at all. I want to work for you. When can I start?”
The certainty of my own voice scares me. I feel phenomenally lucky—minutes away from probably being fired from Bliss, and suddenly offered the dream job that I never fully believed to be within my reach. I’m afraid I’m going to wake up any second now, drenched in a cold sweat in bed, to find that Diego never really called.
“Oh!” He sounds startled, but real, at least. Solid. I’m not hallucinating his offer. “Awesome. I’m glad to hear you’ll be joining us. Can you start in the next week or two?”
“Sure.”
Exactly how I’ll wrap up my current position is another story. But I’ll figure that out soon enough.
“Of course, of course. We’ll be in touch regarding the start date.”
It’s only after the call ends and I’m drifting downtown in a sun-drenched, giddy haze that the reality hits me: I’ll be working with Adam. Who will be raising a baby with Mindy. Who thinks I’m a sloppy harlot. It’s not ideal. But this summer toughened me up. I can deal with it.
“Sasha.” She grimaces. “Come on in.”
Penelope doesn’t waste any time. She’s too busy; even during the brief ten-minute meeting, her phone sits between us on the velvet couch in the brownstone’s study and flashes twice a minute with new messages. She doesn’t offer me anything from the glass dish of chocolate truffles on the coffee table. It’s a good thing she makes me too nervous to think about what just happened on the phone with Diego; otherwise, I’d be smiling all over the place.
“I have to let you go,” she says, her eyes boring into mine as if she’s daring me not to squirm. “You made quite a mess with Mindy Kaplan.”
Then, silence. It stretches for longer than is comfortable. I’m ashamed to tell her; if I explain it out loud, whatever happened between me and Adam might lose its magic.
“I know I made a mistake,” I admit. “But Adam and I aren’t seeing each other anymore. I know that what I did was terribly unprofessional, and it reflects poorly on the company. It was never my intention to hurt Bliss or upset Mindy. I’m so sorry, Penelope.”
“You knew about our policy—no dating clients or recruits.”
“I did.”
She shakes her head. “It’s a shame, really. You had such a unique story. And you really did show such promise. You’re not a bad matchmaker, you know.”
Playing with Matches Page 25