I begin searching the bed for my underwear. I’m nearly dressed by the time he gets back in the room.
He stops just inside the door and stares at me. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” I reply. I don’t sound angry. I refuse to be angry. He owes me nothing, and I owe him nothing.
I move toward the door, but he sidesteps and blocks it. “Why?”
I summon all of my inner fortitude to sound calm, when really I’d like to slap him and scream. “Look, I know how you roll, but I don’t need to be a part of it. I can do better than a guy who gets booty calls and answers them while I’m still in his bed.”
“It wasn’t a booty call.”
I shake my head. “Please, Brendan. Who else calls this late?”
He stares me down. “Do you trust me?”
Maybe it was Gabi on the phone, but the truth is I’d be upset by that too, so I don’t want to contemplate his question. What I want most of all is to end this now, immediately, before it does me real damage, though I suspect it’s already too late.
I fold my arms over my chest. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I need to go.”
“Look me in the eye and answer the question, Erin. Do. You. Trust. Me?”
I meet his gaze reluctantly, and almost immediately feel something seep through my blood. I don’t want to believe him, but I do anyway.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Then when I tell you it wasn’t a booty call, do you know I’m telling the truth?”
Whether or not it was a booty call is irrelevant. He’s going to break my heart, and I should not be here. I want to weep for the moment when it will officially happen, as if I can dilute the pain ahead of time.
I nod and he moves closer to me, pressing his mouth to my ear as his fingers go to the button of my jeans. “Then get back in bed,” he says, “because I’m not done with you yet.”
45
Brendan
Three Years Earlier
The schedule gets so busy that Gabi and I can’t always lead tours together. I’m okay with that. I’m finding she has these little habits that grate on my nerves if I’m around her for 24 hours straight. She employs the words amazeballs and awesomesauce, for instance, more than the correct number of times, which is zero.
All these small irritations fall away when she gets undressed, however…and Gabi is always getting undressed. The more we have sex, the more she seems to want it. I guess that should be flattering, but at times it almost feels like she’s trying to prove something to me or to herself, though I have no idea what that would be. Or what she possibly could need to prove: other than Erin, I’ve never seen a girl get as much unsolicited male attention.
The guys at the tour company make no bones about their desire to sleep with my girlfriend. One of them says something about her ass every time she walks out the door. It doesn’t bother me, but occasionally I wonder if it should. It bothered me when guys even looked at Erin, much less commented. It makes me wonder if I’ve made a mistake, letting this thing with Gabi go as far as it has. Especially because it’s starting to seem like we have different expectations of where it’s headed.
“You know,” she says over coffee, “there are lots of places to do bike tours near Stanford—Big Sur, the redwoods, Napa.”
“I thought medical school was pretty demanding,” I reply. “Are you going to have time to work?”
“Not me, silly.” She laughs. “You. Wouldn’t that be amazing, leading tours along the coast?”
Yeah, it would be amazing. Except I’m already someplace amazing, and I’m nowhere near being ready to move for Gabi. Sometimes I wish I were. Sometimes I wish I could be in this thing with both feet, instead of constantly missing what this is not, but there’s a hole inside me that I’m increasingly sure Gabi can’t fill.
“I was planning to go to Bali next,” I tell her.
“Will you at least consider it?” she pleads.
I tell her I will. I want to be someone who considers these things. I tell myself I want the things Rob has at home. Except I’m still pretty sure I just want one specific thing Rob has.
46
Erin
Present
I learn from Olivia that Brendan and Will aren’t speaking. Will is somewhat pissed that Brendan didn’t tell him about Dorothy’s cancer, but mostly he’s pissed that Brendan is hooking up with me.
Olivia wants details, but I really have none to give, since I don’t even know what’s going on with us myself. I know that I hear from him every day. His texts are always funny and frequently dirty, but what they never are is sweet. I wait for them to evolve, for him to say I wish you’d stayed over, or I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you last night, but those words never come.
I know that I’m with him more nights than I’m not. I know that we’ve fallen into a sort of haphazard domesticity—he’ll make us dinner, I’ll bake. I start staying the night and he doesn’t seem to mind. But we are not dating. We don’t go out, we don’t hold hands. And I don’t know where he is on the nights we’re not together.
That’s what troubles me most.
Brendan’s unexplained absences have become a blank screen on which I project worst-case scenarios: cheerleaders with D cups, sex-crazed models. Or nights spent with Gabi—the girl I suspect he hasn’t left behind.
He goes to Boulder to visit his mom when she starts radiation. I don’t see him for three days, but I have no idea whether he’s with her the entire time. I’m not even sure I’ll hear from him again. I’m forced to wonder—not that I ever really stop wondering—when we will end, and if he’ll warn me before it happens.
I go to his place when he gets home. He’s standing at the stove when I arrive, but takes one look at me and turns the burner off.
“Get undressed,” he says, his voice a low growl.
Mere seconds later we are both rid of our clothes, bare skin meeting bare skin. He manages to grunt the word “bed,” but we only make it as far as the couch.
When it’s through, his gaze follows mine across the room, which we’ve littered with clothing.
I laugh. “Your apartment looks like a crime scene.”
“I did plan to try to talk to you for at least a few minutes first,” he admits. “It’s those fucking heels of yours. Seeing you naked is mandatory when you come here in those things.”
“What’s shocking is that you still want to,” I venture tentatively. "I can’t believe you’re not bored yet.”
“Why would I be bored?”
I shrug, feigning ambivalence. “It’s sort of what you’re known for, isn’t it? Never the same girl twice?”
He studies my face. “Does that bother you?”
“I just want to make sure it ends well.” I grind my teeth together on the last word to keep it from sounding tremulous, because that’s suddenly how I feel when I say it aloud—not ambivalent, the way I’m supposed to be about our dirty little secret, but invested. You cannot be invested in something as brief as this, particularly something you’ve always known will end, but I am.
"You worry too much," he says. "We're in the bubble right now. That’s why this works."
"The bubble?"
"Like a pocket of air in a submerged car. It’s a little space to breathe that you know won’t last. This works because I know you’re getting back together with Rob,” he says. “If you weren’t, I’d have to worry that…you know, you might get attached.”
“So you’re saying if Rob and I weren’t planning to try again, you wouldn’t have slept with me in the first place?”
He laughs, shifting just enough to make me realize he’s already thinking about round two. “I don’t have that much self-control. But if you weren’t getting back together with him, you wouldn’t want this. You’d be off looking for someone just like him.”
"Why do you say that?"
He rolls on his back, staring at the ceiling. "You want stability, Erin. You want the boring guy like Rob who's going to work unrele
ntingly until he can retire at 65, and who's never going to have more than one or two drinks when he goes out.”
"Being a hard worker and responsible drinker doesn't mean someone is boring."
Brendan rolls his eyes. "Fine. Not boring—controlled. You want someone who's always controlled, and reliable, and steady. And that guy will never be me."
I no longer believe that controlled—or controlling—is what I need, but I still want someone I can count on. If I were a smarter girl, I’d ask myself why, given that fact, I am here at all.
"Why are you so against relationships?” I ask. “They aren’t all bad."
"The problem with a relationship,” he says, “is that it's a sort of promise to the other person—not that you’re staying together but that you at least think you might. And it fucks people up when you realize you were wrong. I'm not ever making that promise to anyone again."
“Brendan, it’s not a promise. It’s an attempt. Until you marry someone, you’re only promising to try. No one can blame you when it doesn’t work out.”
“You just never know how someone will react,” he says. “Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I bring it out in people. But the few times I’ve tried have been disastrous when they ended. And when that happens, you bear some responsibility for it, for what you’ve turned someone else into.”
“No, you don’t,” I argue. “I became someone else with Rob—to keep the peace and to make him happy. But he didn’t make me change, and he also isn’t responsible for how unhappy I became when I did. The only person whose feelings you’re responsible for are your own.”
“You really believe that?” he asks, staring off into the distance.
“I really believe that,” I affirm.
He sighs and glances at me before he jumps to his feet. “I wish I did too.”
47
Erin
Present
I’m not sure who I am right now.
I’m not the girl I was a month ago, or even a week ago.
I’m another girl, one who’s only visiting. I wish it were possible for her to stay, but I don’t see how she could.
I wake happy and float into the office. The minute I can escape, I’m heading to Brendan’s, my clothes shed within seconds of climbing his stairs. We do not discuss what we’re doing and all the ways it’s wrong. We don’t talk about the future. We are, like he said, in the bubble. It is temporary, a mistake that was made and one we will somehow need to correct, but until that bubble pops, I’ve decided to enjoy it as if these are my very last days on Earth.
The only thing it doesn’t make better is my illustrious boss, Timothy.
“I came by your desk yesterday afternoon,” he says, leaning into my cubicle on Wednesday, staring me down the way a parent might a misbehaving child.
“Oh?”
“And you weren’t here,” he adds.
I don’t know what his problem is, but I’m done jumping when he says jump for a shitty salary and no chance of promotion.
“Yes, I kind of figured that part out.”
“Is there a reason you’re suddenly leaving early?”
“I’m not leaving early, Timothy. Our hours here are 8 to 4:30.”
“That’s the minimum requirement, Erin. And as one of the senior employees here, I thought you understood that more was expected of you.”
Senior in what way? I long to ask. I don’t have a better office or better pay or better leave. If the only benefit to being a senior employee is longer hours and higher expectations, I have a few suggestions for what he can do with the honor.
“Anyway,” he continues, “the chancellor wants to see mock-ups of the entire branding campaign tomorrow at three, including the new stuff he asked for.”
I very nearly laugh. But then, this is Timothy, who’s never made a joke in his life and therefore must be serious. What he’s asking is impossible. He wants copy for a 10-page promotional brochure, a four-page magazine article, and four recruitment pieces—and then he wants a designer to have them all laid out—within 24 hours.
“That’s impossible. We don’t even have copy yet.”
“I didn’t come here for a status report, Erin. I came here to tell you my expectations. And all of those items had better be on my desk by 2:30.”
I watch his retreating back, and I imagine quitting. I imagine showing up tomorrow at 2:30, empty-handed aside from my resignation letter, and saying, “Here’s your campaign, asshole.” It’s the kind of thing that works for other people—I guarantee Harper could do it and somehow wind up floating out of here on wings of glory, moving a week later into a far better job.
But I’m not Harper. My arc has never gone the way of a Lifetime movie with its inevitable triumph. Which means I will not be seeing Brendan as planned, nor experiencing everything else he detailed in the filthy text he sent this morning. That fact alone makes me hate this job more fervently than anything else that’s happened here over the past four years.
I call Brendan and explain that I can’t come over because I will instead be crafting 20 pages of starry-eyed prose about the glories of ECU.
“You sure about that?” he asks. “I’m making fajitas.”
I groan in dismay. “Oh my God. You know that’s my favorite. But I doubt I’ll even have time to eat.”
“Just come over,” he says, sighing. “Bring your laptop. You can work while I cook.”
I wonder if he has any idea that he sounds like a boyfriend right now. A good boyfriend. I don’t point it out. He’d find the revelation horrifying.
“We can’t be having sex the whole time,” I warn.
“Erin,” he says, sounding exasperated, “I’m capable of controlling myself when I have to.”
I snort. “I guess I haven’t witnessed that yet.”
“What do you think I was doing,” he counters, “for the two months before I slept with you?”
I arrive at his place expecting him to undress me immediately, but he doesn’t.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” he says, grabbing a plate.
He’s wearing my favorite T-shirt, the one that brings out the gold in his skin and makes his eyes look Photoshopped. I instantly regret the prior claims I made about sex, and us not having it.
“I didn’t really mean we couldn’t have any sex,” I volunteer, and he just laughs.
I walk toward him, and he turns to me sternly, wielding the tongs like a weapon. “Don’t even think about getting laid until you’re done with your work.”
“I think you’re underestimating how long this is going to take,” I reply, a hint of pleading in my voice.
“That’s okay,” he says, returning to the grill. “Just get your work done. We don’t need to have sex.”
I suspect he’s doing it just to torture me, because we don’t need to have sex is not a phrase I ever imagined coming from his mouth. I bet the words burned his throat a little as they came out.
I should probably leave after dinner, but I don’t want to. We settle in on opposite sides of his couch: me with a laptop, him with a book, legs intertwined. He seems disappointingly unaware of my presence, whereas I am aware of little other than his. Every time he shifts, every time his foot brushes my leg, I grow very aware of the fact that he is there, and that we have not had sex in nearly 18 hours. Just the way he sits with his legs spread wide makes me think of things I should not.
“A quickie might take the edge off,” I venture.
“Get back to work,” he says, without even glancing up.
Minutes later, I’ve only typed about two sentences, and I am hyper-focused on the fact that his foot has just brushed mine. Such a small, simple motion. It could happen with anyone and be meaningless, except that it's not anyone, it's Brendan, who has the filthiest mind and mouth of anyone I've ever been with. So that little brush of his foot has an entire soundtrack of memories accompanying it.
“I’m having a hard time focusing,” I whine. “Maybe we should…”
He cocks a brow. �
��Not a chance, blondie. You asked for self control. You’re getting self control.”
Great. Trust Brendan to turn it into a personal challenge.
“You want to try it in the hammock?” I suggest. “I promise I won’t get mad if we fall out.”
He laughs but doesn’t even glance at me.
“Remember when you told me that fantasy you had, with me in the red thong? Well, guess which thong I’m wearing?”
Even that doesn’t work.
“I give up,” I say, pulling off my cardigan. He watches me remove it, and I catch the look in his eyes before he glances away. That’s when I realize how to win this battle.
He returns to his book, but seconds later I catch him looking again, surreptitiously, just for a moment.
I am no longer worried about my project. I can get up at 5 AM to finish it. Or maybe Timothy can fucking provide a week’s notice next time. I set the laptop on the couch, still open, and stand. I start taking off my jeans.
"Seriously?" he groans.
"What?" I ask. "I'm not comfortable. They're cutting into my waist."
"Right," he mutters.
I return to the couch and pick up my laptop, laying down so my back is flat, my knees up, feet slightly apart. It makes me think of going to see a gynecologist. But I'm pretty sure it won't make Brendan think of that.
And then I feel his foot skimming the outside of my thong. Skim and retreat. Skim and retreat. I push forward a bit the last time he pulls away, chasing. The next time his foot returns, I release a small huff of air, a slightly desperate noise, and he groans, diving toward me. Before I've even shut my laptop he's pushed the fabric to the side and put his magical tongue to work.
"You like that, tease?" he demands.
Yes. Too much. I’m already close and he just began. After waiting so long, I feel like I’ve earned this. I want it to last, and I know for a fact that it won’t. He adds two fingers and my whole body jolts, my head hanging off the arm of the couch helplessly as I come. I haven't even finished before his pants are down, a condom is on, and he's pushing inside me, knocking the air from my chest.
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