by Kaela Coble
“Ruby. What the fuck?” he would say. (He’s very grumpy when he gets woken up.)
“I need to talk to you,” I would whisper.
“Now? Are you insane, woman?” he would demand.
“No, tomorrow. I just thought I would deliver an in-person twenty-four-hour notice,” I would start to yell.
Then, he would meet me at the side porch entrance and we would have a very awkward conversation about our feelings for each other. Instead, without saying a word, Murphy lifts his screen, reaches down, grabs me under my armpits, and pulls. He knows why I’m here in the middle of the night, and it’s certainly not to deliver bad news. I use his force to help me scale the short climb and topple into his room. Thankfully, his bed is pushed up against the window like mine is, or my leg or arm or face would be broken.
He kisses me, and before I know it, my shirt is off, and then his shorts are off, and then everything is off. His mouth moves all over my skin, and I bite my fist to keep from moaning too loudly. I kiss him everywhere too, and he lets a groan escape. He fumbles through his nightstand for a condom, and I realize this is the first time we’ll have had sex completely sober. But I don’t feel sober. I feel high, like I’m flying. He enters me, his arms framing my head, his hands in my hair. We lock eyes as we make love. Making love. I’m not a virgin, but this is a first.
When we’re finished, we lie next to each other on our sides, looking into each other’s eyes, not able to stop touching one another. I know I haven’t yet said what I came here to say, and I know I have to in order to make this real. In order for us to move forward, and stop the game playing and the secret keeping. The words spread inside my chest, looking for an escape. It’s painful. I can’t say them. Saying them will kill me for sure.
“Murphy,” I finally say tentatively.
He doesn’t say “What?” or “Yeah?” He just waits. He waits for several agonizing seconds.
“I love you.”
“Duh, Ruby,” he says, and he gathers me up and rolls me on top of him, my heart feeling like it’s going to explode.
14
RUBY
NOW
I sit at the marble-topped bar at Ardesia—the wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen that my coworkers and I refer to as our “bitching grounds”—waiting for them to arrive. This is our spot, chosen deliberately because it’s just outside the detestable tourist area that is Times Square. Hell’s Kitchen is too gritty, too harshly industrial, too close to the view of New Jersey across the Hudson to be an attraction for anyone but actual New Yorkers. And we’d rather push through crowds of suits than I HEART NEW YORK sweatshirts and fanny packs any day. There was no question we would end up here tonight. We knew as soon as we came in to inboxes flooded with angry, red exclamation points that today would be “that kind of day”—the kind that either ends with an oversize glass of wine or a gun to the head.
Yesterday there was a last-minute breaking story about the mayor “misappropriating” city funds to pad his reelection campaign, and Layout had to get “a little creative” to make everything fit. As a result, ads were moved or shrunk and, in some cases, cut off in the middle of a sentence, and that was the nightmare of the sales department today. Miraculously, only a few of my clients were affected, so my list of kiss-ass phone calls to them offering discounts and better placement if they didn’t pull their advertising was complete long before Larry’s, Saleisha’s, and Micah’s were. But as I threw on my coat and messenger bag, I put my thumb up to my lips, my pinkie tipped up in the universal signal for drinking, and they had all nodded with wide eyes that told me they would be here as soon as humanly possible.
True to form, at 8:00 p.m. the place is filling up fast for the after-work rush, and I’m getting the side-eye from all the women in heels and men in suits anxious to snag the one bar stool next to me that I’ve managed to save. Above the bar is a second level, a platform where waiters in tight vests and skinny jeans go to retrieve bourgeois bottles of wine from a glass display, and all around me people are discussing politics, plays they’ve seen, books and articles they’ve read. This is exactly the type of place I always thought I belonged in, and exactly the type of place I could never picture Murphy stepping foot in. Maybe Emmett, although he would be immediately annoyed that they don’t take reservations and that no one knew who he was—the Emmett McDowell, Chatwick High’s all-time scoring leader in basketball.
Just the thought of either of them being here—in this bar, in New York—makes me smile. I’m missing them. Missing Chatwick. I’ve been going up to the roof of my apartment building a lot lately. From there, I can see the East River, and I look down on it hoping to get the sense of peace I used to get from sitting in front of Chatwick Bay. It doesn’t compare. Here, there are thousands of people between me and the water, people walking on the streets or moving around in their apartments, but somehow the sight of them makes me feel more isolated. So many people in this city, and I have no real history, no real connection, with any of them.
The only one of my Chatwick friends I’ve spoken with since my September visit has been Ally, all via text message, to coordinate Steph’s bachelorette party in a few weeks. I’m highly anxious about it, not only because I don’t know Steph that well and I’m worried about her having a good time, not only because Krystal is coming, but because I’m scared to tell Ally what I know I have to tell her.
“Anyone sitting here?” a man in a crisp navy-blue suit asks, his hands resting possessively on the back of the chair where my bag lies.
“Yes, sorry,” I say. “I’m saving it for someone.” I shoot him a polite smile, but I don’t fully look at him until I notice that he hasn’t moved away yet. When I look back, I notice that he’s handsome in that overly groomed way I’ve never been particularly fond of. You know the kind: a two-hundred-dollar haircut, flawlessly clean-shaven, eyebrows and nails a bit too perfectly formed for you to believe they aren’t “professionally handled.” He’s grinning as if we’ve just exchanged an inside joke, and there is a glint of overblown self-assurance in his eyes that tells me this is about to be unbearable.
“Saving it for me, right?” he says.
Why, oh why did I have to smile at him? Why couldn’t I have replied to his request for my chair in the New York way, with a sarcastic barb like “No, I just like my bag to have its own seat because I’m an asshole like that.” It’s the damn Vermonter in me that defaults to politeness.
“No,” I say, this smile more curt than the first. “For my boyfriend.”
He scoffs. “You don’t have a boyfriend. No girl comes to a place like this, looking like that, to meet her boyfriend.”
I look down at my clothes, and while the slacks and button-down shirt are certainly fitted, they don’t even approach the realm of sexiness this man is implying, which makes me think this is a line he uses liberally, that it has nothing to do with me.
“Can I get you a drink?” he continues. “They make a phenomenal Bourbon Apple Sangria here.”
I actually cringe, lifting my still half-full glass of 2006 Chappellet merlot. “All set,” I say.
He snorts now. “Wine in a wine bar, how original. You know—”
“I should really find out where he is…” I interrupt, pulling out my cell phone and dialing a number I’ve used in many a situation like this.
“Hi, love,” comes Jamie’s most welcome voice, a little hoarse and groggy. I feel a pang of guilt for calling at 4:00 a.m. London time, but I’m guessing he was already up. He is the kind of writer who works “when the fever strikes,” as he says, which is often from midnight to five or six in the morning.
“Hi, baby. Where are you? I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to hold on to this chair.”
Jamie is familiar with this game, so he plays along. “I’m in bed, thinking of you,” he says.
“Oh, you’re ten minutes away?” I say. “Should I order y
ou a drink?”
“Yes, do, and while you’re at it, tell the tosser who’s chatting you up to bugger off.”
I smile and look at the pristinely manicured man, who is still clutching the chair. “My boyfriend has asked me to tell you to bugger off.”
The arrogant smile fades from the man’s face, and he does as he’s told.
“Ha! It worked,” I say to Jamie.
“You could do that on your own, you know. You don’t need to call me at all hours.” He is just pretending to be grumpy, so I don’t bother to apologize.
“I know, but this way I get to talk to you. Did I wake you?”
He laughs in that sexy, sleepy way that always gets me. “It’s all right. You can make it up to me by telling me what you’re wearing.”
It’s my turn to laugh. “A collared shirt and gray slacks.”
“Sounds fetching,” he says. “But I much prefer that black little number. Remember that one you wore for Christmas that time?”
I feel myself blush. “I remember.”
“That was the night I decided you would be my wife. How’s that coming, by the way? You ready to move back to London and have a farmer’s share of babies?”
My body tightens as it does whenever he talks like this, which is probably the reason he broke up with me. But I can’t help it; he drops it into the conversation so casually, as if he’s asking me to get a cup of coffee. “Tell me what you did tonight,” I say, trying to steer us into safer territory.
He sighs. “Well, after an extraordinarily dull dinner with my parents and my dreadful brother and his dreadful wife…” (They’re not actually dreadful; they’re lovely people, and Jamie adores them.) “I met some mates at the pub.”
“I couldn’t at all tell you’d been drinking,” I say. Hey! There’s that New York sarcasm.
He tells me the pub celebration was for his friend Johnathan, who just got engaged. I remember the weeks of tension that would follow an engagement announcement when we were together—that big flashing reminder that I couldn’t commit to him. Sitting here listening to his accent, a smile spread on my face as we banter and flirt, I can’t for the life of me remember why.
“And how goes the plans for the hen night?” he asks, refusing to submit to the American term bachelorette party.
I groan. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say.
“Don’t overthink it, love. Just get a bunch of objects shaped like tallywackers, and call it a day.”
“It’s more than that.”
“Oh,” he says. “Nervous about your big secret coming out?”
“Maybe,” I say. After I returned from my weekend in Chatwick, Jamie was the first person I called to fill in about Danny and his envelopes. He’s heard a lot about Chatwick over the course of our relationship. He knows about the crew and what they’ve always meant to me. Each time I spoke of one of them, he encouraged me to reach out and reconnect. I’ve even gone so far as to tell him that Murphy was my first love.
“Don’t you think you’ll feel better if you simply tell me what your secret is?” he says, a hint of mischief in his voice that reminds me that love of gossip is not limited to the people of Chatwick, Vermont. When I don’t respond, the mirth disappears from his voice. “Seriously, Ruby. It can’t be that bad, and I can help you sort out how to tell your mates.”
“I don’t want it to change…things. The way you look at me.”
Jamie scoffs. “Well, in my eyes, you’re already a troll. How can it be much worse?”
I laugh.
“Oh, I’ve got it. You were born a man, weren’t you?”
“Yes, that’s it. How did you guess?” I ask.
“I knew you were too good to be true.”
“Speaking of too good to be true…” Again, I skillfully change the subject, this time to his next book, which is due by the end of the year. He starts to tell me about it when my phone buzzes in my hand. Thinking it’s one of my coworkers giving me a status update on their whereabouts, I ask Jamie to hold on so I can check. I find it’s not a text message but a notification from my work email. I’m about to ignore it—I can deal with work tomorrow—but the From field reads [email protected].
My heart quickens as I click to open the message, which says only: All things done in the dark have a way of coming to light.
I return the phone to my ear to hear Jamie telling a story about the “shit meeting” he had with his editor this week. Apparently, he didn’t hear my request for a pause in the conversation. “Jamie,” I interrupt him. “Do you think this is funny?”
There’s a pause. “Think what’s funny?”
“This email.”
“What email?”
I repeat the message.
“Cryptic,” he says. “Where have I heard that? It’s from the Bible, right?”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Ruby! I didn’t send it. Why would I?”
“Well, it’s just interesting timing, don’t you think? We were just talking about the Danny secrets, and I get an email with the threat from Danny’s letter, word for word? I know you think this is some hilarious game, but for me—”
“Ruby,” he interrupts, his voice stern. “I didn’t know Danny said that in his letter. You never told me that.”
My hands and feet go numb as I realize he’s right.
15
RUBY
BACK THEN—SENIOR YEAR
The next day at school, Murphy and I keep our distance until our friends are out of sight. Last night, we didn’t really talk about what comes next. (We didn’t really talk about much of anything, come to think of it, although I did manage to squeeze out of him that he didn’t tell me he broke up with Taylor because he didn’t want to put pressure on me.) We can’t exactly start making out in the hallways without sitting our friends down for one of those after-school-special-style talks.
He manages to sneak my books into his pile on the way to homeroom, prompting me to ask him if we’re going to split a milk shake before the sock hop later. Then once in homeroom he passes me a note. “Do like I did,” it says. “Tell the crew you can’t hang out this weekend.”
“Okay,” I scribble back, giddy as…well, as a girl in love.
• • •
We spend most of the weekend at my house, since Dad decided to stay in New York for the weekend and Nancy is in a black period, which means she stays in her room and watches TV until the storm passes instead of going out drinking. Coral is off hanging out with high school friends and keeps out of our hair on the rare occasion she is home. She was not a bit surprised when I filled her in on Murphy and my Big Feelings. (I had to tell someone.) “I wondered when you were going to figure that out, dummy,” was all I got from her.
Murphy and I snuggle and kiss on the couch, jumping away from each other when we hear Nancy’s footsteps on the creaky staircase. When she descends, she suggests we all watch a movie together, and I make up an excuse to leave the house—that I’m teaching Murphy to drive standard. We decide it’s not the worst idea for him to learn anyway, so we go down to the parking lot of Chatwick Elementary to give it a try. Murphy is hopeless, and we end up laughing too hard to drive and instead have sex in the backseat. Famished afterward, we pick up fast food and bring it back to his house, snuggling and kissing on his couch now, the one in the basement, away from his parents, until late into the night. We fall asleep watching a stupid movie where all the actors are dressed up like apes, and wake up in the middle of the night to make love again before I sneak out to go home.
Since the warm weather has held out but my parents aren’t physically or emotionally present enough to do it, Murphy spends most of Sunday morning giving our pool a final cleaning so we can take a swim. The water is still freezing, but we splash around for most of the afternoon. I ride around on Murphy’s back like I’ve done a million times
, enjoying the weightless feeling and the close contact with another human that doesn’t feel threatening. Only now, I occasionally spin around to face him, and he carries me to the part of the pool that’s blocked from the house’s windows by the deck to press me up against the side and kiss me.
As the sun starts to go down, we wrap ourselves in towels and sit close together on the glider. I am happy and warm.
So naturally, I have to fuck it up.
“Murphy, what are we doing?” I ask, breaking away from a kiss.
His eyes, just a moment before full of desire and love, suddenly look panicked. “What do you mean?” he asks.
“I mean,” I say, exasperated. “You love me, I love you, now what?”
He frowns and shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” I say, resentful at having to pull his teeth, “are we a couple? And if so, what happens next year when I’m at NYU?”
He pulls away from me, his whole energy stiffening. “I don’t know,” he says again.
Now I panic. This is not the answer I’ve been expecting. As fun and wonderful as Murphy is, he’s not the type to do something without thinking. Case in point, he’s been in love with me for two years and hasn’t said anything because he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure of how it would all turn out. I guess, knowing this, part of me assumed Murphy already had some kind of plan about how to move forward.
“Ruby, we’re having a nice day. Do we have to talk about this now?”
My jaw sets in frustration. How is this not an important conversation to have? And why does he seem caught off guard? I mean, did he forget I’m going away to school in four months? We sit in silence for several minutes, questions racing through my mind like the news ticker at the bottom of the CNN Money channel my father always has on in the background when he’s home.