“Don’t worry,” Alls said. “I wouldn’t tell him that.”
Alls knowing she had lied about Riley was almost as awful as Riley knowing. In one way, worse: She still wanted Alls so horribly. Concentrate, she thought. They needed to get to a diner. They needed to sit on opposite sides of a big white table under fluorescent lights and drink Coke. Grace would flap at her pit stains and Alls would say stupid things about the artwork at the auction, and everything would snap back into place. The auction. Someday it would be her and Riley there, buying, selling, whatever. They would win and they would squeeze hands, kiss.
Outside, she and Alls walked a yard apart, Alls following Grace to the subway, though she wasn’t certain exactly where the nearest station was. Almost no one else was out on the Upper East Side. A man in a trench coat, his face tight and shiny, wove unsteadily down the sidewalk behind them like a toddler learning to walk.
“Hey, Nebraska,” he called. “Nebraska, you slut.”
Alls grimaced and took her arm, and they walked faster.
“I know what those slutty boots mean, Nebraska. Is that where you’re from? Or fucking Ohio?”
Grace stopped and turned around. “Get the fuck away from me.”
The man laughed to himself and then pulled out his cell phone, as though he’d forgotten that Alls and Grace were standing there and that he had been harassing her. He mashed some buttons and groaned.
“You done, man?” Alls said. “You need to turn around, go the other way now.”
The man stepped forward, casually, easily. “Who’s this, your brother? Your brother come up from the farm?”
“I told you to get back from me,” Grace warned.
“I’ll tongue-fuck you till you can’t breathe,” he slurred quietly. “In your little boots.” He stepped into the light from a street lamp and seemed to wilt there, his body slumping forward. Grace grabbed Alls’s elbow and they stomped down the sidewalk, Grace’s heels hitting the concrete hard enough to send shocks up through her shins, her thighs, into her hips.
“Has that ever happened before?”
“I’m not usually out so late.” Usually she was on the phone with Riley by now. Boys never seemed stupider than when they were surprised by the bad behavior of other men. “But it’s not exceptional,” she said. Part of her felt grateful. The man had shaken her up. She felt less vulnerable now, less caught.
On the subway, they kept a seat between them until they hit Grand Central and the train grew crowded. When he slid over toward her, she felt the tiny hairs along her forearms stand up, as if they were somehow reaching for him.
They should call Riley. They should have called him already, could still call. She felt an ache deep in her insides that was not allowed. You’re drunk, she thought to herself. But she wasn’t, not really.
She did not say anything when they passed Twenty-third Street, the stop for his hotel, and he didn’t seem surprised when Grace stood up at Astor Place. He followed her up the station stairs and they crossed Fourth Avenue. Neither said a word.
When they stepped into the fluorescent light of the dorm, Grace signed him in. They waited for the elevator, and once inside, they leaned against the back wall, away from each other. She wondered what he was thinking right then. Stop it, she told herself. They were just going to talk. They’d had a thousand late-night boozy talks, usually with Riley there too. A girl in pajama pants got in on the second floor holding an Amélie DVD and then got off at the fourth. The doors opened on the fifth floor and they walked down the hall to Grace’s room.
“I should leave this jacket for your roommate,” he said when Grace opened the door.
“For Kendall, right.”
He draped the jacket on the back of Kendall’s desk chair and then sat on the bed. Grace’s bed. She didn’t turn the lights on. Instead she sat down on the bed next to him.
“Riley,” she said.
He nodded.
“We should call him and tell how our day was, what we did.”
“We should,” he said.
“We could call him right now. But maybe—”
“It might be weird,” he said. “That we’re, you know, just here. By ourselves.”
“Drunk,” she said. “Drunk after the rich-people art party.”
“Are you drunk?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Me neither,” he said.
“Do you want a glass of water?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That would help.”
She filled up the jar from her desk with water from the bathroom and they passed it back and forth.
Grace was still wearing her coat, zipped up. As long as she was still wearing her coat, nothing could happen. She could smell him.
“What do you want?”
She shook her head in the dark.
He turned toward her and got close. “How long?” he asked. “How long have you felt this way?”
“We can’t,” she said, pulling away. “We can’t. We can’t.”
“Why do you think we’re here, then?”
“I feel sick,” she said.
“It’s a sickness,” he said.
“This is new,” Grace said. “This is new to me.”
“No it isn’t.”
She swallowed.
“You get to be who you want,” he said. “I don’t get why you let him decide for you.”
“Fuck you,” she said. “Don’t tell me about me, okay?”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Besides, you think this is who I want to be? This girl?”
“Does it matter anymore?”
“You’ve thought about this a long time,” she said.
“Not because I wanted to.”
She was aching and wet and didn’t miss Riley at all. Riley was a world away, a souring memory that she couldn’t catch the details of and didn’t want to.
“We can never tell,” she said, and his shoulders collapsed. He’d expected her to shut it down. He might have been testing her, she realized, her loyalty to Riley.
He wasn’t.
“We can never tell,” he repeated.
He unzipped her coat and slipped his hands inside, around her waist, clutching her as if she might disappear. She pulled him down on top of her, and his face hovered just above hers, his eyes shining in the dark. They knew, in that moment, that they had not done anything irrevocable. They could still go back. But she could feel his breath on her lips; she could taste it. Then she raised her mouth to his and breathed him in.
And when she ran her hands up to his chest, under his shirt, she told herself that this wasn’t real. When he rolled her over him and she reached back to unclasp the neck of her dress, she knew that this could not be happening. It was not allowed and so it was not real. She slid his jeans down his thighs as if she were in a dream. She sucked on his earlobe and ran her wet fingers around the head of his penis as if she were just wondering what it would be like, to do that to him, and he pulled her dress up over her head in a blind tunnel where she floated, hoping she wouldn’t wake up. She got up and locked the door. He sat up on her bed, leaning against the wall. She climbed onto him and he cupped her ass in his hands and groaned into her neck and none of this was real, not the unfamiliar fingers sliding between her lips, not her sense that she’d known him always and somehow not at all, and then she sank down onto him and lost her breath completely.
? ? ?
They lay there next to each other afterward, not touching, as though by keeping still they might stop time. She saw his arm next to hers, his chest rising and falling, but she couldn’t turn to look at him directly. To do so would be to acknowledge both the sharpness and the depth of their betrayal: sharp like a cut where before there had been only an ache; deep as a sudden drop-off from shallow water.
He didn’t smell like Riley at all. He smelled like black pepper and burning leaves.
This will destroy you, she thought.
She didn’t know what he was thinking, but as they lay there she felt the weight growing heavier with every second.