Mama Jane started laughing.
“It’s not funny,” I whispered as loudly as I could without James hearing me. “I don’t know what to do. This is so bad.”
“Maybe if you told him about what happened in high school—”
“No,” I said. I remembered how he had looked at me in the car the night before. All want and need. It had made me feel so sexy, so beautiful.
I didn’t ever want to go on a date with James again, but I couldn’t bear to see the hot way he looked at me morph into pity. What if he started looking at me like the nice kids at Glass High had looked at me when I was Monkey Night? Just imagining him feeling sorry for me made me feel sick to my stomach.
“No,” I said again.
“Well, then, maybe you could just sneak out of there if he’s still sleeping. I’ve done that a few times.”
“That’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s exactly what I’ll do.” I looked down at my Strokes T-shirt and the panties I had hastily pulled on before slipping into the bathroom with my cell phone. I wasn’t exactly dressed for a big getaway, but my jeans were still lying crumpled near the door. I could put them on, quiet as a mouse, then run downstairs and wait in Nicky’s office until James went away.
Suddenly a knock sounded on the door. “Davie?” came James’s voice.
My heart sank.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” Mama Jane said on the other side of the line.
“Just a minute,” I called to him. Then I said to Mama Jane, “Yeah, it’s him. I’ve got to go.”
“Call me back,” Mama Jane said. “This thing you got going on is way better than the audiobook I’m listening to right now.”
. . .
I opened the bathroom door to find James, standing there with my yellow top sheet wrapped around his waist.
His voice was tight and uncomfortable when he said, “There’s someone here to see you. He, ah . . . just let himself in.”
I looked over James’s shoulder to see Nicky standing in the middle of my apartment.
His eyes went from me in my T-shirt and panties, to James in my yellow top sheet. “What the fuck is this?”
I think he was actually expecting me to answer that. But what do you say to the ex-boyfriend who barges in on you having a morning-after with the man you claimed had turned you off perms fifteen years ago?
The polite and Southern thing to do would have been to introduce them, despite the situation. Southern women excelled at being gracious at the most awkward times, and I did still have my accent. However, both my Southern background and my good manners refused to kick in. I just stood there with my mouth half open, trying to figure out how to handle this without it coming out that I was Monkey Night.
“I thought you weren’t going to go down this road,” Nicky said, brandishing his landlord key at James, like I had actually given him permission to use it.
“I wasn’t, but he was real insistent.”
“Are you guys talking about me?” James asked, looking between us.
Nicky glared at him. “Insistent like romantic insistent? Or insistent like I-need-to-kick-his-ass insistent?”
“Excuse me?” James didn’t look so Ivy League when he took a step toward Nicky, one hand holding the sheet at his waist and the other clenching into a fist at his side.
I got in between them real quick. The last thing I needed was James Farrell and my ex-boyfriend breaking out into a fistfight in my studio apartment. “Nicky, everything’s fine, but what have I told you about coming in here without permission?”
“I’m your landlord,” Nicky reminded me. “I can come in here whenever I want.”
“Nicky, you know that’s not true. There are laws.” I hoped.