Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“You’re not going to sleep in that, are you?” Peter asks her.

“What else am I going to sleep in?” Her heart is thudding so loudly, he must be able to hear it. She wishes she’d thought to bring her overnight bag with her, but it’s still in the backseat of the dead Heart of Gold.

“I have some clean gym clothes in the top drawer there.” He points lazily across the room at his wardrobe. “Take whatever you want. Get comfortable.”

She opens the drawer and sees his neatly folded athletic wear. She wonders if he folds his clothes or if their maid does it. She grabs the first articles of clothing that she sees and takes them to change in the bathroom.

Arden locks the door and looks at herself in the mirror. “What are you doing,” she says aloud.

Mirror Arden has no response.

“Who even are you right now,” she goes on.

Mirror Arden remains silent.

She pulls on Peter’s elastic-waist shorts, which reach down to her knees, and an equally oversized T-shirt. She finds herself hoping that the shirt will smell like Peter, but it just smells like clean laundry. It’s from a Broadway musical—The Lion King—which amuses Arden, to think that Peter not only went to see a live staging of a Disney cartoon, but that he liked it enough to invest in a souvenir shirt. She wonders if one of his parents took him, even though neither of them sounds like they’d be big musical theater fans. Maybe they’d taken him just because buying Broadway tickets is a thing that rich people do.

Thinking about Peter’s parents at The Lion King makes her think of her own parents’ coming to her first play, two years ago. That’s probably the last time her dad stepped foot in a theater. She recalls his comment that with any luck, next time she’d make it on stage. Standing in front of the mirror in Peter’s private bathroom, she thinks that maybe her father was right. Not that she should be in the spotlight in a play—that has never interested her before and it doesn’t interest her now—but that she could be in the spotlight in her real life. That maybe Chris isn’t the only one who can handle a leading role.

She leaves the bathroom and sees that Peter has not moved from his rag-doll position on his bed. She stands there, holding her dress balled up in her hands, and still she does not know what to do. She knows what Bianca would do. Bianca would get right into that bed like she owned it. And Arden knows what she should do. She should lie down on Peter’s thick carpet, on the floor, and go to sleep, and not think anymore.

But she doesn’t do either of those things. She stands still.

“Hey,” Peter says after a while, his voice low and heavy. “Come here.”

She does.

He flaps his arm, haphazardly patting the mattress beside him. She sits. And then, because it is very late and she is very tired, she lies down, facing him.

“You don’t have to be so far away,” Peter says.

“I’m not.”

He rolls over to her side of the bed and flings an arm over her.

“Peter…” she says.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs. “We’re just cuddling.”

They lie there, him in his jeans, her in his gym shorts. This is the latest Arden has ever stayed up. She can hear birds waking up in the rich-person park across the street. The darkness coming through the slats in Peter’s blinds is no longer quite so dark. It is almost morning.

He is drunk and hardly awake, and Arden doesn’t want to take advantage of that—but at the same time, she does want to, more than anything she’s ever wanted. It knocks the air right out of her, how much she wants to.

She leans in just a little and kisses him.

His eyelids flutter, and he kisses her back. It’s a slow, languorous kiss, and she is lost in it.

Then Peter pulls away. He rolls onto his back and presses his forearm to his eyes. “I can’t do this,” he mumbles.