I lift my chin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Somehow we’ve gotten closer. The corner of his mouth hitches, but his eyes stay dark, focused. His breath feathers over my mouth. One more strong inhale, from him or me, would close the gap. “Why are you punishing me?”
I try for an angry laugh. It doesn’t come. He looks too earnest, too lost, like he’s desperately trying to understand.
Like he can’t fathom that all my love for him didn’t just vanish, the way his did for me. That it had to go somewhere, and funneling it into anger is how I’ve managed to make it through these last two days.
It makes me feel alone. It makes me feel defeated.
He swallows. “Can’t we . . . call a truce?” he asks. “Be friends for the next few days?”
Friends. The irony, the sterility of the word, stings. It’s pouring alcohol over my wounded heart. But I can’t quite grasp on to my anger.
“Fine,” I say. “Truce.”
Wyn’s hand slides clear of the door. He steps back and, after a moment, nods. “You take the bed.”
I can’t help but think he doesn’t look any happier than I feel.
14
HAPPY PLACE
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, NEW YORK CITY
A FOUR-BEDROOM APARTMENT that the five of us can barely afford. One full bathroom, with a rigid shower schedule (organized by Sabrina), and a half bathroom we call the “emergency can” because there’s nothing but a toilet and a lightbulb with a chain in it, and it’s creepy as hell.
Original hardwood floors that bow in the middle, tired of holding up grad students’ thrift store furniture for generations. Windows that get stuck for days at a time and must simply be left, tried again later. When it’s hot or when it’s raining, the smell of cigarettes past seeps faintly out of the walls, reminding us that we’re passing through, that this building has stood here since long before we came to this city, and will be here long after we leave.
After Wyn’s and my first kiss, in the cellar over the summer, I’d expected that to be it: our curiosity satisfied, our crush squashed. Instead, the moment the door to our shared room at the cottage closed, he’d lifted me against him, kissed me like only seconds had passed.
Still, we took it slow that first night, kissing for hours before finally taking off each other’s clothes. Are you sure, he’d whispered, and I was.
Will we still be friends after this, I’d whispered, and he’d smiled as he told me, You’ve never been just a friend to me.
He’d laid me gently in his twin bed, and when the creak of the bed frame threatened to give us away, we moved to the floor, hands tangling, and whispered into each other’s mouths and hands and throats, trying not to call out each other’s names to the dark.
Every night after had been the same. We were friendly until the door closed, and then we were something else entirely.
Still, when we moved into the new place with the others—so I could start medical school, and Sabrina could begin 1L at Columbia Law, and Cleo could take up her post at an urban farm in Brooklyn—I expected this delicate thing to fizzle.
Instead, it heightens. When everyone’s around, we find seconds of privacy, steal brushes of each other’s shoulders and hips, the bare skin just beneath our shirts. And when we’re alone, the minute the front door snicks shut, he tugs me into his closet-sized room—since I share one with Cleo—and for a few minutes, we don’t have to be quiet. I tell him what I want. He tells me how it feels. And this thing between us isn’t a secret.
Though maybe the secret is what makes it fun for him.
One night, while everyone else is out, we lie in his bed, his hand tugging at each of my curls in turn. “If we aren’t friends,” I ask, “what is this?”
He studies me through the dark, smoothing my hair back from my forehead so tenderly. “I don’t know. I just need more of it.”
He kisses me again, slow and languid, like for once we have all the time in the world. He pulls me on top of him, his hands soft on my waist, our eyes holding. Our breaths rise and break together, our hands knotting against his headboard as he murmurs into my mouth, “Harriet, finally.”
Finally. The word pumps through my veins: Finally. You. Finally.
I’m on the verge of crying, and I’m not sure why, except that this is so intense. So different than it’s ever been.
“I changed my mind,” he tells me. “I think you’re my best friend.”
I laugh against his cheek. “Better than Parth?”
“Oh, much better,” he teases. “After tonight, he can’t compete.”
“I think you should know,” I say, “Cleo and Sabrina are my best friends. But you’re my favorite man I’ve ever met.”
He turns his smile in to kiss the inside of my elbow. “I can live with that.”
We don’t talk about what it means or how it will end, but we talk about everything else, text all day, every day, even from the same room.
He sends pictures of the new mystery releases during his shifts at Freeman’s to see if I want them. Or samples of fabric from the upscale reupholstery job he goes to after his bookstore shifts, especially the more abstract textiles that inevitably look extremely and only like vaginas or penises.
I fire back illustrations from the medical journals I’m poring over, or give the textiles informal diagnoses, or send screenshots of Google image searches for cowboys and ask him, Are any of these your relatives? to which he always has an answer, like, Only the one with all the gold teeth. When he dies, I’m actually going to inherit those.
When he goes to Montana to visit his family, he comes back with a stack of tencent Goodwill paperbacks for me: She’ll Be Dying Around the Mountain, Purple Mountain Tragedy, Big Rock Candy Murder, and Cowboy Stake Me Away, the last of which is actually about vampires and was misshelved.
When he stops by Trader Joe’s on his way home from work, he brings me cartons of ice cream, Maine blueberry or Vermont maple.
So much of life is waiting for more of him, and even that torture is bliss.
One night, after months of sneaking around, while everyone is home, he offers me a spare movie ticket—a work friend of his canceled—and we leave the apartment together. Outside, he takes my hand and holds it tightly, his pulse tapping into my palm: you, you, you.
I ask what movie we’re seeing. “There is no movie,” he says. “I just wanted to take you on a date.”
Date, I think. That’s new. I hadn’t even known to want a date with Wyn Connor, but now that it’s been spoken, I feel a kind of breathless happy-sad. Like I’m missing this night before it’s even begun. Every time he offers me more of him, it gets harder not to have it all.
We traipse around Little Italy for hours, stuffing ourselves with cannoli and gelato and cappuccinos—or rather I stuff myself while he tries bites. He’s not big on sweets.
He tells me he didn’t grow up eating them, that the Connors were a “meat, potatoes, and Miracle Whip family,” and then he says, “Did you always love sugar this much?”
“Always,” I say. “And you just did that thing again.”