Love Interest

He tucks his hands into his pockets, watching me. Again, I’m sensing the switch in his mood, having gone from the life of the party to a patient, sideline observer in the span of one song. Alex seems to be good at that. Matching your energy where you’re at.

I need to get out of here as fast as possible. This is, officially, no longer just casual drinks with a coworker. Hanging out tonight was my suggestion. I put us into this awkward situation, and now I need to get us out of it unscathed.

I fish my phone out of my purse to call my own Uber home: seventy-one dollars. An involuntary squeak slips out.

“What’s wrong?” His tone is concerned.

“Just expensive, that’s all.” I shake my head and sigh, hair falling into my face. “I’m not that drunk anymore, but I’m also not calibrated for the subway right now.”

“You could…” Alex cuts himself off. He scratches at his neck. “It’s just that I live really close, so if you wanted to stay, and take the subway in the morning … that would be a thing—a thing that you could do.”

And in a moment of poignant, fleeting sobriety, I understand why Miriam wanted to know where Alex lives. For when she tracks me later tonight, or early tomorrow morning, because she doesn’t really believe I’m going home.

I don’t want to. Not only because Miriam and Brijesh will be at our place doing one of two things—loudly having sex or loudly having a talk about what they “are”—but also because … I don’t want to leave Alex yet. I don’t entirely understand it, but the alcohol thinning my blood tells me I don’t need to understand it quite yet.

Also, I haven’t gotten any closer to getting Tracy her answers about the CEO and chairman. I’m frustrated for having to think about that after such a fun evening with Alex, but the reminder still looms.

“Not very professional,” I say around a smirk. “But I am desperate, so.”

“There’s only one bed,” he blurts.

I blink three times. “Alex. That’s not … Most of us mere mortals have only one bed.”

He smiles at the ground and rubs a hand under his chin. “I don’t have a couch yet. It’s on back order. I just wanted you to know that.”

One bed. No couch.

“I could sleep on the floor—”

“No!” I stick out my chin. “We’re both grown-ups, right? We can handle one night of close proximity. If you’re okay with it, too, that is.”

He scoffs, and laughs deeply, and runs a hand through his hair. “Come on, Simba. It’s this way.”





CHAPTER TWELVE


The night air is as crisp as a freshly minted dollar, and my skin is peppered with goose bumps until we walk over a vent below the sidewalk that shoots warmth up my spine. New York is never quiet, but compared to the noise of the karaoke bar, the sounds of cabbies honking their horns and walk signs commanding us to cross are nearly peaceful.

“Are Brijesh and Miriam…?” Alex starts.

“It’s complicated.”

I debate leaving it at that, but before I know it, I tell him about Miriam’s college ex breaking her heart. She got dumped a month before Lance and I ended things. Jared had a habit of doing bars, and Miriam had a habit of being a nursing student, which made the drug abuse particularly difficult for her not to have an opinion on. In the end, it ripped them apart, but I think to this day, Miriam grieves what that relationship could have been.

“So, anyway,” I tell Alex, “Brijesh is hopelessly in love with her, and she’s trying to figure out how to move on from a love that broke her, and they pull each other in and then push each other away again. It’s kind of a mess.”

Alex nods and says nothing. I appreciate that—his ability to just nod and say nothing when the moment truly calls for it. He’s a bit miraculous like that.

“Freddy is cool,” I say.

“No, he isn’t,” Alex says, shaking his head, but his lips are fighting a grin. “Trust me. Sasha’s cooler. What’s her story?”

“She went to UT because she wanted to play basketball for the Lady Vols like her mom,” I explain. “I love her, and so does Miriam, but she isn’t a constant in our lives. Always there one minute and gone the next, like a passing ship in the night.”

Alex hums. “Sounds like how people describe me.”

We’re at his place a couple of minutes later. It’s a redbrick town house on a quiet lane right in the heart of the West Village, and at first glance—when he just vaguely points at it—I’m trying to understand how he’s got the whole thing to himself. This multimillion-dollar, three-floor space that probably shares a real estate agent with Blake Lively and must be owned by his father. But when we go inside, Alex leads me up a narrow staircase to the partitioned second floor. The whole unit’s been split up for renters. There is precious little space—less square footage than my and Miriam’s apartment, even—but Alex has a halfway decent kitchen setup with a sink, a hot plate, and …

“A balcony!” I stride toward it and press my hands and nose against the glass door like a kid in an aquarium. Two canvas camping chairs are set up outside.

“You can … Uh.”

I turn back.

Alex is looking at me with carefully concealed amusement. “You can go out there, if you want.”

“Fresh air in your underwear!”

“I guess? But also, do you really want to assume the air out there is fresh?”

I ignore this valid line of inquiry and ask, “Why don’t you have any plants?”

“Who would see them? That balcony faces an alleyway.”

“You’d see them! Also, the critters would.”

He comes up beside me and leans a shoulder on the other glass pane. “I’m not loving your sudden alignment with my Garden Girl enemies.”

“What do you mean by sudden?” I joke.

Alex smirks. “If I get a plant, will you spare me?”

“If you promise to actually get one. This is a waste of a balcony otherwise.”

“You’d have to pick it. I wouldn’t know the first thing about what has a chance of surviving in New York City alleys.”

I stick out my hand, and he shakes it. “Deal.”

My body unleashes an unattractive, involuntary yawn. I pull out my phone to text Miriam before I forget: Staying at Alex’s.

“Holy cow,” I say. “Is it really three in the morning?”

The question seems to startle him. He walks into his bedroom—which doesn’t have its own door and is honestly more of a nook nestled into one wall—and mumbles, “Here, let me…” He digs a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants out of a dresser drawer and tosses them to me. “Will that irritate your skin? I use scented detergent.”

I look down, feel the cotton beneath my finger pads. He gave me a HARVARD T-shirt. It puts me in a kind of unexplainable trance.

Harvard, Boston, snow in his black hair—

“It should be fine,” I mutter quietly, touched he remembered what I’d said earlier about the fragrance allergy. Confused why I’m suddenly mesmerized by this HARVARD T-shirt. “Perfume and cologne are the real culprits,” I explain.

Alex digs out a blanket from his closet and tosses it on the bed. Then he moves the fluffy comforter over to one side.

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