But comments like that—no matter how offhanded or meaningless they’re supposed to come across—are why I always feel so wrong, wrong, wrong.
When I first started at LC, there was this guy named Wilfred Honeycutt. He studied at Columbia, majored in finance, and absolutely loathed his job. Then he got famous on TikTok with food-based splatter art—his true passion—and started making enough money from sponsorships to quit.
“You’ll get out of here, too, someday” was the last thing Wilfred Honeycutt ever said to me—a twenty-two-year-old who’d just upheaved her whole life to pursue the thing he was running from. Wilfred said it like I was in hell, even though I’d never thought of it that way, and ever since, part of me has been trying to get out of the hell he told me I was in. Maybe it’s this industry, stuffed to the brink with writers and designers who are, honestly, obsessed with using “creative” as a noun, but maybe it’s also just that people are snobs, because I know Miriam deals with it, too: Why would you want to only be a nurse? Even Wilfred’s parents forced him to major in something practical like finance, when all along, he just wanted to crush up berries and splatter it on canvas.
I slip off the bed. “I’m going to water the flowers.”
“Oh—thanks.” Alex follows me to the sink, then out to the balcony as I pour water from a cup into the lip of the planter. “You should do this in the morning, if you can remember,” I say quietly. “That’s the best time of day to water flowers because the soil is cool from the night before and the plants can absorb it best.”
“I, too, am thirsty in the morning. How do you know all this stuff?”
“My stepdad is a florist,” I say. “It was our big bonding activity when I was a kid.”
I recall this one day when I was eleven. I was sitting outside on our front porch steps, rubbing Pirate’s belly. The sound of the musical chords Dad was plucking at random—testing out the tone of a new song—drifted toward me from inside, but the memory’s vision is trained on Jerry, knee-deep in our flower beds.
I’d met Miriam that fall of fifth grade, and together, the two of us were growing into our personalities. We’d both gotten cut from the soccer team after spending all of tryouts screaming at the flying ball and laughing at each other. Miriam decided to do our middle school’s dance program, but that had sounded as anxiety-inducing as reliving the talent show that wasn’t.
Instead, I’d opted for an after-school volunteer club. We did everything from park cleanups to elementary school math tutoring, and I was actually enjoying it. But the more I figured out what activities I liked, the less time I had to practice guitar with Dad. Miriam said she was trying to turn me into a joiner, but I still felt guilty. Mostly because the older I got, the more I realized that music was just something Dad had lent to me. It was never going to belong to me the way it belonged to him.
“How does he make songs out of nothing?” I asked Jerry, frustrated. “I’ve heard him do it a million times, and it still doesn’t make sense to me. I’d just end up copying someone.”
“Well,” Jerry said, yanking up a weed, “it’s not really from nothing. There are chords that are already known, and it’s just about making up a new order for them to go in.”
“Still,” I grumbled, and Jerry laughed. “And the lyrics! How do you decide what’s good enough? How can you know if people will like what you made?”
“You prefer a sure thing,” he said.
“Maybe,” I answered, wrapping myself in my own arms. Pirate whined forlornly.
“Come here,” Jerry said. I hopped up and went over to his work section, and Jerry handed me a spade and a pansy out of a plant tray. “There’s very little guesswork when it comes to making flowers grow,” he told me. “They need soil, sunlight, water, and air. Every day, again and again. It’s as sure a thing as any.”
And in that moment, while I speared the earth and carefully loosened the root bulb, Jerry became a second father to me. I’d spent a lot of my childhood feeling unsteady—the passing of Mom, shyness around strangers, trouble speaking, and frankly, a little bit of confusion over Jerry not being a woman—but in the span of a single conversation, he identified something about me I’d never been able to name, and offered a solution: When you’re feeling lost, do what makes you calm, and sure-footed. I’ve been beholden to him ever since.
It’s pitch-black, I note vaguely as I stand. I should really head home. We’re approaching sleep time, which, last I checked, was not included on most fuckbuddy agendas.
Alex is blocking the doorway, all broad chested and rumpled hair and expressive eyes. He’s looking at me like he’s searching for something, worry lines between his brows, and I try to smile, but I’m sure it must come across the same way I feel inside: tired.
“Shoo.” I flick my fingers at him. “I must be going.”
He stiffens but steps aside to let me through. I find my workbag, yanked from my arms and thrown onto the countertop as I came through the door earlier.
“Thanks for … for…” I can’t meet his eyes.
“The sex?”
I wince. “Yep. The sex.”
Loosely, he grabs my elbow. “Casey. About before. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings again.”
“That sounds like an apology that’s lost its efficacy,” I try to joke. “But lucky for you, you didn’t hurt anything.”
He tilts my chin up with his finger, forcing me to look at him, burnt-sugar eyes swallowing me. “Okay. If you say so.”
“I do,” I insist.
“Okay,” he says again.
I head for the door, but there’s a yank on my wrist, and then we’re lip-locked.
It’s wildly different from our first kiss at Sleight of Hand, twice as intense as the one in the restaurant. This one’s hungry, an act of pure relish. Alex’s teeth scrape against my bottom lip as I wrap my hands behind his neck. One of his arms brackets my hips, pulling me up, up, up off the floor, and my toes settle on top of his. He wraps his free hand around my hair and lets the kisses get softer, tugging on my bottom lip, tugging on my hair. I steal gulps of breath in between each one, flushed and undone.
His touches reignite something I could’ve sworn was supposed to be dimmer now, less mystical. But it isn’t. If anything, every press of his lips to mine leaves me just slightly more addicted to the sensation than the last.
Eventually, he lifts me off him and presses one more kiss to my jaw. I stumble back, lashes batting so ferociously they could induce a small tornado. When my eyes refocus, Alex is watching me with his hands loosely fisted at his hips, biting the inside of his cheek. His boxers are decorated with corgis in Christmas sweaters, and yet he still manages to look like sex got dressed up for a night of revelry.
“Goodbye.” His voice is so scratchy, I want to ask if he needs a cough drop.
I jerk out two nods like a marionette. “Goodbye,” I repeat.
The door shuts between us, and at eight thirty on a Tuesday evening, I do my first ever hangover-free walk of shame.
CHAPTER TWENTY