“Apparently, growing up with Title IX gave you quite a sense of self-esteem.”
“All right, then,” Liz said. “It’s on.” Though they still were fifty yards from Edwards Road, she began sprinting; she was flying up the sidewalk, past the houses and trees, the cars on Observatory Road a peripheral blur. No more than a few seconds had passed when he caught up to her, but they both were running too fast to speak; she simultaneously felt wild and breathless and like she was about to laugh. For a few more seconds, they were neck and neck, until he pulled ahead. She was pushing herself as hard as she could, and, turning onto Edwards, he was only a few feet in front of her, then more than a few, and before long they were separated by half a block. Still, she propelled herself forward; if she was to lose to Darcy, it wouldn’t be by a centimeter more than necessary.
He was waiting for her at the top of the hill, and she was gratified to see that he was still panting; she slowed down, staggering a little, incapable of speech. She rested both hands atop her head, then removed them and bent at the waist. After a minute, she heard him say, “That was respectable.”
She raised her torso, shaking her head. “Don’t patronize me.” Her limbs burned, her heart pounded; she was exhausted, possibly nauseated, but also giddy. As they faced each other, there was between them such a profusion of vitality that it was hard to know what to do with it; they kept making eye contact, looking away, and making eye contact again. At last—surely he was thinking something similar and she was simply the one giving voice to the sentiment—she said, “Want to go to your place and have hate sex?”
Darcy squinted. “Is that a thing?”
The bravado filling Liz—it wasn’t infinite, it could dissipate quickly. But while it still existed, she said grandly, “Of course it’s a thing.”
“Is it like fuck buddies?”
“This isn’t a sociology class. A simple yes or no will do.” She added, “It’s similar, but without the buddy part.”
“I take it you mean right now.” He didn’t seem flustered or even all that surprised.
“Yes,” Liz said. “I mean now.” This was his last chance to accept the offer, though she didn’t plan to tell him so. But perhaps he sensed the door closing, because he said, “Okay. Sure.”
CINCINNATI WAS THE city where Liz and sex had made each other’s acquaintance—in a rather festive cliché, she had lost her virginity to her prom date, whose name was Phillip Haley, and she’d subsequently brought home her two college boyfriends for visits, during which surreptitious intra-Tudor romps occurred—but all of that had been quite some time before. And Jasper’s visit had, of course, been unexpectedly fruitless.
As she followed Darcy through the main entrance of a bland three-story brick building and up to the second floor, she experienced a sense of mischief reminiscent of her youthful encounters. Outside his door, Darcy used the front of one running shoe to pry off the heel of the other, then repeated the gesture in reverse with his socked toes, and Liz did the same. Inside the apartment, nothing hung on the walls, and no rugs covered the hardwood floors. The living room held only a long couch, a flat-screen TV, and a low table with a closed laptop computer on it. He led her to the kitchen, which was small and windowless but looked recently renovated; between the counters and the cabinets, the walls were lined with a pattern of black, white, and green tiles. He filled two glasses with tap water and passed her one. They drank in silence, then he said, “I suppose either we both take showers or neither of us does.”
Feeling a minor appreciation for his willingness to assume the role of host, she shook her head. “I need to be back at my parents’ house before dinner. I will pee, though. Do you have a condom?”
He nodded.
In the modern, clean bathroom, after urinating, Liz washed her hands and splashed water on her face, though more to cool off than establish hygiene. In the bedroom, which contained a king-sized bed covered with a gray cotton spread, a nightstand, and a lamp, Darcy was seated on the floor, still in his shirt and shorts, with one leg stretched out and his torso extended over it. Liz walked to him and held out a hand, and he took it and stood. Uncertainty then presented itself, and no doubt if she had been eighteen, or probably even if she’d been twenty-eight, she’d have looked to him to banish this confusion; but she was thirty-eight, she had orchestrated the encounter, and so she said, “I’m thinking it’s more efficient if we both take off our own clothes. Do you care about getting sweat on your sheets?”
He seemed to find the question funny. “They’re washable.”