I get older, but they stay the same age, Cat thought.
She grinned and climbed into his lap. They kissed messily, the cigarette still between her fingers. Cat vaguely heard the sound of a glass being knocked to the floor but ignored it. Someone—probably Sigrid—turned down the lights and turned up the music. Cat and James took the cue and stumbled through the dark over to the tattered velvet sofa in the bar’s back room, leaving Sigrid and her two men alone in the front of the bar.
Later that morning Hutton woke up to a series of text messages from Callie Court, sent throughout the night after he’d drifted off to sleep.
This set is amazing
Just met Hoodie and the Blowjobs
MADE OUT WITH HOODIE
We could be having a threesome with Hoodie right now
He checked the clock: it was 6:10 a.m. Confident that Callie would be passed out cold at this hour, he texted her back right away with what he thought was an impossible overture.
I was sleeping. Any chance you’re still up? I could swing by before work.
He changed screens, about to reply to a late-night thank-you text from Cat, when Callie wrote back:
Need to sleep soon but wanna get breakfast?
He looked around the apartment. His boxes, still mostly unpacked, were strewn around the edges of the living room; he didn’t have any food in the refrigerator, and he was almost certainly out of coffee.
He threw on a clean pair of running shorts and a threadbare Battle of the Bands T-shirt, packing his work clothes and dress shoes into a backpack as he brushed his teeth. He texted Callie back.
Taking a lap then coming by you, be there in 20, don’t fall asleep!
Callie replied with a photo of her bed.
Run fast
Hutton locked the apartment and looped the park once before sprinting up the westernmost trail of Prospect Park toward Callie’s apartment, a converted turn-of-the century tenement studio on Sterling Place, just off Grand Army Plaza. After buzzing him up, Callie answered the door wrapped in an oversized Turkish towel, her dark-blonde hair still damp from the shower. She reached forward and scratched his beard by way of hello. He grinned and closed the door behind him.
Callie and Hutton had met in college and started sleeping together his senior year—her freshman year—and yet they’d never officially dated or broken up. Hutton’s last relationship hadn’t exactly ended because of Callie…but she certainly hadn’t helped. It was hard to qualify her to anyone else in his life. Men usually thought he was stringing her along; women usually thought they were destined to change their minds about each other and get married. Neither judgment was accurate. He thought of their connection as a true friendship punctuated by bouts of what could only be referred to as breakneck fucking; it wasn’t romantic per se, but it was still meaningful to them both. They’d had various on-and-off periods over the last decade, the most recent off when she’d gone to rehab, but they’d been back on, sort of, for the past four months, hanging out, going to shows, and fooling around.
“I’m so hungry.” She yawned. “Give me two minutes.”
“I’m gonna rinse off,” he told her, and she nodded sleepily. While he showered, Callie rummaged through the antique armoire she used for a closet, pulling on her standard uniform: black lace underpants and matching bra, black Levis, and a plain white V-necked T-shirt. Hutton came out from the bathroom half-dressed, and she knotted his tie.
“Don’t let me get coffee,” she said, grabbing her keys. “I need to sleep after we eat.”
“What did you do last night, anyway?”
“I had a shift at King’s Landing until midnight, then I met up with Libby and Tess. We hit up that new North Korea–themed fried chicken place before going to Grasslands. The show was amazing. They’re so good. Liza, that Indian girl with that cool neck tattoo I keep talking about, was running the bar, so we all went backstage after, and I fully hooked up with Hoodie. Like, in Grasslands, like, behind a curtain. It was so fun. Then we played ping-pong in Joe’s office over on Wythe and drained the keg. Then all of them started doing dope, so I left and came home.”
“You know you’re telling a cop that, right? And I seriously doubt your sponsor would think that it’s okay to even be around drugs.”
“I keep forgetting that I’m not supposed to tell you the truth anymore. You’re so fucking weird, Mark,” she said, slipping on a beat-up pair of leopard-print Vans. “I’ll have you know that Josh, my NA sponsor, is fine with it. He says New York is full of drugs and you can’t spend your whole life trying to avoid them; you just need to know that it’s not part of your life anymore. I happen to agree.”
He kissed her on the forehead, eager to change the subject. “Let’s go get breakfast.”
They left her building and grabbed egg sandwiches from the nearest bodega, eating them on a bench in Grand Army Plaza as the morning crowds of commuters surged around them.
“How’s that guy you’re hanging out with?” he asked.
“It’s good. I mean, it’s a job; it’s not like we’re dating. Hanging with Jonathan is like modeling, except nobody publishes my photo. He just lets me hang out and play around with the clothes. Sometimes he films me, too, but he doesn’t show them to anyone. At least I don’t think he does.”
Hutton laughed. “That’s the shadiest thing you’ve said yet.” He took a huge gulp of coffee and raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not shady. It’s better than modeling, because I don’t have to see myself all the time. It’s like…everywhere I go, there I am, especially when I least expect it,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear with a self-conscious twitch. A bus roared by with Callie’s image stuck to the side, though you couldn’t quite see her face.
She had recently appeared in a Valentino campaign that was plastered all over New York’s transit system. Callie was omewhere between a straight-size and a plus-size model, and the ad made her body look like a big fat girl had been squeezed into a child’s wedding dress. Callie hated it. She watched Hutton watch the bus and thought bitterly about how quickly the thirty grand she’d gotten for the campaign had run out.
“That ad is like a Dalí tit-crease. I still can’t believe it wasn’t photoshopped. In fact, I don’t believe it.”
“I’m sorry you hate it, Cal. I think it’s beautiful. You’re the most beautiful girl in the whole world,” he said sweetly as he shoved the remainder of his sausage, egg, and cheese into his mouth.
Callie balled up their sandwich wrappers and tossed them into the trash. “All right. It’s almost eight. I have to go to bed. Go fight crime, or whatever.”
They stood up and exchanged a warm hug good-bye.
“I’ll call you later,” Hutton said automatically before turning and heading to the 2/3 Line. Callie watched him walk all the way to the subway entrance before she turned to go back to her own building.
Cat’s phone alarm was going off. She pressed the center button.