Chip smiled. “That sounds like Suzanne. She wouldn’t, you know—she wouldn’t want your mom hating her, or hating Wyatt. She’s careful like that.”
She felt something rising in her throat, something so stifling that she opened her mouth to speak but waited a few extra seconds, knowing that her voice would betray her with its thickness, its soft whisper. Not tears, not sadness or embarrassment, but anticipation. She knew the perfect thing to say, she only wished Wyatt Welsh could be here to hear it.
“I don’t talk about Wyatt with my mother,” she said. “That would never cross my mind.”
They were stopped at a red light. Chip was driving back toward school, toward her house, civilization. No one but Chip knew where she was right now.
“We should drive into the city sometime,” she said. She didn’t look over to see if he nodded. She took her hand from her lap and put it over his hand on the gear shift. Chip’s hand hovered there at intervals, as if the car were untrustworthy and might shift into a different gear without his permission.
She left her hand there, curling her fingers around his knuckles, and waited for him to turn to her. This had to be it, without question. He was going to kiss her. They were in a car, weren’t they?
“Yeah,” he said. “We should do that sometime.”
They both smiled, but not at each other. She kept her hand on his until the light changed, until he had to drive again, and he didn’t so much as glance over at her side of the car. She knew that if his hands were free he’d brush his chin with his thumb, and the victory felt just the same—better, even—than if he’d leaned across the car to kiss her.
FOURTEEN
Lily stood with Jackson at the counter, trying not to wince each time the man sweating next to her knocked his elbow into hers or slurped unceremoniously at his giant bowl of ramen. It seemed like it could only be a matter of minutes before he started just dunking his head down directly to the soup’s rim.
“Isn’t this kind of rich for October?” she asked Jackson, no less skeptical than she’d been when he demanded she meet him here. “Isn’t ramen, like, a winter lunch?”
“I’m telling you, everyone can’t shut up about this place,” he replied, sliding his arm around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder, reading the menu along with her.
One thing she knew about her boyfriend: he couldn’t resist a buzz. If his writer friends were talking about a new place, he had to have eaten there. He’d sometimes bluff his way through happy hour small talk and pretend he had been there, though he always waited until she had a night off to come into the city before trying the places out for himself. She’d once thought this was because he wanted to wait for her company, but his habit of jumping up to head to the bathroom right around the time the check hit the table had eventually disabused her of this dreamy notion.
“Which one are we supposed to get?”
“Either. One is vegetarian, though, and if you ask me, ramen without pork is just soup. And honestly, fifteen bucks isn’t half bad for a huge bowl of ramen.”
“Sure,” she said. It hadn’t occurred to her that a trendy new ramen counter on Kenmare would be quite literally a counter. That she’d have nowhere to sit.
Their orders decided, he began trying to coax her to talk, punctuating his words with the kisses he knew she loved, along the side of her neck and her earlobe.
“I haven’t seen you in way, way too long,” he started, wisely. She shrugged.
“You’re the one who wanted to eat a big heavy meal. I voted we go straight home.”
“I still can’t believe you’ve got to go back before dinner,” he said, ignoring her innuendo. “It’s Sunday! You haven’t seen the guys in forever, we could have met up with them later.”
“Gonna grab my baby, gonna hold her tight,” Lily sang. “My boyfriend would rather eat noodles first.”
“I thought you’d need something fun!” he said, laughing when she raised an eyebrow. “I mean something sort of fun before the important fun. I just thought it would be nice for you to get to take a breath, finally.”
“It hasn’t been that bad.”
“Bullshit,” he said, signaling to their waiter. They ordered. Within seconds, several tiny ramekins of various pickled, neon vegetables were placed in front of them. Here, Lily couldn’t help but think, was a meal Bob D’Amico would hate. Cramped, DIY, no pampering, peasant food. Checks all the trend boxes in all the wrong ways.
“Bullshit,” Jackson picked up where he’d left off. “I’m sure it’s been a zoo. I just hope you’re taking notes.”
“Please,” she said, “please don’t start that.”
“Lil, come on. I’m just saying. If you’re going to do this for a decade of your working life, at least be smart about it. You remember that girl the year ahead of me at J school?”
“How could I forget,” she said, and began mouthing the words to the story even as he launched into it once more.
“She was always threatening to transfer to Fiction, which was a joke because it wasn’t even the same school. Like she just knew she could have applied to the Arts school and gotten in? Anyway, we all thought she would probably write a novel after we left. She was such a babe, every professor was always falling all over himself to help her out, take her around and introduce her.”
“I would love, just once, to hear about this girl without hearing about how hot she was.”
He nuzzled closer to her, partly in reassurance and partly because another couple had been jammed in beside them at the counter.
“Be that as it may, she didn’t really seem to have the stomach to report anything, anyway. But then she sort of gives us all this big fuck you after graduation, when we’re all basically interviewing for the same web jobs, some of which aren’t even paid, and she takes this job working as the assistant to this Medusa publishing woman who’s married to a big-time lawyer. Takes care of her kids.”
“Yes,” Lily said. “I remember.”
“Well, she sold the memoir last month,” Jackson interrupted. “Supposedly more than a million. So you never listen to me, but I’m always looking out for you, baby.”
“I listen to you.”
“Okay, but let’s focus. What have you been thinking, in terms of once the worst part passes,” he said. He’d unwrapped his chopsticks and started rubbing them together.
“What do you mean?” Their ramen arrived, and she looked down at the murk, the slab of pork floating somewhere just below the scallions, the noodles coiled around it. It looked like a cross section of human organs.
“I know you love the kids, so you’ve got to see them through this part,” Jackson said. He started to attack his noodles. “But what about, like, say, January?”
It dawned on her. “In January?”
He pushed his bowl toward the edge of the counter and turned, wedging himself against their neighbors so he could look at her face.
“Please tell me you aren’t going to stay at this job,” he said.