It wasn’t fair, really, that it had come to this. The underwear sales were steady, but they weren’t netting as much money as she needed them to—she somehow had only seventy-six dollars in her PayPal account. If only her useless job paid more…if only Dan made more money…if only she wasn’t such a sucker who had a closetful of clothes she didn’t wear. People at TakeOff were always talking about their side hustles—selling their hand-knit scarves on Etsy, DJ’ing, hosting pop-up dinner parties—but she had a feeling that if she told any of them about her side hustle, they’d be horrified. And besides, she was feeling too old for a side hustle. A side hustle, when you were thirty-six, was just a second job.
Another customer last night, Paul, had asked for a white lace thong from Skye “with a strong scent.” Sabrina had thought she would find her customers disgusting, or at the very least pathetic, but in fact, there was something hot about these guys who knew exactly what turned them on and were willing to go to great lengths to get it. These were guys who knew what they wanted—so what if it was smelly women’s underwear from strangers? It wasn’t harming anybody. And even though she knew it was fake—she was selling a fantasy; these guys were buying one—she had to admit that it was flattering to be so blatantly wanted by all of these men, even if they had no idea who she was or even really what she looked like.
She put on the thong and lay down on the bed and took the vibrator out of her nightstand drawer. Did Dan even know she still had a vibrator? True, she’d barely used it in the past couple of years, but it was still there, and the batteries were still working. She turned it on and held it on top of her vagina for a minute or so; even though she wasn’t exactly in the mood, she still felt herself getting wet. As she masturbated, she found herself thinking not of Dan, but of her friend Natalie. They had hooked up one night in grad school; one of the other first-year students, a poet, was having a party in her parents’ brownstone on the Upper West Side. It felt like high school that night, everyone getting drunk on boxed wine and making out in bedrooms, the parents at their country house upstate, the poet making a show of doing coke off their coffee table but freaking out when somebody broke a wineglass.
Sabrina thought about how Natalie’s hair smelled like Clinique Happy perfume and how they’d been smoking in the garden when Natalie turned to her and kissed her and whispered, “I’ve wanted to do that since the first day of workshop,” and now Sabrina moaned (quietly; Amelia had been getting up in the middle of the night lately and coming into their bed). It was a memory she rarely allowed herself to access, but one she remembered every detail of; they ended up in what seemed to be the poet’s little brother’s bedroom, with a poster of Yankee Stadium on the wall and a dresser topped with soccer trophies. She remembered the way that she and Natalie had tumbled onto the twin bed and then Natalie had unbuttoned and unzipped Sabrina’s low-rise jeans—that was when her stomach had been flat enough to wear low-rise jeans—and slowly kissed her everywhere, and just when she thought she couldn’t hold out any longer, Natalie had finally gone down on her and she came, hard, and moaned loudly.
She and Natalie had hooked up one other time after that, and even though she’d never dated women before, it seemed, for a minute, like maybe they would actually be a thing. But then she had met Dan and even though there was a part of her that wanted to keep hooking up with Natalie—the part that wanted to believe that hooking up with a woman wasn’t exactly cheating—there was another part of her that felt like this had just been a fluke, and besides, Natalie started dating a guy not long after that too. But every so often—like now—she let herself wonder how things might have turned out differently.
16
Second That Promotion
THE NEXT MORNING, Mack looked up from his computer to see Jason standing in the doorway of his office. “Hey, man,” Jason said. “Got a sec?”
“Of course, what’s up.”
Jason came into his office and sat down. Mack hadn’t talked to him since the meeting yesterday. “I think we gotta make a general announcement about Casper leaving—I think people are starting to pick up on something being up and it’s just gonna look weird if we act like we’re not cool about it.”
“Right.” Mack drummed his fingers on his desk. People leaving TakeOff voluntarily was a relatively new phenomenon. He’d had to fire a few employees who were underperforming; the important thing was to subtly impart to people that they had brought this on themselves by demonstrating how unhappy they were at the company and that they owed it to themselves to find an environment that would be a better fit for their talents. It was a line, of course, but a line that Mack actually believed to be true. He kept a password-protected spreadsheet on his computer of all the employees at the company, and every three months he asked managers to rank everyone in their departments. People who were consistently at the bottom he put in a special column. Since the company was still small, some departments were only two or three people, so he wasn’t about to fire everyone who was always at the bottom. But he noted it for later. “So we have to convey that we’re really sad to see him go, and we’re thrilled with all of his contributions, but also that life will go on without him? Is that the gist?”
Jason grinned. “Exactly. I can help you compose the email if you want. It should be like, you know, talking about how TakeOff has evolved and how instrumental Casper was at building this thing. But also making it clear that we will be fine, even though we’re sad. That kind of thing.”
“Okay. Right.” Mack turned to his computer. “So how about…” He started typing. “‘When we launched TakeOff three years ago, our first goal was to build a product that people loved and kept coming back to. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without Casper Kim, who shepherded our beta design to market and came up with some of the features—predictive mood analysis, social mood sharing—that are core to the TakeOff mission.’” He looked up. “How’s that sound?”
Jason nodded, and cocked his head to the side. “Someone’s been lingering for a bit,” he whispered, and Mack peered around him and saw Isabel sitting on top of a desk a few yards away from his office, looking at her phone.