Adam sank onto the couch, slung his arm around me. “Sorry. It went later than I thought. I called. Your phone must be on vibrate.”
I rested my head on his chest. He smelled like bourbon and a sugary dessert. The faint scent of tobacco, which I had gradually grown to like. I ran my hand over his shirt, down to his belt buckle, and turned my head to kiss his neck. My addiction was kicking in despite my bad mood, despite the beginnings of a red-wine headache. I pulled him toward me. We had sex on the couch, my dress hiked up and his pants tugged down, fast and hard and mechanical. But something seemed different in Adam. He hadn’t needed this the way I had. He was going through the motions, sating my hunger without needing to sate his.
Afterward I told him what Abby and I had talked about over dinner.
“I think I’m going to call Sara. You know, Sara Yamashita, from the party. I’m going to ask her to lunch.”
“You are?”
“She told me to keep in touch.”
“Sara’s a lot of talk. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
“But it’s worth a shot, right? It can’t hurt.”
Adam reached for my hand. “Trust me, babe. I know Sara better than you do. It might not be such a great idea. All I’m saying is don’t rush into it. You want to be deliberate about your next move, right?”
“I guess.” I glanced again at the cable box—it was almost 3:00 a.m. I started gathering my things, the scarf and boots and coat I’d scattered around the apartment like an animal marking its territory. “I should get going.” Adam sat back on the couch, taking a beat too long before he stood up to walk me to the door. I wondered how much longer we were going to have to do this—saying good-bye in the middle of the night, sneaking back to our own lives. I was already getting sick of it. In the cab ride home, I checked my phone. There were no missed calls or texts from Adam, despite what he’d said—nothing, from anyone, all night. I was annoyed all over again.
When had I lost the power to control my own moods? I felt so porous that fall, so absorbent of whatever the people around me were doing. There was nothing to keep me tied to the earth. I scudded in whatever direction the wind decided to blow. My mistake was that I kept interpreting it as a good thing, confusing that lightness for spontaneity.
*
“Julia! Hey!”
Someone waved at me from the sidewalk outside the entrance to the bar. It was Camilla, a girl from the lacrosse team. We had lived in the same dorm for my three years of boarding school. She had arrived at school with glasses and curly hair and prissy sweater sets. But after a few months around the older girls, she’d learned the ways of experience—hair straighteners, tight jeans, push-up bras, contact lenses. She started sneaking boys back to her room in the middle of the night. She was legendary by senior year. Camilla stubbed out her cigarette as I approached and gave me a hug.
“Oh, my God, I am so glad you came. It’s fucking freezing. How can you stand this place?”
“Yeah, sorry. Not exactly sunshine and palm trees. When’d you get home?”
“I flew in on Sunday. I decided to make a week of it.” Camilla had gone to USC and was working as an assistant to some big-shot movie agent in Los Angeles. She had a tan, and her hair smelled like coconut oil. I was vividly aware of how different her life was from mine. “Let’s go inside,” she said, tugging my hand.
I followed Camilla toward the corner of the bar where the other lacrosse girls were standing. Most of them worked in consulting or in finance or as paralegals. A few of the finance girls joked blackly about how much time they had left—the bosses were just waiting for the holidays to pass before they brought down the ax. There were one or two outliers who, like Camilla and me, had found low-paying assistant jobs in more “creative” industries. “That sounds…interesting,” one girl said after I told her about my job at the Fletcher Foundation. She was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, and we quickly ran out of things to talk about. I was about to use my empty glass as an excuse to leave when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Julia?” he said. The dark wavy hair; the aquiline nose. His voice.
“Rob,” I said. “Wow. Hi.”
“It’s been a while, huh?”
“Wow. What, like, four years or something?” But, really, I knew: it had been almost four years to the day since we’d broken up at Thanksgiving, freshman year of college. We hadn’t seen each other since.
“You look great.”
“So do you.” He did. Energized, happy. Rob at his best. “I was just about to get another drink. Do you want to…?”
After we got our drinks, he pointed at an empty booth. “You want to catch up for a minute?” he said.
In the booth, our knees touched for a brief moment. “Wow. It’s so strange. You look the same,” I said.
He laughed. “In a good way, I hope.”
“Where are you living?”
“Here, in Cambridge. I’m applying to med school. Working in one of my professor’s labs for the year.”
“Med school! Right. I’d forgotten about that.”