“Sure,” Jamey says.
They sit in the dark and eat crackers but can’t think of much to talk about.
Luckily, Jonas and Thalia knock on the door with a bottle of scotch.
“Party time!” Thalia says throatily, unwrapping her plaid scarf, a veteran of Bermuda storms and Swiss Alps blizzards and heavy rains on private islands in Maine. “I told everyone to meet here. I love blackouts. So fun.”
Later, Jamey sees silhouettes in the next-door yard.
He gets up.
“Got to piss,” he says in a ridiculously casual voice to the people gathered in his lightless living room.
He sneaks out the door, toward Elise and two guys making snow angels.
The trio freezes, then Elise, finishing the wings, clumsily sits up and smacks her hands together.
The small guy takes charge. “Crazy storm, right?”
“Totally,” Jamey says.
The guy holds a plastic cup. “Making snow and syrup, man. You want to come upstairs?”
“Sure, I guess.”
Jamey walks over. Elise’s face is blotchy, and steam comes from her mouth. She wears white sweatpants and a rainbow sweater, tufted with snow.
Jamey nods at Elise. “Hey,” he says.
She grins and ducks, like someone with braces. “Hey.”
“What’s going on,” he says, offering his hand to Robbie and Craig. “Jamey Hyde.”
What am I, running for president? he thinks.
They feel their way up the stairs, their footfalls especially loud in the darkness. In the apartment, Robbie pours Aunt Jemima into a cup of snow and hands it to Jamey.
“Thanks,” he says.
Jamey bristles with discomfort and desire, standing like an exclamation point—ramrod straight and perched on a dot.
“You doing good?” Elise asks him.
“Yeah, you?” he says.
She nods, licks ice from her cup.
Candlelight makes her eyes black.
They all sit on pillows on the floor, telling blizzard and blackout and hurricane stories. Jamey hears himself guffaw and ask simple questions, and he’s reminded of his dad or some other middle-aged man talking to teenagers.
But he won’t leave. Everyone can feel it, and it’s thrilling and freaky.
“Why don’t we go for a little midnight walk!” Robbie says theatrically to Craig.
Elise and Jamey sit there on the pillows, stranded. When she finally looks up, he’s staring. He’s dumb, gauche with lust. This makes her flush. She puts her mouth as close to his as she can while letting him be the one to start the kiss.
And he kisses her.
She takes him to the bedroom eventually, pulling up sweatpants unglamorously pushed halfway down her thighs, sweater around her neck.
She’s taken his shirt off and unbuckled him, and he holds his pants closed as they walk hand in hand into the dark room.
“Ouch,” he whispers, after stubbing his toe, and she nervously laughs with him.
They sit on the bed, and she tosses her boots into the corner, where they land heavily. She pulls her sweater off and stands to step out of her pants. Sitting, he circles his arms around her hips and puts his cheek against her stomach, where blood beats like a drum.
She moves his mouth down. He licks her, and she makes him stop, trembling, because she’s about to come.
He looks up, bewildered, in the dark, for directions. She shakily leads him to take off his pants, and lie down. Straddling him, she’s so swollen, he thinks he must be injuring her. But she eases down, then moves, slowly frantic and unstoppable, and they both come so hard it hurts.
She lies next to him, on cold blankets that haven’t had time to warm up. She kisses his damp neck where the artery throbs.
“I’ll do anything in the world for you,” she says quietly.
Her hand spreads flat on his belly.
And he hates her.
He stays awake and sneaks out when dawn washes the room with a bisque-cream light. He tiptoes by Robbie’s open bedroom, sees dirty socks hanging out of the quilt.
Later in the morning at his own house, Jamey yawns, makes tea on the gas stove, acting like nothing happened. Matt looks at his friend with dull hostility.
“I almost called 911,” Matt says. “Why didn’t you just tell us you were going over there?”
“I heard something outside,” he sputters, “and they invited me upstairs for a drink.”
“Who’s they?” Matt says.
“Elise, and her roommate, and his, you know, friend.”
Jamey bounds up the stairs like a kid home from a first date.
The blizzard takes days to plow, and classes start slowly.
Jamey doesn’t go to her place that night, or the next night, and can barely sleep. He jacks off quickly and without ceremony because he has to.
She’s eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in the living room, and she finds herself motionless, paralyzed, holding up a drumstick, unsure how long she’s been like this—lost in the dream. The room is dim; it’s become evening without her noticing. Elise can barely eat because her stomach is shrunk in obsession.
Since their biorhythms are yoked, Jamey’s distraction, even though he’s not doing anything about it, is driving Matt insane.
“You seem a little unfocused,” Matt says acidly.
“What do you mean?” Jamey asks.
Jamey’s extremely focused on those thighs, and hard tits, the way her kiss summons his blood and sends it gushing through his veins like a fucking river!
That weekend, Jamey gets tipsy at the Eggnog Social, where high-society kids do cocaine and listen to the Rolling Stones. He isn’t drunk, just buzzed enough to slide out of the wood-paneled clubhouse when friends aren’t paying attention, turn his coat collar against the crackling Connecticut night, pop into his BMW, driving and grinning, to park at his house, even though he goes into her building, whose door is unlocked, taking two steps at a time, and knocks on her apartment door.
“Whatsup,” she says.
She’s in sweatpants and a tight leopard shirt, her cornrows slick.
He’s got a holly sprig in his lapel; she looks at it, looks at his face.
They have hours of sex. He’s not very good at it.
“Easy,” she says, more than once.
They fuck four times, till daybreak, birds piercing the giant pale winter morning. Elise and Jamey are both sober but strung out as if they’ve been partying for hours, and she throws on a T-shirt to make them coffee, which she brings to the bed. They sit with backs against the bare wall, and sip the black coffee, listening to the city wake up.
“I have to go,” he says.
Jamey won’t look Matt in the eye when he throws on his coat to see her, which he does almost every night now, like a junkie.
“Later,” Jamey says, humming uncomfortably.
Matt shakes his head one night, without looking up from his newspaper. “You better be pulling out or wearing a condom, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Did you just tell me to ‘pull out or wear a condom’?” Jamey repeats, because he can’t think of what to say.
“So you don’t get her pregnant—”