I’m shaky when I getback to the apartment—half anger, half low blood sugar. I break one of the cardinal rules of my mom’s apartment and go out on the little balcony to smoke the last of my stash. It doesn’t make me any calmer, but it does compel me to tear into Mom’s Pepperidge Farm Double Chocolate Nantucket cookies. They make me more jittery.
Houdini’s at the dog sitter, since we’ve been out all day, and without his old man dog grumbling noises, everything in the apartment feels eerily lifeless.
I don’t want to be by myself here. I knock SOS on the shared wall, but I’m not sure he hears it, so I text Nick “come over.” No question mark.
When I swing the door open a minute later and see Nick’s face, the tight, churning feeling in my chest releases.
“Hi.” He’s smiling in this adorably confused way and all I want is to be a person who can text her boyfriend to come over and then actually invite him inside her home. “You okay?”
I reach through the door frame and pull him inside by the T-shirt. It’s like I’m replaying some high school scene that never quite happened this way. I kiss him hard on the mouth before he can respond to that. Maybe he’s caught off guard at first, but he recovers quickly, wrapping his hands around my waist. It feels golden.
“Mom and Perry are staying in one of those giant suites at the Junto,” I say.
“No parents?” he says. “I don’t think I’ve been in this situation since I was seventeen.”
“Should we do it on the sofa?” The truth is, I wasn’t a cool or bold enough teenager to invite a boy over when my mom was out.
“What’s going on?” He’s not literally pushing me away, but he’s definitely pumping the brakes on my apparent horniness.
I run my lips down the left side of his neck. “I just want you.”
“Mmm. The feeling’s mutual.” He kisses the top of my head, pauses, and says, “You smell like weed.”
“Is that kind of doing it for you?”
“It’s bad weed.”
“I know.” I take a step back and look up at him with what I hope is a cute and slightly seductive expression. “Are you going to let that stop you?”
Nick narrows his eyes a little bit, like he’s trying to see me from a slightly different angle. “You could fall into a dumpster and it wouldn’t stop me.”
I lead him farther into the apartment.
I’ve never done this here—had a boy (man?Man.) over to this apartment for illicit purposes. I feel my mother’s vague,unspoken-but-palpable disapproval bleeding through the furniture and the walls.
I keep pulling Nick back, deeper into the apartment. I’m being a little pushy and weird and I need to see what he does with that—how he reacts when I’m not on my best behavior. When I’m feeling a dozen things at once and I need someone to help ground me. Which is a lot of the time, let’s be honest.
I nod my head toward the bathroom. “Want to?”
“In your mom’s shower?” He makes a face.
“It’s my shower, too,” I say.
“Let’s go next door.”
Now it’s my turn for a disapproving look, because Nick shares his bathtub with an almost ten-year-old and I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted toys in there. Not the correct vibes, either.
I shake my head and keep pulling him toward the office. “I don’t want to go next door. I’m an adult. I should be able to have someone over in my own room.”
I know.
I know it’s weird and stupid to do this in here and on a rickety daybed, but I have to feel like I have any space that’s mine and contains things that are important and precious to me. I’ve lived here for five years—doesn’t that make this my home, too?
At least it’s not the floor of a Chili’s.
He looks at me again, as if trying to sort something out.
“Okay.” He stops in the doorway, looking at the space—specifically, my unmade bed—in this new context. “I guess I managed it on a bed this size in college.”
