I nod, my exhale breaking into a moan when he slips himself inside me and he finally, finally, fills me up entirely. I want him to move so badly, but he just holds himself inplace, like maybe that will stop time from spinning away from us.
In the pause, I wonder, again, what the hell we are doing here. How I have made this person materialize in my life, and how quickly I know he is going to dissolve.
I can’t take the stillness anymore. I glide against him once, enough to snap his control and start fucking me for real, steady and insistent.
I let myself believe in this. I let myself go.
Eventually, we go to the bodega down the block and pick up a carton of eggs, a sleeve of white bread, and to-go coffees in Greek-key cups. He laughs when I dump two pods of cream and three sugars into mine.
“That’s not coffee,” he says. “That’s a milkshake.”
I point to the steaming black liquid he lifts to his mouth. “That’s not coffee. That’s motor oil.”
At home, I take a stab at making over-easy eggs on the only burner that works. When I bring his plate to the table, Reid pulls gently at my hair, tugging me down for a kiss.
I love watching the way he arranges each forkful, neatly stacking each bite onto the tip and sliding it down the tines. At one point, he stops, drops his silverware, and gives me an amused look.
“What is it?”
With my chin, I gesture toward his plate. “Enjoying yourself?”
“I am. Are you enjoying critiquing my neuroses?”
“I’m not critiquing. I’m admiring.”
The look he gives me—devilish, conspiratorial—makes my thighs clench. He picks up his fork and knife and slices his last over-easy egg into four evenly sized pieces. One by one, he puts them in his mouth, chews, and swallows. He maintains eye contact with me throughout this performance. I feel my face flush, my heart kick into double-time.
“Were you aware,” he says, dabbing his mouth with a napkin, “that you had a neat-eating kink?”
I take a sip of water. “I don’t think I have a neat-eating kink,” I say. “I think I have a Reid kink.”
I brace myself for his response. Lili before Reid never would have said such a thing.
But he sits back into his chair, crosses his arms, and gives me an appraising look.
“That works out nicely,” he says. “Because I think I have a Lili kink.”
V
On Thursday, Cat gets a hold of her dad’s platinum card and takes Reid, Nisha, and me out for cocktails at Bemelmans Bar, the storied lounge inside The Carlyle Hotel. Reid doesn’t even ask what underhanded methods she used to secure it, and I take his lack of concern as an indicator of how soon he’s really leaving. His time here is too precious to play the role of moral compass, to keep us away from a good time.
In his work suit and with his impeccable manners, Reid is the only one of us who looks marginally at home in this hushed, elegantly perfumed room. I barely had time to change when Cat called with the news that she’d absconded with the card and to meet her uptown in twenty minutes, before her father discovered his wallet a few grams lighter. I threw on a black jersey boatneck minidress—one of the nicer things I own—but I didn’t have a chance to brush my hair. On the sidewalk outside, Reid had attempted to unravel the tiny knots from the fine wisps at my nape.
The maître d’ stashes us in a booth in the back corner. We all order martinis. Reid stops Cat from adding Ossetra caviar.
We carefully clink the edges of our glasses together, trying so hard not to lose any of our ten-dollar cocktails to the table. Still, the toast sends a glug of Cat’s drink over the edge of her glass.
“To this summer,” Cat declares. “Thanks for the opportunity to smoke pure Sour D on various river-view rooftops. You’ve been good to me.”
“To the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board,” Nisha says. “May they one day grant us the ability to run electric legally.”
After her Jeff Buckley moment at the party, Nisha met a trombonist named Pepper, who lives in C-Squat. Over the past few days, she’s been spending most of her time over there, helping the tenants repair the broken staircase and prep the radiators ahead of winter. She’s energized by communal living, says she’s found purpose in contributing her time and energy to a greater cause. She recruited me to volunteer my own skills too, which in my case means documenting the scene with my camera.
Yesterday I captured one of the tenants, a hardcore guy with a tattooed skull and pet rat perched on his shoulder, delicately tending to a row of lemon balm growing in the community garden.
“Brew this shit up, add some local honey, and it’ll cure all your ills,” he told me after giving me permission to take his photograph. Then he snipped off a fistful of leaves and stuffed them in my hand.Does imminent heartbreak count?I’d wanted to ask him, but stopped myself from being so dramatic.
As much as I love Nisha’s passion, I also worry, selfishly, that she will abandon me for her newfound community—she’ll move out of our apartment, spend her time on nobler causes and with people with so much more purpose than me. I worry that I’ll be left behind.
