We stare at each other, neither of us moving. Then slowly, I tilt my chin down and check the time on my phone. As if I should note it. In case I’m later called to make a statement about why she’s here in the middle of the workday and not at herjob.
I raise my eyes back to her. She clears her throat.
“I guess this would be a good time to tell you we’re fucking?”
The inflection of her voice is so high that I burst out laughing. She laughs too, expelling the breath that she’d been holding.
Questions fly through my mind like a high-speed ticker tape. I don’t even know where to begin.
“When did this happen?Howdid this happen? What IS happening?”
Her eyes dart toward the closed bathroom door. She looks guilty, like she’s been caught red-handed.
“OK. Remember the night of the rave?”
“You had sex at the rave?!”
“Quiet,” she orders, grabbing my arm and dragging me into my bedroom. She turns after she shuts the door. “Obviously we didn’t have sexatthe rave.”
“But something happened,” I say suspiciously, remembering wandering round and round looking for them both, and that they were nowhere to be found.
“Er—yes.”
“Iknewit. That’s why you took your bra off. You were advertising the merchandise!”
Carrie’s cheeks flame violently—all the confirmation I need.
“It wasn’t planned,” she says carefully. “But she’s been…pursuing me…for a while now.”
I wonder how long this has been brewing between them before I noticed, and if Sam ever wanted to ask me about Carrie, or Carrie wanted to ask me about Sam. I’m surely the leading expert on them both.
“Why didn’t you tellme?”
She flaps her arms in the universal signal forI don’t know.“At first, I wasn’t really sure what was happening. I could never tell if she was really flirting with me or being mean.”
“Probably both,” Isay.
“Definitely both. But then she got more…focused, I guess. Like, brushing up behind me at the gallery and stuff. This is really embarrassing to say out loud.”
“It isn’t,” I insist. “Keep going.”
“I was really confused. I haveneverbeen with a woman before, or even considered it, or anything. But I was drawn to her, I guess,” she tells me. “I felt like a snow globe all shakenup.”
“Aww.”
“That night after you went to bed, she—I mean, we…”
Carrie is self-conscious in a way I’ve never seen her before. Her eyes dart between me and the floor, pinging back and forth.
“Were together. I got it. Then what happened?”
She shoots me a grateful look. “Then you went out all day with Connor and we…got togetheragain. I thought that was that, but it’s just…kept going. I don’t even really know what we’re doing. Or what this means,” she says, her distress rising. “Am I gay now?”
“OK, one thing at a time here,” I say, squeezing her arm. “How about for now you just focus on you and Sam.”
“Yeah,” she says, her shoulders dropping back into resting position. “OK. You’re right. I’m just freaking the fuck out a little bit.”
“Not surprising, Sam is intense,” I tease. “But I think sexual awakenings are supposed to be fun, you know. In general. You could just enjoyit?”
