Aubrey’s need to be with Ethan means someone gets hurt. She wanted to know how to not make the wrong choice again. Now she does. Whatever her gut says, do the opposite.
34
Aubrey
Eleven MonthsBeforethe Outing
Her gut told her it was a mistake, but still Aubrey couldn’t stop smiling. Behind her two monitors in the communal workspace she shared with her coding team, she squeezed her phone in her hand, then immediately released it, scared she might accidentally delete his text.
Ethan Sonders was asking her out.
Except it couldn’t be her, could it? Maybe he had the wrong number? Maybe he meant to text Mallory. Of course he meant to text Mallory. The three of them met Ethan together last week as they mingled at the reception following Grayson’s speech at MIT, attended by half of AIM, including Ella and Noreen. Contacts were shared, since they were all in tech. Ethan must have texted Aubrey by mistake.
She closed her eyes, picturing those adorable little lines around his eyes that came out when he laughed in response to her asking his opinion on personal cloud computing. The two of them had been in line for shrimp cocktail. He’d paused, amused at first, thinking she was teasing his profession, slowlygripping the fact that she was not only interested in his work but knowledgeable about it.
“You are unique, aren’t you, Aubrey?” he’d said.
“As unique as a website visitor,” she’d blurted out, for some reason referencing the metric for counting user visits to a website.
But it had kicked off the longest conversation Aubrey had had with a man who wasn’t Jonah or an employee in months. And now he had mistakenly asked her out. This was mortifying. Her cheeks burned as she started typing back, struggling with how to tell him that he’d texted the wrong number. Then she noticed something:
Hey, A, any chance you’re free next Friday?
AnA. Right there between “hey” and “any.”Anystarted with ana. It was a typo. Wasn’t it?
Another message came in:
It’s Ethan, BTW. From the Fields’s thing? And now I sent a second text, so I’m not a unique visitor. LOL
Unique visitor.Which meant he meant to text her, which meant he meant to ask her out, and oh god, he meant to askherout, and what should she say and where would they go and what would she wear if she went and—
“Aubrey?” Mallory’s head quirked to the side as she planted herself in front of Aubrey’s desk. “You look both about to toss your cookies and like you’ve swallowed a rainbow.”
“Then I look exactly how I feel.”
Mallory gestured to Aubrey’s monitors. “How worried should I be?”
“No, it’s not the app.” Aubrey handed Mallory her phone.
A split second of confusion and then disappointment in Mallory’s eyes.
“Oh.” Aubrey swallowed. Mallory must have liked Ethan. “I don’t have to go, I mean, he’s probably not even asking, he’s not really asking anything, is he? It’s probably a tour of his company. I said I’d be interested. That’s what it is, I’m sure of it.” She was. That was the only thing that made sense.
She couldn’t read people, had never had the skill, she couldn’t really even tell what her parents or siblings were thinking, and certainly not boys, guys, men, all versions of the species who would always be defined by the boy in high school who’d promised her a pool house and a future she was naive enough to believe but that only lasted long enough for her to lose her virginity.
It wasn’t okay, none of it had been okay, but Miles Perkins hadn’t been the only one who’d crossed a line. Aubrey had too. She did something she couldn’t take back even though the pool skimmer had beentap, tap, tappingagainst the wall of the shed, theshed, not a pool house, not a house, ashed. She’d trusted the way he’d made her feel when he trained those blue eyes on hers and asked her out and she’d not trusted the way he’d made her feel when he wouldn’t take her hand in the movie theater, when he leaned against the counter as she took a seat at the pizza parlor, when she breathed in chlorine and rested her back on a lounge chair damp from mist. He hadn’t even laid down a beach towel.
But he had told everyone. How gullible Aubrey had been. Aubrey lost more than her virginity, more than her reputation, more than the final years of high school. She lost herself, the woman she could have been, to the girl who that day learned that she couldn’t trust herself. In the game of nature versus nurture, Aubrey’s life was to be shaped entirely by the latter.
Mallory nudged Aubrey with her elbow. “Hey now, have a little faith.” She smiled slyly and gave Aubrey back her phone. “See?”
Ethan:Arcade just added paintball. You in?
“Well?” Mallory asked. “Are you going to say yes?”
Aubrey wasn’t much into violence, real or imaginary. But this was Ethan Sonders, who smiled like a Greek god and smelled faintly of cloves. The universe gave her but one choice.
“Definitely.”
