She recognized him both too slowly and too quickly, in the way that you might when you slam on your brakes before you hit a biker who runs a light. How quickly you react determines everything that comes next. An adrenaline rush but nothing except tire marks in the street or a man dead in the crosswalk. Half a second makes all the difference.
Frankie Harriman, who was accustomed to finding herself in plenty of oncoming traffic, did not react well. She stared at the stubble and the chestnut hair and the long eyelashes and the straight nose, and she screamed.
TWO
Ezra
Ezra woke to someone screaming, so loud, too loud. Oh God. Why was it so loud?
“Stop,” he mumbled, his eyes still closed. “Stop.”
The screaming abated, and he curled into the fetal position, tugging the sheets closer. A tug back. He yanked in reply and cocooned himself further in the bed.
Then, an unwanted poking at his hip.Poke. Poke. Poke.
He groaned and exhaled, his eyes still shut.
“You,” he heard, and felt hot breath in his ear. “You!”
Now his eyes were open, and he took a sliver of a beat to process where he had unceremoniously woken.
A dorm room?His brain discarded the notion. Then revisited it.
He tilted his head up an inch from the pillow. No, this was definitely a dorm room.
His heart accelerated in a way he could feel acutely in hischest. Did he actually go home with a college student last night? He did the math: while one hundred percent disgusting, it would not be illegal. Ezra had gone to law school and knew that while there were plenty of things that were unsavory, they could not land you in prison.
He felt the finger pressing his hip again.Please don’t be eighteen. Please be clothed. Please be Mimi. Please please please be Mimi.
“You! What areyoudoing here?” From behind him. And then he instantly knew the voice; he’d heard it a million times back when he was young enough to live in a dorm room. In fact, when he did. When she did. Their junior and senior years. They’d lived together even if it hadn’t been official.
Oh shit.It hadn’t occurred to him to plead for a reprieve from Frankie Harriman because never in ten billion years—no, more than that—would it have occurred to him that she could be the woman next to him.
He didn’t want to turn around to face her, and yet, it appeared to be too late to slink out unnoticed, to leave a note and a promise to call. Not that Ezra had ever done such a thing even once in his life. He was a Big Brother. He spearheaded a free legal aid group in law school. He was a monogamous commitment-fiend who’d never had a one-night stand because he valued the relationship, not just the sex.
He steeled himself before he turned to face her. How he’d ended up in a twin bed in a dorm room with Frankie Harriman was truly beyond him at the moment. But turn he must.
So he did.
And she screamed again.
And he, startled at both the decibel and the proximity of her face for the first time in ten years, screamed back. Louder.Louder.Because he’d vowed the last time he’d seen her that she would never get the better of him again.
THREE
Frankie
What are you doing here?” Frankie shrieked, pushing her palms flat against Ezra’s bare chest, then pulling them back as if she incurred an electric shock. “Why are you in bed with me?”
Her head throbbed with each syllable, so she quieted and waited for what she hoped was a suitable explanation. How could there be a suitable explanation? She had pledged never to speak to him again, never tothinkof him again, and now, here they were, skin to skin, tucked under his sheets as if they still knew each other in the ways that they used to.
She watched Ezra blanch and swallow. He scrunched his face, a habit from back in the time when they were crazy in love and he was tackling an Eastern European history paper or a group project he’d wind up doing the bulk of the work on. A decade ago, she found this perplexed look endearing. Now, its breezy intimacy made her ill. But that could have been the hangover too. How could he be so familiar to her, so exactly the same?
Of course, Ezrahadgrown up (she heard things, ok?)—law school, Manhattan, last she’d been told. But she hadn’t really kept up with him over the years. Had never once been tempted to seek out his phone number, had never whiled away late evening hours (even when tipsy) in an AOL search spiral. When she and Ezra split the day of their graduation, Frankie put it behind her entirely. She had barely given a second thought to Ezra Jones, except to occasionally consider how much she hated him, how deeply he had offended her, how gravely he had misunderstood her. That was the one that really stung. That after two years, he’d gotten her all wrong.
Of course, Laila and April occasionally couldn’t help themselves—April would mention that Connor had crashed with him for a boys’ weekend in New York; Laila would say that she heard he was single again, as if Frankie had known that he wasn’t single in the first place. There was one trip to New York about five years after graduation when the record company put Frankie up at the Gramercy Park Hotel, so Laila had come up from North Carolina and April had trained down from her graduate studies in Boston, and they were at the lobby bar, and Laila gasped and said, “Holy shit, is that Ezra?” And Frankie froze like a cornered animal, her adrenaline seizing her intestines, and then Laila said, “Oh, no, my bad, not him,” but Frankie was already shaking. Later, they were tipsy and flopped on the king bed, and Frankie said, “Guys, please, I don’t want to hear his name again, like, ever, ok?” And she saw a look pass between them, but they nodded all the same. That’s how Frankie did it, that’s how she organized her life, and that’s how she left Ezra Jones behind. By any means necessary.
Now, Ezra’s face unwound, and he hiccupped, his breath smelling like day-old alcohol. Then his features comported themselves again. He didn’t look much different than he had back in college, Frankie thought. His cheeks had shed the last of their baby fat, and his stubble was fuller now, as if he really could grow an actual beard, which had seemed just out of reach at twenty-one. But he was still boyish, his dark eyes still protected by full lashes, the line of freckles that ran from his left eye to his ear still prominent and shaped like the curve of a moon.
