Frankie remembered running her fingers over that curve, awed by the perfect crescent on what she used to think was a perfect face. Though she hated to acknowledge it, even under the veil of sleep and in need of a shower, Ezra Jones was beautiful.
“Why are you in bed withme?” Ezra responded, bringing her back. “And what... I mean... Are we in a dorm room?”
“A dorm room?” Frankie snapped. “I’m staying at the Inn. Why would we be in a—”
She stopped, as something clicked into place. The beige furniture, the vague familiarity, the generic blandness of it all. They had, indeed, inexplicably landed in bed togetherin a dorm room.If this were a rom-com, someone in the audience would squeal. This was not a rom-com, however. Neither of them squealed. Both of them were horrified.
Frankie arched and tilted her head back. The wall behind them was covered in posters. The Backstreet Boys. The Cranberries. Nirvana. Night Vixen. (Hooray, Frankie thought, despite everything else.)
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess this is a dorm room. What the fuck.”
She thought about pointing out that her clients were on the wall above them but decided she didn’t care about impressing Ezra. She regretted that she even had the instinct to impress Ezra Jones.
“Did we...?” Ezra gestured back and forth between them. “I mean, do you remember what happened? Like, with us? Was there—”
“Oh my God, no!” Frankie said, though she honestly had no idea if they did or didn’t. She sure as shit hoped they didn’t though. Frankie had a motto that if something was over, it wasover, which wasn’t to equate that motto with the fact that she had zero inkling of what happened last night.Still, it felt more solid, more concrete to simply rule it out. “No,” she said again. “For sure not. We did not.”
She ran her hands down to her waist. She still had on her underwear, so that was... promising. She raised the sheets and sighed: though Ezra’s flannel shirt was flung to the floor, he was also still in his jeans, although his belt, disturbingly, was undone.
She focused on the positive: “Your belt’s still on,” she said. “And I’m in my tank top. I’ll take that as a good sign.”
He stared at her for a beat, as if he were going to argue, but instead, let it wash over him.
Well, well, Frankie thought, a little annoyed that he didn’t take her bait, a little relieved too. Back then, he’d rarely pushed back, and they’d never argued. Until they finally did in the archway of Burton Library on a clear day in May when theirdivide became a crevasse, when she’d said goodbye to Ezra forever and didn’t lay eyes on him again until now.
“Are we in Homer?” Ezra asked. “Doesn’t this look like Homer?”
Homer.Their freshman dorm.
Frankie screwed up her face into something that she hoped connoted:That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.Inarguably, Ezra was almost always the smartest person in the room—he’d gotten a full merit scholarship to Middleton and was easily the brains of their group, so she never minded one-upping him when she had the chance.
She wanted to prove to him that she’d grown up too. And yet, she heard herself saying:
“How would we be in Homer?”
Ezra rubbed his eyes. “I don’t remember anything from last night.”
Frankie considered this. To be honest, she didn’t either. She remembered getting ready in her hotel room; she remembered getting a call from Laila; she remembered—a jolt ran through her—locking eyes with Ezra as the elevator door closed. But then, well, she tried to find the rest of the night somewhere hidden in her cerebral folds. Nothing. There was nothing else there.
But she was not about to admit that to him, the brains, the ex.
“I loathe you,” she said instead. “I can’t imagine that I wanted to sleep with you.”
“So.” He paused. “You don’t remember either?”
Ezra always did have a way of cutting through her horseshit.She recalled that clearly now too. It helped that they’d been friends before they’d fallen desperately in love at the start of their junior year.
“Of course I remember.” She tutted. “I remember that I absolutely do not want to sleep with you. I remember that the last time I saw you, I swore that if I ever saw you naked again, I’d run into a pit of fire before anything happened between the two of us.”
“You didn’t swear that,” he said. “I have a very clear memory of that scene. Anyone who was walking by probably did too. I’m surprised it didn’t make the evening news.”
“I didn’t swear it aloud, maybe. But to myself, yes, I did.”
Ezra sighed and swung his feet over the bed to scrounge his shirt off the floor. Frankie wanted to look away, but she didn’t. He was fitter than a decade ago, certainly. Back then, he had the torso of a twenty-one-year-old former cross-country runner with a good metabolism, who occasionally played a game of pickup basketball but who also had a McDonald’s habit, which was just off campus for drivers passing through to the bigger Berkshire towns. She remembered the game they invented: whenever Frankie would look at him and sayrun, Ezra had to. Hehadto. They could be at Burton pulling an all-nighter; he could be wearing a towel fresh from the shower; he could be standing in line at the cereal bar in the dining hall. If she saidrun, he had to race her, and Frankie, sometimes because she would cheat and sometimes because he would let her, would always win. Now, she eyed him, saw his six-pack, the way his back was lean and sinewy, and thought she wouldn’t stand a chance.
Ezra reached down, swiped a balled-up ivory sweater fromthe foot of the bed and held it up, and Frankie nodded, so he tossed it to her wordlessly. She tugged her wool cable knit over her head like it was a suit of armor; in fact, she’d worn it so often their senior year that Ezra sometimes joked it was a third wheel. Her parents had split up by then, and her mom tried to overcompensate for both the divorce and the wreckage of her junior year summer by sending enormous packages from the J.Crew catalog.
Frankie felt Ezra watching her now. He remembered the sweater, just as she had, and blood rose to her cheeks.
