Pratt looked at me. "It's real," he said.
His comment wasn't comforting, exactly. It was clarifying.
I nodded once.
He looked away briefly, toward the window, and then he looked back at me.
"I don't—" He stopped and then tried again.
"I don't know how to be that for someone." The words were a little rougher than his usual confident statements. "I have a bad habit of keeping things at a distance where they can't ask much of me."
He took my hand in his.
"But I want to be that person for you. I want to try to be."
I didn't reach for him and hand his words back gift-wrapped. I let them stand right where they are, unpolished and honest.
I said: "Okay. I'm not going anywhere—anymore."
I'd made that decision somewhere around the moment I'd set the record at his door and walked back to my condo in sock feet.
We both stood and walked to the bedroom without discussing it.
I turned the lamp on low. Pratt stood near the door, and I stood near the bed.
The joke arrived the way my best ones did—uninvited, fully formed, and completely inappropriate to the moment. It was something about the general absurdity of two people standing in a bedroom regarding each other like they'd misplaced the instruction sheet. I had no idea why my brain did this at precisely the wrong moments. It just did. It always had.
I let it out sideways.
"Do you ever think sex is funny, Pratt?"
He didn't speak.
"Like, inherently," I said. "As a concept. Two people deciding to do this extremely specific thing together and then committing to it completely seriously, as if it isn't objectively ridiculous."
"I haven't thought about it that way."
"I think about it constantly," I said. "I guess it's an occupational hazard of bartending. You watch people all night, working up to going home together. Some of them build an incredibly elaborate social architecture around it. The more honest just say something like, 'Okay, let's go do this now.'"
He smiled.
I sat on the bed and pulled off my socks. "I was seeing this guy in Providence," I said. "We'd been circling each other for about three weeks, which felt like a very long time when I was twenty-six. We finally got to the point. Everything was going fine. I'm naked in his bed, and then his cat—this enormous orange cat, a beast of an animal—jumps onto the bed and sits directly on my chest, staring at me."
I had Pratt's full attention as he slowly peeled off his t-shirt.
"Like a judge," I said. "Completely unmoved by the situation. I was trying to hold it together, and the guy says, in a totally serious voice, 'Don't worry, she does this. She'll leave eventually.' And I said, 'When?' He said, 'When she decides it's okay for you to be in my bed.'"
Pratt nearly laughed.
"She stayed," I said. "The entire time. At some point, I accepted that there were three of us involved and adjusted accordingly." I paused. "I maintain that I performed admirably well under difficult conditions."
"And the second?" Pratt said.
I looked at him. "Who said there was a second?"
"You always have a second."
I laughed. "First year at Carver's," I said. "We'd gone back to my place, which was a studio the size of a generous closet, and in the process of things happening, one of us—I'm not going to say who—knocked over an entire shelf of books. It wasn't a small one. It was floor-to-ceiling."
