She’s scooted at least a few more inches closer. I look her right in the eye. “Not anymore.” And it’s the truth. For some reason, this is invigorating.
She queues it up. Alicia Silverstone appears on screen in a plaid skirt, and Celeste exhales into the couch like a woman who has finally found the one place in the world where nothing is expected of her.
Twelve minutes in, her head finds my shoulder.
I don’t move. I don’t adjust. I don’t do the thing I should do, which is shift slightly, create a buffer, maintain whatever boundary existed between us before this weekend burned it to the ground. Her hair is still damp and smells like the fancyhotel shampoo—not the Head & Shoulders from this morning, something botanical and French—but underneath it, there’s just her. Soft and close and leaning against me like I’m a wall she trusts not to move.
I’ve been leaned on before. Professionally, personally, physically. I have been the shoulder and the wall and the steady thing that holds while other people fall apart. That’s the role. That’s the function. That’s the reason I’m in the room.
But this doesn’t feel like that.
This feels like the opposite of that. This feels like someone leaning into me not because they need something, but because they want to be near. And the difference between those two things—need and want, function and choice—is so vast and so unfamiliar that I don’t know what to do with it except sit very still and let it happen.
Her breathing changes around the twenty-minute mark. Slower. Deeper. Her hand has come to rest on my forearm, fingers loosely curled, and the weight of her against my shoulder is slight and warm and devastating in its simplicity.
She’s asleep.
I reach for the throw blanket and pull it over both of us without moving her. On screen, Cher is arguing about something in a debate class and I’ve lost all track of the plot. My eyes are heavy. The sectional has magic powers of sedation because it feels impossible to move at the moment, trapped under this cozy haze.
I should carry her to the bedroom. I should sleep on the opposite end of this enormous couch, or on the floor, or on the balcony she threatened me with. I should maintain some version of the professional distance that stopped existing approximately nine hours ago when I ran up a set of stairs and held her while she fell apart in front of two hundred people.
Instead, I tip my head back against the cushion and close my eyes.
Tomorrow I’ll go back to Alphabet City. Back to the cramped apartment and the medication schedule and the sticky note on my nightstand with Dr. Yassa’s email that I still haven’t sent. Tomorrow I’ll return the suit and slide back into the life that was waiting for me before this weekend—the one where I tend bar, guard doors, take bookings from Rina, and sleep four hours. The life where I take care of everyone except myself.
But tonight, on a couch in a suite I could never afford, in a suit I didn’t pay for, with a woman who asked me if she seems maternal and doesn’t realize that the question itself is the answer—tonight, I’m not carrying anyone.
And someone, whether she knows it or not, is carrying me.
I fall asleep to the sound of Celeste breathing and Alicia Silverstone explaining something about the federal mail system, and I don’t dream about anything at all.
chapter 9
Saylor
I’m not sure what I’ve been waiting for. But I’ve waited patiently fornine days.
Nine whole days since the funeral. Nine days since the Riptide booth. Nine days since I fell asleep on a couch next to Celeste who is now taking up a greedy amount of space in my brain. But it’s obvious Celeste isn’t thinking about me.
I’ve heard absolutely nothing. I didn’t even grab her number which seems ludicrous now. She dropped me off at home the morning after we fell asleep on the couch like she was eager to get rid of me, which didn’t feel great, but she had a lot on her mind.
Which is fine.It’s fine.She doesn’t owe me updates. She’s not my girlfriend. She’s not my friend. She’s a client I spent a weekend with, and the weekend is over, and whatever happened between us—the trauma bond, the effortless way she let me hold her when she was about to collapse—that’s finished. Filed under “memorable experiences” right alongside the time I watched a man cry overHamiltonfrom the third row and the night I talked a stranger through her divorce at a bar in the West Village.
Except it’s not filed. It’s not anywhere close to filed. It’s loose in my brain like a marble in an empty room, rolling into every corner every time I tilt my head.
I know the basics through Rina when I not-so-casually asked how Celeste was doing with the baby. Rina gave me a tight-lipped, attorney-like reply. What I gathered between the legal jargon is that Rina put Celeste in touch with the best family attorney in the Tri-state area. Eleanor is indeed contesting the will, that absolutely did name Celeste as guardian to the baby. Raven’s pregnancy is going well, and she has an upcoming ultrasound to find out the sex of the baby. But that’s it. That’s all I’m allowed to know because even though I feel like I started this quest, I’ve been kicked off the great trek to Mordor.
The details—the legal strategy, the caseworker, whether Celeste is sleeping or spiraling or pacing back and forth in her living room at four in the morning, whether she’s missing me—those, I don’t know. Because I don’t have a right to know. Because the funeral is over, and the appropriate thing to do is return to my regularly scheduled life and stop checking my phone like a teenager who’s been left on read.
My regularly scheduled life, for the record, is not cooperating with this plan.
Monday through Wednesday I pick up shifts at the bar. Thursday I spend the morning with Mum, reorganizing her medications, fixing the loose grab bar in the bathroom that’s started wobbling. By Friday, I’ve run out of tasks and chores to keep myself busy, so I sit in my room alone and stare at my phone. I scroll, but not even dancing chicken videos or food-eating competitions are entertaining enough to hold my attention. Usually on Friday nights, I see if Rina has work. I make so much more as an escort than a bartender or bouncer, but after last weekend, it seems impossible.
It’s hard to explain, but I already feel the distance between me and Celeste. Literally. Physically. I don’t want to take any more steps in the wrong direction. I need a change. I can’t keep going like I have been. It’s sprinting in place, my bones ache, my muscles are stripped, and I’m gettingnowhere.
I close the app. Pick up the Rolex case from my nightstand. Turn it over in my hands.
The watch is worth thirty, maybe forty thousand dollars. It’s sitting in my apartment like a ticking time bomb with a price tag. I can’t keep it. I can’t pawn it. And I can’t pretend that the only reason I want to return it in person is because I’m ethically opposed to FedEx.
