He drives David’s silver metallic Tesla that Nicola rolled her eyes at until she first climbed inside, at which point, she admits, she marveled. There’s a reason why people with money pay a lot for their cars. Their cars are nicer than the Pontiacs and Hondas the rest of the driving world has. With Taylor’s midnight-blue Mercedes, their driveway looks like the valet section of a hotel in the French Riviera. Not that Nicola would know. But she has an imagination.
“This isn’t the fancy car,” Jack tells her. “This is the kick-around car. David would never let me near his Porsche.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a 911 GT3,” he says, as if that explains everything. And maybe it does, what does Nicola know about cars?
“ATeslais the kick-around car?” she says.
Sometimes, Nicola thinks about what Taylor called him at that first dinner in June—a playboy without a mansion. He might not have a mansion, but he has a credit card. He takes Nicola to places she never would have gone on her own: out to dinner at Kimberly’s, to Eli’s, and finally, yes, to Spring House. They bike out to Settler’s Rock one evening and pick their way over the rocks toward North Light. The museum is closed for the day, nobody around but the seals swimming close to the shore, so Jack leans Nicola up against the rocky wall and kisses her so intently, so urgently, soindecentlythat when a party of three shows up just behind them they scurry back to their bikes and pedal as fast as they can, back to Nicola’s place.
Once he materializes at the Institute while she’s running a squiddissection. She looks up from her magnifying glass to see him leaning against a pole behind the table. “Sorry,” she tells him. “Reservations are required, and we’re fully booked. You can sign up online for a spot next week.” Jack lingers while she crouches between a couple of ten-year-old girls, showing them the three-chambered heart and explaining to them that squids have blue blood because of a copper-based pigment.
“The way you saydorsal aspectmakes me so hot,” he says later that night in bed.
“Oh, stop it.”
“For real,” he says. He puts his lips close to her ear and says, “Talk to me about the three chambers of the heart.”
“I can never tell if you’re kidding or not.”
“Me either,” he says. Then, “What should we do tomorrow?”
“Do? I have to go to work.”
“Silly Nicky,” he says. He kisses her on the forehead. It’s a kiss that should have felt merely endearing but somehow manages to feel sexy. “Play hooky with me.”
In the world Nicola comes from, people work. If they are lucky they enjoy their work, but it’s stillwork, and you go because you have an obligation and you need the money and people are counting on you but besides all that, if you don’t go to work, what are you supposed to do with yourself all day?
But here’s Jack, who talks like money is the very last reason to return to his job. (“How’s your Achilles?” she asks him every now and then. “Better every day,” he says, grinning. “Better and better and better.”)
There’s a Tuesday Talk this very night. The speaker is the head of animal rescue at Mystic Aquarium, and Nicola knows this will attract a crowd. Who doesn’t want to hear about animals being rescued? Who isn’t looking for a feel-good moment in a feel-bad world? After lunch she and Cherry are going to set up the folding chairs. It’sCherry’s turn to have dinner with the speaker, at Dead Eye Dick’s, before the talk. They each get a turn once in the summer. Nicola is holding out for the white shark expert, but aren’t they all?
Nicola hops on her bike and cycles toward town. She stops at Three Sisters, the pocket-sized sandwich shop on Old Town Road. She chooses the Twisted Sister sandwich, although it’s a tough call between that and the Celeb Sister. Then, back on her bike, she cycles to Fred Benson Town Beach, where there is a bike rack and a bathroom, and where she can be alone with her thoughts. What thoughts does she want to be alone with? She’s not sure. But she’s feeling jumbled—too jumbled to eat with the other interns.
She locks her bike at the rack—it’s so crowded, she almost doesn’t find a spot—and, once she’s clear of the parking lot and through the pavilion, she crouches down and removes her sneakers and her socks, which she immediately regrets because the sand is hot hot hot.
She’s not, of course, alone at the beach. It’s a postcard-ready day on the Block, and the beach is jammed with families and gaggles of teenage girls in bikinis and pods of teenage boys playing Frisbee with no shirts, their bodies so effortless and lean and muscled in a way that they probably think will last forever. But she doesn’t know any of these people, so she sort of feels like she’s alone. She sits well back from the ocean, on the other side of the pavilion from the chair and umbrella rentals. She’s in her blue Institute polo shirt, which feels a little weird at the beach, but so be it. She unwraps her sandwich.
She tries to put her metaphorical finger on what’s bothering her. It’s the thoughts of Zachary that surfaced earlier in the day, as she was thinking about the seahorses. It’s the troubled way the thoughts made her feel. It’s the realization that she’s so much older than everyone else doing her job. Usually she’s okay with that—she even finds it a little funny, like she can be the cool aunt of the Institute, the one who takes the Institute interns out for their first pedicures. But geez, many of the interns will vote in their first presidential election this fall. They arereally young!
Maybe she does miss Zachary. They lived together for two years; it would have been strange if she didn’t miss him! She misses having someone who knew her coffee order (Nicola is the only person left on the planet who still drinks regular milk, no almond or oat, and she almost always gets an extra shot of espresso in her cappuccino) and who will watch six episodes ofSuccessionon a rainy Sunday. She misses planning Halloween costumes with him; last year, when everybody was dressing up as Barbie and Ken the first Halloween after the movie came out, they went to a party as Siegfried and Roy and won first prize in the costume contest. They had big white stuffed tigers they carried around all night, and even though the tigers were awkward they really sealed the win.
At the same time, she’s mad at herself for missing him, so in her head she lists the things she does not miss. She does not miss the way it was okay for her to know things, but only if he knew more things, or had just a different angle on one of her things. She does not miss the way he sighed audibly when she stopped to meet dogs in the street, even if the dogs very clearly wanted to be greeted. She does not miss the way he had to send a steak back to be cooked “a smidge more” every time he ordered one and yet refused to change his order from medium rare to just plain medium. She did not like that he used the wordsmidge.
She pulls out her phone from her backpack and calls her best friend from college, Reina. Due to Reina’s current circumstances as a full-time mother (current buttemporary,Reina would hasten to add), she’s sometimes available to talk at odd times of the day. Because Nicola has kept Reina updated on Jack through text, and because they lived together for so long—holding each other’s hair back during the Jägermeister vomiting incident of sophomore year, sharing clothes and makeup, and twice, albeit accidentally, a toothbrush—they typically forgo niceties and formalities.
“I don’t know what any of this means,” Nicola says. “This Jack Baker stuff.” She glances at her watch; it’s almost time to head backto work. In the background, on Reina’s end, she can hear Mia jabbering, Cooper making new baby noises.
“Hang on, okay? I’ve just got to get Cooper to latch on.” There are some muffled sounds, and then she says, “Okay! I’m back. Sorry, what was the question again? My brain is mush.”
“No specific question. I just don’t know what this all means.” Reina and Hunter had gotten married and had two children within the space of three years. They had been on parallel tracks once, Reina and Nicola, ten years ago, in that double dorm room, with their fairy lights and their complementary comforters and their mini fridge full of vitaminwater, but somewhere along the way Reina zigged when Nicola zagged. Now Reina has Cooper and Mia and Hunter, and Nicola has—what, exactly? The squid and the plankton.
“Whocareswhat it means! Are you having fun?”
Nicola looks down at her bare feet. She digs her toes into the hot sand and then squints out at the ocean. The sun shimmering on the water gives the beach a wavy, fun-house vibe. “Yes.”
“How’s the sex?”
