The mysterious car I’d never seen her drive before was a black Acura. It smelled of faded vanilla, dainty sweat generated from gentle yoga. The leather bomber she wore when I first met her hung sadly on the head of her seat. Candy wrappers rustled underfoot, her coffee from this morning in the cup holder, sticky around the rim. She was absolutely filthy. I felt at home.
The sun shifted as we cruised Rock Creek Park’s winding roads. This was my favorite feature of the city: how you could be on a main street, horns trumpeting, cars bumper-to-bumper, then turn a corner and be in the woods, spindly trees, crisp air, might even spot a baby deer, chin raised in high alert.
It was a hot day, finally April. Nia was a fast, distracted driver, nothing like Tristan. She dropped the window, her hair floating above her like Medusa’s snakes. I didn’t understand how she could see like this. She was joking about how her nudes were more secure than the nation’s war plans when her phone rang.Dad A.K.A The Devil. She didn’t answer, stomping on the gas.
In some impossible twist of geographical fate, we ended up near the Mall. Pale pink trees stood at attention, their candied reflections smeared along the river. The cherry blossoms had bloomed.
Seeing the flowers, Nia fumbled with the steering wheel, whipping down Independence Avenue. We almost hit a squirrel, but it skipped out of the way like a heartbeat on a monitor. Jerking backward into a parking spot, she said, “They might be gone tomorrow.”
“You know I live on the other side of town, right?” I said as we stepped out of the car.
She slipped a pair of sunglasses on her face. “I took a wrong turn.”
That we’d stumbled on the notoriously fickle trees while they were in peak bloom was astonishing. I’d lived there my whole life but always missed them, arriving either too early (buds shut and green) or too late (petals strewn on the ground). But today they were like the postcards: a true pink, not white as they sometimes were, quivering in the wind on thin branches.
When I was little, I thought the Washington Monument was a rocket ship. With its red blinking lights at the tip, it reminded me of one. We passed a flock of tourists riding electric scooters on the way to the water, which wrinkled with sunlight.
Nia’s expression was one I hadn’t seen before. “Tristan’s birthday’s in a few weeks.”
I pretended like I didn’t know this. “Oh, wow!”
She looked at me like I both amused and exhausted her. “I hope this doesn’t freak you out. I mean it as a compliment.”
“Okay.”
“I think he finds you attractive.”
I coughed loudly. Nia slapped my back, but it hurt instead of helped.
“Anyway, now that I know you’re poly, I don’t feel so weird asking you this.”
“Asking…?”
She smiled shyly, turning to look across the river at the Romanesque dome of the Jefferson Memorial. She picked a cherry blossom off the ground and grazed it with her fingertips. “I want to do something for his birthday.”
“Like a pizza party?”
“No. A threesome. It could be fun. I mean, we’re friends, aren’t we? And you know Tristan! Would you want to?”
I felt that dizzy, dreamlike vertigo you might experience a few times in your life, suddenly seeing everything with painful detail (the tiny hairon the beauty mark on Nia’s chin, the ant crawling in the vein of a leaf by my foot). I’d felt this sensation’s inversion when my dad shot himself, that foggy filminess falling over the world. I thought of Nia’s mouth on mine, Tristan’s hands on me. There were worse fantasies to come to fruition.
But then: Jay. I had begun to face the fact that I might miss him more than I needed to act out being polyamorous, that maybe I could just live with it squirreled away inside me the same way people lived with noncancerous cysts or IBS. There was also how Tristan had looked at me that last time we’d had sex, like I was an incarnation of his ego’s worst fears. The silent horror I felt humming through his body when I refused to say what he wanted to hear. Not only did he not understand me, he didn’t seem to want to, only wanted me in whatever narrow way suited his worldview.
Though what was stopping me from doing the same?
Nia tucked the blossom in her hand behind her ear. “You can say no, of course. But if we do it, I want it to be a surprise.”
Chapter 59
The restaurant was closed so we could take a sexual harassment training. I didn’t know workplaces were still doing that. It felt good to be paid to have the afternoon off. I was doing double shifts and cleaning out the basement at home so a tenant could possibly live there, though I couldn’t imagine anyone voluntarily living in our shitty basement.
While Milan and I waited for the training to start, I told her about Nia’s proposition.
“Spoookyyy. You said no, right?”
“Duh!” Actually, I’d said I’d think about it.
Milan twirled on her stool. “It’s kinda perfect, like, you’ve been fucking her man, now she’s giving you permission. You basically manifested this with your coochie.”
