She moved one way. I moved the other.
The partner from Ohio was at the bar. He was watching me. He was going to ask me about it in the morning when he sent the follow-up email he always sent after a reception, and I was going to give him an answer that didn’t answer anything.
I crossed to him. I picked up where we’d left off. I let him finish the story about his daughter’s wedding.
The whole time he was talking, I could feel where her hand had been on my chest.
7
JOSS
Ispent the next hour performing the role of a product manager.
Conversation with the head of design about a launch I wasn’t sure I’d be allowed to work on. Polite smiles at people whose names had no chance of sticking. A second glass of wine I didn’t drink and a third I forgot I was holding. And at some point around 9:45, a glance across the room—barely a glance at all, just the briefest passage of his eyes over mine—and I knew it was time to go.
He’d told me we’d leave separately, which I’d taken to mean me first. So I went first.
The ride home was eight minutes long, and I couldn’t have named a single thing I passed on the way. My fingers stayed pressed against the underside of my jaw where his thumb had been. The windows were down. Warm wind moved my hair around my face, and the memory of his mouth on mine lingered the entire way.
At Pixel Lofts, I paid the driver, crossed the lobby, and stepped into the elevator. The button for the second floor lit upunder my finger. I leaned against the back wall of the car with my eyes closed and my pulse loud in my ears.
The apartment was dark.
Hadley had left a note on the kitchen counter.Staying at Beckett’s. Eat something.She’d drawn a small heart next to my name. I stood at the counter, read the note twice, set it down, and did not eat anything.
I went to my room. I closed the door behind me, even though there was nobody else in the apartment to keep out. I sat on the edge of my bed in my dark blue dress with my heels still on, and I stared at the wall.
The kiss was still on my mouth.
It was the strangest sensation I’d ever had. Not the kiss itself, which had been four seconds long, and which I’d relived every six seconds since it ended. The strange thing was the afterness of it. The fact that something that had taken a handful of seconds to happen had rearranged my entire understanding of what my body could do.
I unzipped my dress. I let it fall. I stepped out of my heels and out of the dress at the same time and crossed barefoot to my dresser and pulled out a T-shirt and a pair of sleep shorts I’d bought because Hadley had told me they looked good on me. I put them on. I sat back down on the edge of the bed.
My phone was face-down on my nightstand.
I picked it up.
I opened our text thread, which up until tonight had contained exactly zero messages, because I’d never had a reason to text the CEO of my company before tonight. But now, I had several. I stared at the empty thread for what was probably forty seconds.
I typed,For the record.
I stopped.
I deleted it.
I typed,I’m home.
I stared at it. Two words. Plain and factual and exactly the message I wanted to send and also the message that gave him too much credit for understanding why I was sending it. I deleted it.
I typed,You said tomorrow, we’d be at the same office.
I read it. I read it again. It was the truest thing I could send him, and the bravest, and the one most likely to make me throw my phone across the room if he didn’t answer it the way I needed him to.
I sent it.
I dropped the phone face-down on the bed and put both hands over my face.
It buzzed within ten seconds. I picked it up so fast I nearly dropped it. I turned it over.
