One hundred percent.
I make myself hug him back. Then I let go.
“I missed you,” he says into my hair.
I kiss his cheek. It is a quick kiss, and I hate myself for it, but I think he ate a hot dog.
“Ready to see my new place?” I ask. “It’s really nice.”
He nods. “Yeah.”
I take him upstairs.
He’s quiet on the way up. Chase is not, generally, a quiet person — he fills space, he tells stories, he laughs at his own jokes — and the silence in the elevator gets thicker the higher weclimb. He looks at the wallpaper. He looks at the brass elevator buttons. He looks at the back of my head in the polished metal of the door, and I face forward and watch the floor numbers light up one by one because I cannot meet his eyes in the reflection right now.
I open the apartment door, and immediately, he says, “Damn, Melly.” He says it under his breath. “This is fancy.” He looks at the high ceilings, the white walls, the paintings, the windows, the rug, the trinkets on the bookshelf, and the marble counters in the kitchen.
“Penelope has really good taste,” I say quickly.
He laughs — short, surprised — when he sees the window seat. The little cushion. The throw pillow with the embroidered bird on it.
“Holy shit.”
I cringe.
“How much is this a month?”
The number sits on my tongue. I’m not going to say it out loud because I cannot afford this apartment. I am paying for it with a combination of student loans, the summer I worked two jobs, and a kind of magical thinking that I do not recommend as a financial strategy.
“Yolo,” I say with a bright smile and shrug my shoulders at him.
He gives a small, surprised laugh. He walks the length of the living room like he’s in a museum. He stops at Penelope’s drafting table. He looks at the sketches pinned above it — careful pencil drawings of building elevations, a watercolor of a courtyard, a half-finished rendering of a stairwell with the dimensions written down the side in tiny block letters.
He says, “Huh.”
He looks at the stack of architecture magazines on the coffee table, fanned out just so.
“Your roommate’s a senior?”
I nod. “Senior. Architecture.”
“And she — what, her parents are —”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no idea.”
I don’t know, but it’s not something you ask outright when you meet someone. But I know what he’s asking. He’s wondering how a girl like me ended up living with a girl like her. I don’t have a good answer.
He looks at me. His face changes when we make eye contact. It’s obvious that he thinks this is too much, but I can’t bring myself to explain to him that this is actually the kind of life I want to live. I want to reassure him that everything’s fine and tell him he’s still my favorite. But I don’t move. I actually don’t miss living with him. And that’s not something I want to dissect right now.
“Where’s your room?” he asks.
I point. “This way.” I scurry my feet across the room.
He follows me.
He sets his overnight bag on my bed, and then he looks around at the room — at the canopy, at the gilt-framed mirror, at the white curved desk and the bud vase and the soft cream of everything — and he says, again, quieter this time, “Holy shit, Melly.”
“Yeah.”
