“It’s only fair, after you introduced us—”
“Don’t make me regret undergrad decisions!”
“Fine,” Amina laughs, “no bakers. Let’s dance?” Lili lets Amina pull her into the thick of dancing, telling herself she won’t check her phone for at least another thirty minutes.
Later, sneaking outside, taking a break from the packed bar, she begs a cigarette off one of Amina’s gallery scene friends, trying not to be attuned to the slightest phantom buzz of her phone. Disappointed when it’s just James texting the group chat, announcing with great ceremony that he’s finally off work.
By the time she grabs coffee the next morning, walking through SoHo towards the J train as Jackie runs off to a shoot—her roommate wearing sunglasses, grumbling about her ankle, still sore from when Amina had dropped her last night, trying to drunkenly piggyback her up the stairs to her studio on Broome—Lili’s considering whether Aleksandr’s lost his phone. He’s older. People of that generation sometimes don’t really get the concept of texting, live communication, rapid responses.
It’s been a week since she left his loft.
He could have—should have—done something by now. At least texted her?
His words loop in her mind while she’s on the train:Let me take you on a date.He’s a grown man. It’s clear what they’re doing—mutual gratification, no strings attached. Isn’t it?
By the time she’s sitting at home, fresh coffee made, laptop open to start revising, it’s getting absurd. Just her own stupid text staring back at her. Lili throws her phone onto the couch, out of sight. She puts her earphones in, and makes herself focus. If she has her phone off silent for once in her life—loud enough to catch an incoming text or call—it’s just to make sure Jackie can reach her if she’s forgotten her keys.
It’s a long shoot day for Jackie, so Lili takes advantage of the quiet, running a final review. She’s run out of incense, so she swipes some of Jackie’s sandalwood sticks, waving them around her desk, before stacking the faintly burning wood in one of the rose quartz geodes clustered on her windowsill;focus, Lili. Her draft is due Monday for Kerr’s first in-depth review. Each revision takes her closer to graduation; to the future vulnerable with possibility, with all its yet unopened doors that an econ masters can get her through—the chance for real security, stability of herown making, control over what happens to her; the heady yet insidious combination of prestige and good money in some cushy private sector job if she really needed it, cashing in her morals, but also: the fragile potential of meaningful work that both does good in the world and takes care of her. It’s a hope she doesn’t often let herself linger on.
So: one step, one revised page, at a time. It feels both so entirely out of reach and just about to slip out of her grasp.
In the afternoon, she absently gnaws on an apple, leaning against the kitchen counter and considering the current state of her argument on the interplay between forgiveness, perfection, and agency within different understandings of predestination, when her phone rings, alarmingly loud. Lili almost drops her apple, scrambling for the call.
“Shit—fuck—hello?”
“Colorful. Hello to you, too, Lili.”
It’s him.
“I texted you,” she says, a faint note of accusation.
“I was traveling. Landed a few hours ago.”
Relief washes through her chest; it’s followed fast by irritation.
Lili, she warns.Don’t be an idiot.
A murmur of foreign noise on his end. Frowning, she hops onto the kitchen counter. “Where are you?”
“Istanbul.” The noise resolves into sounds, images: open water, lazy rush of waves against hulls, the roar of disorganized traffic, a language both melodic and harsh, evening laughter, packed streets.
Her parents had visited: post-undergrad, the nineties. Memories they’d shared with her, planning the trip they’d eventually take again, this time as a family, back to the Middle East. An idea that died with them, now only contained in photographs buried deep in her closet. She’s never been out of the country.
Lili swings her legs, pushing the memories aside. “When are you back?”
“Wednesday.”
“Right.”
A pause hovers. The sounds from her street mingle with the distant city on his end. Lili chews her lip, but the silence seems comfortable forhim. A glass clinks, the call of seagulls on drafts of warm wind. It’s late evening in Istanbul, purple dusk: dying sunlight on the Bosphorus, the push of ferries across dark waters, the Hagia Sophia looming, caught between the sunset and nightfall call of the muezzin.
She can do this: keep fucking him and feel nothing. Casual—it could be casual, inconsequential, efficient.
She’s an adult. She can handle this.
“Are you—are you free, when you get back?” she asks, swallowing a bit of pride.
Sex. It’s just sex she wants. Simple, mind-clearing sex.
