Love Interest(37)

Also, I haven’t gotten any closer to getting Tracy her answers about the CEO and chairman. I’m frustrated for having to think about that after such a fun evening with Alex, but the reminder still looms.

“Not very professional,” I say around a smirk. “But I am desperate, so.”

“There’s only one bed,” he blurts.

I blink three times. “Alex. That’s not … Most of us mere mortals have only one bed.”

He smiles at the ground and rubs a hand under his chin. “I don’t have a couch yet. It’s on back order. I just wanted you to know that.”

One bed. No couch.

“I could sleep on the floor—”

“No!” I stick out my chin. “We’re both grown-ups, right? We can handle one night of close proximity. If you’re okay with it, too, that is.”

He scoffs, and laughs deeply, and runs a hand through his hair. “Come on, Simba. It’s this way.”





CHAPTER TWELVE


The night air is as crisp as a freshly minted dollar, and my skin is peppered with goose bumps until we walk over a vent below the sidewalk that shoots warmth up my spine. New York is never quiet, but compared to the noise of the karaoke bar, the sounds of cabbies honking their horns and walk signs commanding us to cross are nearly peaceful.

“Are Brijesh and Miriam…?” Alex starts.

“It’s complicated.”

I debate leaving it at that, but before I know it, I tell him about Miriam’s college ex breaking her heart. She got dumped a month before Lance and I ended things. Jared had a habit of doing bars, and Miriam had a habit of being a nursing student, which made the drug abuse particularly difficult for her not to have an opinion on. In the end, it ripped them apart, but I think to this day, Miriam grieves what that relationship could have been.

“So, anyway,” I tell Alex, “Brijesh is hopelessly in love with her, and she’s trying to figure out how to move on from a love that broke her, and they pull each other in and then push each other away again. It’s kind of a mess.”

Alex nods and says nothing. I appreciate that—his ability to just nod and say nothing when the moment truly calls for it. He’s a bit miraculous like that.

“Freddy is cool,” I say.

“No, he isn’t,” Alex says, shaking his head, but his lips are fighting a grin. “Trust me. Sasha’s cooler. What’s her story?”

“She went to UT because she wanted to play basketball for the Lady Vols like her mom,” I explain. “I love her, and so does Miriam, but she isn’t a constant in our lives. Always there one minute and gone the next, like a passing ship in the night.”

Alex hums. “Sounds like how people describe me.”

We’re at his place a couple of minutes later. It’s a redbrick town house on a quiet lane right in the heart of the West Village, and at first glance—when he just vaguely points at it—I’m trying to understand how he’s got the whole thing to himself. This multimillion-dollar, three-floor space that probably shares a real estate agent with Blake Lively and must be owned by his father. But when we go inside, Alex leads me up a narrow staircase to the partitioned second floor. The whole unit’s been split up for renters. There is precious little space—less square footage than my and Miriam’s apartment, even—but Alex has a halfway decent kitchen setup with a sink, a hot plate, and …

“A balcony!” I stride toward it and press my hands and nose against the glass door like a kid in an aquarium. Two canvas camping chairs are set up outside.

“You can … Uh.”

I turn back.

Alex is looking at me with carefully concealed amusement. “You can go out there, if you want.”

“Fresh air in your underwear!”

“I guess? But also, do you really want to assume the air out there is fresh?”

I ignore this valid line of inquiry and ask, “Why don’t you have any plants?”

“Who would see them? That balcony faces an alleyway.”

“You’d see them! Also, the critters would.”

He comes up beside me and leans a shoulder on the other glass pane. “I’m not loving your sudden alignment with my Garden Girl enemies.”

“What do you mean by sudden?” I joke.

Alex smirks. “If I get a plant, will you spare me?”

“If you promise to actually get one. This is a waste of a balcony otherwise.”

“You’d have to pick it. I wouldn’t know the first thing about what has a chance of surviving in New York City alleys.”

I stick out my hand, and he shakes it. “Deal.”

My body unleashes an unattractive, involuntary yawn. I pull out my phone to text Miriam before I forget: Staying at Alex’s.

“Holy cow,” I say. “Is it really three in the morning?”

The question seems to startle him. He walks into his bedroom—which doesn’t have its own door and is honestly more of a nook nestled into one wall—and mumbles, “Here, let me…” He digs a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants out of a dresser drawer and tosses them to me. “Will that irritate your skin? I use scented detergent.”

I look down, feel the cotton beneath my finger pads. He gave me a HARVARD T-shirt. It puts me in a kind of unexplainable trance.