Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It(23)

“I need you to put this on for me. I can’t really reach.”

“Of course,” he says. “Where?”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble before turning around and lowering my pajama bottoms.

Jonathan gasps. “Jesus Christ, Phoebe, what did you do to yourself?!”

I sigh. “That is between me, Finn, and the laminator.”

I reach back and hand him a tube of Neosporin. “Here, would you mind putting some of this on the Band-Aid?”

Without taking the tube, he grabs me and spins me around so we’re face-to-face. I quickly reach for the waistband of my pajama bottoms to keep them from falling down entirely. He crouches down so I’m looking directly into his wide eyes. I want to laugh because of the ridiculousness of the situation, but the distressed look in his eyes stops me.

He places his hands gently on either side of my face.

“Phoebe. Is this a sex injury?”

“What!” I screech. “No, of course not. If that were the case, I would have posted a picture of it on Instagram. In feed.”

He exhales as his hands fall from my face and onto my shoulders.

“I stuck my laminated list down the back of my skort and cut myself,” I say with the same air of casualness I would use to tell him I fell off my bike and scraped my knee.

I turn back around and lower my pajama bottoms once more. I hear Jonathan let out an unsteady breath behind me.

Jonathan’s fingers shake as he presses the Band-Aid down, gently securing it to my skin. As we stand there, his fingers brushing against my bare ass, I’m hit with the striking realization that this is the most intimate I’ve ever been with a man. There have been more than a few drunken nights when I’ve had a pair of random hands groping inside the back of my jeans, but the feeling of Jonathan’s hands back there somehow feels more weighted, more intense, even if he’s only patching me up.

In a futile attempt to cover up the thick layer of goosebumps spreading across my lower back, I yank up my pants and turn sharply to make a break for the door.

“I owe you one.”

The pizza’s cold by the time I hand him a slice on a paper plate. We both settle into our respective corners of the couch to eat. Jonathan is practically horizontal as he stuffs himself with a second slice, and I wonder if this is the type of exhaustion that follows a busy day at the office, or if it’s a result of something that happened after he left Jeffery’s.

I try to pose my question as casually as possible. “How was last night? Where did you end up?”

“Oh, you know.” He lowers his eyes and attempts to casually pick a piece of pepperoni off his slice. “Once Meg fell asleep at the table, we called it a night. I met up with Sydney from work and her friends at a bar down the street, and we ended the night at her place.” He swallows. “I just stayed there.”

“That sounds fun,” I lie.

I don’t have to meet Sydney to know I can’t stand her. Jonathan’s mentioned her a few times in passing, but I never paid it any mind until a few months ago, when a comment on his most recent Instagram post caught my eye:


@sydney_joness: Looking hot, Johnny

Johnny?? Looking hot? No one besides his mom calls Jonathan Johnny, so the notion that @sydney_joness felt comfortable doing so was laughable. Fueled by a fit of blind rage, I had called Alex, knowing he would find the comment equally disturbing. Together, we journeyed down the dark path of scrolling through her Instagram, all the way back to her first post in 2010, only to be met with countless photos of a tall, leggy blonde with perky boobs and an affinity for raising money for Alzheimer’s.

“This is disgusting,” Alex had said. And I agreed. It was gross.

“Do you have a thing for Sydney?” I ask. Jonathan shrugs while taking another bite of his pizza.

I put my plate down, having suddenly lost my appetite. “You do have a thing for Sydney.”

Bile rises to my throat at this revelation.

“How was your first day back?” he asks, pivoting the conversation completely.

Ugh.

I guess I have been waiting all day to tell him about Finn, so I swallow my urge to puke up my pizza and allow the abrupt subject change.

“It was great, actually. The kids are great. Cheryl’s great. I’m in love.”

His eyebrows shoot up, and he takes longer than usual to chew and swallow his last bite of pizza. “And this is the new guy you’re talking about? We’re already using the L-word?”

I nod. “Finn. And yes.”

Another prolonged chew and swallow from Jonathan.

“He kept calling me Phoebe,” I add excitedly.

Jonathan cocks his head to the side. “As opposed to…”

“It was the way he kept saying it. Like he was…so sure of it.”

“Okay…this is me encouraging you to look for more in a man than just his ability to call you by your government name.”

Could it be that Finn calling me by my name isn’t as romantically charged as I had initially perceived it to be?

“He also called me amazing. And said I was the best. And said I was the greatest teacher at the school.” I should have led with these.

“Start with that next time.” Noted. “Can I see him?”

“I don’t think he has any social media.”