You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(57)

“How’d you sleep, Joe?”

“Great!”

You pick up an old New Yorker and I feel like a guy who lasts one fucking episode. I was so bad that you’re gonna read?! Was I supposed to sneak out of bed and make you breakfast? You don’t look at me when you sigh. “So whatcha got going on today?”

Is that a hint? “A lot,” I say. “Which is why I should get the hell outta here.”

You flip a page and huff. “Well, okay then. Don’t let me stop you.”

You are not Carrie and I am not Big and was it all just role-play? At the gym, in the locker room, Dick once said that most girls can’t get off the first time you bang them. But then you give her that morning wood, Goldbitch. I can’t do that—I am soft—and did I fuck up? I fucked up. There’s a way to leave with you wanting more, but I can’t find my way in this tiny bedroom. I stub my toe on your stupid New Yorker nightstand and you don’t ask if I’m okay and I hate myself for wanting you to ask if I’m okay.

“I’m okay,” I say. “Barely hit it.”

“Yep,” you say. “It’s not the best bedroom, but it’s mine….”

I remember when mine was a sexy thing. “Yeah, I hear you. I need a new place.”

You fake a yawn like an aunt or a teacher or an old lady on a bus stuck with a crazy person and did you fake your orgasm too? You close your New Yorker. “If you want to move, the best way to find a place is just kinda walking around. That’s how me and Cyn found ours.”

Nothing ever sounded better to me than a walk through the city with you, but I pull up my pants like a douchebag in your Swingers poster. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, you make a day of it. You get a feel for a neighborhood, you go into one of those internet café places and hit up Craigslist…It’s kinda fun. It’s like hunting.”

It feels like you want to do all that with me and I want it too, but you won’t come out and say that, and I can’t come out and say it. I pick up the only book in this room.

“Ah,” you say. “That’s my favorite.”

’Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy. The title alone…Like you want to be Carrie, close your eyes on real love to be the make-out queen of Manhattan.

“The book is famous song lyrics that we all get wrong in real life. Like it’s not ‘?’Scuse me while I kiss this guy,’ it’s ‘?’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.’?” You pull your hair over one shoulder like you’re in a bar trying to pick up a stranger. “It’s good for small talk, you know?”

No, I don’t know and did you fake it? I fake it. “Sounds great. And who doesn’t love Jimi Hendrix?”

You bite your lip like I said the wrong thing, like you have no feelings about Jimi Hendrix and maybe we have nothing in common. “Well, it’s not about him…. It’s more about misunderstandings, Joe. Things we hear and mishear and don’t even know until…I love that kinda stuff. Miscommunication, and reading into things. You think you know the song, the world, a person and then whammo…you’ve been wrong all along.”

“Whores de var.”

“Huh?”

“That’s how I used to pronounce hors d’oeuvres.” SHUT UP, JOE, and did I really just say WHORES in bed? I don’t know how to relate to you. I don’t even know if you came. I just know that it can’t be a good thing, the way you go back to flipping through your old New Yorker.

“Anyway,” you say. “I got it at Urban Outfitters. You can borrow it if you want.”

You offered me a book. It’s not fiction, but it’s something. I should wrap you up in my white button-down shirt and carry you out the door. That’s how a bill becomes a law, how a night becomes a life. We keep it going, drift down your stairs into the sea of less fortunate busy bodies rushing to start their dumb long days. We’re that new couple moving slow as molasses. Holding hands while everyone on every single sidewalk smells it on us, the sex. Then we pop into some restaurant we never noticed that was clearly built for us, for today. We devour eggs and pancakes—so good, best ever—and talk about maybe going to see a movie. Obviously, we don’t do that. We go back to your place for another round and become the couple we’re supposed to be. Night falls and we both know that I don’t need to find a place. We have your place. Before you know it, Cynthia’s moving out and I’m moving in because you love me, because I love you.

But then you close your New Yorker. “Shit. I have to go pay my phone bill.”

Sex doesn’t “complicate” things. It destroys them.

I toss ’Scuse Me on your nightstand and I lean over your mysterious little body. I peck you on the forehead. “Do your thing, kid.”

When I turn my back on you, you don’t beg me to stay. You flip through your New Yorker, the one from March 2001, the one you keep there for moments like this, when you realize that Sex and the City is just a TV show, that you are not Carrie Bradshaw, that men are Mr. Big in the bad way. Dickheads, all of us. The way we just walk out the fucking door a couple hours after making you orgasm. Or not. Did you?

“I, um…I had a really good time, Vail.”

You don’t look at me. Not even a little. “Later, Joe.”