“Analyst,” she adds. Her eyes are closed as she says this, but then they snap open to follow brightly with “Aries,” as if to justify her choice.
Salim’s Adam’s apple juts out at a true ninety-degree angle, and he’s tall and scrawny—a collision of corners—but the rest of his face is all circles. He has huge dark eyes—Disney eyes—a bulbous nose, and bee-stung lips.
“What’s up?” he says. They’re both spectacularly wasted.
“I think I should go back with them,” I tell Patrick, gathering my things. “So she doesn’t get murdered.” I can’t deduce if she knows Salim or she’s picked him from the bar.
“I guess I’ll head out too,” he says, slipping on his jacket.
We trudge upstairs, and I’m overcome by the urge to shake him. We’ve held hands before. He’s cooked for me. I slept in his bed. Pops! I want to scream at him.
Patrick waits with us until the car comes. I catch snippets of June’s conversation.
Patrick. Church. Can you believe it?
A black car pulls up. Gleaming and morose. June gets in the far door. Salim in front.
“Hey,” Patrick says into my ear as I open my side. I stall, wondering what sage parting words he’ll leave me with. Instead he asks, “Where are you gonna be while, they’re, you know…？” He nods to the lovely couple we’ve poured into a car. “Like, is this a one-bedroom?”
“Fuck,” I whisper more to myself than to him.
“You getting in, buddy?” my sister’s sperm donor calls out from the front seat. “It’s a party,” he continues.
“Party, party,” June mutters with her eyes closed. She’s leaned up against the window. Little exhales fogging up the glass by her mouth.
“Scoot over,” he says. I roll my eyes, nod, and scoot over. He gets in and shuts the door.
chapter 42
Smooth classical music washes over us in the dark. I can already tell by June’s stillness that she’s asleep.
“What are you doing?” I whisper to Patrick. This is the closest we’ve been since that night. His thigh is pressed up against mine, and I’m holding myself as still as I can. Not even leaning into his side as the car turns sharply.
June’s snoring softly. He smiles at her, then back at me, and even in my irritation I smile. The bastard’s breath smells like mint. “We can take a walk when we get there,” he whispers. “Or get a cup of coffee.” He leans in closer to me. “Do you really want to be third-wheeling it on this little scrimmage?” He looks out the window for a moment. “Look, I can get out and go home once we drop them off,” he says. “Entirely up to you.”
He holds my gaze for a long time. “I just… I know I owe you an explanation,” he says. “If you’ll let me.”
My resistance gives. “Fine.”
“You go on up,” I tell June when we arrive at her building. Her eyes dart to Patrick, then to me, and back to him. She shrugs, and the two of them shamble through her lobby.
It smells bright and clear outside. As if it’s about to snow. We’re posted up on the street in front of the glass-enclosed white entryway. I cross my arms to conserve heat and tuck my head as low as I can. Anyone reading our backlit body language across from us would take this for a breakup.
“I’m going to sound like an asshole however I say this,” he begins, hands shoved in his jeans pockets. I peer at him over my jacket collar. “Aliyah and I broke up.”
Maybe it’s the cold, but I don’t feel immediate relief. I search for a tremor of glee. I locate an ugly speck of smugness, but mostly I wonder who broke up with who.
“You got a Tinder alert,” I say accusingly. “In the bathroom. That first night we met at the bar.”
This has troubled me more than anything else. The fucked-up truth is that if he’d cheated on his girlfriend with me, I could have forgiven him. Hell, I’m damaged enough that I might have been flattered. But I wanted to believe better of him. The Patrick I knew—rather, the Patrick I thought I knew—is a much better person than I am. Better than some dude trawling dating sites for Strange.
“Right…” He sighs. “But it’s…”
“Oh God.” I throw my hands up. “Please don’t say it’s complicated.” I feel so stupid.
“We’re not actually together,” he says. The “actually” zips up my spine, settling into an exquisite twinge at the base of my skull. I find myself smiling.
I imagine Jeremy putting it exactly that way when he was hooking up with other people. “We’re roommates,” he’d whisper to yet another aspiring performance artist. “We were together, but now we’re not together-together.”
I am the common denominator. Patrick is an improvement over Jeremy, who is leagues beyond Holland, and for all three I am utterly disposable.
“I don’t know if it’s complicated,” he says. “More that…”
He’s shifting his weight from foot to foot. I realize how impractical his leather jacket is and I’m relieved to experience aversion. Vain men are weak, I reason. I congratulate myself for dodging a bullet. Fuck this man and the rest like him.
“Why does it bother you that I was on Tinder?”
I roll my eyes at the past tense.
“Look,” he begins. “You’re the one who hit me up in the middle of the night to meet you at the skeeviest bar in all of New York, including Staten Island. I’m like, holy shit, it’s Jayne. Maybe she’s new in town. Maybe she’s just out and about. I know nothing. I meet you. We get shitfaced; it’s fun. Then you pull me into a bathroom even though there’s a huge line of people waiting to go before us.”
I’m embarrassed to hear myself characterized like this.
“Then you puke, not on the sidewalk but in the literal street, almost getting decapitated by a moving vehicle, and then, just as I’m wondering what exactly I’ve gotten myself into, you announce that you’ve got nowhere else to go. Honestly, Jayne, if you were literally any other woman in this city, that would’ve been it. Actually, no, none of this would’ve happened in the first place. I would have tapped out a solid seven moves before that. But you’re you. I know your family. I’ve met your mom. I foster a healthy fear of your sister. I wasn’t going to leave you falling-down wasted in the gutter. So I loan you my clothes. You use my shower. I cook for you. I act like a fucking gentleman and give you the bed. We hang out the day after. I thought it was chill.”
He sighs. I can see his breath. His eyes are hard, then soft.
“Jayne,” he says. “I would have told you about Aliyah at any point had we seen each other again. I should have told you that first night. I knew it was fucked up. But it’s why we didn’t hook up. Why I stopped. But I also didn’t want to seem presumptuous and call you, like, I have a girlfriend. I was dating a lot of people, and I don’t know anything about your situation.”
“You were dating a lot of people?” My voice is anemic and pitiable.
I stare at him, face completely numb.