I fucked up. I just . . . I fucked up. And now I have to live with the knowledge of it. I have to go on in a world in which no man will ever compare to Erik Nowak. No man will ever make me laugh, and make my body sing, and make my soul absolutely indignant with his outrageous opinions on Galatasaray—all at once.
“Oh, honey.” Mara cocks her head. “You don’t know that.”
“I do. It’s likely.”
“That’s not the point.” Hannah leans closer to the screen till all I can see are her beautiful face and dark eyes. “Okay, so Erik now knows that you occasionally display an appalling lack of conflict-resolution initiative.”
I groan. “I really wish I had the emotional fortitude to hang up on you.”
“But you don’t. What I’m saying is, maybe Erik will decide that you’ll make for a terrible girlfriend who overreacts and is more trouble than you’re worth. Maybe he’ll decide that he wants to bitch about you on the relationship subreddit. But if you cut him out like you did three weeks ago, you’d just be making this decision for him.”
I blink, confused, suddenly remembering why I went into engineering. Logarithmic derivatives are so much easier than this relationship shit. “What do you mean?”
“Sadie, I know you like this guy a lot. I know that if he does decide that he doesn’t want you in his life it’s going to hurt, and that you’re tempted to preemptively pull back to protect yourself. But if you don’t at least give him a chance to choose you, you’ll lose him for sure.”
I nod slowly, trying to think past the hard knot in my throat. Letting the idea—go for it, just go for it, ask for what you want, be brave—slowly seep through me. Remembering Erik. Remembering the breeze hanging between us on a park bench, on a deserted sidewalk. The way my stomach fluttered at the feelings it carried. Of possibilities. Of maybe.
This is my new happy place, Erik murmured into the shell of my ear the second time we had sex that night. And then he pushed my sweaty hair away from my forehead, and I looked up at him and thought, His eyes are the exact color of the sky when the sun shines. And I always, always loved the sky.
“You’re right,” I say. “You’re so right. I should go to him.”
Hannah smiles. “Well, it’s actually what, one a.m. in New York? I was thinking more of a phone call tomorrow morning. Around ten.”
“Yes. I should go to him right now.”
“That’s the exact opposite of—”
“I gotta go. Love you.”
I hang up and bounce out of bed, looking for a jacket and my phone. I start ordering an Uber, except—shit. I know where Erik lives, but not his address. I run to the door, simultaneously looking for my keys and typing the closest landmark to his apartment that I can recall. How the hell do you spell—
“Sadie?”
I look up. Erik is standing in my open door. Erik, in all his tall, unsmiling, Corporate-Thorship splendor. Wearing the same clothes he had on when I left him plus a light jacket, his hand up in midair and clearly about to knock.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“No. Yes. No. I . . .” I take a step back. Another. Another. Erik stays right where he is, and my cheeks burn. Am I hallucinating him? Is he really here in Astoria? In my apartment? I hear a loud thunk, and my keys are on the linoleum floor. I need a nap. I need a seven-year nap.
“Here.” He bends down to pick up the keys, pauses for a second to study my soccer ball key chain, and holds them out to me. “Can I come in for five minutes? Just to talk. If you feel uncomfortable, the hallway’s okay, too—”
“No. No, I . . .” I clear my throat. “You can come in.”
A brief hesitation. Then a nod as he steps in and closes the door behind him. But he doesn’t move any farther inside, stopping in the entrance and simply saying, “Thank you.”
I was coming to you, I open my mouth to say. I was on my way to tell you many, many confusing things. But the surprise of seeing him here has frozen my bravery, and instead of flooding him with the impassioned speech I would have typed on my Notes app in the Uber, I just stare. Silent.
For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with me—
“Here,” he says, holding out a phone. His phone.
Uh? “Why are you giving this to me?”
“Because I want you to look through it. The passcode is 1111.”
I glance at his face. “1111? Are you joking?”
“Yeah, I know. Just ignore it.”
I snort. “You can’t ask me that.”
He sighs. “Fine. You are allowed one comment.”
“How about one one one one comments—”
“That’s it. Your comment, you used it up. Now—”
“Come on, I have way more to—”
“—will you please unlock the phone?”
I pout but do as he says. Mostly out of sheer bewilderment. “Done.”
He nods. “If you click on my email app, you’ll find my work correspondence. Most of those messages are highly confidential, so I’m going to ask you not to read them. But I want you to search for your last name.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s all there. The emails. Me requesting your thesis. Me circulating it to ProBld like an asshole. A couple of instances of me generally discussing your writing. The timeline should confirm what I already told you.” I stare at him. Speechless. Then he continues, and it gets worse. “This is all I can think of, but if there’s anything else I can show you that will help you believe that Gianna misinterpreted things, let me know. I’m happy to leave my phone here. Take however long you want to go through it. If someone calls or texts, ignore them.”
It’s the calm, earnest way he’s looking at me that does it. It snaps what’s left of my terror of being rejected, and I’m abruptly done with whatever fearful bullshit my brain is trying to feed me.
A new knowledge uncurls inside me, and I instantly know what to do. I know how to do it. And it starts with clutching his phone tight, stepping closer, and sliding it into the pocket of his jacket. I let my hand linger inside for a second, feeling the warmth from Erik’s body. The clean cotton. No lint or candy wrappers or empty ChapStick tubes.
I adore it. I love it. My hand wants to slip inside this pocket on rainy fall afternoons and chilly spring mornings. My hand wants to move in and just live here, right next to Erik’s.
But for now, there’s something else I need to do. Which is holding out my own phone to him. He looks at it skeptically, until I say, “My passcode is 1930.”
His mouth twitches. “Year of the first FIFA World Cup?”
I laugh, because . . . yeah. Out of everyone, he would know. And then I feel myself starting to cry, because of course, out of everyone in the entire world, he would know.
“Unlock it, please,” I say between sniffles. Erik is wide-eyed, alarmed by the tears, trying to come closer and to pull me to him, but I don’t let him. “Unlock my phone, Erik. Please.”
He quickly punches in the numbers. “Done. Sadie, are you—”
“Go to my contacts. Find yours. It’s . . . I changed it. To your actual name.” It’s hard to sustain high and prolonged levels of hatred for someone who’s saved on your phone with a cutesy nickname, I don’t add, but the thought has me chuckling, wet, watery.