“Um. I mean, I’m pretty sure I come off rude at first. I’m not great with strangers.”
Alex starts to say something but cuts himself off and says, “That’s true, actually, but beside the point. Once people get to know you, anyone with half a brain can tell you’re special. You take raw potential and turn it into something real. You figure out how to make things happen.”
“No,” I argue. “That’s what you do.”
Alex laughs and leans forward. “My follow-through is terrible, and we both know it. I suck at long-term commitment because I get distracted by the next thing.”
Yeah, definitely the second definition of dating. If that. I move my foot underneath the table away from where it was resting against his.
“I don’t really understand what you mean,” I say softly.
“I can start a million projects at once, but you’re the reason they get pushed over the finish line, Case. If you get on board with an idea, that’s how I know it’s a good one. I wasn’t joking when I said I’d be lost without you. Half the time, Gus is too busy to be any real help, but you—you’re like a North Star.” The intensity in his voice has me mesmerized. I process his words slowly, trying to figure out how on earth he could think of me like that.
“I do numbers,” I say, feeling tired all of a sudden. “All I do is numbers.”
“There’s more to you than just that. I hope they offer you an incredible job in London, because right now, you’re running circles around the rest of us.”
I hope, I hope, I hope.
“Just, please, Casey.” He’s leaning forward, voice dropping low. “Don’t go around thinking you aren’t remarkable. Or inspiring,” he adds, grinning—completely unaware that in one sitting, he’s found my deepest insecurity, ripped it out of my chest, flayed it open on the table between us, and told it to fuck off.
I was in high school when I decided that statistics were boring but that I really liked learning about economics and money, pretty much around the time The Big Short was released. I was obsessed. Completely, utterly enchanted by the idea that a bunch of brilliant outcasts everybody else in the industry thought had a screw loose could predict something like the housing crisis of 2008. The fall of my senior year, I put finance as my major on my college applications. “Just for now,” I told Dad.
He looked at me and shrugged, smiling in this privately amused way I didn’t understand, and said, “You know something, kiddo? You’re the total opposite of your mom. But her parents would certainly be proud.” After everything Dad told me over the years about Mom’s relationship with her parents, he may as well have said I was betraying her ghost.
As an underclassman, I told my college adviser twice that I wanted to change my major. But whenever she asked me what I’d rather do instead, I never had an answer.
“Thank you,” I say softly to Alex right when our food appears. He nods once and turns to his plate. Always reading me, knowing just what to say, and when to say nothing more.
* * *
Later, after a stroll around the neighborhood while we let our stomachs settle, plus a chrysanthemum purchase “to keep the cosmos company,” we’re heading back in the direction of Alex’s apartment when I catch sight of a subway station.
My steps falter on the street corner.
I could … I should probably go home. I’ve got all my belongings with me, and it’s two o’clock at this point.
Alex keeps walking, but he stops and turns when he notices I’m not with him anymore. He has the chrysanthemum in one hand, and his other slips into his pocket as his gaze cuts to the station across the street, then back to me.
I should head out, I try to say, because you’re not great with long-term commitment and I’m moving to London, and even if neither of those things were true, every time I look at you, I want to break my promise to Tracy because keeping secrets from you is starting to hurt me inside. But the words get lost somewhere in the ether. Instead, we just look at each other for a couple long seconds, separated by five feet and at least eight cigarette butts.
Then, Alex gives a tiny, almost nonexistent shake of his head.
Standing there under the landscaped trees dotting the length of the sidewalk, burnished golden leaves under my feet and cool air on my skin, I can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t spend the entire day with Alex Harrison.
So, I do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Alex heads to LA the next weekend for the Hermosa Beach Digital Creator Conference with Gus, Saanvi, and Social Media Amanda. It lasts until the following Wednesday （I visit his place once to water the cosmos and chrysanthemum, affectionately dubbed Cleopatra and Calliope）， but then Freddy convinces Alex to stay out west for a few more days so they can road-trip up the Pacific Coast Highway like a couple of Barbour-wearing, Amex-carrying surf boy wannabes. I laugh out loud at the mental image; their anything-is-possible attitudes coupled with that northeastern boyish naivety seems a little cataclysmic.
Call me ambitious, but if I’d known at the time that I wouldn’t be alone with Alex for over two weeks, I probably would have pushed for a fourth round of sex that Saturday we spent at his apartment together. When we got back from breakfast, we fucked in the bed, slow and drawn out, taking an exquisitely long time to get ourselves there. Then again two hours later, on the couch between episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, spurred on by his hands on my thighs and my ass in his lap and a quarrel over Abe’s funniest lines. Around six, right when I summoned up the willpower to leave and responded to a very hangry Miriam that I’d be home with chicken tenders forthwith, we had sex again. Frantic, frenzied, against the front door. A goodbye christening on my way out of it.
Alex is good at sex. Really good at it. So good, in fact, that I have to assume he’s had copious amounts of it with a copious number of （probably） women. All of whom, like me, dated him by the second definition of the word, with the understanding that he’s not good with long-term commitment but makes up for that fault with orgasms.
I wish I could say it was an equitable arrangement, but my body’s starting to feel like it’s his, and sex is starting to feel like something that’ll only be good with him, and I wonder if he might be ruining me, just a little bit.
We spent last night in this camper van, he texts me, followed by a photo of a van painted with a terrifying hawk clawing at a mouse on the passenger door, but Freddy broke down trying to do his hair this morning, and I think I swallowed fifteen bugs last night, so we ended up renting a king-sized bed at a five-star hotel on the edge of a sea cliff.
Bugs are a great source of protein! I reply.
And lyme disease! Alex replies, followed by a picture of Pebble Beach in Monterey. The coast is rocky and wet, and the mid-November chill hangs heavy in the beach air, almost palpable from the ninety-eighth-floor break room.
The sight of him traveling does funny things to my insides, and I get weirdly excited every time he sends me a photo. A meal he loved, a shot of the van, a selfie of him reading a thriller on the beach. He’ll send voice notes over text, recounting a story of how surreal it was that someone from the conference recognized him from YouTube, or how he accidentally slammed Freddy’s finger in the van door and they had to visit an emergency clinic for a splint.