Deeply uncool, Bobbi said.
I told her she could stay with me. I didn’t know what else to say. She knew I had an empty apartment. That evening she played around with my electric piano using my laptop for sheet music and I checked my email on my phone. No one had been in touch. I picked up a book but didn’t feel like reading. I hadn’t done any writing that morning, or the morning before. I had started reading long interviews with famous writers and noticing how unlike them I was.
You’ve got a notification on your instant message thing, said Bobbi.
Don’t read it. Let me see it.
Why are you saying don’t read it?
I don’t want you to read it, I said. Give me the laptop.
She handed me the laptop, but I could see she wasn’t going back to the piano. The message was from Nick.
Nick: i know, i’m a bad person
Nick: do you want to come over again some time this week?
Who’s it from? Bobbi said.
Can you relax about it?
Why did you go ‘don’t read it’？
Because I didn’t want you to read it, I said.
She bit on her thumbnail coquettishly and then got onto the bed beside me. I shut my laptop screen, which made her laugh.
I didn’t open it, she said. But I did see who it was from.
Okay, good for you.
You really like him, don’t you?
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said.
Melissa’s husband. You have a serious thing for him.
I rolled my eyes. Bobbi lay back on the bed and grinned. I hated her then and even wanted to harm her.
Why, are you jealous? I said.
She smiled, but absently, as if she was thinking of something else. I didn’t know what else to say to her. She went back to the piano for a while and then she wanted to go to bed. When I woke up the next morning she was already gone.
*
I stayed with Nick most nights that week. He wasn’t working, so he went to the gym for a couple of hours in the morning and I went into the agency or just wandered around the shops. Then in the evening he made dinner and I played with the spaniel. I told Nick I didn’t think I’d eaten so much food in my life, which was true. At home my parents had never cooked with chorizo or aubergine. I had also never tasted fresh avocado before, though I didn’t tell Nick about that.
One night I asked him if he was afraid of Melissa finding out about us and he said he didn’t think she would find out.
But you found out, I said. When she had affairs.
No, she told me.
What, really? Out of the blue?
The first time, yeah, he said. It was very surreal. She was away at one of these book festivals, and she called me at like five in the morning and said she had something to tell me, that was it.
Fuck.
But it was just a one-off thing, they didn’t keep seeing each other after that. The other time was a lot more involved. I probably shouldn’t be telling you all these secrets, should I? I’m not trying to make her look bad. Or at least I don’t think I am, I don’t know.
Over dinner we exchanged some of the details about our lives. I explained that I wanted to destroy capitalism and that I considered masculinity personally oppressive. Nick told me he was ‘basically’ a Marxist, and he didn’t want me to judge him for owning a house. It’s this or paying rent forever, he said. But I acknowledge it’s troubling. It sounded to me like his family was very wealthy, but I was wary of probing the issue, since I already felt self-conscious about never paying for anything. His parents were still married and he had two siblings.
During these discussions, Nick laughed at all my jokes. I told him I was easily seduced by people who laughed at my jokes and he said he was easily seduced by people who were smarter than he was.
I guess you just don’t meet them very often, I said.
See, isn’t it nice to flatter each other?
The sex was so good that I often cried while it was happening. Nick liked me to go on top, so he could sit back against the headboard, and we could talk quietly. I could tell that he liked it when I talked to him about how good it felt. It was very easy to make him come if I talked about that too much. Sometimes I liked to do that just to feel powerful over him, and afterwards he would say: God, I’m sorry, that’s so embarrassing. I liked him saying that even more than I liked the sex itself.
I became infatuated with the house he lived in: how immaculate everything was, and the coolness of the floorboards in the morning. They had an electric coffee grinder in the kitchen and Nick bought whole-bean coffee and then put small portions in the grinder before breakfast. I wasn’t sure if this was pretentious or not, though the coffee tasted incredibly good. I told him it was pretentious anyway and he said, what do you drink? Fucking Nescafé? You’re a student, don’t act like you’ve got taste. Of course I secretly liked all the expensive utensils they had in their kitchen, the same way I liked to watch Nick press the coffee so slowly that a film of dark cream formed on its surface.