“It was a mistake,” I said finally, looking Finch square in the eye. “Obviously.”
That night I last saw Finch, a month ago, I’d left the reception in his honor at Cipriani’s an hour before it ended. It was pouring rain by then, and I was standing at the curb under an umbrella, waiting for my Uber, when Finch appeared out of nowhere next to me.
“Where are you going?” he asked, no umbrella, already soaked.
“What are you doing out here?” I gestured back at the party, still going full tilt inside.
“Trying to make you stay,” he said, eyes on the street in front of us. “Maybe then I’ll have time before the night is over to convince you that I’m not the asshole you think I am.”
“Oh, really?” I asked with a raised eyebrow, trying to will away the flutter in my belly.
“Okay, maybe I am an asshole,” Finch said. “But I am other things, too. Some of which you might even find interesting.”
“Yeah?” I gripped my umbrella tighter, my toes clenched inside my shoes. “Like what things?”
“Well, for one, all that matters to me is my work. Just like you.”
I laughed despite myself. “Wait, so we’d be good together because neither of us will care?”
“Oh, I care. All those people in there, and the only thing I’ve been able to think about all night is what my fingers would feel like on the curve of your collarbone.”
He took a step closer, so that the entire length of his body was almost touching mine. We stayed like that as my car pulled up and stopped. Silent. Motionless. And maybe it was the pressure of my patent case going to trial, or that the firm’s managing partner had just berated me for something that was not my fault. Or maybe I was just fed up with doing the right thing all the time. But it was me who’d finally stepped forward and started kissing Finch on that sidewalk. There was no pretending otherwise. And while it wasn’t a great decision to have sex with him, it was one I’d made fully and freely. I was an adult. I’d live with it.
The real problem started as I crept out of Finch’s sprawling Dumbo loft the next morning. Some Polaroids of naked women on his coffee table caught my eye, names written in Sharpie on each one of them. A pretty girl with a nose ring named Rachel was on top. When I paused to look more closely at the pictures, I saw the representation contract next to them. It had been signed by Finch a week earlier with the Graygon Gallery.
Which meant that here we were, a month later, and Keith wasn’t representing Finch anymore, and he didn’t even know. I still hadn’t said a damn thing to Keith myself because I was worried about his fragile state— yes, losing Finch was going to kill him. But I also felt guilty about how I knew. Sleeping with Keith’s most important artist could easily cause problems for him— and I was embarrassed, too. So I’d decided to do the only logical thing— make my one bad decision worse by leaving Keith in the dark.
To think of all those times in college that I’d acted like I had all the answers. To think that I’d actually believed I did.
“It’s like a thing I can’t stop,” I remember Alice saying one night junior year. She was sitting cross-legged on my bed, face tearstained as she talked on and on about Keith and how she loved him, but how he was also breaking her heart. By then the two had been on and off for more than two years. She hadn’t told me the details of what had happened this time. And I hadn’t asked. Their relationship was a spectator sport no one wanted to watch.
“You need to pull yourself together, Alice,” I’d said. “You may be telling yourself you can’t stop things with Keith or whatever. But you actually can. You’re just choosing not to.”
I thought now of all those times Alice had called me the night she died. All those calls I’d ignored. Because I didn’t want to hear her still obsessing about what had happened on the roof. I never was good with being in the wrong.
Finch looked up at me finally. “Personally, I don’t think what happened was a mistake.” His voice had an edge, but a restrained one. “But I can respect that you do. Also, I was beginning to get that sense after the fifteenth unreturned message.” He smiled a little, luckily. I could live with him being angry at me— I just didn’t want him taking it out on Keith.
“We should get out of here,” I said, getting to my feet. Seemed best to end this conversation while I was ahead. “Before that contractor comes looking for Jonathan.”