“You always knew?” I said softly. “About me?”
“Of course I did. Why do you think I was so skittish with you? You had this way of looking at me that was very intense, Neil. Like you were stripping me naked, and not just sexually. Like, existentially. It was a lot for a fifteen-year-old.”
“That’s embarrassing,” I said. I groped for the piece on the coffee table. Was the indignity of your teenage self always so close at hand, long after you thought you’d escaped?
She sucked in, held her puff, and then breathed out a slender rope of smoke. “Some girls, all they ever want is someone to look at them that way, you know? And I just ignored you.”
“Because you weren’t one of those girls.” I waved my hand, refusing another puff. “I drove. I should stop. If I want to drive back.”
“Those girls, though, they’re happy now. Their lives don’t look like this.” Anita glanced around at the emptiness of the apartment, and I followed her gaze. There was just one shelf across from us, with a few books, Bluetooth speakers, and a framed photo of Anita in cap and gown, flanked on either side by her mother and what I presumed to be her ajji—a fair-skinned woman with light eyes and the same Mona Lisa smirk as Anita. Next to it was her diploma: BA, magna cum laude, double major in economics and sociology. “Want less, and you can have everything you want. I always thought of those girls as unambitious.”
She was still waving the piece in my face, loopily.
“I can’t be too baked,” I said. “I have to drive home.”
“You don’t have to drive,” she said. She scooted closer. Her knee knocked mine. She didn’t move hers away. I didn’t move mine away. “What about you? What do you want? Love? Fame? Fortune?” She folded a heel into her crotch and dropped her bare thigh on my quad. Before I could answer, she added, in a newscaster baritone: “The chance to pull off the biggest known bridal gold heist in American desi history?”
My hand landed centimeters from her lower thigh, testing. I knew things about lust now. Could she tell? Could she sense that I’d become, in some way?
“You don’t want me to drive,” I said.
“Not if you don’t want to,” she said.
“Hang on.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet, a beat-up brown imitation-leather hand-me-down from my father, the same thing I’d been carrying since high school. I reached behind the driver’s license and pulled out the two golden hoops I’d taken from Anita’s nightstand ten years earlier. They had lived with me all this time, out of habit.
“Here.” I unlocked her knuckles from their hard fist and pressed the cold circles into her palm. “These belong to you.”
I felt the phantom of them on my skin then, all the times in Hammond Creek and Athens and Berkeley when I’d fingered them and placed them under my tongue, as though if I swallowed, I’d possess all Anita was—all we were—back then. And there, in the lingering cool circles of those hoops, those last physical mementos of the Lemonade Period, was one answer to what Anita had asked me. What did I want? It was impossible; all I wanted was what had already been lost. I wanted more than to change the past. I wanted to be consumed by it, to go back to a moment when all was still potential and I had ruined nothing, no one.
But absent that, there was this—Anita’s eyes widening as she slid each hoop through her bare earlobes and fingered them as though surprised they still fit. Then she was leaning over, her palms taking my head with surprising force, pressing me to her chest, as she whispered thank you, more than once, so I was sure she was not only speaking about the earrings.
“I need you, Neil,” she said. “Will you do it? Will you help?”
I brought my hands to her wrists and pressed them against the back of her couch. I nodded then, my cheek moving against her braless breasts, and I breathed, hot and hard, on the poke of her left nipple through the cotton, then the right. I looked up to see her eyes closed, her own mouth open. I didn’t know what private dreamscapes passed behind her lids, and yet I had a sense of the pattern, a collage of what had been lost, and what she craved.
“Yeah,” I said. I brushed my lips on her neck, still pressing her wrists into the sofa, as though we’d done this a thousand times before. “Yeah. I’ll do it. I have some terms, though.”
Her eyes opened. I loosened my grip on her wrists. “You want some,” she said.
I thought about hiding my need, but I couldn’t. “Yes,” I said into her skin.