Cleo made it over after class with two bottles of wine in hand, I changed into sweats, and we moved to my blue velvet couch to discuss how to handle my newfound fame. As we talked, BuzzFeed published “SubwayQTs Is the Love Story We Didn’t Know We Needed but Now Can’t Live Without.” I locked my Instagram account, deleted my already dead Twitter page, and deactivated Facebook. We opened the second bottle of wine.
“I swear this will all be over soon,” Lola said reassuringly from the floor, where she sat on the giant gold throw pillows that doubled as chairs in my tiny space. “No one will remember this in a week.” She was using one of my hardcover books of Italian Renaissance art as a tray for a plate of crackers and cheese. My head was in Cleo’s lap, and she stroked my hair gently, raking her fingers along my scalp as if she could massage my infamy away.
“It’s just so embarrassing,” I moaned, shifting onto my back and pressing the heel of my palm against my forehead.
“Which part?” Cleo asked.
“Um, all of it?” I said rhetorically, as if it should be obvious.
“But I mean, what’s really upsetting you?” she pushed, shifting into lawyer mode. “Is it being fired, the fact that your ass was on full display, or slow-dancing with Hot Suit?”
“Losing my job, of course,” I replied honestly. I was out of work, and I basically lived paycheck to paycheck. I was screwed. “I know it’s just a job, but it felt like such a big part of my identity. Of who I am. And you know I already struggle with that stuff.”
Over the years, Cleo and Lola had listened as I worked through the challenges of not knowing much about my birth father. He was a vague entity, a tense subject with my mom, captured in one photograph I kept in the drawer of my bedside table. For my whole life, half of me had always felt like it existed in the shadows.
“And also,” I started, and I saw Cleo raise a brow in Lola’s direction. “Yes. Hot Suit. It’s never fun to be completely humiliated in front of someone, much less a person you’d ogle at in a normal situation. And I told him about that time I peed myself outside Cherry Tavern.”
Cleo winced. She’d been there to see that happen in real time.
“I mean, you all have seen every guy I’ve dated for the past ten years. None of them were ‘I carry a briefcase’ level of hot.”
“Nick the Graffiti Artist was hot,” Lola said.
“Nick who gave me a framed picture of himself for Valentine’s Day?”
“Oh, right, I forgot about that part.” Lola’s lips curled in horrified laughter.
“And then there was Rock Climber Aaron,” Cleo said. “Remember how his bed was in the kitchen of that apartment he shared with Jasper?”
Cleo had dated Jasper on and off in our midtwenties, and Rock Climber Aaron had been his roommate for a few months before moving back to Colorado for the ski season. His bed had been so close to the stove that his pillow caught on fire once while he was cooking us Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Cute butt, though.
“He literally told me he didn’t want to be exclusive, while his penis was still inside me.”
“Definitely not ‘I carry a briefcase’ hot,” Cleo said.
I sat up, pushing myself back against the other side of the couch and tucking my knees in toward my chest. “I just wish I could say thanks, you know?”
“And get his number,” said Lola.
I grabbed a pillow and tossed it at her in response.
It wasn’t his looks that had unraveled me. Something about him seeing me at my most vulnerable and not turning away, but rather stepping in to help, had felt both mortifying and thrilling all at once. For better or worse, he had seen the real me, and there was something about his expression in that moment that had told me he knew it. And even though the whole world could now view what had happened between us, it had also been something just the two of us shared.
“Lo,” chimed in Cleo, sensing my desire to change the subject. “I told Franny we’d help her come up with a plan for work.” The only thing Cleo loved more than making a plan was executing it.
Lola’s posture straightened, ears perked. She leaned forward in anticipation.
“My plan is to eat a big-ass bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips and watch every episode of Law and Order for a week,” I told them. “I’ll ride out my severance, apply to as many jobs as possible, and hopefully I’ll land something.”
“Or you could use this fifteen seconds of fame in your favor,” Cleo said matter-of-factly.