“Just so we understand all of this,” Russell says, “you’re not upset with us?”
“I’m not.” Torrance glances at her ex-husband and current boyfriend, and there’s a real tenderness in the way she looks at him. “Seth?”
He shakes his head. “How can we be? You helped us realize we weren’t over.” He strides over to Torrance, draping an arm around her shoulders, and while it should be a casual, effortless move, I don’t miss the way Torrance’s eyes flutter, like she’s still processing the adrenaline rush of his touch. I know that feeling. I love that feeling. “It was a hell of a way for us to get here, but . . . it worked.”
“Our therapist is going to love this,” Torrance says.
God. They’re even going to therapy together.
This is surreal. They know the truth, and they’re not furious. I have whiplash—my emotions have done multiple one-eighties in the past half hour.
“I guess it worked for both of us!” Seth gives Torrance’s arm a quick squeeze before moving toward the door. “I’m going to see if they have any more of that champagne out there.”
And with that, he hustles out of the office.
“I don’t know what to say,” I admit. It should be comforting, maybe, that we were all conspiring together. But something about this wild truth has melted away all the magic from this snow day. I want to be as eager for a champagne toast as Seth, and yet there’s a hockey-puck-sized lump in my throat I’m not sure how to explain.
“I take it this means we’re not out of a job?” Russell asks. It sounds as though he’s across the room, maybe in a different office or different building, and not in the chair next to me.
“Definitely not,” Torrance says. “And I’m no longer managing Ari directly, but I see no reason why HR would need to know any of this. What you two did . . . it doesn’t change the kind of journalist or scientist you are.” She lets out a sharp ha. “In fact, it was almost its own form of journalism. But I think we can agree on honesty from here on out?”
“Yes,” I say emphatically, pushing my boots hard into the floor to keep myself present. “Of course.”
“Then I’m going to get back to that party!” She springs to her feet, scrunching a hand through her curls to return them to their usual state of perky perfection. “Let’s do another double date soon, okay?”
We’re quiet after she leaves, reality settling over us like a too-thick blanket. I’m desperate to know what’s going through Russell’s head, and if it’s anywhere near as chaotic as what’s going through mine. And yet I have no idea where to start. Probably with getting out of this chair. Out of this office.
“I think I’m going to take a walk,” Russell says. “Ari?”
He doesn’t need to ask me twice. I zip my coat and follow him outside, my brain buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.
“I’m still trying to process this,” Russell says when we’re a couple blocks from the station, ducking out of the way to avoid being caught in a snowball fight. “How exactly did they find out, anyway?”
My boots crunch into seven inches of snow. This street is usually jammed with cars waiting in traffic; today, only a handful of drivers are braving the roads. “Torrance saw an email we sent months ago, where we joked about trapping them somewhere in a snowstorm. I fucked up when I was forwarding it to her. I’m sorry.”
“It probably would have happened eventually,” he says, and I can’t tell if there’s a hint of blame in his voice.
“It doesn’t matter how they found out. What matters is that they’ve been doing the same thing. They’ve been manipulating us, the same way we were manipulating them.”
“Gently nudging,” Russell says, borrowing Seth’s wording.
“Sure.” The single syllable hangs in the air between us, shifting the temperature. Dragging it far below freezing.
It should make us equal. Two couples meddling in each other’s romantic lives—logically, they should cancel each other out. A mathematical relationship equation. I’d love to laugh it off like Torrance and Seth did, but this revelation has shaken me in a way I wasn’t expecting. We don’t have the foundation Torrance and Seth did. We weren’t building on something that was already established, albeit shattered. We were starting from scratch.
“We’re both a little on edge right now,” Russell says. He runs his fogged-up glasses along the hem of his jacket before putting them back on. “Let’s calm down, maybe get coffee and talk?”
I can calm down over coffee.
But first, I want some answers.
“I need to know,” I say as we pass the Thai restaurant where I had lunch with Torrance a few weeks ago. Across the street, some asshole kid swipes a carrot nose from a fresh snowman and chucks it into an alley. “That night on the retreat. If Torrance had gone with me to the hospital, would we have gotten as close as we did? If she was the one who took me back to my room afterward and helped me with everything?”
“Would we have—what?”
“I’m just trying to imagine what might have happened. If she hadn’t gently nudged you to take me, would we have started dating?”
“It’s not like the alternative was me letting you lie there in pain.” Russell’s voice is knife-edged now, his steps in the snow more deliberate. “She didn’t track me down and beg me to take you. I was glad to do it—I cared about you, and I wanted to make sure you were okay. She also didn’t ask me to go to your room or bring you vending machine candy. Or talk to you.”
The memories of that night flood back, warming my face even out in the cold. “I understand that,” I say softly, wanting to keep that memory untainted.
“Do the details really matter? We’re together, and it took us a while to be able to express what we both wanted, but we’re finally here. Can’t that be enough?”
I want it to be, so desperately I can almost feel the desire thumping next to my heart like a brand-new organ. He looks so lovely out here in the snow, the pink tip of his nose and ice crystals caught in his hair. I want to say okay and live out our snow-day fantasy. We’ll go sledding and build a lopsided snowman and drink cocoa in front of the fireplace. When we settle into bed, he’ll sweep my hair away from my ear and tell me again how good it feels to be around me.
“And my feelings for you didn’t suddenly materialize that night,” he continues. “I didn’t realize I cared about you after they disconnected your computer. And I didn’t instantly want to kiss you after Torrance told you to go home with me when I faked being seasick. I’d liked you for a while, Ari. I want to think we’d have gotten together eventually, whether I went with you to the hospital or not.”
Truthfully, I don’t think he’s wrong about that. But it’s not that we wouldn’t have found a way to each other. It’s that there’s been something keeping us together, preventing us from veering off course. And whether it’s a gentle nudge or a firm shove, it doesn’t change the fact that someone was pulling strings, making sure we never strayed too far from each other.