“Emmie, I invited him to my apartment tonight.”
There was a silence. Then Emeline said, “Wo-o-o-o-w.”
Sylvie could hear her sister smiling and Izzy burbling somewhere near the phone line.
“I’m going to be the only one of us who’s still a virgin,” Emeline said. “You have to call me after and tell me everything.”
“Do you want me to ask him if he has a nice friend to set you up with?”
“Heavens, no.” Emeline said this cheerfully. “I’m too busy with classes and work. But this is so exciting, Syl! Don’t forget to shave your legs. Look at your body and try to see it like a stranger.”
“He’s not a stranger. I’ve known him my whole life.”
“You know what I mean.”
Sylvie looked down at her jeans and tennis shoes. She tried to remember which pair of underwear she had put on that morning.
Emeline said, “You told Julia he came by, right?” When Sylvie didn’t respond right away, she said, “You have to call her, Sylvie. She’ll be hurt if you don’t tell her.”
Sylvie sighed. By the complicated math that tied the sisters together, Emeline was correct. There were four of them, but inside the four there were two pairs: Sylvie and Julia, and Emeline and Cecelia.
“You’re in your own place now,” Emeline said. She meant: It was excusable for you to be weird with Julia while you were homeless and sleeping next to me at night, but now you’re settled, so you need to do better.
“God damn it, Emeline,” Sylvie said. She knew Emeline didn’t like it when she swore. “Why do you have to be so wise?”
“I’m the only one without my own personal life, so I have time to watch you all.”
“I have to go back to work,” Sylvie said, and hung up. She told herself to call Julia whenever there was a lull at the library, but she didn’t, and the next thing she knew, it was time to close up.
* * *
—
Ernie arrived at eight on the dot, and Sylvie suspected he had been walking around the block until the exact time arrived. He wasn’t wearing his usual uniform of a white T-shirt and dark pants with pockets designed to hold tools. He had on a button-down shirt, and his hair was combed. He held a bottle of red wine.
“Do you like wine?” he asked.
Sylvie nodded, though she wondered if she would be able to drink. She was so nervous she was finding it hard to swallow. She looked around her tiny apartment and tried to see it through his eyes. Did it look worn and sad in the lamplight?
Ernie touched her cheek and said, “I can go if you want. We don’t need to do this, whatever this is.”
“Yes, we do,” she said. This was her new life, her life, whether she was ready for it or not. “Kiss me. That will make me feel better.”
Kissing did make her feel better. They had been kissing for years, after all. They never opened the wine. They didn’t have to step apart after ninety seconds or think about patrons or Head Librarian Elaine. Sylvie put her fingers in Ernie’s hair. When he unbuttoned her shirt and gently moved her bra aside to kiss her breast, Sylvie thought she might die from pleasure.
He rose up to check her face and said, “You like this?”
She said, “Oh yes.”
More kisses, and then they were tugging clothes off each other. Sylvie couldn’t believe that her body could feel this much. She couldn’t believe anything could feel this good. With her eyes closed, she saw warm colors: reds and oranges. They spoke, but Sylvie barely paid attention to her own words. Her body was responding to his body, her mouth to his mouth.
Afterward, though, when they were lying in each other’s arms, panic tickled the back of Sylvie’s neck. She heard herself say, in a voice that sounded too loud to her own ears, “Just so you know, I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”
“Okay.” Ernie’s stubble rubbed against her shoulder. “What are you looking for?”
Sylvie pictured William sitting on the bench and squeezed her eyes shut to make the image go away. “I’m not sure.”
“So we can just have fun together,” Ernie said, and rolled her over.
Can we do that? Sylvie thought. This certainly was fun. She’d never been this close to a man’s chest. It was so different from her own. Hairy. She ran her finger down the rivulet in the center of his abdomen. He ran his finger down the center of hers. He had to wiggle his finger slightly to fit between her breasts.
Kiss them, Sylvie thought, and somehow he knew, and did.
“I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything normal,” Ernie said finally, “from the girl who siren-called me to kiss her.”
He stopped touching her for a moment, and Sylvie almost yelled at him to resume. Her body arched toward his. “I siren-called you?”
He smiled at her body’s eagerness and pressed his cheek to the side of her breast. “A couple years ago,” he said, into her skin. “I was in the library. To write a paper for Mrs. Brewster. You came out of a row of books and gave me a look. No one had ever looked at me like that. I looked back. Then I pushed my chair back and followed you.”
“And we kissed.” Sylvie liked this story; she liked what he was doing to her body; she liked the girl she used to be.
“Mmm-hmm. Even when my life was terrible,” Ernie said, “I knew I could go to the library and kiss you.” He pulled back a little, looked at her. “Although one time I went there and you were kissing another guy.”
Sylvie blushed. “I didn’t see you.”
Ernie lowered back down with his sturdy body. She held on to his upper arms. “I was angry,” he said. “At first. But I had no right to be, you know? We weren’t dating. When you asked me to come over here, I thought of that other guy, though. I wondered—I wonder—if he was here first.”
“You’re the first.” Sylvie suddenly felt sad, and her voice sounded sad too—was there some basic human truth that if you were naked, you couldn’t control the tone of your voice? Like, her voice was naked too? She said, as evenly as she could, “There’s been no one else.”
But she was relieved when Ernie said he had to be at work early the next morning and needed to go home. “Maybe we can see each other tomorrow night?” he asked, and she made a noise that even she didn’t recognize as a yes or a no.
Sylvie waved to him awkwardly while he let himself out of the studio. Alone in bed, she covered her face with her hands. She felt a jumble of emotions at the same time: embarrassed, pleased with how great sex was, uncomfortable about Ernie. He’d said they could just have fun, and she found herself repeating the word fun inside her head. She didn’t think there was anything morally wrong with having sex with someone she liked but didn’t love, but a new loneliness had arrived deep inside her. She was aware that if her mother heard what Sylvie had done, Rose would drag her to St. Procopius and leave her there on her knees. But Rose lived on a beach in Florida now, and that felt like a punishment too. Sylvie curled into a ball under her covers and pushed herself into sleep.
The phone rang next to Sylvie’s mattress early the next morning, and she rolled over to answer it. She squinted at the sky through the window: pale light striped with pink clouds. Dawn.