Chapter Thirteen
FEBRUARY 14, 2024
Terra
Upstairs there are at least five bedrooms, with their doors all open to the hall. The room that draws me in is a library. Bookshelves stretch from floor to ceiling and line the entirety of three walls, except for a narrow space in the center of the back wall where a long window overlooks a park lit by small spots of yellow streetlights.
Isn’t it everyone’s dream to have a library like this? I trail my fingers over the spines, squinting to read titles in the dark. There’s fiction, nonfiction, reference, poetry. Books on photography and art and travel and cars. There are a few authors I recognize—Ursula Le Guin and Joan Didion and Donna Tartt, the kind of fiction written by women that a man would own—but there are even more that I don’t. The collection is huge but feels a little haphazard, not especially curated. The room is beautiful but not warm. There’s a giant firm leather sofa with old-fashioned brass detailing and two matching chairs with an ornately carved wood coffee table between them. Why does it feel like no one ever comes in here?
I leave the light off, sink down onto one of the chairs, and lift the wine bottle to my lips.
I’ve never been a huge drinker, but since I’ve graduated and there’s no professional women’s lacrosse league, I’ve discovered that wine and I are newfound buddies. But still not such close buddies that a glass plus an unknown quantity consumed straight from the bottle doesn’t go directly to my head. The tipsiness means that my thoughts float aimlessly. I quickly move past thinking about Nick, because I’ve wrung all of the thinking possible from that emotional sponge, and I steer clear of letting my mind wander to my research because it occupies all of my daylight thoughts and shouldn’t deserve my nighttime ones, too. But then my thoughts land on C again, and the idea of meeting up in person with him after so long makes me feel weak with nervous anticipation.
I wonder what he’s doing right now.
I wonder, for the millionth time, what he looks like.
I wonder whether I’ve seen him back home before.
And it’s these thoughts that distract me enough that I don’t hear the voices, a man and a woman, until they’re right outside the door.
Wine, attending a stupid party in a strange house, and my adrenaline-soaked blood from thinking about the Without question. Those are the only reasons to explain why, instead of comfortably remaining seated and facing whoever is about to enter the room, I panic and bolt with my bottle of wine into the library’s tiny closet, shutting myself inside.
Chapter Fourteen
FEBRUARY 14, 2024
Callum
Iallow myself to be led down the hallway, sensing the inevitability of what’s coming. Of course, Kristen and I aren’t the first exes to occasionally hook up after we’ve ended things, but for every time we said This is the last time, there is, at some point, an actual last time. For me, that was three weeks ago. For Kristen, it seems that actual last time hasn’t happened yet.
She tugs me into Dylan’s library and shuts the door, sealing us up inside. It smells like lemon wood polish and dust in here, and even when I walk toward the window, I can sense the way Kristen prowls over to me. I turn away, feigning obliviousness, pretending to study some of the book spines.
“Do you think he’s ever fucked someone on this couch?” Kristen asks, and I didn’t realize how close she’d come. Her breath fans warm across the back of my neck. I feel the hairs there stand on end and take a step to the side before turning to face her.
“Probably not.” Leaning casually back against the waist-high ledge in the middle of the bookshelf, I smile, trying to make the mood friendly, but not we’re-in-agreement-why-we’re-here friendly. “Leather gets a little squeaky. But that velvet sofa in the living room? He’s absolutely banged on that.”
A sound, like a tiny gasp, comes from somewhere across the room. For a beat, I’m elated that there’s someone else in here, someone to distract Kristen from her mission. But when I lean to the side, looking, there’s no one there. We’re alone.
Kristen steps forward into my field of vision, right up against me, and begins toying with the top button of my shirt. “Wanna be the first, then?”
Yes, I’d known it was inevitable, but the request still fills me with vague dread. We already broke up once. This is the problem with the casual hookup: having to break up again.
I like Kristen; I want us to still be friendly. We dated exclusively for a few months. The sex was always decent, but outside of that we have almost nothing in common. I guess it’s that combination that always made it easy to keep coming back into each other’s bed out of boredom or intoxication or lazy desire, but the lack of emotional connection always made me feel sort of gross afterward. Unfortunately, we have friends in common, work in the same lab, and even have a small research collaboration. Don’t shit where you eat, our graduate mentor said once, and he’d been talking about grad students behaving badly at department parties, but maybe he was also talking about dumbass ideas like dating your labmate.