“Maybe not,” I say as his eyes flash with anger.
“So what are you going to do?” he says, and only then do I realize I have no idea.
We hear Talia stirring, a welcome distraction. Though she should be able to get back to sleep on her own, I walk into the bedroom to look at her and Yuri follows me. She looks up at us and her lips form an enormous smile, and her fat cheeks rise up to her big ears and her fists come up to her face. As both of us smile and I stroke her now-fluffy little head, I consider that hey, if I was a baby, I, too, would be as happy as a pig in shit because why not be happy when you haven’t yet chosen your family, you haven’t learned to walk or seen any places outside the city or tasted solid food, you don’t know who the president is, and you have no idea that one day, hopefully long after all of your bad decisions have been made, you will be swiftly erased from the planet.
I stand outside Stas’s Harlem apartment for centuries sweating like a beast, that garbage-pizza scent rising through the air as the subway rumbles below me, waiting for him to let me up. The perfectly made-up, ponytailed, Uppababy-stroller gentrifying moms pass me with their coffees, laughing to each other like they are gliding on ice, like they never had to wipe shit off their feet or blood off their nipples. Mom friends, mom friends, Yuri and Steph have hinted that I should make mom friends, but what the fuck for? I already spend my time thinking about changing diapers and nap schedules, and why exactly would I want to spend time with a bunch of women talking more about the things that are driving me crazy? To each his own, though, I guess, but now I have to focus on talking to Stas and then checking out the stage again, while Yuri’s running errands with Tally, which is maybe a nice distraction from hating me.
When Stas finally opens the door, I feel like I’m his mom, showing up at his dorm unannounced, as if he had actively tried to cover up the smell of cigarettes I just walked into. He reaches out, as if he’s going to run a hand through my hair, but then he just strokes my shoulder and I reconsider, no, no, I am definitely not his mother.
“Hey,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Sorry if it’s too early.”
He laughs. “You’ve probably been up half the day already.”
I follow him up four flights of stairs and walk into a dumpy studio with pizza boxes stacked in the kitchen, towers of thin little books of poetry, and a few plants wilting by the door. The bed is unmade, and there’s a pile of clothes by it, and I try to remind myself what the shithole studios I lived in ten years ago looked like and that it was much worse than this, and yet, I can’t believe I’m lusting after a man-boy who lives in this place. But by the bedside, I see it, a framed photo of a girl who could only be his sister, standing with him by a lake, looking deliriously happy, a girl with big cheeks and goofy hair. She reminds me how happy I am not to be a preteen anymore.
“Your sister,” I say, holding it up and putting it back down.
“Is that what you came here to talk to me about?” he says. He has his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and he looks kind of guilty and ill at ease.
“I told Yuri about our kiss,” I say.
He takes a step back, and looks terrified and then a bit excited. “Why the fuck did you do that?”
I shrug. “I didn’t plan on it. I just kind of—felt like he should know.”
“It couldn’t have waited until after the play?”
“Like I said, I didn’t mean to. It just came out.”
He sighs. “I guess we’d have to deal with it eventually.” This is the first time he says we and it makes me dizzy. Not to mention the fact that he said eventually—that he didn’t think this would blow over.
“We?”
He sighs and sits down on his rumpled bed and puts his head in his hands. “You. And me. I don’t fucking know, Natasha,” he says.
“I don’t know either.”
“Look, if you want me to fight for you, it’s not gonna happen. If you want this, you can decide. But I can’t convince you I’m the right person for you or that you should ruin your life for me. I can tell you my feelings for you scare the shit out of me, but what difference should that make to you? I can’t predict the future.”
“All right then,” I say.
“All right,” he says. “I wish I could say more. But I have no fucking clue what will happen a month from now, let alone a year or a lifetime. I can say I think I’ll feel this way, but I can’t ask you to blow up your life on a feeling.”
“I never said I wanted you to,” I say.
What did he expect me to do, tell him to run away with me and Tally? Where would we go, exactly? How could we make it work? How could we even afford a place in New York? Anyway, I have no plans to leave Yuri because I’m not a delusional psychopath, and it’s nice to hear he doesn’t exactly think we’ve got long-term potential either. And yet, I move toward him, remembering the smoky taste of his tongue. It would have been nice if he had tried to make a plan, even if I had to shut him down, I guess.
“I think I’m losing my mind,” I tell him.
He nods slowly. “I lost mine a long time ago.”
He takes two steps toward me, and I take a few away, until I’m near the tiny balcony, and I open the screen door to get some air. I stand out, looking at the Columbia campus in the distance, a few hopeful students passing through the side gates. I turn from the balcony and see a photo he taped to the wall, of himself standing on some kind of hiking trail. It seems likely that his ex took the picture in question.
“What happened with the girl in Boston?”
“What girl?”
“What do you mean, ‘what girl?’ Yuri said you left because of a girl.”
“That’s what I told him. I left because of my sister.”
“You what?”
He sighed and sat down. “Our mom—she just can’t really take care of her, like I said. She had a bad few weeks where she was in bed almost the whole time and my sister and I had to do everything for her. Well, she climbed out of it and went back to work, but my sister, she—she asked if she could move in with me. For high school. And I know I should have said yes, I know that was the right thing to do, but I just started to panic. Like, who am I to take care of somebody? And how do I live my life with her always around? Our mom isn’t a danger to her—she’s just kind of out of it. I chickened out and made up some lie about my lease running out, and then really did break my lease and said I was leaving town for a while, but that I would figure out a plan for us soon. And we still talk every day like she never asked, like it never happened, but I know she’s waiting for me to come back. I’m a coward, right?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. I take a minute to process this, to understand there was no mystery ex, that he escaped from something bigger than that. “I think it’s okay to want space for yourself. It’s a lot to take on. But I know you don’t want to leave her alone out there either.”
“I miss her like hell.”
“I bet you do,” I say. “It’s okay to take time to figure this out. You’re not an asshole.”
“I called myself a coward, not an asshole,” he says, but he’s laughing a little.
“Same difference,” I say. I try to think of something brilliant to say about his shitty situation, but he seems to have cheered up a little.
“I’m glad I told you that,” he says.
“Me too.”
Then he runs a hand through his uncombed hair, trying to look presentable for whatever it is he has to say, and I feel nervous. “I wrote you something,” he tells me. He opens a drawer in his nightstand and pulls out a piece of paper.