I gazed at him with my chin propped on a fist.
“Cry me a river,” I giggled.
“I know. And those Syrian refugees think they’ve got problems.”
The wine arrived—red again—and we toasted.
“Do you get back home much?” I asked.
“To Omaha? Sometimes.” He took a long gulp from his glass. “Not really. My folks are much older. My dad used to be a pastor at a megachurch. One of those places where the minister walks around with the Britney Spears headset. But he ended up with dementia pretty young.”
“I’m sorry. That sounds like it could be rewarding, though, to grow up like that.”
“Oh, it was mostly a childhood of bigotry against gay people and anti-abortion rants washed down with some syrupy Jesusy swill.” He took another long pull, his glass nearly drained. “My folks didn’t really approve of what I went and did with my life. Hardly original, right?”
When he spoke of his family, I could see the haggard quality of his features. In the bathroom at the restaurant, I’d googled and learned that he was twelve years older than me, but only now did I see that age in him. He picked at his thumbnail, peeling back a sliver and discarding it on the floor. My eyes fell to the wine bottle. We’d once pitched for an Italian wine brand, and my idea had been “Open to Life” with the image visually connecting to the emotional sensation of an open wine bottle. Of course, what I actually drew was myself and Jefferey looking out over what had once been my family’s farm. When you want to create an emotional response in a stranger, you first look to your own joy or melancholy or nostalgia. Beth McClann didn’t like the pitch.
“Why did you ask me to dinner?” I said, breaking the long quiet that had settled. “Honestly.”
His eyebrows arched in an expression that could have been worry.
“You were in that bookstore. You were beautiful. Then you were smart. It was really nothing more than that—spur of the moment.”
“I just want to know why you’re doing this.” I hated how this comment made me sound, but it was honest. “If this is some kind of shtick you put on to sleep with civilians.”
“Look, you can go anytime you’d like. I’m not holding you hostage here. I thought we were having a good time.”
“We are.”
“Then why can’t you just enjoy it? Why do you have to question it every ten minutes?”
“You want to sleep with me,” I said, as if accusing my younger sister of stealing my clothes.
He rolled his eyes. “Of course I want to sleep with you. I don’t have a charity where I take out spinsters.”
“That’s what you’re after.”
“Is it that surprising?”
“I’ve just never heard it stated that bluntly. How often do you do this?”
“I’m not going through twenty questions with you.”
“I just want to know where I stand. What happens afterward.”
“Afterward, we fall asleep. In the morning, we get breakfast. Then I catch a flight in the afternoon back to LA. But I’ll be back in about a month when we start filming.”
I nodded and pretended to consider this. It was so stupid. All of it. I could think of a half dozen of my closest friends who would throw themselves at this opportunity—maybe even wreck a marriage over it. Yet here I was simply wishing I’d never gone to the bookstore that day.
In the cab, once again we were quiet, and I found myself pointlessly thinking of Jefferey. None of this would have happened if he could have just grown up, if he could have just been the person I wanted him to be, but that’s silly. That’s putting such a massive “if” into the formula it topples the entire equation.
When we met I was so unsure about him and yet grew to be so certain so quickly. Maybe I saw what I wanted to see. He’d been so confident texting on the app that I distrusted him. But he was also cute in that way we learned boys were cute where I grew up: tall and sturdy, an Opie-like face with big features. Big ears, big chin, big nose, big jaw, big lips. Blond hair parted on the side with a cowlick bursting out of the product he used to tame it. A face where you could still see the pudge that had covered it as a boy but had stretched out handsome. When we went out, he was not the brazen jock I’d expected from our brief interaction on the app. He was a goof, witty in a dumb, self-aware way. He also had the widest, most beautiful smile.
He worked in supply chain logistics but said he wanted to go back to school to become a high school history teacher; he loved graphic novels; he watched loud, idiotic superhero movies but in a way that I enjoyed, deconstructing the tropes in endlessly amusing fashion. He traced patterns on my back that made the hairs on my neck stand up. We waited a full month before we finally had sex, which when you’re a young person in the city is practically abstinence. We deleted the app together.
After a year I was sure I would marry him. My family adored him. We went down to Florida to see my brother, and while I chatted with my sister-in-law and ogled the new baby, my brother and Jefferey laughed like donkeys in the kitchen, tossing Corona caps into plastic cups and loudly debating college football. The other men I’d seriously dated in my life came to feel like filler, ways to learn the lessons young people need to learn before they’re ready for the real thing.
When we moved in together, the high lasted for months. I’d never lived with a boyfriend before, and there were so many weird things about it. The little razor clippings he left behind in the sink or how there were these sacrosanct times when the television absolutely had to be on a sport of some kind, and I came to find the white noise of a football broadcast oddly soothing. He had an old Nintendo 64 that he refused to throw away, and finally he forced me to learn how to play Mario Kart with him. We would stay in on Friday nights, drink wine, and play every level of Mario Kart, screaming whenever the lightning shrunk the other down to miniature go-cart size. In the mornings, when we were both grouchy with sleep, he’d sometimes start dancing in his boxers, swaying his hips wildly while eating cereal or cooking eggs. “You like my moves?” If I ignored him, he’d start jittering his thick legs with all that blond thigh hair. “How ’bout these moves? Bae likes these moves, don’t she?” It was so stupid, and it made me laugh so hard. He knew he could just go on like that and keep me in hysterics for hours. We hosted parties, and once he came up behind me about ten minutes before people were supposed to arrive and started kissing my neck. Without turning around, I unbuckled his belt, and he hiked up my dress. The way two people can learn each other, what the other enjoys and how to do things in a certain way. The right angle, the right way to move, the right way to hold me. He knew me. I would cradle his face and practically black out, holding the cheeks where those razor clippings began.
As we waited for the elevator in the hotel, his hand came to the small of my back, and I realized it was the first time he’d touched me intimately. In the elevator we were quiet. I stared at the floor and played with the jewel of my earring, felt how the stone was loose in the metal.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Just nervous.”
“Don’t be.”
“That’s easier said.”
His hand crept into my hair and his breath drew near. He smelled of neutral shampoo and the mint he’d popped. The kiss felt entirely natural.
He didn’t give me another chance to think about it. As soon as the door to his room closed (and this room was enormous—a separate bedroom adjacent to the living room, a wide view of the vast, blinking cityscape through the windows), he was kissing my neck. He worked quickly, popping open each button of my blouse, finding the zipper on my jeans. I sat on the bed, and he slid them off.