I’VE SWITCHED OVER to live TV in an attempt not to eavesdrop, but the floorboards creak as Miles paces in his room, and the indistinct murmur of his voice is tinged with something akin to frustration—at least, Miles’s chill version of that.
Then, something less indistinct: “No, no, I mean, obviously I want you to. It’s just . . .”
A pause. “Shit, Julia,” he says. “Just ask me next time. Don’t pretend you’re asking me when it’s already a done deal.”
After a beat, he opens the bedroom door. “Okay,” he’s saying. “See you then.” Another second and then, “Love you too.”
He takes a deep breath, then emerges from the hall, looking exhausted. “Everything okay?” I mute the TV: another show about a perfect couple
house-hunting in a nondescript suburb with a four-trillion-dollar budget.
Miles tosses his phone into the chair and rubs both hands over his face. “My sister can be kind of impulsive.”
I sit up further, pull a throw pillow into my lap. “Is she okay?”
He comes to sit on the couch, leaving a foot between us. With a sigh, he says, “She’s at the airport. In Traverse City.”
The airport closest to us. “What?” I say. “Why?”
He drops his face into his hands, massaging it for a second before meeting my eyes. “It’s . . .” He laugh-huffs. “I don’t know. She says she’s here to ‘help me take my mind off everything.’ ”
Well, that’s a sharp reminder of the state of things.
His jaw and forehead tense. “But something else is going on. Julia’s spontaneous, but she’s not fly across state lines with no warning spontaneous.”
He groans and massages his eyes again. “Sorry. This isn’t your problem. I just . . . She’s already here. So if it’s okay with you, I’m gonna go pick her up and bring her home. We don’t have to let her stay all week. Or if you don’t want her here at all, I can find her a hotel. I would’ve asked how you felt about it, if I’d known—”
“Miles, hey.” I grab his arm to get his attention. “Of course she can stay here. Unless you want me to say no, so that you don’t have to be the bad guy. In which case, absolutely the fuck not.”
He smiles. “She’s going to give me shit for the beard.”
“Oh, the mourning beard?” I tease. “The moving-to-the-woods-and- never-loving-again beard? Why would she have a problem with that?”
“Will you pretend to like it?” he asks.
My heart squeezes as I nod. It’s nice, feeling like we’re coconspirators. “Anything else?” I ask. “You want me to pretend your bong is mine?
Need to move your nudie mags under my bed?”
His head tips back on a bright laugh. “No nudie mags,” he says, “and for your information, I don’t have a bong.”
“What kind of a pothead doesn’t have a bong?” I ask.
“The kind who mostly uses weed when he needs to deep-clean the apartment, de-pill the couch, or watch Prehistoric Planet.”
“Okay, so the kind I’ve absolutely never met,” I say. He points both thumbs at himself. “This guy.”
“You’re just one of a kind, aren’t you,” I say.
I was trying to be jokey, playful, but his face softens and he catches my hands in his, running his thumbs up mine, a frisson of want bolting through me. “If she gets to be too much and you need me to kick her out,” he says, “just say the word.”
My throat feels desert-dry. “What should the word be?” “Ryan Reynolds,” he suggests.
My laugh breaks up some of the growing tension. “That’s two words, and also comes up way too often in casual conversation.”
“Okay, just scream enough at the top of your lungs and I’ll use context clues to figure it out.”
I ask, “Why are you so worried about this?”
“Well, for one thing,” he says, “she’s twenty-three.” “Are you calling me old,” I ask.
“I’m calling you thirty-three,” he says. “Rude,” I say.
“She’s the best,” he promises. “But she’s very much a little sister. She’s going to make herself completely at home. If your toothbrush goes missing, you’re going to want to just assume the worst and buy a new one.”
“I can’t even begin to imagine what the worst is in this scenario.” “Whatever it is,” he says, “it’s bad. Probably just don’t leave anything
you’re really attached to in the bathroom.” Our gazes hold for a second too long.
“So—” I begin, right as he says, “We probably shouldn’t—”
He laughs. My abdomen feels like one of those water wiggler toys, the glitter and liquid inside bubbling furiously to the top as it flips. I’m sure I’m blushing.
“After you,” I say.
He rubs the side of his head with the heel of his hand. “That was a bad idea, right?” He’s looking at me closely, like it wasn’t a rhetorical question. “I mean, we’re both just coming off of horrible breakups.”
He has a point. I’m not exactly myself right now. I don’t normally do things like this.
But the Daphne I’ve always been, the practical and intentional one, hasn’t exactly set me up for success. For a few minutes, I’d just wanted to give fun, casual Daphne a turn at the wheel.
She didn’t even run things when I was twenty-one, ferrying Sadie to frat parties and pulling her into the bushes when cops showed up to bust them. I was never the one just having fun. I was the one anticipating consequences.
It’s not that I want to revert to a twenty-one-year-old, but my whole life has collapsed, and I’ve been trying new things, and whatever just happened, it was new and fun.
Miles is still looking at me closely, like he’s making a decision. I feel my courage building, the words rising. Right when I’m about to tell him I don’t think it was a mistake, or even if it was, I might like a break from smart decisions, he sighs heavily and goes on: “We live together. If things got messy . . .”
The carbonated feeling in my chest turns leaden.
If things got messy, he’d need a new roommate, and I’d need a new apartment. As ready as I’ve been to flee the state, I’m here until the library gets through the Read-a-thon, and I can’t screw things up before then.
“Honestly,” he says, “I’m not usually the guy to think things through. But I really like you, and the last thing I want right now is to fuck up this friendship. Or hurt you.”
What exquisite timing for my identity crisis: he wants to do the smart thing, and I want to have reckless sex with him.
“I really like you too,” I tell him. At his faint smile, I clear my throat and add, “You’re a good friend. I don’t want to mess this up either.”
That part, at least, is still true. I just wish we could “not mess this up” in bed together.
“So,” he says, his small smile somewhere between apologetic and bemused, “friends?”
I clear my throat. “Of course.”
He stands, brow lifting on a smile. “And you’ll have my back with Julia, about the beard.”
“That’s what friends are for,” I deadpan.
His bemused smile splits open. “Wanna come to the airport with me?” “No, go have some time with your sister, and I’ll pick up here.” My gaze
dips and snaps back to his eyes, my face flushing. “What?” he says.
“Nothing, you’re just still . . . unzipped.”
“Oh, shit,” he says calmly, putting himself to rights without an ounce of shame. Unfortunately, I now find even this incredibly sexy. “Anything else I’m forgetting?” he asks, holding his arms out to his sides.
He looks like exactly what he is: a man I was recently straddling. “All good,” I chirp.
He smiles, pokes my chin one last time, then turns to leave without another look back.
 |
WHEN I WAS a kid, my mom was an amazing host.
I’m not sure how she did it while working full-time, but somehow the house was clean when it needed to be, the fridge and pantry stocked with the good stuff—name-brand sugary cereals and chips, off-brand cookies that were better than the originals. She’d order us greasy pizza for dinner, and in the morning serve fruit salad and scrambled eggs, one of her few specialties.
Before the first move, she, Dad, and I lived in a tiny two-bedroom, one- bath. Our boxy, outdated TV sometimes had random bars of color fuzzing across the picture until you smacked the side, but our furniture was all broken-in-to-perfection comfort, and the house smelled like basil and lemon, all the time.
When Dad moved out, we couldn’t afford that place, so we moved to a one-bedroom on the far side of town. It was on the fourth floor, with brown carpet and walls that seemed hollow. Its major selling point was its tiny balcony, overlooking a brown man-made pond and facing hundreds of other identical balconies.
Even so, all through elementary school, that tiny apartment was the
sleepover spot among my friends.
Then I got to junior high, and Mom was promoted from a teller at a local branch to an actual banker at one an hour and twenty minutes away.
For the first couple months, she’d drive me back on weekends, or my friend Lauren’s mom would bring Lo out on a Friday night and we’d take
her home Sunday.
But the trips, the phone calls, the texts tapered off as she found her footing in her new class and I made friends with some of the girls on the yearbook committee in mine.
Then we moved to St. Louis in eighth grade, so Mom could help open a branch there. It went so well they sent her to do the same thing in eastern Pennsylvania a year later. Junior year, we moved twice more, first to North Carolina, then to a suburb outside Alexandria.
The apartments got nicer, walls thick enough that you couldn’t hear the neighbors fighting (or passionately making up), ceilings that were smooth instead of popcorned, yards with trees and wooden fences where before we’d had gravel and chain link. Mom started working to get licensed to become a loan officer, and with the coursework on top of her job, the housework fell to me.
By then, we rarely had guests. Mom had no time for a social life, and I pretty much gave up making friends. I didn’t see the point. None of those friendships lasted beyond the next move.
A year later, I left for college in Columbus, where I met Sadie. My heart keens when I picture her.
Petite, whip-smart Sadie. We sat next to each other, in an elective class that was more a semester-long Jane Austen book club, on our very first day of college. The professor had us go around and introduce ourselves, say which Austen character we most related to and why. Ninety percent of our classmates said some variation of “I’m a total Lizzie.” The one boy among us declared, very boldly, that he was a Darcy. A couple of girls picked Elinor Dashwood, or Jane Bennet.
It was probably too honest for a stupid get-to-know-you game, but when it was my turn I said, “Unfortunately, I’m probably Charlotte Lucas.”
She was the most practical character I could think of, even if her practicality did lead her to marry Mr. Collins.
Beside me, Sadie erupted into laughter. “Don’t feel too bad. I’m probably Lydia.”
After class, she asked me if I wanted to go get coffee with her on her way to her next class. I genuinely couldn’t imagine just walking up to someone and starting a conversation, let alone asking them off the bat to hang out.
I tried that once, after the eighth-grade relocation. I believe the girl’s response was, “Ew. Why?”
Sadie befriended pretty much everyone she met, but that day, I felt like she chose me, in a way I’d never felt chosen.
She took me to my first frat party. I took her to Cellar Cinema, a tiny theater in the basement of a bookstore that Mom and I had gone to during our campus visit the year before. Sadie got us into bars, despite our lack of drinking-age IDs, and I dragged her to a backyard poetry reading where a guy I liked performed a truly horrific homage to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl that quickly resolved my crush on him.
We always joked that Sadie would have thrived as a lady in Regency England, because she embroidered and knitted, had a ballerina’s posture, and spoke both Spanish and French fluently. We joked I would thrive in an apocalypse, because I was kind of scrappy, already used to living on noodles, and could probably be pretty happy talking to no one for days on end, if I had enough books around.
For the next four years, I rarely had to make my own friends or score my own invitations. But whenever Sadie organized group hangs or threw Halloween parties, my job was to channel my mother and play host.
So the second Miles leaves to scoop Julia up from the airport, muscle memory takes over.
I wipe the kitchen down, sweep the crumbs into one corner, and vacuum them up. I bring a couple of candles out of my room and light them, opening the windows to let in fresh air. With a deep, preparatory breath, I open the hall closet, ignoring the right-hand side and its excess of thrifted lace tablecloths, votives, and the Dreaded Dress for my canceled wedding, and dig around for clean sheets and fresh towels, which I stack on the couch.
I vacuum under the cushions, scrub the bathroom sink, and load the handful of dishes into the washer.
It occurs to me then how little food we have on hand, so I grab my bag and keys and head out to wander the fluorescent-lit, mostly empty aisles of Tom’s.
I can’t buy much produce here without devastating Miles’s farm-stand- loving heart, but I grab a few apples and some broccoli, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a couple other essentials.
On my way to check out, I also detour to grab four new toothbrushes. Just in case.
I still make it home before them and have just finished putting everything away when two very loud voices move down the hallway, and the door swings open.
I see Miles first.
“Hey,” he says, stopping short, grinning like he’s pleasantly surprised to see me here. Like he forgot we lived together. I’m not sure if this is a compliment or an insult.
His sister barrels into the kitchen right behind him. She’s tall. As tall or possibly taller than him, and string-bean skinny with the same impish nose, perfect teeth, and dark hair, though hers is chopped into a little wavy French Girl bob, complete with baby bangs.
“Hi!” she says brightly, hurling—actually throwing—her duffel bag in the general direction of the living room. “You must be the roommate, Daphne.”
“And you must be the sister, Julia,” I say.
“What gave it away?” She hooks an arm around Miles’s neck and shoves the side of her face against his. “We look nothing alike.”
“Total stab in the dark,” I agree.
She pulls away from him, scratching her jaw. “You need to scrape that roadkill off your face,” she says, beelining toward the fridge. “I think I just got fleas.”
She opens the door and looks over her shoulder at me, though not in time to catch Miles mouthing something along the lines of Told you. “Have
you seen my brother without a beard?” Julia asks me. “He’s adorable. Like a fifteen percent less hot version of me.”
“I don’t know, I kind of like the beard,” I say.
She narrows her gaze on me. Then she straightens, lips pursing sourly as she considers me, like I’m a particularly tricky poker opponent. But I’m not. I’m terrible at lying, except when that one unhinged demon possessed me to make up a whole-ass boyfriend.
Suddenly, Julia spins toward Miles, pointing a finger in his face. “You fucking told her to say that!” she shouts, victorious.
He swats her hand out of the way. “Jules, inside voice. Our crotchety neighbor is going to come yell at us.”
“Admit it,” she cries, swatting his hand.
She spins toward me, face alight, a more extreme version of Miles’s lit- from-within, delighted-by-everything grin. “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you tell me the truth, Daphne.”
“Daphne,” Miles warns, trying to get past her. Julia puts her arms out to her sides, stance wide, a defensive guard keeping us from passing the deceit between us.
“Daphne!” she shrieks through laughter as Miles tries to push past. “Tell me the truth!”
“I already did!” I cry, running past both of them to the far side of the counter. “I like the beard! It’s grown on me!”
“Daphne.” Julia straightens up, hands on her hips. “We’re supposed to be a team here.”
“You just met,” Miles says, rounding the counter to stand beside me. “We’ve been living together for over two months.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Julia says, turning to resume digging through the fridge. “Holy shit, you have food in here. Like, not leftovers, I mean.”
“We do?” Miles says right as I say, “We do.” He glances at me. “Thanks.”
Julia snatches a grapefruit sparkling water and faces us as she pops the tab. “So how long have you guys been together?”
I choke on air. “What.”
“We’re not,” Miles says, clearly a little embarrassed.
Julia’s dark brows flick upward as she sips, then slams her can on the counter. If he’s a Labrador, she’s more of a clumsy pit bull, thwacking into corners and swinging her head into coffee tables without batting an eye, completely unselfconscious. I like her immediately.
Julia’s head tilts. “That’s not what Petra said.” “You talked to Petra?” Miles says.
“Not in a Judas Iscariot way,” she blurts. “I chewed her ass out over text a few weeks ago, and I never heard back. Then last week, she messaged me out of the blue, to say she’s happy for you.”
“How thoughtful,” I grumble.
Julia’s gaze wanders back to me. “Is there any particular reason she thinks you guys are sleeping together?”
I wonder if I have hives visibly forming on my neck. I also wonder if I have bruises where Miles bit me.
“That’s my fault,” I tell Julia. “Long story, but Peter—my ex—called me, and I accidentally just . . .”
Her brow rises as she waits for me to go on. It’s an exact Miles Nowak expression, but somehow it’s so much sharper on her.
“I straight-up lied,” I finish.
She stares at me for a second, then bursts into laughter, hinging over her hips and resting her whole face and arms on the counter as she shakes with giggles. When she finally peels her face off the granite, she says, “That’s fucking amazing.”
Miles smiles faintly. “That was my reaction too.”
Julia drums her hands on the counter for a second. “So. Should we get drunk?”
I laugh.
“Daphne works in the morning,” Miles says. “She hosts Story Hour at the library on Saturdays. Does all the voices.”
I don’t think he’s trying to embarrass me; I think he genuinely believes this is an interesting and maybe even impressive tidbit to share with his ultrahip, ultraconfident little sister.
“Oh, hell yeah, we should go see that,” she says.
“You really don’t need to do that,” I say. “Tomorrow’s book is The Stinky Cheese Man.”
“You can’t talk me out of it.” She angles herself back toward Miles. “What about you? You want to rage tonight? I’m sure you could afford to blow off some steam, judging by the . . .” She gestures toward his jaw.
He grabs the edge of the counter and lets his hips sink away from it, stretching his back with a groan. “Julia,” he says. “I’m thirty-six. If I get drunk, I pay for it.”
“Oh, bullshit,” I tease. “Last time, you were up on a breakfast sandwich run while I was still shaking with the sweats in bed.”
“Ha!” Julia cries. “Gotcha.”
“I can manage that every once in a while,” he allows, “but we’re supposed to go out Sunday night with our friend Ashleigh.”
I’m surprised he remembers. Then I look over his shoulder and realize he’s added it to the calendar, right next to the long arrow through the Sunday column.
“You’ll like her,” Miles tells his sister. Then his forehead wrinkles. “Or you’ll hate her. I’m actually not sure.”
“Time will tell,” Julia replies with a shrug and a slurp of seltzer. “Should we order pizza?”
He chances a glance at me, his voice a teasing scrape: “I’m sure Daphne would love that.”
A whisper shivers down my backbone: I love the sounds you make. “Actually, let’s do something else,” I say.
I try to think of the least sexy food I can come up with. Most food, I realize, is at least a little sexy.
“Nachos?” I say.
