"He could have been doing anything in New York. It's a big city. People go there."
"Cal hates cities," Erin says flatly. "He has said this to me personally, multiple times. He once described Manhattan as a sensory emergency."
"Maybe he was there to get laid," I blurt, reaching, grasping at anything. "He goes out of town for that. Everyone knows that."
The silence lasts about two seconds.
"Oh, he got laid alright," Poppy drawls, as she and Erin both dissolve into full, helpless laughter that fills my entire apartment.
I sit there holding my glass, watching two of the most perceptive women I know laugh themselves stupid, trying very hard to ignore that my face is on fire.
"We're not dumb, Lil," Poppy gasps, wiping her eyes. "We love you and we're happy for you and we are not dumb."
Erin straightens up, tucks her hair behind her ears, and levels me with a directness that makes her the person I can always trust.
"This is a safe space," she says. "I'm not telling Rome. I've known for a while and I made that decision then and I'm sticking to it. But you should tell him, Lily. Soon. Before he figures it out the way we did."
My stomach turns over. "How long have you known?"
"For sure? Since Christmas. The pinky thing."
I close my eyes in mortification. "What pinky thing?"
"Every time you passed each other. In the kitchen, in thehallway, at the table. Your pinkies touched. Every single time," Poppy tells me.
"Nobody else would notice. I did because I know what sneaking looks like. I did it with your brother for weeks before anyone found out," Erin fills in.
I press both hands over my face and sit there, behind my own palms, in the dark of my own making.
We'd been so careful. Months of separate arrivals and coded texts and never looking at each other too long in public. And the thing that gave us away wasn't a look or a word or a car parked on the wrong street. It was a pinky. The smallest possible point of contact, the thing we invented because we couldn't touch any other way. The thing that felt like ours, like a secret no one could see.
"Okay," I say into my hands before I drop them. My girls, the women who took me in and never let go, sitting right here waiting for me to trust them.
"Okay," I say again. ”What do you want to know?"
Poppy's face lights up like Christmas morning, and she bounces slightly where she sits.
"Everything. But first and most critically." She fixes me with a look of absolute seriousness. "Is sex still as pleasant as ever?"
"Sex," I say, choosing my words with great care, "is no longer pleasant."
They wait, leaning forward, barely breathing.
"Sex is filthy and all-consuming and sometimes I can't walk properly the next day and I have never been happier in my entire life."
Poppy slaps the floor with her open palm. Erin's wine sloshes dangerously close to the rim of her glass.
"There's more," I continue, because the hell with it. They wanted the truth and I was so tired of holding it alone and these women had earned every word.
"He has a slightly dominant side, nothing too bad. He tells me what to do and I do it and it's the hottest thing that has ever happened to me."
"I knew it," Poppy whispers reverently. "I knew it. The quiet ones, Erin. It's always the quiet ones."
"He calls me his good girl," I say, warming to this now, feeling the relief of confession spreading through me like wine.
"And his trouble. And when I push him far enough, when I'm bratty enough, his little slut." I pick up my glass and take a sip and hold both their gazes. "My favorite is when he can't choose between praising me or degrading me and is a blabbering mess."
The apartment goes silent for exactly one second. Then Poppy and Erin scream into an embrace, clutching each other like I've just announced I won the lottery, and I sit there, finally not hiding, and the relief is so enormous I feel lighter by actual pounds.
