“I’m trying to be a good student,” she says, and Janet lets out a soft meow. Her favorite sound in the world. “We’ll play later.”
She returns her attention to the blank Word document and blinking cursor. And then immediately shifts it to her phone, and her message chain with Nick. Across the kitchen, Janet swishes her tail, judging her. Then again, that’s always how Janet looks.
Surely it’s okay if she texts him about this. It’s topical, after all.
Ramona:I think the last time I wrote an essay, it was some “describe your summer vacation” bullshit
needless to say, I’m ready for a challenge
Nick:You have no idea how excited I am for this. I’m going to read yours first.
She must be ill, because her brain instantly turns those words suggestive. She pictures him reading it in a dark room, shirt undone at his throat—and then lets out a low groan, banging her forehead with her fist. He is herprofessor.
Which only makes the fantasy hotter.Fuck.
Ramona:the pressure!!
you’ll have to imagine me bent over the kitchen table, wearing threadbare pajamas that have definitely seen better days, kept alive solely by the miracle of sparkling water
To an extent, she recognizes what she’s doing, even if it’s harmless. Thinks about Betty, with her digital-only suitors. Ramona’s done her share of suggestive texting, but she’s never carried out an entire relationship through a screen. It’s the same reason she’s never sent nude photos—because she didn’t trust anyone to keep them private.
None of her boyfriends ever felt permanent. Either she’d get bored of them or they’d decide she couldn’t further their careers the way they hoped she could, so they tried to get as much out of her as possible before they ditched her. They weren’t obvious about it, not always—but she could tell.
“Such a prude,” the guy she dated after Zander would tease, begging for just one shot of her tits, something to keep him company while she was on tour, only it felt more like a sentencing than teasing.
Zander Parrish. Not where she wanted her mind to go tonight, but now she can’t turn it off.
Absently, she lets her attention drift from Microsoft Word to her internet browser. Types Zander’s name. His stupid face, always a little too attractive for their wholesome children’s show, beams back at her.
There’s nothing about the costumer Petra mentioned during their call. She clicks through news hit after news hit, fighting acringe every time she sees the wordCalamityville. Either the incident wasn’t as inflammatory as it sounded, or he has PR people good enough to bury it.
She hates the uneasy way this sits with her. So she types in another name.
Nick Navarroyields a number of results that aren’t her Nick Navarro, and it takes a couple scrolls down the page before she finds his teaching profile on the UCLA website. There’s a headshot and a bio that highlights only his academic history, i.e., not anything she’s actually interested in. Even his genuine smile is too sweet, like he’s just happy to be there. And there’s that gold hoop through his left ear—she wonders when he got it.
Picturing Nick reading her paper is a thrilling kind of motivation, though, because another couple hours and she’s doing a final read-through, checking her grammar and making sure all her sources are cited. A little too proud of herself, she opens their thread back up. He’s still online.
So she bites down on the inside of her cheek and lets her id lead the way, that pleasure-seeking part of her personality driven by impulse. Pure psychology.
Ramona:up late again?
—
Nick’s in the middle ofa scintillating night of grading when he gets Ramona’s text, and that’s when he pours himself a glass of whisky. He’s not a big drinker, but he and Kathryn used to go to tastings together, and he developed a taste for Macallan during a trip to Scotland that now feels like it happened in another lifetime. This bottle is the last one they brought back with them, andthough part of him wants to dump it down the drain and be done with it, his therapist thinks he ought to challenge himself to enjoy things he used to enjoy without them carrying painful memories.
So he’s trying. Six months ago, the Macallan might have represented the last trip they took together before things started to fall apart.
Now it’s mostly just a bottle of whisky.
The room is softly lit as he sits at the desk opposite his bed, the Velvet Underground spinning on his record player. Pushing aside the stack of assignments, he switches over to Google. All he has to do is typeramona wilder dand it autofills toramona wilder dating history. Cringing at his own curiosity, he hits enter. For science. This is purely a research project.
Rows and rows of photos appear, her smiling with a half dozen guys who all look somewhat interchangeable. Ramona looks different—glossier—and then he remembers that airbrushing exists. He tries to find it, her unhappiness, but she must have been damn good at faking it.
The Ramona in these photos, the ones with the Getty Images watermark, doesn’t seem as hard-edged as the one who challenged him in class.
The one who ate burritos with him in a strip mall parking lot and told him he washot.
As if she’s sitting right next to him whispering it in his ear, he tugs at the collar of his shirt. Loosens a button. The alcohol is already giving him a warning, turning his cheeks warm.
