So she started treating sex as another performance. She’d get herself off later, when he was asleep, or when she was back in her room.
But Nick—Nick wanted to touch her. Wanted to undo her, until she was panting on his desk with his hand between her thighs and her face in his shirt.
A purely physical release—that’s all it was. She’s not about to latch on to him just because he’s the first person to give her this kind of attention since her retirement. He cannot be the only man with magic fingers.
Even if it feels like a small crime that she didn’t get to watch him fall apart, too.
In the elevator, she bangs her head against the wall, just before it opens up and a gap-toothed tween she’s probably seen on TikTok steps inside with his parents.
And then she goes home and calls her therapist.
14
Back when Nick was stillmarried, he loved his weeknight routines. He’d finish work a little earlier than Kathryn, settling into the kitchen and picking out a record, something he knew his wife liked—Ziggy Stardust,Beauty and the Beat, anything Nina Simone. Kathryn would get home from her marketing job, put her arms around him, and kiss him on the shoulder blade. “What are we making?” she’d ask, dipping her finger into marinara sauce before getting out a cutting board and starting on the salad. Dinner, dishes, an episode of whichever critically acclaimed drama they were making their way through.
Maybe it was the most ordinary of ways to spend their weeknights, but it was comfort and safety andjoy, and as much as Nick liked his job, he always looked forward to coming home.
Then she started getting home later and later. Until one evening, when he innocently asked if she’d had a lot of work to finish up, she confessed that no, she hadn’t. She’d been having drinks with a coworker, and drinks had turned into dinner, had turned into feelings she hadn’t expected, though she’d been trying her best to ignore them for months.
“I think I’m in love with him,” Kathryn said, eyes full of tears. Nina Simone sang innuendos about sugar and sweetness, and Nick felt his whole world shatter around him.
The Nina Simone records were the first ones he donated to Goodwill.
The devastation had been twofold. How had he allowed it to get to this point, where Kathryn didn’t just have a crush but fullylovedsomeone else? And how had he not noticed? They were supposed to know each other better than anyone else. Shouldn’t he have realized she was drifting?
A year later, and he still can’t forgive himself for being the kind of person who gets left like that.
Lexi plants a hand on his shoulder. “Still in your therapist’s office?” she asks gently.
Nick runs a hand down his face, stretches out his legs on the chaise longue. They’re in the backyard next to the pool, Audrey at the barbecue firing up another couple hot dogs. Lexi has some paperwork in her lap, and Nick is dangerously close to his wallowing limit.
He did have therapy this afternoon after classes, where his therapist, Isabel, urged him to consider trying to date again. He wants to know when it stops feeling awkward, two strangers agreeing to meet up to see if they like each other enough to do it again. Or if it’s always like that, and he’ll just have to get used to it.
What he can’t get past, really, is the overwhelm of starting over. No inside jokes or years of shared memory. Unpacking the ugly bits of your life to someone new, hoping they won’t change their opinion of you.
At least he’s no longer worried about running into Kathryn with her new boyfriend. They got that out of the way prettyquickly, their carts almost colliding in the pasta aisle of Trader Joe’s. Awkward introductions, Kathryn’s face turning the color of the roasted red pepper pesto. Some bonus self-loathing to take home with his groceries.
“I’m good,” he promises his sister, which isn’t unlike what he promised Isabel.
He wants so badly to be the optimist, to keep any lingering pain from breaking through, even though Lexi is the last person who’d judge him. And he loves these weeknight routines too, the evenings with his family. He just wishes he could see what’s beyond them. What his life might look like once he has a place of his own.
Ever since Monday, Nick’s been rattled. One thing is clear that he couldn’t see in the lust haze of his office: it can’t happen again. And that’s why he hasn’t mentioned it to his therapist or his sister. Because it did not—cannot—mean anything.
God, it was like someone else had gained control of his body. He still can’t process what the hell actually happened, and he really can’t let himself process how good any of it felt. Absolutely not. He thought his morals were ironclad, but evidently all it took wasI think I make you flusteredto topple them. And send him into an ethical panic.
Their message chain has gone silent, and he misses that boost of oxytocin her texts gave him. Which makes him unsure if he genuinely likes her, or if he was rebounding in the most stereotypical way. A younger girl, and a forbidden one at that.
Sure, Behavior and the Brain has been a bit uncomfortable, the two of them avoiding eye contact, Ramona arriving the moment class starts and leaving the second it ends. But that’s only fifty minutes, three times a week. He can handle that.
Then there is the question of her panties. Throwing them away seemed wrong—that tiny scrap of silk and lace probably cost more than the monthly mortgage on his old house. He can think of a thousand obscene things to do with them, and maybe he’d be less tightly wound if he did two or three, but the fact of the matter remains: she is hisstudent. Perhaps he had a moment of weakness and indulged a fantasy, but he’s stronger now.
Even if he can still feel her, warm and trembling in his hands.
But every time he imagines what could have happened if someone had opened the door…
In the end, he tucks Ramona’s panties in the back of his dresser and tries his best to forget about them.
—
