“I don’t hate it. I just—didn’t expect you to be good.”
“Wow. Thanks.”
“No, I mean—fuck. It’s brilliant. Who knew I’d be getting high with Emily bloody Dickinson?”
I averted my eyes. How to tell him that I was actually a half-employed temp? I’d hardly written anything new since I moved toNew York. I’d dabbled in a part-time MFA program at CUNY, but I didn’t have the undergrad credits and I needed to pay for rent and cold brew. “Yeah, well, I mostly write grants, some freelance articles for magazines.”
“What kind of articles?”
My eyebrows knit together. Did he really care? My last assignment was to track down things that cost a dollar for theNew York Daily News. “And it couldn’t be sketchy.”
“No hand jobs?” He sipped his beer, his eyes cocked at me, mischievous.
“Those cost more than a dollar. They don’t call it ajobfor nothing. I tracked down a goldfish, a one-minute foot massage…”
“Go on, ya. That is some intrepid journalism.”
“…and a one-dollar slice.” I leaned my torso over the balcony. “Actually, I think Dom’s Dollar Slice is right near here.”
Roman extended a hand to pull me along with him, until we were floating down the stairs, right past the party, something out of an Esther Williams movie.
I liked watching Roman take his first bite of greasy, mediocre pizza that tastes like the best slice in Naples when you’re that stoned. “Damn, that is delicious. I’m new to New York. See, this is the kind of news I can use.”
“What? Your girlfriend didn’t tell you about the one-dollar goldfish?”
“She did not.” A breath, an admission. “I’m Australian, Chablis; we hardly have to open our mouths to do very well for ourselves in New York.”
“Not with me. See, I prefer swarthy, hirsute men. No interest in Australians. You’re like an entire nation of the football players who teased me in high school—except beefier and drunker and you watch crap soap operas and it’s a damn crime what you did to the Aboriginal people.”
“I take issue with that…Home and Awayis not crap.”
He inched closer. That crooked smile again. His blue-green eyes so intensely focused on mine. An attraction that hit me like a crowbar.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“The East Village.”
He tilted his head, grinning slow. “So why the fuck aren’t we there?”
I don’t remember Roman flagging a taxi. I only remember his fingers inside me, and the window cracked, and gasping for cold air as we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. The way Roman pulled down my tights and touched me under my dress and winter coat, not like the guys I met on dating apps. I mean, does anyone really enjoy getting fingered? This was different. It was as if he’d taken an anatomy class of only my body.
“Where’s this bloody apartment?”
I’d forgotten we were even in a taxi, headed anywhere but toward each other. “Just up here. By the Whole Foods…and…the TD Bank,” I said through heavy breaths.
We were both still wearing our jackets when we hit the bed and his head was between my legs. He pulled down my tights and slicked out of his peacoat. I unwrapped my scarf, still dotted with pizza crumbs and ash. Then he was on top of me, and I was on top of him, and when it was all done we both fell back on our backs. The radiator gaped. The room was a wreck, a pile of sheets and winter clothes and sweat.
We looked at each other and laughed. Sex wasn’t something I did that often. Much less sex with a stranger. He opened his arm, signaling for me to move closer. I lay my head on the fleshy part of his chest. I fit perfectly, a memory foam pillow. I rubbed my finger over his sandy chest hair. “Hmm. You’re hirsute enough, ya know.”
He ran his finger over a horseshoe of a scar under my breasts, kissed my forehead, then realized something. “What’s your name?”
“Emily,” I said. “My name is Emily.”
We spent every night together after that. On weekends, we’d hardly leave the bed, except to see a Bill Murray movie andMidnight Cowboyat the Metrograph. I always thought that in order for me to be attracted to a guy, he needed to be aloof. To tell me not to sleep over because his girlfriend would be back in the morning. Or to dump me on my birthday, like the junior editor of an online men’s magazine had done. I’d even gotten a spray tan for the occasion, and there I stood on a West Village sidewalk wondering what I’d done wrong, my palms the color of a traffic cone. Before Roman, I dated a freelance photojournalist with a studio apartment in Harlem with a mattress on the floor who would not stop talking about how much better life was in Guatemala. (He was not Guatemalan.) We were eating arepas in Morningside Heights one night when he told me his ex-girlfriend was moving back to New York, and he really wanted to give it another shot. He paid for his share of the eleven-dollar check and then slid it my way, noting that my two strawberry-lime licuados actually cost more than his “cerveza.” Roman did not do any of those things. Yet he still exuded an air of mystery that frightened me just enough.
For one, it had been a month and I’d never seen his apartment. I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to seem insecure. In Roman’s mind, I was still the cool poet who got high at parties and knew where to get a one-dollar foot massage (Waterlily Spa on Forsyth). So I lied. I said there was a bedbug infestation.
“They’ve got to fumigate all the apartments. Sleep at yours tonight?”
