Page 101 of Bad Words

“Wednesday?” she said. “I get off at eight thirty—we could do a late dinner?”

“That sounds great.”

On the doormat she rose up on her toes and kissed me, her lips cool and soft, and I felt that pleasant buzz in my fingertips, the same thing I’d felt an hour ago, when, lying on the sofa, she’d turned to me halfway through Roman Holiday, and I’d dipped my face to hers and kissed her with a kind of determination.

Once she’d gone, I washed out the beer bottles, wiped down the table, and opened my laptop. After one look at my draft I shut my computer and pushed it away, disgusted, for some reason, by the sight.

Arthur slouched out of his room at eleven and crossed into the bathroom. “What’s up,” he said, emerging with his toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. “You have a good night with bookstore girl?”

“Yeah. She’s nice, it went well.”

“Thought so. Heard the movie going.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “What’s her thing?”

“Um, she’s from Michigan and studied English in college, and she has two sisters. She’s into the indie rock scene. She plays guitar, which is cool.”

“Cool, yeah.” Arthur went into the bathroom and spat.

Lying in bed an hour later, inhaling the floral hint that Emily had left on my T-shirt, I tried to think of her. But it was Selina’s instant of surprise that kept intruding into my mind.

I’d never so much as taken Selina’s hand. For God’s sake, she’d never so much as given me an indication that she liked my company.

Didn’t she? said some idiotic part of me. We’d sent 128 emails over a week. Then New Year’s, and our conversation while I was in California. Did all this sum to anything besides Selina being pleasantly surprised that she didn’t hate me?

I passed a restless weekend on my laptop, trying and failing to write. In cafés and libraries, I tried to write. Deleted. I wondered if, rather than self-identifying as a writer, I should tell people I was a deleter. Wednesday night, I told myself. A second date. This was going to be fun. Why couldn’t I have fun? Maybe High and Dry’s upcoming release was making me incapable of recognizing and appreciating fun. Selina didn’t message me about the Lispector.

On Monday night, I began to wonder if that book had been the real reason she’d come.

I knew the question was trouble as soon as it occurred to me, but I couldn’t put it back in the box. Doubt began to eat up minutes. Swaths of minutes. Why else would she have visited my apartment?

I ruminated on her cryptic expression in the Book Bar. You don’t ever have to apologize to me for your opinion. How long had I looked at her after that, feeling as though she’d reached forward and taken some vulnerable part of me in her hand?

Wednesday came as a relief. That afternoon, Bill called to tell me that I’d been invited to be the keynote speaker at a book festival in Seattle, whose chair had, apparently, adored High and Dry. I felt steadier than I had in days as Emily and I walked from Word to a vegetarian restaurant a block away, then settled into a corner where we could look through a glass window and see a brick oven in the kitchen.

“So, besides the good news, how was your day?” Emily asked.

“Not that productive. I mean, I spent about seven hours trying to write a paragraph, then got rid of the paragraph.”

“Ah, I’m so sorry!” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah, of course. I bet most people would be horrified at the amount of time authors spend failing to write.”

“It must feel so cool, though. I mean, doing the thing you love.”

“It does, yeah. I’m beyond lucky.” The words came easily. I’d said them before. I poured her some water and asked, “How was the store?”

“Pretty good, pretty good. Had a lady doing that thing where she asks for a book she saw four months ago, but she doesn’t remember the title, author, or genre.”

I laughed. “Did you figure it out?”

“I don’t know!” She laughed too. “Like, we tried. She bought this book, and she was like, I’m pretty sure this is the one. So, I hope it was the right one.”

“Yeah, hope so.”

“Right?”

“Yeah.” I took a quick drink of my wine. She was watching me, smiling, in a way that reminded me of Kate, this pause a gentle prompt that she was ready for a segue. “You, um—are you ready for your sister to visit?”

“So ready. We’re looking at doing Ellis Island. She’s never done the tourist stuff before. I mean, neither have I.”