Page 85 of Bad Words

I was rereading the text when he said, But also if you weren’t thinking about it that hard, that’s great!

Yeah, sorry, I said. I’m actually borderline hungover

Oh for real? What’d you do last night?

I thought for a moment, then wrote, My friend Julian had a house party. How about you?

Took it easy. I had to get up at 8:00

Nobody’s ever suffered like you’ve suffered, Arthur.

So true

Fly safe, I said. Then I turned off my screen and hunched over the counter, feeling like the conversation had wiped some fogged-up window clean in my mind, so that I could see clearly again.

Everyone in my life was reading Selina’s posts as mockery. Was I being overgenerous, reading them as something like banter?

I tugged my coat from the hook and laced up my boots. On our salted doorstep, I reread her texts, and this time they didn’t have the laughing, secretive tone I’d lent them the first go around. They sounded arch and scathing.

It’s an offensive text message.

That’s our entire thing, Parker. Offensive messages.

Maybe you drank enough last night to forget.

The wind raked across my face. I parted my lips and drank in the cold. Was Selina right, as always? Had I forgotten what this was?

It was just that I was trying to remember the version of her I’d met in October, the one who’d induced white-hot loathing from tiny behaviors like the handling of her purse or the turning of her head. I was trying to figure out what it meant that she’d invited me to a New Year’s party, and why I grabbed for my phone immediately whenever I thought she’d texted me. I was trying to figure out the difference between what I was doing now and what I’d been doing in November, when I’d woken up and checked her social media like it was the weather, obsessed by the thought of the next moment we’d interact.

My temples had begun to throb. I headed down the block, phone still in hand, and scrolled through the next few days of Google Flights. With New Year’s in the rearview, the prices of a San Francisco round trip had cratered.

With two taps, I was booked. I needed to get out of New York. I needed no further evidence that I was going stir-crazy than this: Even as I looked around at my neighborhood billowing with motion, the weaving of cars, the swaying of stoplights smacked by wind, the steaming of the halal stand on the corner—even as I walked faster and faster into the city that had revved back into life around me—I felt as though some part of me remained absolutely still, frozen opposite her in the darkness of last night.

I pushed my phone deep into my pocket, her texts unanswered.

Chapter EighteenSelina

The City office reopened on January 3, for which I was grateful. In the past two days, I’d checked my phone so often for a reply from Parker that by the time I went to sleep on Sunday night, I was fighting off embarrassment. But the next morning, my routine came back to me like a faithful pet. The blare of my alarm, the whining of the subway as I read my way into Manhattan, the bleary welcomes of my City coworkers. I was happier than usual to see Kellie swinging around the doorframe of my office, and to engage in the usual polite script.

“Did you have a good break?” I asked.

“Spectacular. My partner and I went to Iceland and saw the Northern Lights. I bet it’s the feeling astronauts get when they see Earth from orbit.” She jerked back, eyes wide, as though she’d been caught in a searchlight. “Flattens you. How was break for you?”

“Uneventful.”

“That’s all I get? You should work for the CIA.”

“Conflict of interest. I’m already working for MI6.”

Kellie laughed. “That tracks. By the way, Mike told me the anniversary party is black-tie this year.”

“What? Why?”

“To justify the hundred-and-twenty-dollar tickets, obviously. I’m trying to figure out how to tell Nextward Capital Associates that they don’t pay us enough to expect floor-length gowns.”

I smiled.

“What?” she said.