Page 15 of 32 Days in May

Marco is looking down his nose at me, his thumb pressed into the slight dimple at the center of my chin. A bemused smile flickering on his lips. Slowly, he lowers his mouth until I feel the steady pulse of his breath. My breathing, on the other hand, is quick and ragged.

Then, he turns, the tender skin of his lips grazing my ear. “I’m going to kiss you,” he whispers.

I swallow. “Okay. Kiss me.”

His fingers flex their hold on me as he turns my mouth to his. The first time our lips meet, it’s so light, I wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t for the electric pulse between my thighs. The second time, I’m inching forward, dislodging my hands from underneath my legs, reaching for his belt loops. The third time, I’m almost panting.

His fingers migrate; they find the nape of my neck; they burrow into my hairline. He presses his forehead into mine. “Nadia,” he whispers my name, and I know it’s part of a longer thought. I can tell by the way he hangs on to the vowels.

“What?” I drag my hands up over his arms, feeling his muscles tense and relax. “Just say it.”

He makes no move to pull away from me; instead, his lips travel over my cheeks, across my jaw, down my neck, all while he says, “I’m . . . not good at following up. I have a way of taking good people and good situations a-and using them up. Just sucking the fucking life out of them. A-and you’re great. I think you’re fucking gorgeous and funny and smart, but I’m a fucking vampire. I-I just don’t want you to take it personally.”

“What makes you think,” I say, my voice heavy and slow. I don’t pull away. I can’t look at him. “I’m ever going to speak to you again?”

His fingers tighten in my hair.

Our mouths connect; this time, we’re desperate. Messy. Our teeth bump together and the toilet seat groans cacophonously when I pull Marco against me, maybe with a little too much force. My head hits the wall with a dull thud and we both gasp and laugh, and while I curse, Marco’s tongue slides down the side of my neck and then, my overalls are on the floor. His hands are everywhere. Under my shirt, down my thighs. Heavy breathing and sweaty T-shirts and my feet leave filthy footprints across the tile. My body throbs. It’s a new throb. Tomorrow, I’ll be ruined. Broken and battered. But right now, I want it to hurt.

“You can use me,” I tell him. But he’s so very gentle.

Friday, May 5

The moment I became too sick to keep working at Foster & Honey advertising agency is inexplicably tied to the moment I knew my life, as it had been for most of my twenties, was over.

Dance parties, dive bars, bar trivia, and biking everywhere. Sunbathing until my skin was the color of a penny and my mouth felt like the Sahara. Taking clients out to dinner, then drinks, then karaoke. Sleeping with a client, whoops. Lugging curb-treasure up endless flights of steps to my one-bedroom without any help.

It’s a short, tragic story: I lost my job and I lost my life and I ran away.

It begins with me sleeping through my alarm.

INTERIOR - DAY - Nadia’s studio apartment in Old City, Philadelphia.

The walls are exposed brick and NADIA, a voluptuous thirty-year-old with symmetrical tits and Brooke Shields eyebrows, is sleeping on a very expensive mattress on an even more expensive bed frame from some Scandinavian website. Not that Scandinavian website. A different one.

Yes, she is sleeping, but to the viewer, she appears to be dead.

Beside her, an analog alarm clock is going haywire. Screaming, rattling, nearly blowing steam.

A client kickoff meeting with a global travel insurance company she’s been courting for six months is already underway. She was supposed to be presenting the agency’s Super Bowl commercial pitch. Oh, sorry—THE BIG GAME commercial pitch. Nadia had written the three-and-a-half-minute spot set to air during the first quarter of the game. The commercial went like this . . .

A little girl boards her first flight alone from Boston to Shanghai to visit her grandparents for Lunar New Year. She’s thirteen and brave; she has a feeling she might just be destined for greatness. But for now, she’s biding her time in the wings, waiting until curtain call when she’ll be unveiled to the world in all her brilliance. Maybe she’ll be an astronaut—or an EGOT winner.

But right now, she’s all by herself on her fourteen-hour flight, and this little girl is starting to feel her smallness. Her youngness.

But saFeLY is there for her. Her bags are insured. Her parents can track her flight. A flight attendant brings her an extra ice-cream mochi. Ice cream still solves many of her problems. One day it won’t; life will become more and more complicated. But right now, everything is very simple. This little girl is safe.

Fade to end card: saFeLY. Life is hard. Travel shouldn’t be.

Yes, this is the script Nadia should be reading to a room full of rapt marketing executives. Instead, Nadia is asleep.

I’d spent hours and hours perfecting that script, polishing each line of dialogue, working with our art director to assemble the perfect mood-board, even curating a playlist made up of Chinese indie rock bands to run in the background while my copywriters performed the script.

I didn’t know I had lupus. I didn’t know it was even a possibility that I could have a disease like lupus, because nothing materially bad had ever really happened to me. I mean that. Sure, I’d had my heart broken. I’d gone through phases of intense personal grief. I’d hated myself, wondered if I was worth anything. I’d pinched the fat on my thigh till it bruised, wondering why I wasn’t naturally slender and waifish.

But all of that felt like part of the Faustian bargain that is living.

Plus, I was ambitious and hungry and I could. That was the best part: when I wanted to, I could just go and do and be. My insecurities and times of sadness had felt like seasons, not sentences.