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LILY
The fire in my cheeks seemed to burn for the entire afternoon. Even Victoria, the brand development specialist in the desk nearest mine who had barely said good morning when I introduced myself, said something about it. She must not have been invited to lunch either, because she was sitting at her desk with a salad when I came in, a little dazed, a lot humiliated.
“Did you get a sunburn?” she asked as I sank numbly into my uncomfortable chair. I’d noticed earlier that everyone else had a fancy ergonomic chair. Now I could barely feel the hard, uncushioned seat or the strange curve of the back that seemed designed to puncture the spine.
“What?” I asked, trying to rest my arms on the armrests before I remembered it didn’t have any. I crossed my arms over my chest instead. I could still feel my arms reaching out for Con, extending away from my body as if of their own volition.
He’d thought I was reaching out to hug him. That was humiliating, but not as humiliating as the truth. The truth was that I didn’t know exactly why I’d reached for him. Maybe it was only to hug him goodbye—a reflex that had become ingrained in me after four years in the sorority. But God, I wasn’t sure. It hadn’t been a conscious action so much as an uncontrollable impulse to touch him. If he hadn’t stopped me, who knows what I would have done next.
Likely, I’d have humiliated myself far worse.
“A sunburn. I think you got one. Your face is bright red,” Victoria observed, pointing the tines of her fork at me and waggling them. “You need to start wearing sunscreen unless you want to look like a leather handbag by the time you’re thirty.”
Lily, this isn’t a sorority. In the real world, you shake hands with someone to say goodbye instead of rubbing up against them.
Con thought I was a moronic, juvenile, child. That stung. But not as badly as him thinking that I was trying to rub up against him. Mostly because I was afraid that I was.
“It’s not a sunburn,” I finally managed to answer her. I wanted to put the backs of my hands to my cheeks to cool them, but Victoria was watching me too closely. I wished she’d go back to ignoring me the way she had all morning.
“Then what is it?” she asked bluntly, popping a bite of salad in her mouth and chewing intently, her dark gaze never wavering from my face.
I desperately wanted to confide in someone, but Victoria was the last person I’d trust with my secrets. I barely knew her, but I knew her type too well. She was interested in me right now because she sensed there was something of interest going on beneath this supposed sunburn. If I gave her an opening, she’d root around until she found something of value to bring back to the other women in the office. Then she’d try to trade my secrets for a lunch invitation, like they were social currency.
I said the first thing that came to mind. “Rosacea.”
Her nose wrinkled. She pushed back her chair slightly, as if it was contagious. “Ew. Isn’t there a cream for that?”
“Yes, but it’s not working right now.” I gave into the impulse to put the cool backs of my hands to my cheeks and smiled at her between them. It was my turn to root around. “Why didn’t you go to lunch with the others?”
I knew why. It was because they hadn’t asked her. Other than me, she was the newest to the office. This was clearly a hierarchical environment that factored in time served. It gave me a bad taste in my mouth, like I was going backward. I hadn’t dealt with a clique like this since high school. Despite what people thought about sororities being exclusionary, ours really had been inclusive. I’d been cocooned by friendship since I was nineteen. I never thought I’d feel the overlording presence of a queen bee again at twenty-three.
Victoria’s avid gaze flickered away as she chewed, swallowed, and speared another bite. “Someone has to stay here to watch the phones,” she said unconvincingly. I felt a stab of pity at the pinched, unhappy expression on her face. At least I was only here for two months before I rotated to a new division. This was where Victoria was trying to make her career, and she didn’t look much older than me.
“I’ll stay next time,” I said.
“I mean, yeah. That would be fair.” She crunched down on her salad.
I rolled my eyes and shifted in my chair, trying to find a comfortable position. That would teach me to be nice.
Nice. That was all I was being earlier with Con. Friendly. It wasn’t what he made it sound like. I felt my cheeks heat again, but luckily Victoria was too engrossed in her phone to notice. I heard his low, tense voice in my ear again, but along with the embarrassment, a thrill of excitement went through me at the idea. A small, distant voice reminded me that this was Halley’s dad I was thinking about “rubbing up against,” but that wasn’t how I thought about him anymore.
My cheeks felt like they stayed warm throughout the rest of the afternoon. I’d forget about what happened with Con for a little while, but then something would happen that put me right back on the sidewalk. The sun at my back. My shadow stretching out to meet the tips of his fancy leather shoes. The way the rugged panes of his face shifted, first in surprise, then into something that I couldn’t identify, and then settled into the hard mask. I wished he didn’t wear those dark-framed sunglasses everywhere. If I could just see his eyes, maybe he wouldn’t be such a mystery to me.
By the time I left at the end of my first day, I was exhausted. Dealing with the exclusionary politics of the brand development team would have been tiring enough, but the way Con had completely taken over my brain was another. Not just my brain. My body kept reacting to the idea of him, the fantasy of us. It didn’t matter that the reality was that he’d pulled away like I was a leper, and that he was the most off-limits man in the world to me, even if he was interested. Which he definitely was not.
The strange, deliciously unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach that told me he might be was just wishful thinking. A juvenile, sorority-girl fantasy. Time to join the real world, Lily, I lectured myself as I stepped out onto the street in the bright sunshine.
It was a beautiful evening. The sky was still bright blue, and the world felt awash in light and luxury. As I walked toward Halley’s condo, it seemed like everywhere I looked, extraordinarily beautiful people were stepping into town cars that were ready to whisk them away to fancy restaurants or exciting parties. It seemed to me that these people were all living in an idealized version of the real world. They weren’t walking home alone, fantasizing about someone they could never have.
At the end of my second week, despite the beauty of the day and the place and the people, my heart grew heavier with every step I took. It took me most of the way back to Halley’s condo to identify the feeling.
I was lonely.
Of course I was. Other than an occasional conversation with Victoria or a pleasant exchange with a nice guy at work named Devon, I spent most of my time alone. Once in a while I had lunch with Maureen, Con’s EA who I’d gotten to know over the last few years because she was always available to help Halley and I when we were traveling and in a bind. But as much as I liked her, I was still alone most of the time.
I hadn’t been lonely in—God, I couldn’t remember. In college, I’d lived with no fewer than thirty girls. It was impossible to take a shower in complete privacy, without someone banging in to ask to borrow your clothes or to see if you wanted to grab coffee, much less get lonely. In high school, I’d had a few good friends I could always count on. I had to trace this sensation all the way back to early middle school—when my elementary school clique fell apart and I found myself adrift, unmoored, in the sea of puberty.
I’d felt awkward and hopeful and desperately alone, and it killed me to realize that was exactly how I felt now, a lifetime later.
