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“My boyfriend.”
“He was your boss?”
“We were both the boss.” She was tense now. “We were partners in the business, and when we broke up, I got kicked out. That was three questions. It’s my turn.”
“Go ahead,” I said, spearing a strawberry.
She surprised me by asking, “Do you still play drums?”
I inhaled the strawberry, which was fresh. “Every day for at least an hour. I have a drum kit in the basement of my house. The room is soundproofed, which is why you never hear me.” I put down my fork to reach for my glass. “I’d invite you to come see it, but asking you to come alone into my soundproofed basement makes me seem a lot like a serial killer.”
Brit laughed at that—a real laugh that bubbled up from her chest. I felt like I’d won something good, something valuable. I paused with my glass in my hand and savored it.
“Okay, I’m giving my tentative approval,” she said. “We can be friends. But I’m not going into your basement.”
“A smart decision,” I said. “Dig in.”
FOUR
Brit
Two weeks later, I went out with Axel on another friend date. I’d spent the between time sleeping and scrolling social media, like I’d done since I left L.A. I added in a few other activities, though—namely helping Aunt Ellen around the house and spying on the Road Kings’ drummer.
Ellen would rather die than admit it, but there were things she couldn’t do as well as she used to. Even in the depths of the worst period of my life, I felt like a douche sitting on my butt while my great-aunt hauled garbage bags or shakily climbed onto a stepstool to change a light bulb. So I found myself doing regular chores—unpacking groceries, carrying laundry up and down flights of stairs. Ellen grumbled a little, but she let me take over with surprising ease. She also didn’t make a single comment about how “burning calories would be good for me,” something my mother would have loved to rub in.
Instead of staring fruitlessly at either my meager wardrobe or the sinking total in my bank account—the fallout of my complete crash and burn—I stared discreetly out the window, wondering what Axel’s life was like. The soundproofing in his basement must have been top notch, because I never heard his drumming sessions, and now that I knew him a little and had watched a Road Kings concert video on YouTube, I regretted that. I wanted to see his basement and listen to him play.
The mornings he went running were pure eye candy, watching him move in those magic sweatpants. When he came back, his shirt was always soaked through, but he kept up a brisk, tight pace instead of limping and gasping. One morning he spent an hour on his back deck, talking to someone on the phone, sitting on a chair with his feet up, his long, perfect legs stretched out. I heard him laughing, the musical sound filtering up through my window.
Another day, as the sun dappled beautifully through the trees, Axel spread a yoga mat out on that same deck and did an incredible sixty minutes of yoga, moving through poses that were more and more complex. One of the final poses had him with both palms flat on the ground, his elbows bent, his body braced on one shoulder as he lifted his legs in the air. In the perfect silence of the afternoon, he straightened one leg and bent the other in a way that defied gravity and anything I thought a human body could do. I watched, unable to look away.
What I felt when I spied on him was nothing as simple as lust. Lust was a pure, uncomplicated emotion, related to both joy and hope, requiring you to be in touch with your body and what it wanted. My body and I had been through too much, and we weren’t on good terms right now. We were like a married couple on the brink of divorce, picking fights with each other and enduring long silences. I fed it and studiously ignored everything else. My body retaliated with restless sleep, random headaches, and periods that followed no discernible schedule. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d touched myself. My body and I needed couples therapy.
So I didn’t exactly want to have sex with Axel. But Jesus, that body. I didn’tnotwant to have sex with him, either. I couldn’t picture the act, couldn’t imagine what he would feel like and taste like, whether he would be good. I couldn’t picture giving him pleasure, couldn’t picture him making me come. Just the thought of any man touching me made me stress-sweat, my breath coming short in panic.
“You two are suited,” was Aunt Ellen’s comment when I told her I’d had lunch with the hot neighbor.
“You sound like a lady in a Jane Austen novel,” I replied. “Like you’re trying to marry us off.”
“Ha!” Ellen waved a dismissive hand. “I’m the last person to talk marriage. I don’t believe in it. I just mean that both of you are young, and you’ve seen something of life. Your interests align. You’re probably friends on Snapchat.”
I laughed, and the look Ellen gave me said that she knew perfectly well what Snapchat was and that Axel and I didn’t use it. My great-aunt was more hip than she let on.
“It doesn’t have to be complicated, you know, just because he’s a man,” she said. “I’ve had plenty of man friends. Some of them were the intimate kind, but not all of them. Men can be useful even without sex, and not all of them are out to debauch you.”
I wasn’t looking for sex advice from her, but I found myself sitting in one of Aunt Ellen’s front porch chairs one morning, sipping an iced tea and reading a book instead of staying inside. When I’d been out there half an hour, Axel’s front door opened and he came out. He crossed his arms and smiled at me from his porch.
“There you are,” he said, as if he’d been looking for me.
And damn him, I felt myself smiling back. “Hi. What are you up to?”
“I’m going to run some errands.” He flipped his keys in the familiar way I’d noticed the first time I’d seen him. “Want to come?”
Now that I had his blue gaze on me, I realized that I wanted his company. I’d wanted it for a while. My mood lifted at the thought of it, and I didn’t care if it was just to run errands. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
It was a warm day,and Axel was wearing worn jeans and a threadbare gray tee, his tattoos fully visible and silver rings on his hands. He wore the necklace with the small medallion, paired with a second one of dark brown beads. His forearms flexed as he turned the wheel. The Arctic Monkeys’ “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High” played on the stereo as the breeze blew through the car. He smelled good.
