21. Adam

21

ADAM

I think the next three days must be the most perfect I’ve ever spent. Anna and I hang around Janus’s apartment, and when she goes off to practice, Janus and I hole up in his den. When I ask him why he’s not in his office downtown, he says, “You’re here, buddy, and we never hang out together anymore. And if you think I’m not taking this opportunity to get help with my code, you’re off your rocker.” When I protest that I can come round anytime, he waves his hand, grumbling, “I can work remotely, and they can get used to me not being there and making their own goddamn decisions for a change.”

So, we both do meetings online and take calls, but it still makes my heart sing to fill the time in between with getting things done and sharing tech ideas, scarfing down homemade sandwiches and drinking too much coffee. I sketch out concepts for electronic kits and send them to Keith and Sean, and because I’m not there being sucked into day-to-day tech problems, I have more time to talk to Susie and give her more support. Janus and I walk Pepper and buy a fabulous flat white from the café downstairs in his building. After the first walk, Janus starts talking about buying a dog because he never walks around his neighborhood, and if he had one, he’d “get out more.”

I tell him what he needs is a kid in a stroller, and he tells me there’s nothing he’d like better than having a little Jo in miniature. He talks about how his parents are already dropping not-so-subtle hints about grandchildren and about a guy who’s got involved in Jo’s company whom he hates. And I tell him he has to make me the godfather of at least one of the children or I might never speak to him again.

Each day, Anna comes home and we take Pepper for another stroll through the neighborhood. The paparazzi haven’t caught on yet, so it’s a peaceful walk through quiet streets and a detour along the Hudson, and I talk to Anna about the ambitions I once had for my business and how I always wanted to buy a brownstone, and she tells me about fighting her way up through the Russian tennis system. When I listen to her stories about the pressure to take performance-enhancing drugs and the abuse from coaches, I understand why she doesn’t worry too much about a few press people with cameras on street corners, irritating though they are.

Most evenings, Janus, Anna and I do a Google Meet with Jo, who, it turns out, has never met Anna because Anna’s on the road so much. Jo claps her hands when we tell her we’re keeping Janus company, and Janus rolls his eyes at the lot of us. She fills us in on Samsung and all the big business politics she and her number two, Des, are dealing with, and I’m hit with a renewed enthusiasm for my little startup. Susie calls with figures for the last month and they’re better. We’re not setting the world on fire, but the dog kits are slowly ramping up, so I do a revised budget and it pushes the time I’m going to have to close the company out by a month. I tell Susie that, if she can keep the sales creeping up, any extra we make she can spend on advertising the dog kits.

On Wednesday night, a grocery delivery arrives with turkey and all the trimmings, and I wake up on Thanksgiving morning to find I’m alone in bed with two cats and Pepper sleeping in a row all along Anna’s side, like they’re all BFFs, and I snort into the bedsheets. I never want to leave the peace of this place, and when I tell Janus this while we’re cooking, he says I should move in, that “he loves having friends living here” and has plenty of space. When Anna comes back from practice, we’ve got a veritable feast on the table and we stuff ourselves and then lie around groaning .

If I thought my lack of control with Anna was due to a long dry spell, I’m starting to think I’m mistaken. Every night in the wide bed in Janus’s beautiful spare room, we sweat and fight and pin each other down, heat swirling around our bodies. I become more and more insatiable, and Anna gets braver and more adventurous. And I know this because she tells me she feels she can do anything she likes to me, that she’s never been like this in bed with a guy. And good Lord, letting her do things to me sets my skin on fire. She says she has nowhere and no part of her life where she can let loose, but now she’s found it, and I close my eyes and suck in a deep breath and ache. I can’t contemplate stopping living together and sharing a bed with Pepper. The idea of me going back to my place or her going back to hers turns my gut sour.

And lying there, on what will turn out to be the last day I stay in Janus’s apartment, I fondle Pepper’s ears and hope in my heart of hearts that she feels the same way.