Chapter 42

chapter 42

Smooth classical musicwashes over us in the dark. I can already tell by June’s stillness that she’s asleep.

“What are you doing?” I whisper to Patrick. This is the closest we’ve been since that night. His thigh is pressed up against mine, and I’m holding myself as still as I can. Not even leaning into his side as the car turns sharply.

June’s snoring softly. He smiles at her, then back at me, and even in my irritation I smile. The bastard’s breath smells like mint. “We can take a walk when we get there,” he whispers. “Or get a cup of coffee.” He leans in closer to me. “Do you really want to be third-wheeling it on this little scrimmage?” He looks out the window for a moment. “Look, I can get out and go home once we drop them off,” he says. “Entirely up to you.”

He holds my gaze for a long time. “I just… I know I owe you an explanation,” he says. “If you’ll let me.”

My resistance gives. “Fine.”

“You go on up,” I tell June when we arrive at her building. Her eyes dart to Patrick, then to me, and back to him. She shrugs, and the two of them shamble through her lobby.

It smells bright and clear outside. As if it’s about to snow. We’re posted up on the street in front of the glass-enclosed white entryway. I cross my arms to conserve heat and tuck my head as low as I can. Anyone reading our backlit body language across from us would take this for a breakup.

“I’m going to sound like an asshole however I say this,” he begins, hands shoved in his jeans pockets. I peer at him over my jacket collar. “Aliyah and I broke up.”

Maybe it’s the cold, but I don’t feel immediate relief. I search for a tremor of glee. I locate an ugly speck of smugness, but mostly I wonder who broke up with who.

“You got a Tinder alert,” I say accusingly. “In the bathroom. That first night we met at the bar.”

This has troubled me more than anything else. The fucked-up truth is that if he’d cheated on his girlfriend with me, I could have forgiven him. Hell, I’m damaged enough that I might have been flattered. But I wanted to believe better of him. The Patrick I knew—rather, the Patrick I thought I knew—is a much better person than I am. Better than some dude trawling dating sites for Strange.

“Right…” He sighs. “But it’s…”

“Oh God.” I throw my hands up. “Please don’t say it’s complicated.” I feel so stupid.

“We’re not actually together,” he says. The “actually” zips up my spine, settling into an exquisite twinge at the base of my skull. I find myself smiling.

I imagine Jeremy putting it exactly that way when he was hooking up with other people. “We’re roommates,” he’d whisper to yet another aspiring performance artist. “We were together, but now we’re not together-together.”

I am the common denominator. Patrick is an improvement over Jeremy, who is leagues beyond Holland, and for all three I am utterly disposable.

“I don’t know if it’s complicated,” he says. “More that…”

He’s shifting his weight from foot to foot. I realize how impractical his leather jacket is and I’m relieved to experience aversion. Vain men are weak, I reason. I congratulate myself for dodging a bullet. Fuck this man and the rest like him.

“Why does it bother you that I was on Tinder?”

I roll my eyes at the past tense.

“Look,” he begins. “You’re the one who hit me up in the middle of the night to meet you at the skeeviest bar in all of New York, including Staten Island. I’m like, holy shit, it’s Jayne. Maybe she’s new in town. Maybe she’s just out and about. I know nothing. I meet you. We get shitfaced; it’s fun. Then you pull me into a bathroom even though there’s a huge line of people waiting to go before us.”

I’m embarrassed to hear myself characterized like this.

“Then you puke, not on the sidewalk but in the literal street, almost getting decapitated by a moving vehicle, and then, just as I’m wondering what exactly I’ve gotten myself into, you announce that you’ve got nowhere else to go. Honestly, Jayne, if you were literally any other woman in this city, that would’ve been it. Actually, no, none of this would’ve happened in the first place. I would have tapped out a solid seven moves before that. But you’re you. I know your family. I’ve met your mom. I foster a healthy fear of your sister. I wasn’t going to leave you falling-down wasted in the gutter. So I loan you my clothes. You use my shower. I cook for you. I act like a fucking gentleman and give you the bed. We hang out the day after. I thought it was chill.”

He sighs. I can see his breath. His eyes are hard, then soft.

“Jayne,” he says. “I would have told you about Aliyah at any point had we seen each other again. I should have told you that first night. I knew it was fucked up. But it’s why we didn’t hook up. Why I stopped. But I also didn’t want to seem presumptuous and call you, like, I have a girlfriend. I was dating a lot of people, and I don’t know anything about your situation.”

“You were dating a lot of people?” My voice is anemic and pitiable.

I stare at him, face completely numb.

I glance up at the gleaming building, trying to see which unit is hers.

“They’re not done,” he says, reading my mind. He breathes into his fists and scowls.

“Here,” he says, nodding across the street. It’s a delivery entrance with a glorious recess and nice thick walls to block the wind. There are even stairs on a stoop.

Without hesitation we run-waddle and sit side by side, huddling close. “We had an open relationship because she wanted one,” he says. “It wasn’t working. So we broke up.”

I’m doubled over with my hands shoved in my pockets, and my breath warms my knees. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“No, I’m not.”

“We were together for two years,” he says. “Living together for six months. She didn’t tell me she applied to the Peace Corps. Meanwhile, I thought we only had to navigate grad school.”

It takes me everything not to ask where she applied.

“Instead she told me she was going to Peru for two years.”

“Jesus.”

“She slept with some rando a few months ago, but we talked about it like adults. We said we’d try an open relationship, and that’s when I met you.”

I tilt my head to look at him. He’s hunched over too, with his head turned toward me, temple to knees. It’s strangely intimate. Like we’re in a blanket fort.

“But then why break up?”

He sighs as he grinds the sockets of his eyes into his kneecaps. “Because I’m not built for this. I tried it. I did all that Tinder shit. Raya. Bumble. Whatever the fuck, Hinge. I thought maybe it was a good idea. I’ve had a girlfriend from the time I was fifteen. It’s like in high school, Asian dudes were one thing, but a decade later it’s like suddenly we’re all hot. It was ridiculous. I felt like such a trope, like one of those tech bros who gets all cut up and gets Lasik and acts like a totally different person. At first it was a laugh. I liked meeting all these people that I’d otherwise never know. Especially in New York. But having sex with strangers is fucking weird. I think I hate it.”

Recognition knocks at my heart.

“I felt so fucking emo.” His shoulders shake a little as he chuckles. “Like, I was getting offended that no one seemed to want to be friends with me.”

I can’t stop a tiny, sympathetic whine from escaping. I clear my throat. Fuck, he’s cute.

“It all started to blend together. The drinking, partying, random hook-ups. The shit freaked me out. When you’re fucked up, you’re not always as careful as you need to be. I started to get tested for STDs, like, every other day because I’m a total fucking hypochondriac and the anxiety was making me nuts.”

“Are you okay now?” Reluctant compassion wells squishily in my chest.

He nods. “When I saw you in the bar, man, it made me happy. I wanted someone to talk to, to just spend time with. You seemed a little messy, but the last thing I expected was that we’d hook up. Look, I’ve met girls like you. Shit, I’ve been curved by girls like you. And honestly, and I don’t know if this is fucked up, but you ask me to meet you at a hipster dive bar, high-key looking like the type of Asian fashion chick who drinks bubble tea but only dates white photographers who speak conversational Japanese, so I had zero expectations.”

I sit up. “What the fuck?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know, Jayne. But, that’s the vibe. Like, how many Asian guys have you dated?”

Malcolm Ito.

“I haven’t even…” I’m embarrassed to continue, but I hate that he’s turned it around like this. “I haven’t even had a real boyfriend.”

“But you’ve hooked up with guys?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Well…” I scoff. I glance across the street. I stare at the pavement, disappearing into myself. I wonder if he’s going to ask if I’m obsessed with white-people things.

“Shit,” he says after a while. He rubs his palms on his denim-clad legs, sighs, and then turns to me. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I wonder if I go sufficiently dead inside whether I’ll feel the cold.

“I sound psychotic,” he says.

I can’t bring myself to meet his gaze. “What do you want, Patrick?” Jesus, men are exhausting. “You’re the one with a girlfriend.”

“I know.”

“And you’re cross-examining me about my choices.”

“I’m just trying to figure you out,” he says. “And it’s going very poorly. God, I sound like some asshole ajusshi.”

“Yeah, you’re not coming off great right now.”

“Fuck.”

Finally, I turn to him. “I wish you’d have just told me about her.”

“Same,” he says. “Hard same. But again…” He smiles ruefully. “Deadass I couldn’t tell if you’d care. Your whole thing about being fun and effervescent convinced me, until you effervesced all over the place and shit got dark so fast.”

I laugh despite myself. He’s not wrong. I finally see how wounded he appears. How bloodshot his eyes are. It’s clear to me now how much he looks like someone going through a breakup.

“Man.” I let out a sigh. “You’re kind of a fuckboy.”

He grins. “Fair.”

We sit for a while. I nudge his shoulder with mine. “Yeah, well.” I sigh, my breath misting the air in front of me. “I started hooking up with this grifter who moved into my apartment, and he fucked a whole bunch of other people right in my bedroom while I slept on the couch. So…”

I feel him shift beside me. “Jesus. Guess you’d know a fuckboy when you see one,” he says.

“I’m like a truffle pig for fuckboys.”

He throws his head back and laughs. “You know what?” he says, getting to his feet, shaking his hair, and blowing air out through pursed lips. I look up at him.

He crouches in front of me and whispers close to my face, “I like you a lot, but it’s freezing.”

“This is dumb, right?”

“Want to come over?”

I nod, teeth chattering.