Her Intern

by Anne Marsh

  * * *

  Jack goes with me to collect our next round of margaritas from the bar. He rattles off the impressive list of orders without hesitating; I suspect I’m only here to play waiter. Hazel is particularly challenging. Not only does she want her lime margarita with no salt, but she’s allergic to most food colorings, so Jack quizzes the bartender and then actually insists on reading the labels on the mixer bottles.

  He checks his phone while the bartender gets busy, but he must have no new messages because he puts it away and looks at me. “You don’t have to screw this up.”

  “What?”

  “This thing with Lola—you don’t have to screw it up. It’s okay to let her in.”

  I give him a side-eye stare. “Are you Mr. Sensitive now?”

  Jack snags the bowl of tortilla chips the bartender slides our way. “Just more experienced.”

  “Not all of us want to get married.” I stuff a chip in my mouth, but Jack makes a good point. Exhibit A? The impressive collection of margaritas the bartender is making. I’d have just ordered two of everything so that everyone could find something, but Jack notices details about people. Maybe that’s why he’s married and the rest of us are not.

  Jack tosses me a menu. “Pick one.”

  “What?” I sound like a goddamned parrot.

  “Pick the drink you think Lola would like most.”

  Is he nuts? “We just ordered her a drink.”

  “You can pick a drink out for your girl, Dev. Just think about what she likes, and then read the nice words.”

  “She’s not my girl.”

  Jack tosses a chip at me. “Just because you’ve always refused to have a relationship with anyone of the opposite sex doesn’t mean you can’t. It means you won’t.” My face must convey the WTF-ery I’m feeling because he elaborates. “Lola seems great. You seem happy.”

  “So it seems like we should have a relationship?”

  “You already do.”

  “But—”

  He grabs another, larger handful of chips. Jack’s appetite is legendary. “Make it a good one. Make it not just about sex.”

  “But I like having sex with Lola.”

  “Noted,” Jack says dryly. “But ask yourself this—is that all you like doing with Lola? It’s naked times and nothing else?”

  “I’m not sure I should take relationship advice from a man who uses the phrase naked times.”

  “Yeah.” Something flickers in his eyes and then it’s gone. Probably too much salt. He points a chip at himself. “I’m going out on a limb here. Which of us is not relationship-challenged?”

  It is true that Jack got married a week after our college graduation. Molly doesn’t hang out with us often because first she was finishing a PhD in gender studies and now she’s got her academic career to think about. Max thinks we’d give her a lot of material to work with, but she clearly prefers her space. But since she and Jack are coming up on their fifth anniversary, he’s right about one thing. He’s Dr. Relationship here.

  “So you’re saying I’m about to totally screw this up.”

  He smacks me on the back. “I’m saying don’t. Don’t screw up. Don’t run screaming into that good night because you have a pattern of noncommittal dickitude.”

  “Now you’re just making words up.”

  “Lola seems great.” He passes his credit card to the bartender. “But I’m concerned about how the two of you met. I’m concerned that she’s smart but she’s gonna feel stupid when eventually you come clean about who you really are. Sex is great and the two of you should do whatever consensual shit you want. As long as you’re honest with each other and you’re both happy.”

  I look back at our table. Hazel’s narrating a story, hands waving over her head. She looks like an octopus having a seizure. Lola is laughing so hard that she has tears in her eyes. She’s sunburned, her hair salt-tangled and down for once. She looks quirky and gorgeous, free-spirited and downright amazing—and that’s just the outside packaging. I don’t need Jack to tell me I’m a lucky bastard and that I’d be a first-class idiot to let her go.

  I exhale and go there. “I don’t know what I want.”

  But the possibilities are scary.

  Maybe I do want more.

  More Lola.

  More nights and days.

  More lists, more laughter, more being there when life takes a bad turn and she needs someone to hold her while she cries or (since this is Lola) to piss her off and give her an outlet.

  “Pick a drink,” Jack repeats.

  I grab the menu and sort through possibilities. In addition to the usual beer and cocktail suspects, the bar offers a number of house specialties. They’re out of the ordinary, rather like Lola—so check. Spicy tamarind margarita? Lola doesn’t like hot food although she won’t admit it. Plus, I don’t think either of us knows what a tamarind is. There’s a margarita with limes and passion fruit but that will be on the sour end and Lola likes sweet. I finally settle on the ginger rosemary margarita. I also order tacos al pastor because Lola loves food even though she never cooks or makes time to grocery shop. Bon Appétit is her food porn. The tacos have mango pineapple salsa, so they count as a serving of fruit, too.

  Winner.

  When we return to the table, Hazel is expounding on the dangers of hot boys. She makes the I’m watching you sign, drawing her fingers away from her eyes in a V and pointing them at Jack and I. Somehow Max gets off scot-free. She’s also grossly overestimating Jack’s ability to be bad, if we’re being totally honest. He’s a happily married man who lives for his wife. It would be disgusting if he wasn’t thrilled about it.

  I set the frosty green margarita in front of Lola. It smells amazing, even if it’s the color of a garden hose. “Here.”

  She points to her other glass. “I’m good.”

  “I wanted you to have this one.”

  “Oh.” She fiddles with the stem of the glass for a moment, while the conversation washes over us. I expected her to be more curious.

  “You don’t like margaritas?”

  “No! Yes! I totally do.” She blushes. She colors up over the strangest things.

  “Drink.” I inch the glass closer to her with my finger.

  She squints and I hand her her glasses. “Did you put something in it?”

  “Christ.” I snatch the glass back and take a gulp. Maybe rosemary wasn’t the best idea. Or maybe it needs more tequila? It tastes like one of those super healthy green drinks except that there is no way more alcohol is good for us. “Poison tested. I swallowed. Your turn.”

  “That’s what she said,” Max deadpans. Fucker. But Lola giggles and grabs the glass back from me.

  “I thought you would like it.”

  Although apparently it tastes like shit.

  So... I suck at this.

  She takes the world’s smallest sip. It’s more of a lick than anything.

  “Well?” I demand.

  Jack face-palms from his end of the table. I’m cocking this up.

  She fiddles with the glass stem. “It’s great.”

  “So drink up.”

  Now she frowns. “I can’t. I have to drive home. The size of the shot is the variable, but I’m a hundred and forty pounds pretending to be a hundred and thirty. If I finish both drinks, I’ll be at .048 if the bartender poured a standard shot. I shouldn’t drive at that point, but if he poured on the generous side, I’m over the legal limit.”

  “Wow.” Max sets his own margarita down and stares at her. “Marry me?”

  I roll my eyes. “So crash at my place. It’s a ten-minute walk from here and we can come back tomorrow to pick up the cars.”

  It’s surprisingly easy to toss The Rule out the window and invite Lola back to my house. Jack flashes me a thumbs-up—apparently, I’ve redeemed myself. Ten minutes la
ter, Lola and I are walking back along the beach, Nellie bouncing ahead of us. I stole a to-go cup from the restaurant so we could take the rosemary-whatever margarita with us, and we take turns swigging from it. Lola hums under her breath, giggling to herself. My chest pinches. She’s really a lightweight. And fun. She’s so many things.

  We stop to stand on the beach for a moment. The sky looks amazing tonight, the stars scattered across the ink-black emptiness like a sparse, lean piece of code. The surfers have gone home and it’s just us and the lights of the houses lining the cliff. We have to pick our way through the rocks and then go up and down more than one set of stairs because this isn’t the Caribbean. California makes you work for the beach.

  To take my mind off the way Lola’s leggings showcase her ass, I ask the question that’s been bothering me. “So what’s up with the hot boy vendetta?”

  Her forehead wrinkles adorably. “What?”

  “Back there? At the Mexican place? You and Hazel were bonding over a shared dislike of hot boys. Is there something in particular you dislike?”

  “Mmm.” She flops down at the top of the last set of stairs. Not because she’s out of breath but so she can look up. When I lie down next to her, the sky is amazing. It’s still pretty cool even when Nellie sandwiches me on my free side.

  “How can you not enjoy the occasional hot boy? It’s like giving up candy bars or never having deep-fried Twinkies at the fair. You might as well go on one of those horrible no-sugar diets.”

  She turns her head, so she stares at me instead of the night sky. “Are you the deep-fried Twinkie in this analogy?”

  I shrug. “If you want me to be.”

  Her expression shifts. “I dated in college—the two years I went before I dropped out. Then I backpacked around Europe and hit Africa. I met guys, really fun guys, and sometimes we traveled together. Sometimes they stayed awhile.”

  “So they broke your heart.” I bet I can find them and kick their asses. There are advantages to having a computer programmer boyfri—

  I shouldn’t go there.

  She laughs quietly. “No, Dev, they didn’t. They were just crushes. I didn’t know who they were, not really. They might have been fabulous or awesome, but I never got to know them because I was having so much fun enjoying the fantasy of it all.”

  “Do you think about them?”

  “Not really.” It’s her turn to shrug. Tired of the disturbance in the nap force, Nellie moves to an empty step, curls up and goes back to sleep. “Do you think about the women you’ve slept with?”

  “Not really.”

  I may be just a bit of a manwhore. The truth is, I almost regret it. Just for a nanosecond. A nanosecond, for those of you without access to Google, is a billionth of a second. In that brief fraction of time, electricity can travel eleven point eight inches. So let’s just say that my regret is really fleeting. I’ve filled my plate up at the dessert bar in an all-you-can-eat buffet and only now learned that the chef will make crêpes suzette just for me. Lola’s gorgeous. Spectacular. An understated, elegant sweetheart of a beauty (poor wardrobe choices aside) who makes my mouth water. I in no way deserve her.

  We listen to the waves for a moment. Her hand reaches for mine.

  “We suck,” I announce.

  “I did.” She lets go of my hand, rolls over and straddles me, her legs hugging my sides. “But I’ve gotten my shit together finally. After I dropped out, I did that traveling. Then when I came back to the US, I was years behind all my college classmates. They’d stuck it out and graduated, but I was broke and degree-less. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I held a series of minimum wage jobs as I worked my way across the country. Car wash attendant, the girl at Costco who passes out the free cheese, library assistant, proofreader for a card catalog conversion project.” She ticks these off on her fingers. “I’ve done a lot of things. And then I discovered coding and that I liked it and was good at it.”

  “But no keeper guys?”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “No keepers.”

  It sounds like we’re both relationship virgins (although she sounds more like the sacrificial virgin than a virgin-by-choice).

  “So you don’t want anything more right now?”

  Her expression shifts and she pulls her phone out of her bag. I watch her fingers picking out letters on the tiny screen. When my own phone dings, I shift just enough to pull it out and read.

  I have a company to launch.

  I have the world to conquer.

  I have no time.

  I always get it wrong anyhow.

  She gets to her feet. “There’s no room in my life for a real relationship.”

  She stands over me, frowning, silhouetted by the night sky as she says all the things I’ve said to my lovers before. Not now, not here, not you. It doesn’t feel good.

  Whatever. It shouldn’t matter. I get halfway to my feet and then pat my back. “Your noble steed awaits, princess.”

  “Even better than holding out for a ride in Max’s Porsche,” she says solemnly.

  She leans against my back, sliding her arms around my throat. When I stand all the way up, she tucks her legs around my waist and buries her face in my neck. She only does that when we’re having sex, which means I’m getting horny and run-walk into my house.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Dev

  I FEEL MY face heat when I shove my key in the lock. I don’t bring girls back to my place—see the aforementioned Rule—so this lightning burst of panic is a new and unwelcome sensation. Did I pick up? Are the sheets clean? And Do I even have condoms here? Condoms aren’t the sort of thing you order up from Uber Eats. But it’s too late to plan now, so I open the door and lead the way inside. Lola’s close on my heels, probably because she’s been groping my ass the last hundred yards of her piggyback ride and not because she knows I’m panicking and need the distraction. Damn it. I have to stop thinking about Lola. And sex. And Lola.

  “Wow.” Lola halts just inside the door. She may say something else but I miss it, too busy messing with the alarm and pretending I’m not painfully hard.

  “Your house is amazing.” She scoots into the main living space, twirling in a slo-mo circle. Nellie follows her, barking happily. “And it’s huge. You could fit my entire apartment in here.”

  The living room runs the length of the house with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the ocean. The ocean’s now an inky expanse of black pricked with starlight and tiny whitecaps. Cruise ship lights hurry stage right. I’d had a decorator pick out the furniture after Hazel suggested Frat Boy 101 wasn’t a good look for a twenty-six-year-old boy genius, so I’m the proud owner of matching leather sofas in a creamy, milk chocolate brown. There’s also a generous helping of white linen, some faux fur stuff (no Mongolian lambs were sacrificed to decorate my man cave) and lots of spindly gold crap. It’s a compromise I can both live with and drink a beer on. Nellie seems to agree because she hops up on my designer sofa and passes out.

  Slightly drunk Lola moves around touching things and making cooing noises that remind me of a happy pigeon at the 16th Street BART station in San Francisco.

  She strokes a white vase shaped like a seashell. Or a gouty snail. “Where did you find this?”

  “Here?” I gave the decorator a key; she moved shit in.

  Lola points toward a watercolor and raises an eyebrow.

  “Still no clue,” I admit. Now that I look more closely, however, I kind of like it. It’s streaky, dreamy blues and yellows. It might have cost me thousands of dollars or might be something the decorator’s kids finger-painted.

  She waves her hand around the room. “Did you pick any of this stuff out?”

  “It matters?”

  “You have no memories.” She toes off her flip-flops and throws herself on the empty sofa. Her T-shirt rides up, exposing a sun-browned expanse o
f stomach, soft and curvy and perfect for kissing. I drop down beside her, brushing my fingers over her skin. She has a freckle to the right of her belly button. How have I not noticed the freckle before? What else have I missed?

  “I have plenty of memories,” I argue, lying down beside her. “Scoot over.”

  “You didn’t choose anything here. It’s just stuff—no stories, no souvenirs.” She pats my chest. “It’s sad.”

  Her hazel eyes roam the room, examining everything. I try to see it through her eyes but give up. Stuff matches, it’s paid for and everything looks relatively tidy even though the cleaner won’t come again until Monday. Looking at Lola is far more interesting than debating the provenance of my knickknacks.

  Our margaritas have definitely gone to her head. Her eyes are warm and happy. Bedroom eyes. Her hair is tangled around her face and she’s sort of coming apart, her T-shirt rucked up and the strings of her bikini top peeking out. I tug on one and it comes untied in my hand. Of course I appreciate the possibilities.

  Her big brain is also clearly on slo-mo because her eyes suddenly widen as she realizes that if these are my things, then I haven’t rented the place furnished. “Is this your house? Like, you own it?”

  Deflect. “Does it matter?”

  She waves toward the inky expanse of ocean. “How does a low-paid summer intern afford a place like this?”

  “State secret.” I lean over her, capturing her bottom lip between mine, and suck. She makes the sweetest sound, her breath growing faster as her eyes flutter closed.

  “Can you afford hot water?” she whispers when I let go.

  I roll off her, offer her a hand and pull her to her feet. “Let’s find out.”

  Lola

  Margaritas and I were best friends during my college days and I periodically renewed my acquaintance with them on a Mexican beach. Now that I’m a newly minted thirtysomething, however, tequila has clearly decided to renegotiate our relationship. My head swims, the world swinging slowly around me like an ornament on a Christmas tree. It’s pretty but dizzying, which ups the odds that I throw up. After setting up Nellie for the night with water and the spare can of dog food I carry in my purse, I’ve spent the last twenty minutes in Dev’s master bathroom working on getting my head screwed on right. Eventually, a shower seemed like the best answer, so I dropped my clothes on the bathroom floor and shut myself into his massive tiled shower stall.