“I feel like I have already,” I say.
He likes to sleep naked and he likes me to sleep naked. On days when he gets up at five in the morning to go churn the new flavors, I make him turn on the light so I can see what he’s wearing. Then I roll over and fall back asleep.
Late mornings, when I get up, always involve a sort of piecing-together of what happened the night before. One day there are soggy tissues on the bedside table.
“Did I cry last night?” I ask him that night over tacos and horchata.
“Yeah, you were missing your family. And then you said you were scared about what’s gonna happen after you finish your PhD. And then you cried about your ex, and how horrible the breakup was.”
“Well, I guess we covered all bases in one go,” I say, scraping the jicama to the edge of my plate.
“And you, uh, you told me about the abortion,” he says, looking at me and lowering his voice. “I was sorry to hear about that. I cried a bit then, too.”
“Well—we don’t have to worry about that anymore,” I say. “I’m on the pill. It’s not gonna happen again.”
Another morning I wake up with a bad taste in my mouth. “You threw up,” he says, pushing the hair out of my eyes. “This might seem forward but I’m getting you a toothbrush to keep here. You puked your little heart out, then wrestled mine from me and insisted on using it.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I hide my face in his underarm and groan. “I have hangover head.”
“That’s the worst,” he says.
“Yeah, wait till you’re in your late twenties. It doesn’t just disappear at ten A.M. It sticks around all day till you hit the bars again that night.”
Another morning I wake up with a clear head but feeling like something terrible happened the night before. He’s not next to me in the bed. I find him in the kitchen making breakfast, a bowl of torn-up bread and soft-boiled eggs all mushed together. We eat on the couch in the living room. Then he carries my bike down the stairs and kisses me goodbye at the front door, and I think: I love him.
“Just so you know,” he says. “You told me you love me last night.”
“No, I didn’t,” I say, then I get on my bike and ride away.
Halfway home, I stop and get out my phone to text him. It doesn’t count when you’re drunk, I write. And anyway, I think boys are gross.
It is two excruciating hours before he writes back. I hate dating people with real jobs. The answer, when it comes, says Uh-huh, whatever you say.
I swear to myself that I won’t say it again until he does, but the next night I say it again. The morning after that, I wake up before him and whisper it in French to the croissant tattooed on his chest. After that I say it all the time. I can’t stop saying it. We’re watching a movie, or we’re lying in the park, and it just comes out.
“Oh my God.” I cover my mouth with both hands. “I didn’t mean to do that. Why do I keep doing that? Just ignore that.”
“I ignored it last time,” he says. “But this time I’m paying attention.”
I have other thoughts, too—embarrassing thoughts. Like I want to call him my boyfriend, and I want to add him to the “favorites” section in my phone. I want to take him back to the UK to see the house I grew up in, and sleep next to him in my old bedroom. I want to make him, God help me, a mixtape.
He finally says it back to me, on the Fourth of July. We’ve ridden our bikes to the Embarcadero to see the fireworks above the bay and missed them by a minute. He shouts it to me over the voices of people pushing past us, excited to get to their cars and go home. I’m not sure if he’s saying it because he means it, or because I’m bummed about not seeing the fireworks. But at the end of the night, in his room, in his bed, he says it again, all breathless and sleepy.
I say, “The week it’s gonna take me to get over this past month is gonna be the worst week ever of my life.”
He says, “Maybe you’ll never have to.”
—
He has a best friend. A short guy with blond curly hair and black plugs in his ears. His name is Connor. The three of us go to the Irish pub on Sy’s day off. I’ve walked past the place every day for years, but I’ve never been in. We all order beer. They get pulled-pork sandwiches and chat about people they know back home.
“Did you hear Charles and Kelly are getting married?” Connor says, chewing on a garlic fry.
“Uh-huh,” says Sy. “I told him a month ago that he should move out here. He was having anxiety attacks, and he said he didn’t know what to do with his life.”
“This is a great place to find out what you wanna do.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And now he’s getting married.”
“I know.”
“Crazy, dude.”
Connor is secretly seeing three different girls and he tells us that two of them showed up at the Homestead the night before. “I played it good,” he says. “I bounced between the two of them until Leila said she was really sorry, but she was super tired and had to go home. Then I took Jamie back to my place.”
“Nice,” says Sy. The waitress comes and takes orders for the next round, and leaves again.
“Dude,” says Connor, “this place only hires sevens.”
Sy is watching the Giants game playing on the TV behind the bar, but he turns back long enough to say, “Dude, not true.”
“Why does it have to be a number system?” I say. “It’s kind of insulting. Why can’t you just have a color grade? Like, one girl’s turquoise, another one’s magenta.”
“You’re a Mission nine and a Marina seven. Okay?” says Connor. “Happy now?” I don’t know what to say to that. I haven’t hung out with guys who talk like this since I was an undergrad and, besides, I am kind of happy with my rating.
The next night, I meet the rest of his friends from home. We go to Connor’s place on 25th Street, where a bunch of them are playing a card game with coins. They’re a hippie-ish group, with long dready hair and piercings in their eyebrows, lips, noses. The guys are sitting in a circle on the floor, gambling with quarters, and the girls are on the bed, humming along to the bluegrass playing from a laptop. I play two games with the guys and come in third both times. None of them asks me my name.
I defect to the bed. The girls are all talking about Gay Pride, and how it’s gonna be awesome, and they hear there’s lots of nudity, and should they go to the park or watch the parade downtown?
“Hey, they should also have a gay shame parade,” I say. “Where gay people dress up like they’re trying to pass as straight, and everyone else stands on the sidelines dressed like disapproving parents, shaking their heads.”
They all stop smiling and just look at me. I can actually see chewing gum stuck in a clump to one girl’s molar.
“She’s joking,” Sy says from the floor, and everyone relaxes a little.
“When did you all move here?” I ask them.
“A few months ago,” they say.
One of them asks where I’m from. “Cool,” she says when I tell her. “I’m going to Spain for my junior year abroad.”
“Hey,” says a skinny emo girl with a short fringe. “Did you hear about Charles and Kelly?”
“Uh-huh,” says a redhead girl. I recognize her from behind the counter at Aquarius Records. “We’re all going back for the wedding at the end of September.”
“Dude,” says Connor, throwing his cards into the center of the circle of guys. “I can’t believe it. So close. So fucking close.”
Sy hasn’t eaten dinner so we leave after a couple of hours. He buys a bag of cheese popcorn from a corner store on Mission Street. He eats it in handfuls on the ride back to his place, dropping pieces onto the road along the way.
“Your friends are cool,” I say.
“You think so?” he says. “I wasn’t sure.”
“Well, they’re kind of young,” I say. “There wasn’t a load of stuff to talk to them about.”
“Yeah,” he says. “They can b
e pretty first-level. But I don’t really mind that. I just enjoy their company, and accept them for who they are.” He keeps one hand on his handlebars, leans his head back, and pours the rest of the popcorn into his mouth.
“Those have so much MSG in them,” I say. “You’re gonna be up all night.”
“Nuh-uh,” he says, shoving the empty bag into his back pocket. “I always sleep well when you’re with me.”
The next week, my friends Nick and Rafael are having a dinner party at their place in Oakland. We take BART over to the Lake Merritt stop, carrying a six-pack of IPA and a carton of salt-and-pepper ice cream from his shop.
Nick answers the door and leads us into the kitchen, where everyone is sitting around, drinking gin and tonics. “Hey,” Rafael says, “maybe you have an opinion on this. We were talking about whether A Woman Under the Influence would be better or worse if you didn’t know Gena Rowlands was married to Cassavetes in real life. Thoughts?”
“Well, their mums are in it, too,” I say. “To me that’s much more—” Sy has his hands in his pockets and is looking around the kitchen. I catch myself. “Wait, can we not talk about film right away? Let the layperson think we’re actually fascinating people with diverse interests. For at least five minutes.”
“I’m not a layperson,” Sy says, putting his arm around me and waving at the group. “I’m her boyfriend.”
Dinner is homemade pasta with a pesto sauce, and halfway through the meal, the conversation turns back to Cassavetes. Sy is quiet the whole time, concentrating on his food. When he’s done with that, he leans back in his chair until his belly button is exposed, and yawns. Later, his phone rings in his pocket. He has to stand up to get to it because his jeans are so tight. It’s his dad, he says, and he goes into the living room to talk. Everyone else turns to me.
“We like him,” Amanda says. The others nod.
“How do you know you all like him?” I ask. “You haven’t discussed it. I’ve been sitting here the whole time.”
“He’s a much more comfortable person than Luke,” James says.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“And he’s so pretty,” Amanda says.
“So pretty.” All the guys agree.
“Is he prettier than me?” I ask. They all look at one another.
“Well, you’re cute,” Nick says, “but he’s just—everything.”
“You’re both very pretty,” Amanda says.
“Do you wanna make out with him?” I ask Nick.
“Can I make out with him?” he asks Rafael.
“I thought we said only during birthday week,” Rafael says.
Nick shakes his head. He looks down at his plate. “I can’t make out with him.”
“Hey, lady, what are you, pimping me out?” Sy comes back into the kitchen and snaps his phone shut.
“Trying to,” I say, “but no takers.”
“Wait,” he tells the others. “You haven’t even tasted my ice cream yet.”
Later, the two of us walk back to the station together. “Sorry if that was boring,” I say.
“It wasn’t at all,” he says. “They’re really nice. I mean, there’s definitely a nerd factor there. But I had a good time. It was relaxing. The pasta was good.”
I reach out and put my hand inside the pocket of his hoodie. He puts his hand in there, too, and covers mine with his.
“Are we there yet?” I ask, bumping his leg with my hip.
“Not even nearly,” he says.
—
We go to a party at the Common Room. It’s a welcome-back thing for a guy called Calvin, who moved out to Brooklyn to work for Café Grumpy a year ago, and just got back. Everyone’s doing KGB shots. In England we call it Russian Cocaine. You dip a lemon slice in sugar on one side and ground coffee on the other. Then you drink a shot of vodka and eat the lemon, coffee-side down. I do six.
There are probably a hundred people in there when Calvin gets up on the bar, all wobbly on his feet. “Man,” he says, “it’s good to be back.” Everyone cheers. Someone passes him a bottle of Maker’s and he takes a gulp. “In New York, there are hella babes.” Everyone screams. “But it’s good to see you ugly fuckers again.”
People are wasted by this point. I go to find Sy and he’s talking to a girl with Princess Leia braids in her hair. When I come up, she walks away. He puts a hand on my arm.
“Why aren’t we kissing?” I ask him.
“I dunno. I feel kind of uncomfortable being affectionate around your ex.”
“Luke?” I say. “Don’t worry, he’s fine with it.”
“Maybe,” he says. “When someone introduced us, he shook my hand and called me 2.0.”
“He’s just jealous,” I say.
“Exactly.”
Everywhere around us people are making out with each other. Unlikely couples, like Pete from Bi-Rite and Violet the documentary filmmaker who is, as far as I know, a radical lesbian documentary filmmaker.
Calvin calls me over and pours some Maker’s into a cup for me. “What news of New York?” I ask him.
“Man, there’s like a portal from here to Brooklyn,” he says. “Everyone dresses the same, listens to the same tunes. You run into people from here all the time. It’s crazytown.”
When I look around, Princess Leia is talking to Sy again, doing a little dance that makes him laugh.
“But the weather,” Calvin says. “The weather is shitty as fuck. You know how people always say that September eleventh was the most perfect summer day? They keep saying that because they have, like, three nice days a year. They were all kinda pissed that the terrorists ruined one of them.”
When I turn again, Sy and the girl are heading out the front door. “Hey,” says Calvin. “I picked up a little blow habit in New York. And I picked up a little blow when I got back. Wanna have a key party?”
“Uh, I’m a member in England,” I say.
I’m halfway to the door when I see Katie the manager locking it.
“I need to get outside,” I tell her.
“The cops came and I told them I’d lock the door so no more people could get in.”
“I have to.” I fumble with the lock until it turns, and I push the door open.
The street is quiet, the sounds of the party muffled behind glass. Sy is sitting on someone’s front steps by himself, smoking a joint.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Just getting some fresh air.”
“Where did that girl go?”
“What girl? Oh, I don’t know. I guess she went home.”
“Did you make out with her?”
He looks at me like I’m crazy. “No,” he says.
“I don’t care if you did,” I tell him. “Just be honest about it.”
“I didn’t do anything with her. I’m in love with this other lady.”
“I don’t believe you. And I don’t even care. You can do whatever you want.”
Now he looks terrified. “Claire,” he says.
“I don’t care. I don’t really even live here, anyway.”
He stands up and flicks the rest of his joint into the gutter. “I’m going home,” he says. He walks away.
Back inside, Calvin is behind the bar, pulling shots. “Come here,” he says. “I’ll show you how.”
I go around and stand beside him. He shows me how to hold the portafilter under the grinder. I tamp it so unevenly that I have to throw the coffee out and start again. This time it’s better, and I get it into the machine and watch it drip into the demitasse. Then I taste it. It’s disgusting.
“Flavor notes?” he asks me.
“Uh, capers?” I say. “Salt-and-vinegar chips?”
He takes the cup out of my hand. “More like tears,” he says. Then he asks, “Can we kiss now, please?”
“No,” I say. “I have a boyfriend.” I picture Sy’s back as he walked away from me down the street.
“Well, can I touch your ass?”
“Uh, sure.”
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He grabs my butt and squeezes. “Nice,” he says.
“Thanks.”
Luke comes over and leans his elbows on the other side of the counter. “Did you screw up?” he asks.
I pout and nod.
“Why don’t you go find him and make things better?”
“I will,” I say, “whenever Calvin lets go of my butt.”
At two, I walk over to Sy’s and call his phone. He’s still awake. I follow him inside, watching his left foot turn in slightly as he climbs the stairs. In his room, he sits on the desk chair and I collapse onto his bed.
“What is it?” he asks me. “Do you think you don’t deserve to be loved or something?”
“I was just wastified,” I say. He doesn’t answer. I try again. “Everyone was drunk and making out and you wouldn’t kiss me and it made me insecure and I saw you leave with that girl and I got jealous.”
“I didn’t leave with her,” he says, his voice cracking on the word “leave.” I want to make a joke about his age and puberty but it’s not that moment. He swivels in his chair and turns to face the window. The lights on the Twin Peaks tower are blinking. I close my eyes and put my hands on my forehead.
“Listen,” I say. “I think I just have to open myself to the possibility that things are going to be okay with you and me. That it won’t end ugly like the rest.”
He turns and looks at me.
“I promise promise this won’t happen again.”
“Okay,” he says.
He comes and lies down and I shuffle over until we’re close. His hair smells like smoke. We don’t sleep together that night, but still I feel like things are going to be okay.
Another night, though, it happens again. We’re at a wine tasting in Hayes Valley with a bunch of his friends. When we get on our bikes to leave, he speeds ahead of me with the others and leaves me trying to catch up. I’m pedaling fast but soon they’re almost out of sight. Eventually Connor comes back to find me. “You okay, old lady?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I laugh. “I’m thinking of switching to ultralights.”
Sy is waiting for us alone at the lights opposite Zeitgeist. I ride up and tell him, “Everyone’s nicer to me than you are.”
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
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