Drowning Erin

by Elizabeth O'Roark

That sounds more like Brendan.

  Rob leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Look, I’m not happy about it, Erin, but I don’t want to fight with you tonight. So can we just table all this for a time when it’s not my last few hours with my beautiful girlfriend?”

  I agree with relief, and he throws his tie next to his jacket. “Then it seems to me you’re wearing too many clothes.”

  “I’m only wearing a tank top and shorts.”

  He grins. “Like I said. Too many clothes.”

  We walk into the bedroom. I don’t think we’ve ever once had sex anywhere else. Harper calls it boring, but there are far worse things than a boyfriend who’s a tiny bit predictable. His shirt comes off, his pants follow, and he slides into bed, pulling me against him.

  “I can’t believe I’m going to have to go without for a whole month,” he says against my mouth.

  I nod in agreement, although we’ve only slept together a few times since he started work on this merger, so I’m not sure a month apart is really going to feel all that different.

  He rolls me on my back. "Jesus,” he groans, already hard, pressed against my stomach. “It's been so long. This is going to be over before it starts.”

  I tell myself I don’t mind, but my thoughts flicker briefly to the idea of Harper’s imaginary hot factory guy before I can stop myself. I bet sometimes it’s over with the hot factory guy before it starts too.

  9

  Erin

  Present

  Rob calls dutifully after he arrives in Amsterdam, and each day after that, but the eight-hour time difference makes it hard—one of us is always just getting up, just going to bed, or at work. I wish he would do a video call, so I could see his face, but he says it’s “off-putting.”

  The days without him drag on interminably, as I knew they would. It’s not that my life is so different with Rob gone…it’s just that it feels a little pointless. The house has been empty when I get home for months, but now it feels different, more vacant and mocking. When Rob was here, that feeling was temporary. Now it is not. There’s just me, with no one to talk to all weekend, and five weekdays spent at a job that makes me miserable. I come home each night wanting something, and I have no clue what it is. I go to sleep, knowing there’ll be no warm body beside me in the morning. And I’m not sure when, exactly, my life turned so empty that a warm body would be the only thing to look forward to in the first place.

  I’m still at the office when Rob calls toward the end of the week. It’s two in the morning in Amsterdam, and he’s just getting in, which has been the case most of the nights he’s been there. He tells me first about dinner with the team in an old pirate radio station, and then he details the bar crawl that ensued afterward.

  I shouldn’t be jealous, but I’ve been at work for nine hours and have big plans for a night in with Mr. Tibbles, Rob’s cat, and possibly a delicious bowl of cereal for dinner. My unhappiness isn’t Rob’s fault, but knowing that intellectually doesn’t seem to puncture the small bubble of resentment in my chest, a bubble that swells every time we talk and he tells me yet another story about fancy dinners and wild nights he’s enjoying without me.

  I make appropriate sounds of interest about the the meal and the bars and the shots he did. I agree that Benchley, a guy they hired last year, is super funny. When the conversation lags, he asks if I got a chance to look at reception sites over the weekend, and I make weak excuses that we both know aren’t true.

  “I meant to,” I tell him. “But this weekend was so busy.”

  “Okay,” he says, the affection in his tone now absent. “Well, I should probably get to sleep. Love you.”

  I start to tell him I love him too, and that I’m sorry I haven’t done more work on the wedding, but he’s already hung up the phone.

  On Saturday morning, some yard equipment is delivered to the house. I’d forgotten we even rented it, back before Rob’s trip was extended. I’m sure he forgot as well, but I’m still annoyed that I’m the one stuck with the job. This is my first yard, and I have never even used a lawn mower, much less something designed to pull clods of earth from the ground and spread seed.

  So I’m already in a sub-par mood when Brendan strolls into the yard, wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt just fitted enough to assure you he is all muscle beneath it. I’ve seen signs of his presence over the past few days, but no evidence of the man himself until now. I wish it had stayed that way.

  “Aerating the yard?” he asks with that ever-present smirk. “What an amazing way to spend a Saturday. Marriage looks so awesome.”

  "We’re not married.” My voice is clipped, tense, precise. I promised Rob I’d be nice, but already it’s taking all of my effort just to be civil.

  "Oh, right. It's after you've said your vows that it gets really exciting."

  Ignore him, Erin. Ignore him. Pretend he’s not there long enough, and eventually he won’t be. I crouch down to look at the engine, hoping he’ll be gone when I stand.

  "Staring at that thing isn’t going to make it turn on.”

  I roll my eyes. “Thanks, farmer boy. I knew you’d prove helpful.”

  "Go sit in the shade and look pretty,” he says, pulling the handle away from me. “I’ll do it.”

  "I’ll have you know that I am perfectly capable of—"

  He places a finger over my lips. "Shhhhh," he says, still smirking.

  I hate being silenced like a child, which is probably why he’s doing it.

  “You know I grew up on a farm, right?” he continues. “And you grew up in an apartment in New Jersey?"

  "Yes, but—”

  The finger rests on my lips again. "Go sit, sweetheart."

  Part of me feels like I should tell him to fuck off. The bigger part of me doesn’t want to aerate a lawn.

  "Fine, smart guy. I'll go relax, and you can show me how it's done. There's a bunch of laundry inside. Maybe you can show me how good you are at that next."

  I have no intention of sitting on the steps, however. I have other things to do, first of all. More importantly, I suspect nothing good comes of watching Brendan. It’s irritating, how pretty he is. It’s irritating that he does everything so confidently, that he’s managing to make aerating a yard look sexy. Ridiculous. Harper would pay for footage of this.

  He pulls his shirt up to wipe his face, and I hustle. When you've only had sex once in the past month, and it only lasted 30 seconds, being anywhere near Brendan Langstrom’s perfect, exposed abs is just inviting trouble.

  10

  Brendan

  Four Years Earlier

  I am out drinking with everyone from work. Everyone but Erin, that is. She normally comes out, though I wish she wouldn’t—it seems like asking her not to ruin my free time as well as my work hours is a reasonable request. Because I’ve discovered that being stuck in the office with Erin isn’t merely irritating, it’s my private, existential hell—from the moment she breezes in the door until the moment she leaves at night.

  First, there’s the humming. When she’s in the back sorting helmets, counting oars, she’s humming the entire fucking time, if not outright singing to whatever comes up on the playlist.

  If it was merely that, I could hold it together, but the humming is just one of a thousand irritating habits—the way she sits, for instance, with her legs all tangled as if she’s made of Silly Putty, as if there’s too much of her to possibly go straight. Or the way her teeth sink into her lower lip when she’s uncertain, like a rodent with cheese, or the fact that she doesn’t realize her old high school track team T-shirt is now way too small through the chest. And then there’s the little groan she makes when she smells Thai food, the way she bounces out of her seat when her favorite song comes on. The way her hips sway when she’s wearing heels, and the way every guy in the office is riveted by them when she does.

  But tonight she’s blissfully absent, which means for once I can escape the judgmental little smirk she gets on her face whenever the girl I’m
with says something stupid. I’ll admit that happens more than I’d like it to.

  The guys are all talking about this huge rafting trip we led over the weekend during a thunderstorm. I hear my name, but I’m not really listening because—though I’m happy that Erin is absent—I keep wondering why that is. Yes, I’ve gone out of my way to be a dick so she won’t want to come out with us, but until tonight, I was failing miserably. So where the fuck is she?

  I finish my first beer and start on my second, while this pressure builds in my head.

  “What’s the matter, babe?” asks the girl I brought.

  Her name is Anya, I think, but I’m not entirely certain. All I know is she’s wearing the shortest shorts I’ve ever seen, and in about an hour, I plan to remove them.

  I open my mouth to suggest we leave, and something entirely different emerges.

  “Where’s Erin?” I ask Pierce, and Anya shifts unhappily beside me.

  “What do you care?” he asks. “You act like you hate her most of the time.”

  I shrug. I’m not willing to say I hate her, necessarily. Hate seems like something that should be confined to the truly awful, like Hitler, or smooth jazz. But I’m not going to deny it either.

  “I don’t get you,” he says. “Everyone loves Erin.”

  Maybe that’s the problem—everyone loves Erin. It’s tedious the way she charms people, with the big smile and the eagerness to help. It’s as if she never got the memo that she’s smart and good-looking and doesn’t need to work so hard for everyone’s approval.

  “Some of us love her a little too much,” I say, meeting his eye.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means if I catch you looking down her shirt again, you and I are going to have issues.”

  “If you hate her so much, why do you care if I look down her shirt?”

  I really have no idea. I don’t want to know.

  “Well, she’s walking in the door right now,” he says, “and until you have a good reason, I’m going to keep on doing it.”

  My head swivels to see her moving toward us, wearing sky-high heels and a little skirt with a pristine white button-down. This is the outfit she wears on Mondays and Thursdays, when she goes to her internship, except she should have been done hours ago.

  “The naughty librarian look,” Pierce says under his breath, grinning at me. I don’t smile back.

  He jumps up when she gets to the table, while I pretend not to notice she’s even arrived. To my chagrin, he pulls out the chair between him and my date—my date who looked just fine sitting here on her own, but now, next to Erin, looks like she’s trying way too hard. Only now do I notice that Anya’s clothes are too small, and she’s wearing an assload of makeup.

  “Well, well, well, look at Miss Corporate America,” I say to Erin snidely. “How was a day spent selling your soul to the man?”

  I see a flash of anger in her eyes and feel a little surge of victory. She largely ignores me now; sometimes that flash of anger is all I can get.

  “Laugh all you want,” she says. “When you’re 50 and living in Will’s basement, I’ll be laughing too.”

  “Maybe you can visit me there when you’re finally ready to lose your virginity,” I reply.

  To my unhappy surprise, she laughs. “Unless you’ve devised a time machine—and let’s face it, you’re unlikely to exert the effort even if you were capable of it—that ship has sailed.”

  I spend the rest of the night feeling bitter. I don’t even like her, so why I am pissed off that I’ll never be her first?

  11

  Erin

  Present

  We’re only five minutes into Friday’s staff meeting, and Timothy has already used the word synergy 15 times by my count. I have trouble staying awake during these meetings under the best of circumstances, but after last night’s long call with my dad, it feels almost impossible. He’s called twice this week, which means he’s on another downward spiral. I’m sure my mother hoped—though she would never say it—that the move here, away from his friends and past, would give him a clean start. Instead he’s lonely, and my father’s solution to every unhappy feeling is to make it go away with booze.

  I feel my cell buzzing in my lap and surreptitiously check it, only to discover that I am missing a call from Rob. Timothy says synergy again, and I picture winging the phone at his head. I imagine the clunk it would make on impact, the shock on his face. It’s small consolation for being stuck here.

  When the meeting’s over, I go outside to call Rob back, positioning myself in a patch of sunlight to stay warm. I love Harper, but she won’t hesitate to shout commentary over our shared cubicle wall if I’m there.

  He answers, and I hear rustling in the background, which forewarns me that he’s busy and about to rush me off the phone for another of his super-fun nights out. I’m annoyed before he’s even said a word.

  “I’ve got to run here because people are waiting,” he says. “But I wanted to let you know, it looks like we’re not getting out of here until the end of July.”

  “July,” I repeat blankly.

  It’s April. He was supposed to be home the first week of May, and that was bad enough, but July?

  “They’re bringing in new staff to replace some of the people here, and we can’t even begin the transition until that’s done. None of us are happy about it but…”

  He continues to speak, but I have stopped listening. I don’t want him to justify this to me. Does he really think I care deeply whether or not the transition is a success? I don’t. All I’m thinking is this: July is three months away. The end of July means two-thirds of the summer will be over.

  “What about Olivia’s race?” I ask, my voice devoid of inflection, barely a whisper.

  We already have our plane tickets. We were going to fly into Reno and spend a day in Tahoe before we drove up.

  “I think the tickets are refundable, but you should still go,” he says. His tone is encouraging, as if he’s being kind somehow when he’s actually bailing on our first trip together in a year. “It’ll still be fun.”

  Yeah, nothing like a trip to Tahoe alone, Rob.

  I tell him I wish he’d spoken to me first, and he simply continues to justify the decision, telling me what a big deal this is for the company. I dig my nails into my hands to silence my reply. To avoid saying “I don’t give a flying fuck about the transition, Rob, and this isn’t fair.”

  I hold all of it in. It’s easy enough to do because I’ve done it my entire life. But as he continues to speak I only hear the words three months. Three months. Only two weeks have passed, and I’m already going crazy. How the hell am I going to stomach three months?

  I stew about it all day, and I’m still not over it that evening as I finish up an op-ed demanded last-minute by the chancellor’s office. It’s after 7 PM, and I’m scrounging through my desk for something to approximate dinner—which will apparently consist of Tic Tacs and one mangled cereal bar—when Harper emerges from the bathroom, clad in five-inch black heels and a tiny black dress.

  “Wow, Harper. I don’t know who this guy is, but I guarantee he’s going to like that outfit.”

  She grins wickedly, winking at me. “As long as he doesn’t make me wear it for long.”

  I laugh, but feel a squeeze of envy. I miss that—the excitement, the anticipation, the way just getting ready felt like foreplay. But Rob doesn’t notice what I wear, and sometimes it hardly seems like he notices me. He just finds enough bare skin somewhere under the sheets to make things work. Sex with us is now like a shortcut through the woods, everything trampled down by repetition to make it easy, straight to the point. I guess that’s a good thing. It’s just that sometimes, when I see Harper heading toward a destination she can’t begin to predict, I feel like I’m missing out on something I shouldn’t be.

  When I get home, there’s a FedEx envelope on the front step waiting for Brendan. If it weren’t about to rain, I’d be tempted to lea
ve it. Instead, with vast reluctance, I go out back and tap on his door. Three crisp knocks: my civic duty and not a shred more.

  He has 30 seconds to answer before I throw it and walk. I’ve counted to 25 when he opens the door.

  “This was at my place for you,” I say, thrusting the envelope toward him.

  He takes it from my hand, studying me a little too carefully, and steps aside for me to enter. I really don’t want to go in, given that I suspect he’s made our pool house smell like sex and bad decisions, but I can’t come up with a reason to demur.

  My eyes are drawn to the center of the room. “You hung a hammock in the living room?” I ask incredulously.

  “I checked with Rob first.”

  “But…why? You already have a bed.”

  He shrugs. “I like to mix things up.”

  “Are you talking about sleeping in the hammock or something else?”

  He gets this secretive smile on his face. “Hammocks are good for a lot of things, Erin.”

  “Oh my God. You can’t have sex in a hammock. You’ll fall out and crush the poor girl to death. I’m almost positive our liability insurance doesn’t cover that.”

  He gives me a crooked grin, a little light in his eyes that wasn’t there a moment earlier. “Haven’t had an accident yet. Maybe I’m a little more agile than the guys you know.”

  I make some noise that sounds an awful lot like “harrumph,” which is something only portly old men in Dickens’ novels make. But this information sits poorly, right on the heels of Rob’s announcement that he’s not coming home. I’m not asking for that much. I don’t need some stranger eagerly removing my little black dress. I don’t need hours of sex in hammocks with men whose agility is almost unfathomable to me. But I need something more than I have, which is nothing at the moment.

  He frowns. “I can take the hammock down if it really bothers you.”