The Plus One

by Sarah Archer

  “This is important, Kelly, and you have very little experience. Of course you don’t want him to think you have a lot of experience. But you should have a lot so that you know what you’re doing. He has to think you’re a natural. But I have a feeling you’re not a natural.”

  Logically, Kelly was well aware that Ethan had exactly zero outside sexual experience. She knew that worrying that he wasn’t sufficiently impressed by her bedroom performance was ridiculous.

  But . . . now Kelly started to worry about it. She recalled with some dismay that he had unlimited internet access. He had undoubtedly seen some Olympic-level bedroom showmanship. Kelly couldn’t do any of that. She could barely take her shirt off without getting it caught on her nose. And, well, he was just so good-looking. She glanced back at him in the bed, where he lay half twisted in the sheets. Even unguarded and asleep, he had the impossible geometrics of an Adonis, his skin burnished, his hair artfully mussed. The sight triggered the same insecurities she had felt on every other morning after in her life, but tenfold.

  “Of course, the landing strip has been a popular option for a while now,” Diane was saying when Kelly zoned back into the conversation. And that was her cue to get out.

  “I have to go, Mom, talk to you later.”

  Kelly wrapped her naked body in a towel and tiptoed back into the bedroom, hoping that the hinge on the closet door wouldn’t squeak as she opened it. It squeaked. Ethan stirred awake. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Oh, hi, I didn’t see you there!” Kelly chirped nonsensically. She yanked a high-necked blouse and long skirt from the closet rail. She felt a reflexive need to be modest today. And then she stood there, clutching her clothes in one hand, the top of her towel in the other, suddenly shy to get undressed in front of Ethan. She looked at him, sitting up in bed but not yet out of it, the sheet still drawn half over him, and realized that he was mirroring her hesitation. They stared at each other, neither willing to move or break the silence.

  Finally, he spoke. “I’ll make you a deal. I wear this sheet forever, you wear that towel forever, and we’ll save a ton of money on laundry detergent, okay?” Kelly laughed. The tensions inside of her suddenly seemed ridiculous.

  “Fine, fine.” She dropped her towel and started getting dressed while Ethan went to his own wardrobe.

  “I guess there’s no point in my being modest,” he went on, “seeing as you made my entire body.”

  “Didn’t do a bad job on it, either,” she said with a flirtatious smile.

  “You’re not so bad yourself.” He kissed her on the cheek and walked away into the kitchen. A little butterfly took up residence somewhere around her heart.

  * * *

  • • •

  The whole way into work that morning, Kelly wanted nothing more than to get into the lab with Priya and tell her everything. She was desperate to have someone other than her mom to talk with about last night’s turn of events. Anyone other than her mom. But as soon as she and her friend were settled on their stools in the lab, she went mute. How was she supposed to spill a secret like this anyway? It was just too much. She could never tell.

  Priya positioned her soldering iron. Kelly normally had an almost Pavlovian response to the acrid smell of soldering, with all the memories of hours of creation that it brought—it simultaneously soothed and excited her, making her feel at home. But today, it wasn’t enough to save her from feeling out of sorts.

  “What’s up?” Priya asked her, her eyes focused down on her work.

  I built myself a boyfriend. We slept together. I think I’m falling for him. I really want to talk to my best friend about it.

  “Nothing much,” was all Kelly said.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the last bot had battled that night, smashing its opponent into a charred and contorted hunk of metal with one wheel sadly whirling in the air, the show ended and Ethan clicked the TV off. He set the remote down on the coffee table and made to get up from the couch, but Kelly stopped him, curving closer into him instead.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s just Priya; things have been different with us lately. I wonder if we’re growing apart. Though that sounds like a totally teenage thing to say.”

  “Adults grow too,” Ethan remarked. “Together, apart.”

  “Yeah, I guess I just feel like I can’t talk to her about everything.”

  “You can always talk to me, you know.”

  Always—the word brought sharply to Kelly’s mind something that she had been doing her best to keep out of it. Clara’s wedding was that weekend, and that meant her time with Ethan was almost up.

  She bent her neck to look up into his face, his head positioned just above hers, the bow of his jawline shadowed in the lamplight. She looked back down and tucked her head into his neck, growing sleepy. “I know,” she murmured. “And I’m glad.” He turned and kissed the top of her head. For a moment, Kelly imagined how the picture they formed would look to an outside observer. It might look just like the model of love she had never before had.

  seventeen

  • • • • • •

  On Clara’s wedding day, Kelly’s world became such a blur that she had no time to consider the day’s personal implications for her. The day, too, was all about Clara: it was as sunny and fresh as the bride. Family, staff, and bridal party members scurried from tent to tent, making last-minute preparations, and even the wider world seemed to be busy decking itself in pastels specifically for the occasion: the unbroken blue of the sky, the pink of fine petals scattered in pathways over the green grass. At the geographic and metaphorical center of all the happy activity was the blushing bride. Clara was the contented eye of the hurricane, the gracious recipient of everyone’s attentions and goodwill. Today, more than ever, the quality about her that magnetized people into her presence was in full and magnificent force.

  While she was the eye, her mother was the storm. Diane moved with lethal efficiency, a sergeant in satin, shouting orders at everyone around her like she was captaining the sinking Titanic. The birch round-cake stand was off-center by an inch—the whole dessert table layout had to be reimagined. Bridesmaid Number Four was missing a necklace—Diane half shouted directions to her preferred jewelry store in town. The pink fountains weren’t photographing well—more dye, more dye! Her industry friends were already swarming the place; several seemed to have shown up early expressly for the purpose of watching the preparations, seeing what made the sausage, as it were.

  For her part, Kelly attempted to strike a balance between being useful and staying out of the way of the storm. She enlisted Ethan to help set out the place cards, cognizant that some poor waiter might be asked to come in and move them each by a millimeter. As wary as Kelly was of her mom’s stress level, she couldn’t help but notice that Diane was as vibrant, as happy, as she had ever seen her. The design of the day seemed to be the sort of blowsy, shabby chic coziness that Clara gravitated toward, but ratcheted up to Pinterest levels of perfection by Diane. So many of the brides in Silicon Valley demanded to be cutting edge, but Kelly sensed that here was Diane’s chance to follow her own heart a bit more, almost as if she were hosting the wedding that she had never had—after all, she and Carl had been too poor to afford anything more than a honeymoon night at the Holiday Inn. Once Kelly swore her mother said something about “my wedding day.” Luckily Clara had a crowd of curlers around her head and didn’t hear.

  Meanwhile, the knot of Suttles was growing, attracting the various incoming family arrivals—cousins, grandparents, a grandbaby Kelly didn’t know had been born yet, a great-aunt she would have sworn had died. Carl’s boisterous immediate family showed up in a tidal wave, sucking him in. Kelly took Ethan’s hand and steered him into the fray. Being in the vicinity of her entire family was a bit like being trapped in an echo chamber. But between
the scattered greetings and introductions, she gathered two things: that her extended family was quite impressed with Ethan, and that he could hold his own among their high-energy ranks.

  He flowed smoothly from handshake to hug, eliciting warm back-claps from the men and startled, flushing smiles from the women. He already had a perfect memory of who each of these people was from the data in Kelly’s Facebook account and, in fact, recognized some of them sooner than she did, though he graciously gave her the credit (“How is the new business coming? Kelly told me you opened a leather goods store . . .”). Kelly tried not to laugh when she saw her cousin Eleanor gaze hungrily at Ethan, busily rearranging her cleavage. The moment gave her a little spike of satisfaction: Eleanor had taken the corner piece of Kelly’s birthday cake when Kelly turned five, and oh no, Kelly had not forgotten. That piece had a frosting rose on it. She smiled and gave Eleanor a little wave.

  But Kelly wasn’t keen to linger in the throng, which was becoming increasingly hot and noisy. It was impossible to actually talk to any of her family when they were so thickly massed anyway. Since Ethan was doing so well, she slipped out, seeking a moment of respite. There—a storage shed on the side of the lawn. She darted in, fanning her face, hoping that her sweat wasn’t treating the world to a perfect outline of her shapewear bathing suit under her dress, but then she jumped, seeing that her dad was already inside the shed. Their instincts appeared to have led them to the same place.

  “It’s getting hot out there, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, and loud. My family sure knows how to talk,” Carl replied.

  Kelly sighed and smiled. “It’s nice to get away. Have a little quiet.”

  “Yes,” Carl said simply. His hand holding his journal flicked, rustling the pages.

  Suddenly Kelly felt uncomfortable—her dad had come here looking for quiet. Maybe instead of sharing a nice moment with him, she was actually disturbing his peace. She straightened herself suddenly, shoulders back, bumping a rake in the process and frantically stilling it before the whole rack came toppling down. “Well, I’ll let you read,” she said, with an attempt at dignity.

  “Sure,” her dad said calmly, looking back down at his open page. Kelly left with that same deflated feeling she so often had after their near-conversations. The morning had been full of hubbub, and here, finally, was a moment of quiet. But the quiet didn’t calm her the way it usually did; it began to feel dull and empty.

  Considering that this was her family, that she was the maid of honor at this wedding, Kelly felt oddly left out as she strolled back onto the grounds. Maybe the very volume of people rendered her irrelevant. She spotted Jonathan with a cluster of his college buddies tightening each other’s vests from the back. The baker and her team rearranged the dessert table as if performing open heart surgery, looking stern-faced between their diagram, chart, and mood board. A woman Kelly recognized as one of her mom’s friends, a wedding florist, scrutinized a spray of flowers decorating the seating board, snapping several close-up pictures. Kelly knew most of the people here, but few of them well.

  Then, through a break in the crowd of groomsmen, she saw Ethan. He was playing with Kelly’s nieces, flipping Hazel in the air, the tulle of her flower girl dress floating around her elbows and back down to her ankles, up and down as she laughed with glee. The sight warmed Kelly from somewhere deep and primal. Suddenly she felt utterly at home. She walked over to join him. “Hey,” she said, slipping a hand onto the small of his back. He turned and gave her a quick kiss.

  Before long, everyone was in their seats for the ceremony, fanning themselves with the programs, poking at the doily cups of flower petals hung over the chairs. Kelly managed to make it up the grass aisle to the arch of wildflowers standing in for an altar without either slipping and exposing her bathing suit to the crowd, or experiencing sudden stage fright and running off into the blue yonder, so she tallied the moment as a personal win. As the ceremony got underway, she and Ethan peeked at each other from opposite sides of the lineup and smiled.

  Clara’s vintage-inspired dress was not on trend; her makeup was spare. Yet as she walked down the aisle, she was radiant with anticipation and assurance. Jonathan cried when he saw her, a big, red, ugly cry. They flubbed their vows, which they had written themselves, and Jonathan ended up promising to love Clara until she was “old and gay,” while Clara declared Jonathan to be her “missing puzzle priest.” But their kiss was passionate, and the whole thing was disarmingly cute. When Ethan escorted Kelly back down the aisle at the end of it, she squeezed his arm.

  As the reception got underway and the afternoon light started to soften, Kelly realized she felt completely happy. She and Ethan chatted and laughed with the others at the family table. She warned him quietly not to talk politics with that one uncle, and to just smile and nod when Grandpa Ernie relayed the transmissions his silver fillings were picking up from the aliens. The fire of Diane’s mania seemed to have burned down now that the day was successfully in progress, leaving her with a radiant glow of energy. Kelly caught Clara’s eye, up at her couples table, as she and Jonathan snorted with laughter into their soup while trying to scoop from their bowls with linked arms, and waved to her sister.

  After dinner, when people trickled onto the dance floor in the middle of the tent, the ceiling of which was crowded with twinkling lights, Ethan turned to Kelly, setting down his wineglass.

  “Come on, let’s dance.”

  But she resisted with a gentle hand on his arm. “Nah, let’s just sit.”

  “Why, do your feet hurt?”

  Kelly lifted her feet in the peep-toe heels that Clara had liked, wiggling her ankles. “No, I’m holding up pretty well, actually. I’m just not much of a dancer.”

  “Right, right,” Ethan said, mock seriously. “You probably couldn’t hold your own out there. I can see that Grandpa Ernie has had classical training.” He nodded to where Ernie was doing what appeared to be the hip replacement edition of the twist.

  Kelly rolled her eyes. “Fine. One dance.” Out on the parquet platform, she took Ethan’s outstretched hands and tentatively shifted her weight from foot to foot. How was it that she had been walking successfully for the better part of thirty years, yet each time that she broke contact between a foot and the ground now, it felt like a leap of faith? Robbie’s words about the thought of her dancing flashed back into her mind. It was true, she knew it. She was “not precisely a paragon of grace.” The thought had never troubled her terribly before, as she didn’t see the point of dancing. To expend that much energy on movement without actually conveying your body from Point A to Point B or accomplishing a concrete task was arguably foolish. But seeing Clara and Jonathan whirl together with half-tipsy abandon, even watching Ernie execute his ecstatic, off-kilter solo, made her reconsider the merits of shaking a leg.

  She allowed Ethan to guide her around the floor, following his rhythm as he stepped back and forth. Soon they were shimmying and twirling. Kelly didn’t even notice the other dancers until, too late, she saw an oncoming walker leg from Great-Aunt Marge in her path. She tripped as she dove out of the way, falling into Ethan. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  But Kelly just laughed, righting herself, not even bothering to check the expressions of anyone who might be watching. “I’m great,” she said.

  Later, lounging on the lawn with Gary and his wife and three girls, Kelly closed her eyes and took in the sounds of the scene: music flowing from the next tent down, muted by distance to an underwater quality; glasses clinking; the high laughter of children slightly delirious with sugar and exhaustion; the trill of the crickets as they gained voice in the warm night air. She opened her eyes again to watch Gary and Ethan taking turns blowing bubbles at the girls, who delighted in the chase, simultaneously trying to escape the glycerin streams and reveling in the way the rainbows popped on their arms and noses. For once, Kelly felt like she could simply exist in this present moment
. She and Ethan were just like any other couple here. They were together. They were happy.

  Gary grew red-faced as he strained to blow more bubbles. “Why are Ethan’s always bigger?” he panted.

  “Because Ethan is different!” Bertie cried.

  Kelly straightened in her lawn chair. She gestured to Bertie, pulling her over. “What do you mean, Ethan’s different?”

  Bertie shrugged. “He’s just different from everyone else.” And off she ran to catch a giant bubble that was slipping from her reach, up toward the sky. Meanwhile, Kelly’s breath caught in her throat. Was it possible that Bertie somehow knew? That she had sensed what every adult who crossed Ethan’s path had been blind to? Suddenly the sights and sounds of the scene, so peaceful a moment before, were jarring, threatening. The beauty and ease of this night with Ethan had popped as easily as the fragile, iridescent skin of the bubble alighting before her on a blade of grass. Maybe that’s all it had been: a fleeting rainbow bubble, a trick of the eye.

  She grabbed her glass from the ground and stood abruptly. “I’m going to get a refill.” But she could barely bring herself to drink the wine she picked up at the bar. She wandered restlessly from tent to tent instead. How could she have been so stupid as to fall for her own illusion? She had allowed herself to forget what this day meant: Ethan was a robot. She had built him for a wedding date. And tomorrow, she had to take him apart. She felt like Cinderella, dressed for a ball she wasn’t even supposed to be at. And now the raucous music, the off-key singing of a drunken duo of groomsmen, the insistent chink of metal on glass as someone called for a speech, the building drill of the crickets outside, all of it synchronized into a pitch, pounding harder and harder in time with the rush of Kelly’s pulse, like the ticking of a clock.

  “Everyone gather ’round!” Clara’s high voice broke the spell. Kelly inhaled, steeling herself before she followed the crowds to Clara’s call, abandoning her untouched glass on a table.