Priya had told me Wes wasn’t coming. She said it twice, once on the phone and once by text, with a little thumbs-up, so by the time I walked into her apartment on New Year’s Eve with a bottle of prosecco and a dish of the spinach dip everyone pretends not to want, I had stopped bracing.
Wes was standing by the radiator, holding a paper plate with a single deviled egg on it.
We looked at each other across the room. Someone’s speaker was playing a song we used to dance to in his kitchen. The universe has a cruel sense of humor and no sense of timing.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Priya said you weren’t coming.”
“Priya said you weren’t coming.”
We both turned and looked at Priya, who was across the room very deliberately not looking at us, in a sequin top, with the posture of a person who has done something deeply stupid and is now committed to the bit. She raised her glass. I raised my prosecco. Wes ate his deviled egg whole.
It had been fourteen months. I’d counted, because that’s the kind of thing I do. We hadn’t ended in a fire. We’d ended in a long, tired Tuesday, over takeout, where we’d both finally said out loud that we were holding on to the idea of each other instead of each other, and he’d hugged me at the door with his chin on my head for a long time, and then I’d gone home and slept for eleven hours. It was a kind breakup. Those are the worst. There’s nobody to hate.
So of course, forty minutes into the party, we were sitting together on the arm of Priya’s couch, talking like we hadn’t stopped.
“I got the job,” he said. “The one in the city. I start on the fifth.”
“Wes. That’s huge.”
“It’s fine. It’s a little scary.”
“It’s huge. You hated your old boss.”
“I did hate my old boss.”
“I remember the voodoo doll.”
“It was a stress ball with a face drawn on it. It was art.”
I laughed. He laughed. He looked at me the way he used to when I’d said something that surprised him, head tipped, a little crease between the eyebrows, and a warm weight dropped through my stomach like a coin down a well.
It was the second glass of prosecco, I told myself. It was the radiator heat. It was the kind of light Priya has, those string lights she leaves up all year, that make everyone look like they’re in a good memory.
At eleven, the roads iced over.
At least that’s what Priya announced from the window, phone in hand. A freezing-rain advisory, an overturned truck on the interstate, rideshares surging to a price you’d normally pay for a kidney. People started doing the math. Couples peeled off to walk home. A few people said they’d sleep on the floor. By eleven-thirty the party was a smaller, cozier version of itself, and Priya, drunk and sparkling and unrepentant, clapped her hands.
“Okay! Sleeping arrangements!”
“I’m taking the couch,” said a guy named Dov, who was already horizontal.
“I’ve got the air mattress,” said someone else.
“And the guest room,” Priya said, “has one bed. A queen. I’m sorry. It has one bed. It’s just a very large, very nice bed. Wes, Maya, you’re both adults, you can share a bed, you’ve shared worse.”
“Priya,” Wes said.
“I’m serious. I don’t have another one. Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t plan the ice.”
“You planned something,” I said.
She put her hand on her heart. “I’m just a woman who loves her friends.”
The guest room was down the hall, past a bathroom with a clawfoot tub and a bookcase of cookbooks nobody had ever used. The bed was, in fact, a very large, very nice bed, made up in white linen with about eleven pillows, under a window that looked out over the iced-up street. The room smelled like cedar and clean sheets. Wes stood in the doorway with his coat over his arm, and I stood by the dresser with my bag, and for a long moment we didn’t say anything at all.
“I’ll take the floor,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I don’t mind.”
“It’s a queen, Wes. We can put a pillow wall down the middle. We’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I turned my back to change into the oversize T-shirt Priya had left on the bed for me. Behind me I heard the rustle of his sweater, the belt, the soft thump of his boots. We were being so careful. We were being so careful that it started to be funny, and I made a small noise, and he said “what?” and I said “nothing,” and he said “no, what,” and I said, “We’re acting like we’ve never seen each other naked.”
He was quiet. “We’ve seen each other naked.”
“Hundreds of times.”
“Thousands.”
“I’m just saying. It’s weirder to hide.”
I heard him breathe. Then, very quietly: “Maya, I’m not going to pretend it isn’t weird to be here with you.”
I turned around. He was in his undershirt and boxers, standing by the foot of the bed, his hair rumpled, and his face had that open, unguarded look that used to undo me. He looked tired. He looked kind. He looked like home.
“It’s weird for me too,” I said.
“Is it bad weird?”
“It’s — no.” I swallowed. “It’s not bad weird.”
On the other side of the apartment, someone started a countdown. Far away, through the walls, muffled voices: ten, nine, eight. We stood there, two feet apart. Seven, six. He took a step toward me. Five, four. I took one toward him. Three.
“Maya,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Two.
“Can I?”
One.
I said, “Yes,” and he kissed me, soft, a question with his mouth, and from down the hall a roar went up, cheering, a horn, somebody’s off-key “Auld Lang Syne,” and I felt the warmth of him and the stubble on his jaw and I kissed him back so hard I rocked on my heels.
It was like putting a key in an old lock. Everything remembered. His hand found the back of my neck, my hands went up under his undershirt, the planes of his back, the warm familiar slope of his shoulder blades, and he made a low sound in his throat I’d been missing for fourteen months. I hadn’t known how much until right then.
“Wait,” I said, pulling back an inch. “Wait. I want to be sure.”
“Okay.”
“This isn’t just — it’s not just the ice and the champagne. You’re not going to get weird in the morning.”
“I might get weird in the morning,” Wes said honestly. “I might get weird in a week. But I want this. I want you. I’ve wanted to call you about nine hundred times.” He rested his forehead against mine. “What about you?”
“I wanted to call you ten hundred.”
He laughed, and I laughed, and I put both hands in his hair and said, “Okay, then,” and he walked me back until the backs of my knees hit the bed.
We went down together onto all those pillows, laughing as three of them slid onto the floor. I pulled the T-shirt over my head and tossed it away, and he stopped and looked at me, just looked, in the glow from the streetlight through the iced window, and said, quietly, “I forgot how beautiful you are. How did I forget.”
“You didn’t forget.”
“I tried to.”
“Try harder at remembering,” I said, and tugged his undershirt off.
He took his time. He’s always taken his time, it’s one of the things I loved, and the memory of it rose in me like heat. He kissed my collarbone, my breasts, the soft place under my ribs, and I felt his mouth curve into a smile against my skin when I gasped. His hand slid down the outside of my thigh, found the elastic of my underwear and stopped.
“Still the thing with the left side?”
“The what?”
“The left side. When I do this.” He kissed my hip bone, left, then right. “Left is better.”
“Oh my God. You remember that.”
“I remember everything.”
He slid my underwear off and kissed his way down, and I was ready for it, it turned out, I was so ready, and when he put his mouth on me I curved up off the mattress with a noise I hadn’t made since the last time he’d done it. His tongue was patient and sure, the way it had always been, a hand under my hip to tilt me, and I grabbed fistfuls of the linen and let go. I didn’t try to be quiet. The whole party was screaming over the countdown aftermath anyway. I came with my head thrown back and the streetlight streaking across my vision, one long cresting wave, and his name came out of me broken in half.
He rose over me, wiping his mouth, flushed, eyes shining. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said, breathless. “Get up here.”
He did. I pulled his boxers down, and he sprang free, hard and warm against my thigh, and I wrapped my hand around him, and his eyes fluttered shut. “Maya,” he said. “Fuck.”
“Do you have —”
“In my coat. Priya made me bring them. I think she had a plan.”
“I’m going to kill her.”
“After.”
“After,” I agreed, laughing, “I’ll thank her first.”
He got the condom from his coat and rolled it on, and I pulled him over me, and when he slid inside I forgot that anything had ever been broken. It was like coming back to a house you used to live in, and finding your name still on the mailbox. He moved slowly. He held my face between his palms and watched me, as he always did, and I watched him, the line of his throat, the flush climbing his chest, a drop of sweat from his temple that landed on my cheek.
“I missed you,” he said, hoarse. “I missed this. I missed you so much.”
“I missed you too.”
“I’m sorry for the Tuesday.”
“Don’t. Don’t be sorry. We were right.”
“Were we?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and arched up against him, and he groaned. “Ask me in the morning.”
He laughed and then he stopped laughing, because I wrapped my legs around his waist and rolled us, so I was on top, braced on his chest, and rode him slow, the way he likes, the way he’d told me once he’d dreamed about. He looked up at me like I’d hung the stars. His hands gripped my hips. The bed creaked, softly, and from down the hall somebody laughed, and the ice ticked against the window.
“Look at me,” he said.
“I’m looking.”
“Stay with me.”
“I’m here,” I said, and I was. It built slow and then fast, like it used to, his thumb finding me, my hands pressing into his chest, his hips rising to meet mine, and when I came the second time it was quiet and deep and it felt like being forgiven. I folded down over him with my forehead against his neck. He turned us again, gently, one hand under my head, and moved in me with long deep strokes until he shuddered, my name in his mouth like a prayer or an apology or both.
He collapsed beside me. We lay there tangled on the wrecked bed, the pillows scattered, the sheets in a heap, the radiator clanking out its New Year’s cheer. His hand found mine on the mattress and laced our fingers together.
“Happy New Year,” he said.
“Happy New Year.”
“That was a hell of a countdown.”
“It was a decent one.”
He turned his head. “What do we do now?”
I thought about it. I thought about the fourteen months and the voodoo doll and the new job in the city, forty minutes from my apartment. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think we sleep. I think we get up tomorrow and make pancakes in Priya’s terrible kitchen. And then I think we talk, like grown-ups, with coffee.”
“Coffee,” Wes said, as if it were a sacrament.
“And maybe you call me. Not the nine hundred times. Just once.”
“Once I can do.” He pulled me in, tucked my head under his chin, and drew the blanket over my shoulder. “I’ll call you once. And then I’ll probably call you again.”
“That’s allowed.”
“It’s allowed,” he agreed, and kissed my hair.
Down the hall, the party was finally winding down, someone laughing, someone running water, the door to the bathroom clicking closed. I closed my eyes. Outside, the ice kept falling, glazing every branch and rooftop and parked car, turning the whole city into something fragile and bright and new.
In the morning there would be pancakes. There would be Priya, smug in a robe, pretending she knew nothing. There would be coffee and talking and maybe a hard conversation. But right then there was only the weight of his arm over my waist, and the sound of his breathing slowing, and the year beginning, one soft inch at a time.
