“Oh, shit,” he says calmly, putting himself to rights without an ounce of shame. Unfortunately, I now find even this incredibly sexy. “Anything else I’m forgetting?” he asks, holding his arms out to his sides.
He looks like exactly what he is: a man I was recently straddling.
“All good,” I chirp.
He smiles, pokes my chin one last time, then turns to leave without another look back.
When I was a kid, my mom was an amazing host.
I’m not sure how she did it while working full-time, but somehow the house was clean when it needed to be, the fridge and pantry stocked with the good stuff—name-brand sugary cereals and chips, off-brand cookies that were better than the originals. She’d order us greasy pizza for dinner, and in the morning serve fruit salad and scrambled eggs, one of her few specialties.
Before the first move, she, Dad, and I lived in a tiny two-bedroom, one-bath. Our boxy, outdated TV sometimes had random bars of color fuzzing across the picture until you smacked the side, but our furniture was all broken-in-to-perfection comfort, and the house smelled like basil and lemon, all the time.
When Dad moved out, we couldn’t afford that place, so we moved to a one-bedroom on the far side of town. It was on the fourth floor, with brown carpet and walls that seemed hollow. Its major selling point was its tiny balcony, overlooking a brown man-made pond and facing hundreds of other identical balconies.
Even so, all through elementary school, that tiny apartment was the sleepover spot among my friends.
Then I got to junior high, and Mom was promoted from a teller at a local branch to an actual banker at one an hour and twenty minutes away.
For the first couple months, she’d drive me back on weekends, or my friend Lauren’s mom would bring Lo out on a Friday night and we’d take her home Sunday.
But the trips, the phone calls, the texts tapered off as she found her footing in her new class and I made friends with some of the girls on the yearbook committee in mine.
Then we moved to St. Louis in eighth grade, so Mom could help open a branch there. It went so well they sent her to do the same thing in eastern Pennsylvania a year later. Junior year, we moved twice more, first to North Carolina, then to a suburb outside Alexandria.
The apartments got nicer, walls thick enough that you couldn’t hear the neighbors fighting (or passionately making up), ceilings that were smooth instead of popcorned, yards with trees and wooden fences where before we’d had gravel and chain link. Mom started working to get licensed to become a loan officer, and with the coursework on top of her job, the housework fell to me.
By then, we rarely had guests. Mom had no time for a social life, and I pretty much gave up making friends. I didn’t see the point. None of those friendships lasted beyond the next move.
A year later, I left for college in Columbus, where I met Sadie.
My heart keens when I picture her.
Petite, whip-smart Sadie. We sat next to each other, in an elective class that was more a semester-long Jane Austen book club, on our very first day of college. The professor had us go around and introduce ourselves, say which Austen character we most related to and why. Ninety percent of our classmates said some variation of “I’m a total Lizzie.” The one boy among us declared, very boldly, that he was a Darcy. A couple of girls picked Elinor Dashwood, or Jane Bennet.
It was probably too honest for a stupid get-to-know-you game, but when it was my turn I said, “Unfortunately, I’m probably Charlotte Lucas.”
She was the most practical character I could think of, even if her practicality did lead her to marry Mr. Collins.
Beside me, Sadie erupted into laughter. “Don’t feel too bad. I’m probably Lydia.”
After class, she asked me if I wanted to go get coffee with her on her way to her next class. I genuinely couldn’t imagine just walking up to someone and starting a conversation, let alone asking them off the bat to hang out.
I tried that once, after the eighth-grade relocation. I believe the girl’s response was, “Ew. Why?”
Sadie befriended pretty much everyone she met, but that day, I felt like she chose me, in a way I’d never felt chosen.
She took me to my first frat party. I took her to Cellar Cinema, a tiny theater in the basement of a bookstore that Mom and I had gone to during our campus visit the year before. Sadie got us into bars, despite our lack of drinking-age IDs, and I dragged her to a backyard poetry reading where a guy I liked performed a truly horrific homage to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl that quickly resolved my crush on him.
We always joked that Sadie would have thrived as a lady in Regency England, because she embroidered and knitted, had a ballerina’s posture, and spoke both Spanish and French fluently. We joked I would thrive in an apocalypse, because I was kind of scrappy, already used to living on noodles, and could probably be pretty happy talking to no one for days on end, if I had enough books around.
For the next four years, I rarely had to make my own friends or score my own invitations. But whenever Sadie organized group hangs or threw Halloween parties, my job was to channel my mother and play host.
So the second Miles leaves to scoop Julia up from the airport, muscle memory takes over.
I wipe the kitchen down, sweep the crumbs into one corner, and vacuum them up. I bring a couple of candles out of my room and light them, opening the windows to let in fresh air. With a deep, preparatory breath, I open the hall closet, ignoring the right-hand side and its excess of thrifted lace tablecloths, votives, and the Dreaded Dress for my canceled wedding, and dig around for clean sheets and fresh towels, which I stack on the couch.
I vacuum under the cushions, scrub the bathroom sink, and load the handful of dishes into the washer.
It occurs to me then how little food we have on hand, so I grab my bag and keys and head out to wander the fluorescent-lit, mostly empty aisles of Tom’s.
I can’t buy much produce here without devastating Miles’s farm-stand-loving heart, but I grab a few apples and some broccoli, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a couple other essentials.
On my way to check out, I also detour to grab four new toothbrushes.
Just in case.
I still make it home before them and have just finished putting everything away when two very loud voices move down the hallway, and the door swings open.
I see Miles first.
“Hey,” he says, stopping short, grinning like he’s pleasantly surprised to see me here. Like he forgot we lived together. I’m not sure if this is a compliment or an insult.
His sister barrels into the kitchen right behind him. She’s tall. As tall or possibly taller than him, and string-bean skinny with the same impish nose, perfect teeth, and dark hair, though hers is chopped into a little wavy French Girl bob, complete with baby bangs.
“Hi!” she says brightly, hurling—actually throwing—her duffel bag in the general direction of the living room. “You must be the roommate, Daphne.”
