HOLLIS:Flight canceled. Driving. Should be there by tomorrow night. Sorry.
YEVA:
HOLLIS:I’ll make it up to you.
YEVA:You better. I can’t believe I’m all alone on our anniversary.
Anniversary? What? Is it not a sex appointment awaiting him in Miami but a full-scale girlfriend? Why would Hollis lie about that?
The phone vibrates again in my hand, and another text shows up.
YEVA:I guess I’ll just have to start without you...
Yikes. I am not supposed to be privy to this conversation. I should really put the phone back down, mind my own business—
Oh. Geez. Wow.
The picture that appears on the screen is... a lot more of Yeva Markarian than I ever intended to see. It’s artfully shot, for sure; the lighting is actually quite lovely. But there is no mistaking what is going on in that photo.
“What are you doing?” Hollis’s voice startles me into dropping his phone. It bounces off his leg and falls to the floor.
“Nothing,” I say, feeling my face heat. “I think you, uh... you have a text from your girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?” He recovers the phone from where it landed between his feet, rubbing the area by his knee where it hit him. “You mean Yeva? She’s not my—”
“Well, whatever. None of my business, is it? Pause the navigation, please. That’s what I was trying to do in the first place.” I sound relatively calm, I think. But inside, my heart is slapping against my sternum. It shouldn’t matter that Hollis’s friend with benefits is apparently more like a girlfriend with... standard amenities. It shouldn’tmatter. Itshouldn’tmatter. Except it clearly does for some reason. And before I can unpack the whys—because I extremely don’t want to—I slam the car door behind me and march to the side entrance of the McDonald’s. The glass door opens more easily than I expect, and the handle hits the brick wall, bouncing the door back into me and pushing me inside like I’m in some sort of vaudeville act. Hollis watches the whole embarrassing scene from the car, his eyebrows raised in what could be either confusion or amusement. I stick my chin in the air and continue through the restaurant’s vestibule.
The thing is, when I broke up with Josh, moving next door into Mrs. Nash’s apartment was a double-edged sword. No need for movers (or even to put anything into boxes), minimal disruption to my daily routine, easy enough to retrieve any misaddressed mail. The downside was that the sound of Josh having aggressively loud sex with someone new within a few days of our split carried remarkably well through the shared wall. And the feeling was kind of the same as this. This heavy-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach-ness thatI can’t reason my way out of no matter how many times I tell myself I have no right to be jealous.
At least that memory, coupled with this unpleasant feeling, makes me remember Mrs. Nash’s amazing reaction when the noise carried into our living room. As soon as it became apparent what the sounds were, she scrunched up her nose as if smelling something rotten.
I’m sorry, Millie,she said.I know you must have cared for him at some point to have stayed so long. But I have to say, that boy fornicates like a gorilla doing an Elvis impression. And this new friend of his sounds like a squeaky door.
I laughed until I cried. Each exaggerated grunt and high-pitched glissando that reached my ears sent me howling again, while Mrs. Nash continued her scathing commentary on their efforts. It ended after a few minutes, and I sobered as I realized: If we could hear Josh and his mystery woman, Mrs. Nash had probably heard Josh andme.
Oh no. Mrs. Nash. Please tell me we weren’t terrorizing you with our sex noises for the past two years, I said, clutching her hand.
You silly thing. I never heard a peep from you. Which is one of the many reasons I was relieved to learn you were leaving him.
There’s a grin on my face when I come out of the bathroom, but it fades when I see Hollis leaning against the wall in the little hallway, studying the brown wallpaper peppered with large sans serif food words opposite him. He extends my backpack toward me, his index finger hooked through the loop at the top.
“You forgot Mrs. Nash. And your wallet.”
I take the backpack and thread my arm through one strap. “Thanks, but I don’t want anything.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’m sorry, by the way.”
“For what?” I fold my arms over my chest, waiting for him to admit he lied to me. I still don’t understandwhyhe would lie about something like this. Why hide an entire girlfriend?
“I presume you saw that picture. It, uh, clearly was not meant for you.”
“Right,” I say. And then, maybe because it’s been a long and weird day and my brain-to-mouth filter is unreliable even under ideal circumstances, everything in my head suddenly turns into actual words I am saying. “Because why apologize for lying to me about Yeva, right? I mean, I’m just some ridiculous girl you’re stuck driving to Florida with. You don’t owe me the truth. You don’t owe me anything at all, really.” And that’s a pretty thorough accounting of reality, so I don’t know why I’m spitting my sentences with such venom.
“I’m starting to think ‘ridiculous’ isn’t the right word for what you are,” he says, taking a step toward me. “Weird, absolutely. I’d give you weird. But not ridiculous.”
I take a step backward, and my butt hits the wall. “Thanks... I think?”
“And I didn’t lie to you. Yeva isn’t my girlfriend. She’s exactly what I said she is: a friend I have sex with sometimes.”
