One Good Thing (2 page)

I folded my hands in my lap, straightening in the chair that hugged a round white table. The truth was I didn’t have any leadership experience. I’d had exactly two extracurricular activities in college—the art club and a marketing internship. In art club, all we did was paint sets for the Theater Department. But even during the internship I hadn’t been in charge of anyone; I’d sat at my desk and added photos to the company’s website.

I smiled at the director in her crisp, button-down suit. Or tried to smile. Nerves made my stomach roil, so my curled lips must have looked more sickly than cheerful. “Whenever there were group projects for my college courses, I tended to take the leadership position,” I said after a deep breath and a quick survey of my scattered thoughts. “I felt that everyone was at their most efficient when there were clearly defined goals and a division of labor. Everything also tended to run more smoothly when I would set deadlines for everyone’s individual tasks. I like to think of leadership as being a motivator.”

Not bad. Complete bullshit. But not bad.

I just hoped Ms. Director (I’d already blanked on her name) couldn’t tell it was complete bullshit.

She nodded, her face smooth. The woman wasn’t going to give me a clue about what she thought of my answer. My palms felt clammy, so I rubbed them on my skirt and then balled my hands into fists and rested them on my knees.

“Why do you want this job, Ms. Meyer?”

Because I want a paycheck.

“I majored in art,” I said, “so working at a gallery like this one would be my dream.” Actually, at the moment, working anywhere I didn’t ask “Do you want fries with that?” sounded good enough. “I’m very meticulous and organized, so secretarial work is perfect for me. But just being a part of the community of art lovers here would be fulfilling. When my family and I would make trips to the city, we’d visit this gallery because it’s one of my favorites. It always has a great selection, and I love the architecture of the building.”

Bullshit, again. I didn’t like this gallery any better than any of the other ones I’d visited. In fact, the workers at this one seemed a little snobby. It wasn’t my first choice, but there was that saying about beggars I’d taken to heart.

Another stone-faced nod.

“Why do you want to work here?”

Hadn’t I already answered that? I plastered a smile on my face and talked about the great benefits. My interviewer kind of scared me. Her lips never broke into a smile, and her dark hair was pinned back so severely her forehead stretched to an unnatural angle. I’d thought art people were supposed to be whimsical. This one reminded me of the wicked witch.

She didn’t respond to my answer. She simply moved to the next question.

“Okay, Ms. Meyer, how would you rate me as an interviewer?”

My hand clenched in my skirt. Was this a trick question?

I’d hesitated too long. Her finely plucked eyebrow began a slow arch upward. I opened my mouth. “You asked good questions,” I finally said, lamely. “I’d give you a very high rating.”

*

“I don’t think it went well,” I told Drew, dropping the lemon wedge into a tall glass of iced tea. My tenth interview in the past few months, and it was another dead end.

We sat across from each other in a booth at a local café, where they managed to be a little more upscale than fast food by bringing the meal to your table when it was ready, even though you still ordered at the counter. They were known for their grilled sandwiches. Usually they came with fries, but I’d ordered a side salad to make up for the surge of microwave TV dinners I’d been eating.

The walls in the café were painted a calming blue and decorated with vintage-style photos. Our booth had an Eiffel Tower shot.

A lunch date was all Drew had time for anymore.

His phone beeped. He checked it and then slid it back into his pocket before answering. “Did you really want to work as a secretary?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind it.”

“You’ll have to find something else.”

I nearly rolled my eyes. “I know. It’s not that easy.” Not everyone had a father who could place their son at a high-level job.

I didn’t say that. It sounded a little bitter. Okay, a lot bitter.

“Why don’t you apply at SLQ?” he asked. “I could put in a good word for you with human resources.”

I shook my head. “What would I do? I’m probably not even qualified for anything.”

“There are a few lower-level jobs. Some that require a high school diploma and no experience. You could see if one of those has an opening.”

“I’ll think about it.” I sighed. “I shouldn’t have majored in art—how does that translate to a career?”

“It doesn’t.” He grinned. “But you knew that; that’s not why you picked it.”

No, I picked it because I’d never felt as perfectly right as I did when I was in front of a canvas. But now my easel stood in the dark corner of a closet, behind the clothes in the back that I didn’t wear. Every time I reached for my paintbrushes a twisting, consuming fear clutched at my chest.

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell him I hadn’t painted a thing since graduation, but a shrill beep cut me off.

I watched Drew pull out his phone again, his fingers flying over the screen. I suddenly felt a gulf between us, starker and deeper than I’d realized. I remembered how it had been before—we’d started dating our senior year of college. Drew and I had sat next to each other in biology. I didn’t usually approach new people, but he’d started a conversation with me one day.

And though I had only a handful of friends, Drew had become one of them pretty quickly. We’d joked about our professor, who gave really long, dry lectures and whose specialty was a rare lizard in the Southwest. We’d talked about our favorite movies and music and discovered how much we had in common.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when Drew asked me out on a date, but I was. At the time I hadn’t realized he felt something for me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted a relationship anyway, but I liked Drew, liked being around him, and I didn’t want to lose that, so I said yes.

And for a few short months things had been good—for someone who’d reached twenty-two without dating anyone, it had been a whirlwind of new experiences—late nights and tentative gestures and walking around campus with his arm slung over my shoulder.

I missed it. I missed him.

When had everything changed?

“Hey,” I said, “we should do something this week. Will you be busy?”

“Probably,” he said. He paused to thank the teenage employee who brought us our food before turning back to me. “But I’ve been neglecting you, haven’t I? What should we do?”

I didn’t like the way he said that.
Neglecting me
. Like I was some sort of puppy he had to show affection to every now and then. I brushed it off, picking up my fork and spearing a tomato. “Alyssa has a date tomorrow night. You could come over and we could, I don’t know, order takeout and watch a movie, or do whatever. It’ll be fun.”

“Tomorrow night?” He frowned. “I don’t know if that’s—” but then he looked up from his phone. I didn’t want to know what he read in my expression—loneliness, desperation? His frown eased into a smile. “Yeah, I’ll make time for it.”

“Good,” I said, forcing a smile. As I leaned forward and took a sip of tea, I searched around for something to talk about before he whipped out his phone again. “I went to that Halloween contest with Alyssa.”

He groaned good-naturedly. “Where you dress up your pet?”

“Yeah that one. It wasn’t horrible. And Princess won second place.”

“She won a prize for that?”

“A ribbon. First place got a gift basket with pet products, I think.”

Drew laughed. “I can’t believe you actually went.” He took a big bite of his sandwich and chewed.

I didn’t have anything else to do
. But that wasn’t what I said; I didn’t want him to think I was guilt-tripping him. Instead my shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I’m getting into the Halloween spirit.”

As I watched Drew devour his sandwich with a ravenousness that always amazed me, my mind reached back to Darth Vader, Hot Lips, and my Horrible Thong Experience, as I was starting to call it. I thought about telling Drew. It was something we could laugh over.

But I hesitated. And then the moment was gone and I couldn’t bring it back.

“Speaking of Halloween,” he said. “Do you want to watch some old horror movies on our date?”

“Sure. What should I pick up?”

And then, as Drew warmed to the subject, the conversation flowed more easily and nothing was left unsaid, and it felt like it had at the beginning. Like it had months ago, when we were just two people discovering each other and the whole world was in front of us.

*

The red thong rested atop all my other underwear in the drawer. I snatched my hand back as though it had been burned when my fingers grazed the fabric.

I’d bought it for Drew, but now it was tainted by Darth Shepherd and Hot Lips.

“I’m not wearing you,” I said, pulling out a more serviceable pair of black bikini bottoms instead. After a second of indecision, I pushed the thong to the bottom of the drawer, where I couldn’t see it.

After I shrugged into jeans and a T-shirt (I didn’t want to make it look like I was trying too hard), I brushed on some mascara, slicked my lips with gloss, and waited. I grabbed a collection of poetry and tried to distract myself from the minute hand on the clock steadily ticking past the time we’d set. My gaze kept fluttering in that direction anyway—it was one of those black-and-white cat clocks with the bulbous eyes and swishing tail. Alyssa had picked it out. The thing was sort of creepy, but I supposed I should have been thankful she hadn’t decorated the whole apartment with a cat theme.

Twenty minutes after Drew was supposed to arrive, the intercom beeped and I stood to answer it.

A minute later, he stepped into the apartment with wind-tousled hair, shrugging off his jacket and tossing it on the nearest chair. I noticed Princess’s shadow slinking along the wall to investigate and then slinking away again when she realized it was just Drew.

“Hi,” I said, standing on my tiptoes to kiss him. His mouth was cold and dry.

“Hi. Sorry I’m late. I wanted to run home and change.”

I stepped back from him, my hands sliding from his shoulders. “It’s fine.”

“What did you want to order?”

I lifted the takeout menu from the kitchen counter and handed it over. “Does Chinese sound good?”

“Sure.” He took his phone out and glanced at the menu. “Forty-five minutes,” he said once he’d placed the order.

“Oh, I didn’t think it would be that long,” I said. I was pretty hungry.

He grinned, his eyebrows lifting suggestively. “What should we do?”

“What do you want to do?” A nervous fluttering began in my stomach that had nothing to do with emptiness.

“Do you even have to ask?” he said, moving toward me. “It’s been too long.” He took my face in his hands and pressed his lips to mine.

I felt a slow stirring of desire. After three weeks with only a few kisses here and there, having sex on the couch sounded way more appealing than it usually did. My hands fisted in his shirt as we stumbled toward the sofa blindly. His fingers trailed across my stomach, and I had to stifle laughter—they were still cold from being outside.

He unbuttoned my pants and together we shimmied them off; more clothes gathered on the floor beside us.

His mouth latched onto my nipple and sucked as I ran my hands through his dark hair. Something quickened inside me and my breathing came in little gasps. He covered me with his long, lean body, pushing my legs farther apart to accommodate him. And then I felt a dull pressure.

He pushed into me.

I wasn’t ready. When Drew said it had been too long, that worked both ways. Though I was aroused, I wasn’t wet enough, and his invasion (because that’s exactly what it felt like) pinched and stung.

Drew tilted his hips, moving back and forth. Gradually, I opened for him, and it wasn’t quite so uncomfortable. But just as I was beginning to like the friction, he stilled, breathing hard.

I blinked up at the ceiling, noticing a spiderweb in the corner—I’d have to get a broom to get it down. I moved my lower body a little bit and moaned. I didn’t even sound convincing to myself, but I think Drew was too focused on his own orgasm to notice.

His forehead fell against my shoulder, his chest rising and falling. “You’re still on the pill, right?”

“Yeah,” I said; my voice was oddly tight.

He laid against me for a few moments more. Then he dropped a kiss on my mouth before he withdrew. “That was nice,” he said, pulling on his boxers.

Nice
—that sounded lackluster. Good weather was nice. Watching an interesting movie was nice. Sex was either more or less. “Very nice,” I agreed, reaching down to collect my own clothes. Except the best word to describe it would have been “underwhelming.”

But I was being selfish. We were together, which was what really mattered. Every couple probably had boring sex sometimes. It was no big deal.

I glanced at the clock on the living room wall. Fifteen minutes had passed—it would still be half an hour before the food arrived.

I leaned against Drew’s side, smelling his familiar spicy aftershave. It was nice just to have him here, really. I should have been happy about that, not hung up on an unreached climax. I kissed the underside of his jaw.

“Did you check the job openings?” he asked, wrapping his arm around my shoulders.

“There was a job in the Analytics Department, and it didn’t require experience.”

The official job title on the listing was clerical support specialist—which I was pretty sure was just SLQ’s way of making a low-level job seem prestigious. From the description it sounded like mostly data entry, plus a few miscellaneous tasks, like sending out mail.

But it would be a lot better than working at a fast-food place, which was where I was seriously starting to worry I would end up.

“I can give your name to human resources.”

“Okay,” I said. I pressed my face against his neck; it had the smooth, just-shaved feeling that I liked. “I ended up renting four movies,” I said with a smile. My habit was to pick out more than one and then let him decide. When I was by myself I usually stood in the aisle staring at the selection until another library patron jostled me out of the way.