Next Time

The morning light had just begun to pinstripe the kitchen through the warped blinds, but it was already hot and thick, the kind of heat that turned every breath into something you had to drag through syrup. We were both sitting at the small, battle-worn breakfast table. Sarah’s hair was a tangled mess, and she was wrapped in my old t-shirt, which she wore like a flag captured from a defeated country. Her knees were pulled to her chest, making her look smaller, maybe even childish, except that she was staring at me with the intimidating calm of a seasoned hostage negotiator.

“Yeah, if his date goes well there will be more,” she said, confirming the threat. She sipped her orange juice, but I could see her eyes tracking my reaction over the rim of the glass.

I was so tired—bones, eyes, memory, the works. The part of me that would have once argued, or even cared, had been burned away by the sustained humiliation and replaced with a kind of psychic cartilage, bendable and numb. So instead of rising to the bait, I just let the silence settle over us. It was a thick, sour silence, the kind that could be cut with the blunt back of a spoon.

After a solid ten minutes of playing chicken with each other—me pretending to read the mail, and Sarah endlessly stirring her juice with a plastic straw—I finally said, “So, when’s the man of the hour coming out? Or is he too afraid of me now?”

She looked up, her eyes empty of irony. “He already left. His date started early.” For a second I thought I caught a glimmer of satisfaction behind her deadpan delivery, but she blinked and it was gone.

Of course. It was Saturday, the day Wiley had spent the entire week prepping for like it was a NASA re-entry. I flashed back to the last time I'd seen him, wobbling on the edge of my father’s old desk, nervously rehearsing the lines of a conversation he would inevitably botch.

I should have felt relief at having the apartment to ourselves. Instead, all I got was the feeling of a loaded gun being cocked somewhere in the dark, the tension unresolved and waiting for the next misfire. Sarah spent most of the day glued to her phone. Every few minutes she would glance at the screen, sigh, and then tap something back with the insouciance of a bored empress. I tried to busy myself with some menial housework—dishes, sweeping, scrubbing out the inside of the microwave, even though it hadn’t been used in a month—but every time I walked past the living room, she was still there, knees up, phone in hand, completely unreachable.

At one point, I hovered in the doorway and said, “You know, if you want to talk about it, you can.”

She didn’t look up. “About what?”

I hesitated, then **** the words out: “About Wiley. About… what you did last night.”

She put her phone down and regarded me as if I’d asked her to comment on a tornado that had already swept the house up and set it down somewhere in Kansas. “There’s not really much to say. He needed it done. He told me you said I could. So, I did it.”

“Sarah you have no right to be snap at me,” I said.

She was quiet for a long time, and for a moment all I could hear was the hum of the refrigerator laboring under the burden of an almost empty interior.

We stood there like that, staring at each other across a tiny chasm, both pretending not to care which direction the wind was blowing.

At around one in the afternoon, her phone buzzed on the table. She read the message and, for the first time all morning, smiled.

“It’s Wiley,” she said. “He says the date is going so well that he’s taking her back to his place. He won’t be home tonight.”

The way she said it—deadpan, but with a little upward inflection at the end, like she was testing out a possible punchline—caught me off guard. “Good for him,” I said, trying not to sound as bitter as I felt. “Maybe he’ll finally found someone a gross as he is.”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “You know, you could at least pretend to care.”

“I do care,” I said, and found that I meant it, in the same way a person might care about the weather: with resignation, and the knowledge that nothing you did would make a difference. “I care enough to want him out of my life!”

The afternoon dissolved into a series of inane chores and phone calls. I tried to nap, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw Wiley’s quivering back and Sarah’s hands gripping him like she was about to be carried off by a flood. I wondered if Wiley was having a better time right now, or if his anxiety had already gotten the best of him. I wondered if Sarah was thinking about him, or if she was already compartmentalizing last night into the same psychic vault where she kept every other disappointment I’d ever inflicted on her.

Just before dinner, Wiley texted Sarah again: [The date is going so well that he is taking her back to his place, so he won’t be back tonight.]

Sarah tapped out a reply: [Just make sure your date knows she has her own bed, preferably yours without you in it, just in case she’s not ready for anything.]

He replied almost instantly: [Will do.]

I spent the rest of the night on the couch, binge-watching a series I’d already seen twice, trying to pretend I was alone in the world. At some point, Sarah made popcorn and sat beside me, legs wrapped in a blanket. She smiled at me, just once, and for a moment it felt almost normal.

Then, at ten o’clock, her phone buzzed again. I watched as she read it, her eyebrows arching in amusement.

“What is it?” I asked.

She held the screen up for me to see: [Shit Sarah, she wants me to share my bed with her, do you think she actually wants to, you know.]

Sarah’s smile widened. She texted back with both thumbs, quick and sure: [Yes. Someone her age wouldn’t share a bed on a date unless she wanted that.]

Wiley’s next message was almost immediate: [Fuck… I am so nervous that I am going to do something wrong. Do you think I am good enough.]

Sarah typed for a long time before answering: [Just calm down, you’ll be fine trust me.]

Within seconds: [Thank you sara-bear, I knew I could ]

Sarah tells him to make sure his date knows she has her own bed preferably his without him in it, just in case if she is not ready for anything.

he text her back

[Will do]

I pretended to be focused on the TV, but every word of the exchange burned a little deeper. The show blurred into a haze of canned laughter and reruns of reruns, and eventually I dozed off, half-dreaming of Wiley, nervous and sweaty, fumbling through a moment that he’d probably spend the rest of his life retelling as a triumph or a tragedy.