coffee. It is both exciting and scary, like waiting for a wave to crash over your head. Something is coming, and I am doing nothing to stop it.
It is Tuesday night, twenty minutes before eight. I am home. I have not heard from Dex all day so I assume we are still on. I floss and brush my teeth. I light a candle in the kitchen in case there is a lingering aroma of the Thai food I ordered the evening before for my solo Memorial Day dinner. I change out of my suit, put on black lacy underwear-even though I know, know, know that nothing is going to happen-jeans, and a T-shirt. I apply a touch of blush and some lip gloss. I look casual and comfortable, the opposite of how I feel.
At exactly eight, Eddie, who is subbing for Jose, rings my buzzer. 'You have company,' he bellows.
'Thanks, Eddie. Send him up.'
Seconds later Dex appears in my doorway in a dark suit with faint gray pinstripes, a blue shirt, and a red tie.
'Your doorman was smirking at me,' he says, as he steps into my apartment and tentatively looks around as if this were his first visit.
'Impossible,' I say. 'That's in your head.'
'It's not in my head. I know a smirk when I see one.'
'That's not Jose. Wrong doorman. Eddie's on tonight. You have a guilty conscience.'
'I told you already. I don't feel that guilty about what we did.' He looks steadily into my eyes.
I feel myself being sucked into his gaze, losing my resolve to be a good person, a good friend. I look away nervously, ask if he wants something to drink. He says a glass of water would be fine. No ice. I am out of bottled water so I run the tap until the water comes out cool. I fill a glass for each of us and join him on my couch.
He takes several big gulps and then puts his glass down on a coaster on my coffee table. I sip from my glass. I can feel him staring at me, but I don't look back. I keep my eyes straight ahead, where my bed is situated-the scene of the Incident. I need to get a proper one-bedroom or at least a screen to separate my sleeping alcove from the rest of the apartment.
'Rachel,' he says. 'Look at me.'
I glance at him and then down at my coffee table.
He puts his hand on my chin and turns my face toward his.
I feel myself blush but don't move away. 'What?' I release a nervous laugh. He doesn't change expression.
'Rachel.'
'What?'
'We have a problem.'
'We do?'
'A major problem.'
He leans forward, his left arm draped along the back of the sofa. He kisses me softly and then more urgently. I taste cinnamon. I think of the tin of cinnamon Altoids that he had with him all weekend. I kiss him back.
And if I thought Marcus was a good kisser, or Nate before him, or anyone else for that matter, I thought wrong. In comparison, everyone else was merely competent. This kiss from Dex makes the room spin. And this time, it's not from booze. This kiss is like the kiss I have read about a million times, seen in the movies. The one I wasn't sure existed in real life. I have never felt this way before. Fireworks and all. Just like Bobby Brady and Millicent.
We kiss for a long, long time. Not breaking away once. Not even shifting positions on my couch even though we are at an unnatural distance for such an intense kiss. I can't speak for him, but I know why I don't move. I don't want it to end, don't want the next awkward stage to come, where we might ask the questions about what we are doing. I don't want to talk about Darcy, to even hear her name. She has nothing to do with this moment. Nothing. This kiss stands on its own. It is removed from time or circumstance or their September wedding. That is what I try to tell myself. When Dex finally breaks away, it is only to move closer to me and put his arms around me and whisper into my ear, 'I can't stop thinking about you.'
I can't stop either.
But I can control what I'm doing. There is emotion, and then there is what you do about it. I pull away, but not too far away, and shake my head.
'What?' he asks gently, his arm partially around me.
'We shouldn't be doing this,' I say. It is a watered-down protest, but at least it is something.
Darcy can be annoying, controlling, and exasperating, but she is my friend. I am a good friend. A good person. This isn't who I am. I must stop. I won't know myself if I don't stop.
Yet I don't move away. Instead, I wait to be convinced otherwise, hoping he will talk me into it. And sure enough: 'Yes. We should,' he says. Dex's words are sure. No second-guessing, doubts, worry. He holds my face in his hands and stares intently into my eyes. 'We have to.'
There is nothing slick in his words, only sincerity. He is my friend, the friend I knew and cared for before Darcy ever met him. Why didn't I recognize my feelings sooner? Why had I put Darcy's interests ahead of my own? Dex leans in and kisses me again, softly but with a sense of absolute certainty.
But it's wrong, I silently protest, knowing that I am too late, that I have already surrendered. We have crossed a new line together. Because even though we have already slept together, that didn't really count. We were drunk, reckless. Nothing really happened until this kiss today. Nothing that couldn't have been stuffed into a closet, confused with a dream, maybe even forgotten altogether.
That is all changed now. For better or worse.
Chapter 8
I have always done my best thinking in the shower. The night is for worrying, dwelling, analyzing. But in the morning, under the hot water, I see things clearly. So as I lather my hair, inhaling my grapefruit-scented shampoo, I pare everything down to the essential truth: what Dex and I are doing is wrong.
We kissed for a long time last night, and then he held me for even longer, few words passing between us. My heart thumped against his as I told myself that by not escalating the physical part we had scored a victory of sorts. But this morning, I know it was still wrong. Just plain wrong. I must stop. I will stop. Starting now.
When I was little, I used to count to three in my head when I wanted to give myself a fresh start. I'd catch myself biting my nails, jerk my fingers out of my mouth, and count. One. Two. Three. Go. Then I had a clean slate. From that point forward I was no longer a nail-biter. I used this tactic with many bad habits. So on a count of three, I will shake the Dex habit. I will be a good friend again. I will erase everything, fix it all.
I count to three slowly and then use the visualization technique that Brandon told me he used during baseball season. He said he would picture his bat striking the ball, hear it crack, see the dust fly as he slid safely into home base. He focused only on his good plays and not the times he screwed up.
So I do this. I focus on my friendship with Darcy, rather than my feelings for Dex. I make a video in my head, filling it with scenes of Darcy and me. I see us hunkered down in her bed during an elementary-school sleepover. We are discussing our plans for the future, how many kids we will have, what we will name them. I see Darcy, ten years old, propped up on her elbows, pinkies in her mouth, explaining that if you have three kids, the middle one should be a different sex from the others so everyone has something special. As if you can control such things.
I picture us in the halls at Naperville High, passing notes between classes. Her notes, folded in intricate shapes, like origami, were so much more entertaining than Annalise's notes, which simply reported how bored she was in class. Darcy's were chock-full of interesting observations about classmates and snide remarks about teachers. And little games for me to play. She'd put quotes down the left-hand side of the page and people's names on the right for me to match. I'd crack up as I drew a line from, say, 'Nice brights, buddy' to Annalise's father, who made that comment every time drivers forgot to turn off their high beams. She was funny. Sometimes cutting, even downright mean. But that only made her funnier.
I rinse my hair and remember something else, a memory that has not surfaced before. It is like finding a photograph of yourself that you never knew was taken. Darcy and I were freshmen, standing beside our locker after school. Becky Zurich, one of the most popular girls in the senior class (but not the nice kind of popular, more the
