Other People

I didn’t want to go to work. I said it to myself in the mirror several times that morning while washing my face. I sang it, a dirge for my current condition. I crooned. I stated it imperatively. 

I don’t want to go to work today.

I don’t want to go to work today.

I don’t want / to go / to work / today.

I do NOT want to go to work toDAY.

I went to work that morning. On the walk to the train I ate my yogurt: vanilla with little almond slivers left over from a salad kit I had bought at Trader Joe’s and eaten for dinner the night before. It was ominously quiet on First Avenue that morning, so quiet that I felt almost an unpleasant shock when I pulled my earphones out to order a coffee— the sort of quiet that exists beyond the words you exchange with your barista, or the gutterpunks screaming anarchist jargon on the corner of St. Marks. It was as if the city was a stereo track and presently, at First Avenue, at eight-forty-five in the morning, only my left earphone was working so all I could hear was the vocal arrangement. It was empty and eerie. It happened often, though today the silence was particularly heightened. I wandered into the coffee shop, onto the line. 

“Can I get… uh… a small coffee, no sugar just— do you guys have coconut milk?”

The long haired boy with a bandana tied around his neck behind the counter shook his head, wordless for the woman ahead of me in line. She barely looked up from her phone as she spoke to him, her figure swallowed whole in an absurdly oversized down coat. It was a loud, hot, steamed vegetable green. She wore a shearling hat that matched. 

“Cashew milk?”

He shook his head. The woman’s tone rose.

“Okay. Do you have almond milk?”

He nodded, passing her a paper coffee cup and pointing her towards the little condiment bar by the front door. “There’s almond milk in the green pitcher.”

She paid without a word. I stepped forward with a smile, hoping to prove less irritable and particular than the woman before me.

“Can I get a cappuccino? Regular milk is fine, thanks.”

Bandana boy nodded at me the same way he had nodded at Haricot Vert, an unpleasant and dismissive nod. He left the total on the screen and gave the go-ahead to pay. I tipped two dollars. 

“Thanks so much!” I smiled and waved on my way out the door, in a loaded effort to kill with kindness. He raised a hand, and if it was a wave, it was a limp, sad excuse for one.

The train smelled like pee. It was fifteen minutes late and approached the station with a slow, deliberate crawl, like a runway model making sure she doesn’t catch her heel on a long organza gown. Some fucking nerve, showing up here this late, crammed with Bedford Avenue milennials in long leopard print coats and puffer vests and tortoise shell framed glasses, without so much as an apology. Not only was there no apology, there was no promise of an L train waiting in Brooklyn due in two minutes. The next train was in, yes, fifteen minutes. And when I entered the train and shrugged my bag down onto the ground, holding it like a penguin holds an egg between my two pigeoned toes, it smelled not only like pee but like expensive shampoo, a tall woman with wet blonde hair pressing up against the side of my body. Her and a lover chatted flirtatiously in an unfamiliar language, taking claim to an entire handrail. For a moment I thought of saying something, but I was small and wearing a peacoat from Target and the last time I washed my hair was three days ago. Standing next to this Latvian Vogue Typecast, I felt completely powerless. It was only for a few stops. 

When I got off at Eighth Avenue to transfer to the A train, however, she and her unapproachably handsome lover parted ways with a kiss! kiss! and a tiny princess wave, she walked beside me, long slow strides working in parallel with my small, springy steps. I tried to walk faster, but I threatened crossing the line between brisk commuter walk and lopsided jog. So together we walked, me and let’s-call-her Tilda. And when we got on the same A train and stood beside each other, and as I sipped my coffee and she stood there as if it was her job to remain still and looked beautiful, I returned to feeling that same weighted silence that I had felt on my early morning walk down First Avenue. My inner ears rang and my palms clammed up. I suddenly felt myself panicking, scrambling for my earphones in the pocket of my coat, my vision surging, lights in a thunderstorm. I gripped so tight on my cappucino that I popped the top off and splattered hot milk everywhere. The same hand grabbed for the handrail. The last thing I saw was Tilda, her green eyes wide, her little pink mouth pursed in confusion. 

I regained consciousness as I was being carelessly towed onto a wooden bench at the Columbus Circle Station. MTA officers in reflector vests and two EMT workers guided me as I tried to sit up, feeling suddenly aware of whether or not anybody saw my underwear. I bet Tilda didn’t even wear underwear. I bet she was so self-secure and everything fit her so seamlessly that underwear was of no necessity. I bet she caught a glimpse of my favorite pair of boy briefs with the lace trim and pearling around my hip points and flying pig print and let out an adorable, pitying sigh. The MTA officer encouraged me to lay back down as I tried to sit myself back up.

“Sir, I’m gonna be late for work, I’m fine, really.”

Truth be told I wasn’t sure why I fainted, and I couldn’t assure that I was actually fine but perhaps if I said it out loud, the feeling would manifest. My chest hurt, but my legs were sturdy, and my head hurt, but I had woken up with something of a headache and decided to remedy it with caffeine and yogurt, so perhaps that was backlash. I should probably call my mom, I thought. And so while the MTA officer grew frustrated with my efforts to button my coat and put my backpack back on, wiping some residual coffee off of my leg in the process, I stood up and smiled.

“As a patient, it’s my right to refuse care. I copywrite hospital pamphlets for a living so believe you me, I know how this goes. I really, really appreciate it, I just—” I turned towards the exit gates and saw Tilda standing in my periphery. I paused. She was standing with her hands in her pockets, goggle-eyed as before, mouth just barely open.

“I gotta go.” 

I stood up and with a sharp inhale walked towards Tilda, not sure what to say. 

“Sorry for spilling coffee on you.” As I got closer, I  could see the pale blue of her long, mohair coat was stained with splashes of beige. She seemed unfazed, or perhaps unsure of what I had said. She towered over me, or maybe I just shrank beneath her.

“I..” she paused, and pulled out my wallet from her pocket, “..I found on train floor. You dropped when you fall.”

“Ah,” I took the wallet from her hand. “Thanks.”

“You are welcome,” her teeth caught her lip as she pronounced the ‘w’ in “welcome”— maybe she’s German? 

Before I could say anything else, she made her way into the crowd, her long, decisive strides giving her an almost-floating effect. I looked in my wallet and saw everything was in its place, not even a dollar bill missing. I hadn’t suspected Tilda to be a thief, though I sort of just expected something to be missing, expected something to have gone even further wrong. My wallet had been stolen from my gym locker in April, and while it was entirely my fault for having not secured a lock on my locker while I was showering, the breaking of sacred lockerroom trust has taken its toll on me. Me and my unnamed thief had been not only naked, but naked and sweaty in that same dingey purple-and-yellow basement locker room. I would never consider myself the most trusting person, and so the effects that experience had were relatively brutal. I was constantly patting at my pockets on the subway, manically checking my purse at the bar. I looked up from my wallet to see if Tilda was still in sight, but she was gone, lost in a sea of commuters with their respective coffee cups and shuffled steps. 

In my office, I considered and reconsidered calling my mom, twirling a pen in remiss, occasionally moving my mouse to keep my screen from falling asleep. There was no point, she would worry more than I could ever even imagine worrying about myself. She wasn’t wrong to worry, but she wasn’t right to inflict her own terrors onto me after such a hapless morning. I looked around at the other desks, the other people in my office appearing to be disengaged from reality completely, their little hands tirelessly click-clacketing away, even the sleek design of Apple keyboards couldn’t silence the work sounds. The office was colder than it should have been, my feet chilled even through wool socks and ankle boots.

“Hey, Reggie,” I peaked around my computer, and from the reflection of his glasses I could see that he paused scrolling through an excel sheet, though his eyes did not rise to make contact.

“Yes, Coral?” His eyes slowly made their way to meet mine, his body posture remaining hunched and slanted towards the screen.

“Do you think we could make it maybe just a baby bit warmer in here? Like a little toasty? It is November, after all.” 

“Coral, do you know how much money this company spent on these computers?”

He probably knew the number down to the last cent. Reggie was the company’s financial administrative coordinator. I had no idea. 

“My guess is a lot.”

“Right,” he rocked back into his swivel chair, placing his hands in his lap. “And do you know, Coral, that the electronic components of a desktop computer operate at a specific current induced by a low voltage? So that even a small fluctuation in voltage is dangerous, and that excessive heat lowers the electrical resistance of objects, therefore increasing the current. Despite being a danger, Coral, higher temperatures can also result in slowdown. So not only could keeping it ‘toasty’ in this office result in a slowdown of computer functionality, but also an electrical breakdown.”

Dumbfounded, I sat silenced in my chair, Reggie’s arms crossed smugly across his chest as he proved himself right and me, not only wrong, but stupid. This wasn’t unlike Reggie, in fact earlier that morning he had given me the same look as I struggled to configure the grind basket back in the coffee maker before it started heating up, though I was too slow and the water had already started percolating, spitting hot steam and dew at me. Instead of helping me immediately he just stood there, and after about forty five seconds he hit me with a cold, “Turn it towards the right.” 

“Breakdown, huh? All because I want it to be three degrees warmer in here?” I nodded a slow nod, and, before I angry cried at him, turned back to my screen. It was lit up with overwhelmingly unfinished manuscripts and Adobe software, bits of unidentified texts floating in the background. There was no commonality to the tasks I was set for today, and it left me feeling a sticky malaise, the kind that lead to wanting to do an overwhelming amount of nothing. I felt sorry for me. I had thought my literary pursuits would put me in a fabulous position full of love and feelings, an artist’s world built on empathy and understanding, underscored by a sense of belonging and perpetual inspiration. When I was in school upstate I thought that moving to the city would be a move towards the sort of urban poetics of Patti Smith’s lifestyle, where I’d be sipping coffee with Chloë Sevigny and smoking cigarettes with the ghost of Jack Kerouac. Maybe it was contrived and unrealistic, but maybe it was powered by enough hope that it would manifest itself in little ways. Instead, it gave me Reggie Greenbaum’s toffee-nosed glares and ill fitting v-neck sweaters. I made pamphlets. I was a literary bootlicker. 

My phone rang. Like she smelt my lack of productivity, my mother was calling. I sighed.

“Martha.”

“Coral Mae.”

“Mom, how are you?”

“I’m fine. Your father has been on this new home renovation kick and so we’re currently in the process of dismantling our kitchen cabinets. He says that some light wood will bring life back into this house, but—” 

She paused and brought the phone away from her mouth, yelling. “If we wanted to bring life into the house maybe we should just get a god damn cat! Wouldn’t cost us three grand!” 

“I don’t know, maybe some change could be nice. I’ll be excited to see it, for sure.”

“You’re always so mellow, Coral. I don’t know how I could have birthed you from my loins.”

In the background I heard the faintest sound of drilling, followed by a hard snap, followed by my father’s voice murmuring indistinct curse words.

“I wonder the same thing. You just calling to check in?”

There was a pause. It wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t the sort of comforting silence you might expect to be shared between a mother and child. 

“I suppose. I got this deep feeling of worry for you earlier this morning, something like a sign from the universe that I should check in. You know, a, uh, motherly instinct.”

I bit on my cheek so hard I thought it might bleed. 

“ Uh, right, yeah no, I’m fine Ma.”

“No heart palpitations?”

“No, Mom.”

“No dizzy spells?”

“Nope.”

“Are you in the office?”

“I am.”

“How’s that boy?”

“Fine, Mom. Not a boy, just a coworker.”

“So secretive, always, even since you were a toddler. Always hiding your notebooks like I’d be able to translate your crayon scribbles and disclose all the private affairs of your three year old life. Well, have it your way I suppose. Love you, Coral Mae.” 

“Love you too, Ma.” 

After a brief moment the other line buzzed with a soft silence, the kind that only a house phone permits. I sat with it for a few seconds, reveling in the comfort of the ordinary. 

I scanned the room. It looked like a space age doctor’s office, all lit up with iridescent whites and smooth, neutral-colored leather. It smelled like air conditioning. I took a sip of lukewarm coffee and looked down the row, all my coworkers but one (not including myself) diligently going about their work. 

That one was Felix. 

He was watching a video on his phone, which he kept posted between his electric pencil sharpener and stack of folders. From where I was sitting you really couldn’t tell what he was doing, though he had told me the last time that we went out that he usually watched wartime conspiracy theory videos on Tuesdays and Fridays, when our floor supervisor went and sat in at the other office in DUMBO. At first I thought it was funny, charming even when I factored in his barely-there British accent and tall, athletic frame. And after the fifth time I reconsidered it, and after the third time he re-told me, it didn’t seem funny at all, it seemed a serious impediment to our productivity. And especially after I considered that he was the one who sourced the projects that came to me, and by happenstance they came always late or never on Tuesdays and Fridays, it became absolutely irritating. Fuck Felix, and his boyish haircut, and early childhood upbringing in Wales, where his father taught at “university” and his mother died of pneumonia. I wanted to knock his phone over. So I did.

Having fun over there?

The text sent through space and delivered with an immediate vibration, one that knocked his phone flat on its face. I watched him with soft eyes. 

Lymes Disease is definitely an escaped bioweapon that was designed for Vietnam but was released accidentally into the Long Island Sound

Can you cite that?

No, but the proof’s in the pudding

That’s some convoluted pudding

From down the row, I watched as Felix chuckled lightly and then swiveled to face me, his head tilted slightly. Our coworkers made no sign of notice.

Want to get dinner tonight?

I fainted on the train this morning. 

Should probably just go home and

                                                                                                     rest, but I appreciate the offer !!

Jesus Christ, are you okaY???

Do you want to just come over then? Keep it ↓🔑

He was watching me respond. I desperately wanted to say no, and while I could imagine the look on my face was unaffected, inside I boiled with frustration. I blushed unpleasantly. I wasn’t dying, and I was at work, which meant there was effectively no reason I shouldn’t come over except that I really just didn’t want to. Felix always cooked pasta, and gluten made me bloated and left me feeling full and puffy into the next morning. It wasn’t even good pasta— I suspected it was the British in him that inspired Felix to overcook any and all linguini to a mealy mush. He did his best, but it was unpleasant, paired with a Six Buck Chuck and one-sided conversation, either on my end or his, myself struggling to deal with silence and him struggling to keep his mouth closed. It was the sort of painful interaction that you endure because you know it’s better than listening to your own internal monologue or doing your laundry, the way holding a yoga pose feels when you know it’s only temporary and you’d otherwise be sitting on your couch, or the way you take a shot because you know the dizzy warm feeling you’ll get later is worth the immediate dry heave. It was the sort of painful interaction you endure because you’re unsatiated.

Will put my sommelier skills to the test. It’s a… dinner.

:)

I slipped my phone into the side of my bag in a conscientious effort to stop playing text message footsies with horrible, terrible, doe-eyed Felix and focus on what I was supposed to be doing. I skipped lunch, opting for a break-room granola bar, and powered through the work I had spent my morning avoiding. It was surprisingly painless, I finished early, and in the spirit of Felix Fridays I didn’t receive any new assignments, so I threw my coat on and, with an especially exaggerated wave ‘goodbye’ to Reggie, I headed home.

I’m going home to take a chemical bath. Will hopefully wipe out whatever

flesh eating bacteria I picked up on the subway floor this morning C U @ 8

I was repulsed by my own consideration— I should have let him think I bailed. Why did I even let him begin to think I cared? Why did I feel sort of like I did care? Maybe I didn’t care about him so much as I cared about what he thought of me, and I hated that. 

At home my roommate was burning something into his cast iron, a process he called “seasoning” it but which I called “seasoning our entire apartment and all of my clothing so that I went to work smelling like a steakhouse.” He had the windows open but that did little for the smell, it mostly brought in the cold air from outside to mingle with the thick bacon smoke. 

“Adam, it smells ridiculous in here.”

He peaked out from behind the wall between the kitchen from the living room.

“Coral! You’re home. I assumed you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.”

I put my bag down on the loveseat and stepped into the kitchen. He was cooking ham hocks and garlic cloves with butter. 

“And why would you assume that?”

“Because you’ve stayed at that doucher Felix’s house the past three Fridays.”

“It has not been the past three Fridays,” I lied.

“Oh, it has. Because last Friday you weren’t home so I deep fat fried a cornish hen, and the week before you weren’t home so Valerie came over and we drank martinis and painted our nails and watched Beetlejuice in Spanish, and the first Friday it happened I was so confused that I found myself sitting with the new season of that cooking show you like queued up on Netflix, ready to play, just waiting for you to come home.”

I let out a soft awe despite the feeling of being very, very exposed. 

“Adam, you waited out to watch the new season of Mafia Kitchen Bang-Bang with me?”

“If you can even believe it, yes. I considered watching it without you, but it’s actually the worst TV show to have ever been released for more than one season of streaming. So at like, three-ish, I just went to bed. I assumed you went home for the weekend, because your mom keeps leaving worried voicemails on that landline phone she got for us, which was weird at first but now is just sort of sad— stop being a bad daughter, by the way, call your mother. Anyways, but so I heard you come in at like ten the next morning and I was like, ‘Oh shit dude, Coral’s getting laid!’” 

I could feel my face heat up. Had Adam and I not lived together since our senior year of college, I would have been concerned by how much he had invested into my Friday night and also my mother-daughter relationship.  But we had developed a sort of sickly sweet bond over the years, him and his cross-borough girlfriend Valerie having helped me acclimate to city living, to subway systems and unexpected late night bar crawls. They explained to me that I was no longer allowed to say I was from New York, when what I meant to say was “I’m from Buffalo.” Adam had grown up in an affluent but totally absent family situation in TriBeCa, the product of two wayward artists who hated each other and smoked opium in the loft of their apartment like it was 1882, and Valerie lived with her extended family in Queens while she attended medical school. They worked in tandem to give me a sort-of balanced secondhand perspective on New York living. I was now fluent in Lower Manhattan subway transfers, at least, and I had Adam to thank for that, mostly. 

“My guess is you’re going there again? Just judging by how imperatively you walked in here and how red your face just got?”

I made my mouth small and nodded a small, shy nod, with all the deliberate coyness of a puppy who just peed on the carpet. Without a word, Adam raised his hand in a salute, and signaled me on my way to the shower.

“Go get him, tiger. At least he’s better than Paul.”

“You mean, Phil?”

“Yeah FUCK that guy. That one time you had him over he tried to talk to me about double-entendre in Melville. Like bro, we get it, you know I’m a PhD student and that makes you want to try and engage me in literary discourses about dick because you’re also a PhD student. But can’t you see I’m trying to watch the commercial break between rounds of Jeopardy, Paul?”

I chuckled in agreement. Phil was awful, Adam was right, and I am so glad that I no longer have to listen to him try and analyze homoerotic underscores in Western Classics. He was a very bad kisser, and the way his tongue sloshed around in my mouth reminded me of a harpooned whale out at sea, fighting the good fight. Call me Ishmael. 

I was seven minutes early to Felix’s house. He lived off the F train, which I could have taken but I was ready sooner that I thought I would be, and the longer I remained in my apartment, the more I threatened absorbing Adam’s Pan Smell, and so I figured, weather permitting, I would walk. It was cold, though not unusually so, the soft yellow lights of the Lower East Side left me feeling warm and blanketed in familiarity. It was loud and ruckus laden, every bar near capacity with every early-twenties art student and finance bro who dared start their night before ten. I took long inhales and smooth exhales as I made my way across East Houston, down Ludlow, across Delancey, remembering the morning with an odd but expected fuzziness. The silence of it all, the way I could distinctly see let’s-call-her Tilda’s face as I melted into the ground, it was like a lucid nightmare, like the ones I get during the holidays about my mom and my ex-boyfriend and gifts I forgot to pick up for my nephews. I felt dually connected and disconnected to the experience of it all, my fixation on let’s-call-her Tilda was itching and demanding because I hated how pleasant she was and how unpleasant I felt in myself, and yet in the intricacy of my remembering her I seemed to skirt off the idea of having fainted completely. Being so out of control seemed near-normal since I moved here, since I had become dependent on the MTA for transportation and other people for my happiness— a flaw which, in therapy, I was fully honest about and “trying to work out,” but in practice I was horribly good at perpetuating.

In the seven minutes before my expected arrival I walked the block three times, went into and paroused two separate bodegas, and bought a baguette. I thought about waiting outside for the last two minutes, but my ears were cold and my hair was wet, so I threw etiquette away and rang. The door immediately buzzed open, and as I came up the stairs, I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. I cringed. I wasn’t a resident here, there was no need for mid-stairwell confrontation. The steps drew closer and before I could even look down at my feet, let’s-call-her Tilda came swiftly down the stairs, as light as air in the form of a woman, in the shape of a supermodel, in the outfit of an all-powerful media goddess. She paused and looked at me with a childish whimsy, like she knew who I was but couldn’t put a name or a place to the face. I looked at her too. The same gut feeling came rushing back, a tightness which bordered nausea which bordered on disgust which melted into envy. I suddenly felt very sick. We paused for a moment, there on the stairwell, but before I could say anything she just smiled the smallest smile, mouth closed, and continued down the stairs. I was still for a moment, then continued upwards. 

“You’re two minutes early!” Felix was waiting for me, door open, a schmutz of tomato sauce on his cheek, one hand mitted and holding a colander. 

“Don’t point it out, please, I’m sorry as it is for showing up with wet hair. But my roommate was seasoning his cast iron and my apartment smelled like it had been scrubbed down with Sazon and I had to get out of there. I uh, I brought bread.”

He smiled at me, silent but expressive. It was the same grin he gave to me when he saw me on the salad bar line at the bodega across the street from our building, watching me pick the black olives out of an antipasto. It was the same grin I had come to find comfort in when, after a long day of proofreading and drinking muddy coffee, I could look down a row and catch Felix fixing paperclips into a long chain or tossing paper footballs in my general direction. It was situational, it was indulgent beyond my own benefit, but it was a break from the rigidity of things.

 I pulled the baguette out from my tote bag and placed it on the island, taking a seat at one of the barstools. His apartment was large-ish, though he had two roommates and made decent money so I expected no less. It was like a soundstage for a Manhattan apartment: touches of exposed brick, a TV mounted on one wall, a single-speed bike on the other. The whole place was peppered with young people belongings— framed art prints, records in recycled milk crates, family photos and funny postcards thumbtacked to the wall. The place looked lived in, though not enough, not enough to feel home-ish, even with photos of Felix’s Very British Family stuck all over and the small collection of stained coffee mugs accumulating on the side table. 

“Coral, this bread smells fantastic, where did you get it?”

“That market up the street with all the dried pork hanging in the window?”

“You know, they make the most amazing burrata?”

“Do they?”

“They do.”

He talked about cheese for a while, about how you make cheese, how much milk you need to make cheese, how hard it is to find cheesecloth if you’re not trying to buy it from Amazon. I watched him move his hands around a lot. I watched him overcook tagliatelle. He gave me a glass of wine to taste. I swirled it around in my glass a bit, the way I imagined one might if they visited a very French wine chateau. I confessed that I had never been to France or a wine chateau for that matter. Felix smiled. He placed his hand on the small of my back. I sneezed. He apologized, though neither of us were sure why. The wine was better than usual, though that made it just about average. 

Over pasta I told him about how I had fainted on the train this morning, how I had woken up to the sight of this beautiful woman, and how I swear to God I had seen that same beautiful woman on the walk up the stairs to his apartment. Oh yeah, he said, that’s Juni. Her and her husband Elias live in 4L but have a studio in East Williamsburg. Juni. I said her name out loud, let the syllables swirl around in my mouth, like how you’re supposed to do with wine when you really want to get a taste for it . I told him she made me feel like a sad pug of a woman. I laughed at myself when I said this, so much so that I couldn’t even finish the word “woman.” A sad pug of a woma. He said that was understandable because she was a Swedish runway model (Swedish!), but that I looked nice and, hey, I was actually very beautiful. I felt stupid. I didn’t mean for that comment to garner compliments, I just liked imagining myself as a pug in a peacoat next to this ethereal Swedish(!) woman. Felix talked about Sweden for a while. He had family there. We didn’t talk about how I had fainted on the train, and though I didn’t particularly want to, I thought maybe he’d care enough to ask. He didn’t. He just kept going on about how he had family in Sweden, and I didn’t, so I let him talk. He had family there and in Germany, and his family was sort of German though not really because when you’re from Wales you usually say your family is from there if it’s been about two generations or so and— Hey, here, let me open another bottle of wine, why don’t we go sit on the couch? He was from Wales, which is different than being from England or being British, because, actually, the accent is different which I hadn’t noticed and so I’d apparently misnamed his accent. So he was a Wale, or he was Waleish? Waleian? and had family in Germany and Sweden and I had more wine than pasta in my system and he had his hand on my thigh and I had a heavy feeling between my two eyebrows that made every blink feel languid and lazy. It was a warmer sort of dissent from consciousness than I had felt that morning on the train, less jarring. He had only been to Germany a few times but it wasn’t anything exciting and so he sort of just stopped talking about it and proceeded to put his tongue in my mouth, which was fine and felt like tongue in your mouth when you’re very much expecting it, and I proceeded to take my dress off which was easy to do because it was basically a giant t-shirt. I heard Adam’s voice as he described talking to himself about me getting laid, but that faded softly into him telling me to call my mother, and I could hear her voice too which was sad to think about in the context of getting laid. Juni. That was a better name for her than let’s-call-her Tilda. I could hear Felix muttering something, though it came between warm breaths that were mostly pressed against my body, so they were unintelligible. What? I said, do you care if my roommates come in? Oh, so this is foreplay. Uh. No, I don’t care. Are you sure? Like, Coral, what if we’re just, you know, doing it— he placed emphasis on the “it”— on this sleeper sofa, and Jamal just walked right in? What would you do? Nothing, I wouldn’t do anything, I don’t care. Oh yeah? Yeah, really I don’t care, let them come in, fuck it, I hope they come in. From where I was sitting, I could see the front door was not only locked but deadbolted. Even if they came home, he made it nearly impossible for them to just walk right in before I could pop my clothes back on and sit pretty. I could feel sweat that wasn’t my own on my chest. It was gross and a little funny and in some imagining of this situation it may have been intimate. It was not intimate. It was fluid. Literally. Let them come in, I thought, let them come in and let’s see if you’re really into fantasies of someone walking in on you having sex on a forbidden futon in your overpriced Lower Manhattan apartment with a very average looking girl, when we all know there are hundreds of now-called Juni’s out there just waiting for some bland and shallow and handsome idiot like Felix to come sweep them off their feet and make subpar vanilla love to them in a windowless living room. The pasta wasn’t sitting well. I thought for a moment I might go excuse myself to throw up in the bathroom, but that might only make him suspect a connectivity between my throwing up and passing out where there was none— I had bad anxiety and a mild though livable gluten intolerance, but these two entities were mutually exclusive. I opened my eyes and smiled lightly to pretend like I had been fully present in this moment of supposed intimacy. Fuck. The sweat was less a drip and more a smear now. I thought for a second I might have heard a knock on the front door, but even then, I really didn’t care.