Page 12 of Business or Pleasure

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The sound of Noemie’s high-end espresso machine wakes me up too early, a whirring and grinding that sounds more like a Category 5 storm than a prelude to coffee.

When my pillow does nothing to drown it out, I heave a groan and slowly extricate myself from beneath the blankets, rolling over to check my phone.

Missed you last night.

With a start, I bolt upright in bed, wondering how the hell Drew got my number. I must have been careless and left something behind, or maybe he’s just this side of creepy to manage to track me down. Oh god—I cannot see him again.

My heart starts back up with a new, less panicked rhythm when I blink my bleary eyes and see the name: Wyatt Torres.

Missed you last night. Just four words and he’s able to take me back to that evening a few weeks ago, desperate kisses and twisted sheets and entry number one on my list of regrets. A list that only seems to keep growing.

I flop back onto the pillow, scrolling his social media for photos of the housewarming. There he is with some of our other friends from college, posing in front of an impressive charcuterie board. It looks like a proper, classy AF party for the gainfully employed, nary a Ping-Pong ball or Solo cup in sight. Wyatt, with his job as a reporter at the Tacoma News Tribune. Alyssa, an investigative reporter at a local TV station. Josh, the sole reporter for a twice-weekly newspaper on the Eastside, covering everything from city council meetings to high school football games.

We always joked in college that we couldn’t wait to be the age where we could throw mature parties, the kind with hors d’oeuvres and cocktail napkins and wine we hadn’t bought for two dollars at Trader Joe’s. We’d all be award-winning journalists then, sharing anecdotes about our latest stories and bragging about who’d be the first to make the front page. If only we’d known that a digital front page was slightly less exciting.

It’s easy to forget that even before that, I wanted to write books of my own, before I realized it was impractical to think I’d be one of the lucky ones who could survive on that alone. I wrote all the time as a kid, stapling together little books with haphazardly doodled covers. Mysteries were my favorite; I loved the thrill of being able to trick the reader (aka my parents or Noemie), dropping what I’m sure were very obvious red herrings and leading them to a conclusion they swore they never saw coming. In hindsight, they might have been lying to protect my fragile preteen self-esteem. Being able to create chaos and then wrap everything up soothed my anxious brain, and there was something innately satisfying about stringing sentences together, to the point where I could hear their rhythm in my head before I typed them out. Nothing beat the pure and utter joy of finding exactly the right word to mean exactly the right thing.

That was a long time ago, when you could tell adults you wanted to be an author when you grew up and they’d grin and tell you how creative you were, how smart! But then you got older. Closer to the age you’d need to be when a school printed on a piece of paper the thing you’d committed the last four years of your life to. You have to be a little more realistic, guidance counselors said. Does anyone even make money doing that? your parents asked, worried. So you started saying journalist, because that was writing, too, only you didn’t get to make anything up. And they started smiling at you again, told you about all the interesting articles they’d read lately.

Sometimes on weekends, when I’m between deadlines, I open up the password-protected folder in the depths of my computer, My Documents / Personal / Other / Misc, just long enough to read what I wrote the last time I was between deadlines. Maybe I’ll swap out a word or two, but I haven’t made progress beyond that in months. Years.

Somehow, looking around my room, with its discounted Anthropologie duvet and candles burned down to stubs and stack of cozy mysteries I’ve read dozens of times but keep close for comfort, I don’t feel nearly as settled as I hoped I’d be at this stage of my life. I’m still not entirely sure I’m doing my taxes right.

I throw off the sheets, noticing the violet bruise blooming on my calf. A lovely memento from last night. When I got home after an Uber ride with a too-chatty driver—I check my phone again—five hours ago, I grabbed for the first clean-ish pajamas and socks I saw. I almost never sleep without my feet covered, except on the two days of the year it hits eighty degrees. It’s become something of a joke in my family that I ask for socks for every birthday or holiday, always seriously. I love wearing them, I’m always cold, and the occasional teasing is entirely worth it.

I can’t think of anything charming or witty enough to text Wyatt, but there’s a message from my mom from earlier this morning, a slightly blurry picture of Maddy’s book with the caption, I still don’t know who she is bt u did a grt job! thirsty!! And then a string of water droplet emojis. I don’t have the heart to tell her what they really mean.

It always takes a moment to decipher my parents’ texts. They’re a bit older, and while I’ve taught my dad five times how to attach something to an email, they’re trying, and I love them for it. This text, at least, is easy to reply to, so I send my mom a thank-you and pull on a robe, following the scent of Noemie’s bean-of-the-month subscription box downstairs.

My room, a bathroom, and a guest room comprise the upstairs, and I pay a comically low rent compared to most Seattle apartments. This quaint Ballard neighborhood with its brightly painted houses and landscaped backyards might as well have a sign saying Your Paycheck Must Be This Big to Move In. Every time I try to tell my cousin I should pay more, she waves it off. “I like you here,” she’ll insist, as though the mere fact of my presence is worth a few hundred dollars a month.

“Morning!” Noemie chirps from the kitchen. “Just opened a new bag. From Maine.”

Put something in a subscription box, and my cousin will lose her mind over it. Over the years, she’s subscribed to products ranging from practical to bizarre: toilet paper, sheet masks, artisan hot sauces, even a box that mails monthly clues to solve a mystery. One Hanukkah, she got me a sock-of-the-month subscription, and it remains the best gift I’ve ever received.

I’ve lived here for three years, and it never fails to surprise me how she sticks to a schedule on the weekends. She’s Saturday chic in a cropped sweatshirt and leggings, dark hair in a ponytail, wearing her tortoiseshell glasses and sipping coffee from a mug one of her publicist colleagues got her that says life’s a pitch, paging through the Seattle Times because we refuse to let it go the way of the Post-Intelligencer.

There’s a pan of scrambled eggs on the stove, dotted with red peppers and onions and broccoli, a new loaf of sourdough next to the toaster: a pale pink one I fell in love with in the clearance section at Target that remains my sole contribution to the house’s appliance collection. I take out my favorite mug, the one with a vintage typewriter on it, and fill it to the brim.

Noemie flicks to the arts and culture section as I sit down next to her. “You didn’t have to make breakfast,” I say, dabbing my scramble with some of July’s prickly pear habanero hot sauce.

“It was the least I could do. The lights were off when I got home, so I figured you must have beaten me here.”

“Is everything okay at work?”

She shrugs, not meeting my eyes. “Maaaaaybe.”

“Nome. You cannot let them yank you around like that. You deserve to have a life outside of work.”

“It’s not my forever job,” she reassures me, as though a career is something that can be permanent. “Once I finish this campaign, I’m out of there. I swear. I’ve been looking at other PR jobs.”

I can’t count how many times she’s said this before. Even with the house and the steady paychecks and the subscription boxes, Noemie has precious little time left for friends or hobbies. Pivoting from journalism was maybe the right choice financially; publicist jobs are more stable and higher paid, but it’s wreaked havoc on the rest of her life. More than a couple holidays with our family have been cut short because she had a client who needed something right that moment. Sometimes I think she did the smart thing, leaving journalism when she did, before she ventured out into the industry and it flattened her self-esteem. Other times, I wonder if she fast-tracked her life when she might have been happier slowing it down.

Noemie takes a sip of coffee, clearly eager to change the subject. “What time did you get home?”

“I didn’t exactly beat you here.” I nudge eggs around my plate, debating how much I want to share. It’s a pointless thought process—I tell Noemie everything eventually. “I, um... went home with someone.”

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