Page 21 of Business or Pleasure

“Perfect, thanks. And...” I trail off, scratching at the lavender nail polish I applied a couple days ago. If I don’t paint my nails, then I’ll anxiety-pick them to mangled stumps. “If work gets awful and you need to talk, you know I’m just a few taps away. Even when I’m in Minnesota or Tennessee.”

She nods, but I don’t miss how she breaks eye contact. A classic Noemie deflection. In one swift motion, she turns off the TV and hops off the couch. “I should get the mini quiches in the oven.”

“And I should probably finish packing. Unless you want some help?”

Tonight she’s throwing me a casual wish-Chandler-good-luck party before I leave early tomorrow morning. A week ago, my life was entirely unremarkable, and now I’m about to spend most of my waking hours with a celebrity. Sometimes I’m excited and sometimes I’m terrified and usually, I just want to throw up.

Noemie waves me away. “Not a chance. This is your party.” She squints at me. “You just really don’t want to pack, do you?”

“I don’t know how to pack for something like this!” I fake-whine. “How do you pack for ten cities and at least four different climates?”

“Layers?”

I roll my eyes and head up the stairs. My suitcase, the ancient black one I borrowed from my mom because at age thirty-one, I still don’t own my own luggage, is open and overflowing in the middle of the room. Because my mom read one article one time about how black luggage is the likeliest to be stolen, it’s covered with an array of peeling, faded hippie stickers: stay groovy and free your mind, peace signs and retro flowers. I wasn’t lying when I told Joe I haven’t traveled much. My parents and aunts were always more fond of Oregon Coast road trips than plane travel, and Noemie and I were happy as long as we were together. I’ve been almost swayed by those sleek Instagram suitcases a number of times, the ones that come in colors like sea breeze and rose gold, but I’ve never had anywhere to take one and it’s always seemed like a luxury. Something I’d be able to afford one day, when both my life status and paycheck merited it. My work has always been here, and so have all the people I love.

There’s been no need to go anywhere else.

I put on my headphones and blast Bikini Kill while I pack—because even my taste in music is stuck in the Northwest.

An hour passes in a blur of sweaters and t-shirts and too many pairs of socks, plus an amazing moisturizer from Noemie’s makeup subscription box. I toss in the latest book in my favorite series, about a bagel shop employee turned amateur detective, and it’s only when I’m searching for my denim jacket that I realize I must have left it in Finn’s hotel room. It was perfectly worn and buttery soft, and now I must take a moment to mourn.

“How many vibrators is too many?” I yell to Noemie, popping out an earbud. When I don’t get a response, I put one of them back in the drawer. “If I have to ask, is it too many?”

“Uhh... Chandler? Wyatt’s here!” Noemie says, rushing up the stairs, and I drop the LELO on top of a mound of clothes.

“Please tell me he didn’t hear me shouting about my small army of self-pleasuring devices?”

“Oh, he definitely did.” A frantic Noemie appears in my doorway, the hair on half her head straightened and the other a chaotic mass of curls.

Yes, I invited him. Yes, it was probably stupid. But if it’s the last time I see him for a couple months, I want some closure—whatever that looks like.

On the way out of my room, I glance at my reflection in the mirror and quickly change into the black T-shirt dress I was planning to wear for the party, grimacing at the state of my hair and trying to finger-comb the short blond strands back into place.

Wyatt is in the kitchen, brandishing a container and calling out, “I brought hummus!” as though we didn’t already have three half-open tubs of it in the fridge. “Hey,” he says when he spots me, giving me a nudge of his chin in hello but never quite making eye contact. “Thanks for inviting me over.”

I don’t love the way my stomach swoops when I see him, with his shaggy black hair that hangs to his shoulders, full lips that are now intimately acquainted with my body. I spent so many years dreaming of him—this guy who was just as passionate about journalism as I was. Or at least, as I thought I was. He was even laid off from The Catch at the same time, then managed to snag a coveted reporter job at the Tacoma News Tribune. I thought that shared layoff would bring us closer together. And I guess it eventually did, before what happened in August pushed us all the way apart.

I can’t deny that’s some of the appeal of skipping town. Instead of confronting this mess of awkward, I’ll simply put a couple thousand miles between us.

By the time I come back, I won’t be hung up on him at all.

“Yeah, no, of course.” I force a laugh as Wyatt scratches at his elbow. Yeah, no: the mantra of the chronically anxious. See also: no, yeah. “It’s good to see you.”

Noemie shoos us out of the kitchen, so we make our way to the living room, where Wyatt pretends to be deeply entranced by the gallery wall above the couch and I spend far too much time selecting carrots and celery sticks from the platter on the coffee table.

It feels like the night we slept together happened months ago with how much distance it’s created. I was just so convinced we were a good fit. Sophomore year, when there was an outbreak of lice on my floor but he’d promised to quiz me for our journalism ethics class—I kept mixing up court cases—he told me he didn’t care, that he’d come by my room to help anyway. Of course, he wound up infested, too. There is nothing that bonds you quite like having nits picked out of your hair together at a treatment center called Lice Knowing You, and maybe that shouldn’t have made me like him more, listening to him crack jokes while we tried our best not to scratch at our scalps, but somehow it did. He was selfless and he was smart, and I dreamed of us becoming the next journalism power couple. An Ephron and Bernstein for the modern age. Minus the affair.

He knows my past, my whole past, and he’s never judged me for it. When I had an abortion junior year, he dropped off a heating pad and takeout gift card at my apartment. I’ve never had to explain it to him, the way I want to in new relationships, which means no worrying over the right timing. Because even though it’s a choice I’m glad I made, it doesn’t make me any less anxious about telling someone for the first time.

Part of me has always been scared that I won’t find someone who knows me as well as Wyatt does. Someone who accepts every piece of me.

Wyatt turns to me now, toying with a baked lentil cracker. “We’re okay, right?” he asks. “I mean—you asked me to come, so I guess you don’t completely hate me?” He follows this up with a wide-eyed pleading look, one that a traitorous part of me still finds adorable.

I dip a cucumber slice into sriracha hummus. “How could I hate the one person who doesn’t complain when I want to have a Murder She Wrote marathon?” He lets out a laugh, but I can’t bring myself to join in. “We’re fine.” A lie. “I guess I’m just...” Confused. Embarrassed. Desperate for answers. “Processing,” I finish, wondering if I’ve ever had a spine when it comes to Wyatt or if this is new for me.

He lets out a visible sigh of relief. “Good. Because I’d feel like shit if I knew you were mad at me. We’ve been friends for too long for something like this to come between us.”

Great. Glad we cleared that up.

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