Page 61 of One-Star Romance

He guffawed at that. She didn’t make people guffaw often. “I’ll be a perfect office mate, I promise.” She looked at him. He had a rather nice laugh. He probably deployed it all the time to win people over. “So, what are you waiting for?” he went on, and she realized she was still watching him. “Get back to work.”

She did, biting down on her own smile.

That was a Friday. On Monday, she walked into her office to find Michael already there, working diligently on his computer to plan a lesson. He gave her a silent nod, and so she beelined to her desk, hopeful that he’d be a nondisruptive force after all.

A framed drawing sat next to her pile of books. “What’s this?” she asked, picking it up to examine. She recognized the style. “Is this a Nia North?”

“I wanted to say thank you for letting me invade your space,” he said.

“She’s one of my favorites.”

“I know. I read your article.” Zuri had published a piece recently about up-and-coming artists who were working in a postcolonial framework. Nia had gotten a whole page to herself. Michael went on. “We’ve worked with Nia at the gallery, and I bought this piece after the show. I drove back to Phoenix this weekend to get it. Figured as long as you have to put up with me, you might as well get to look at this to make up for it.”

Zuri looked at the messy lines of the drawing, something welling up in her. This was why she loved to study art. Sometimes she felt herself on the outside of the world, an observer of her own feelings, or rather the feelings she was supposed to have. But a beautiful, interesting piece of art could poke a hole in the border between her and her emotions.

A tear came to her eye, and she brushed it away.

“Oh no,” he said. “I didn’t think my presence was that bad.”

“It’s not you. I just love the way she puts her whole soul on the page.”

“I know. During the run of her show, every time a potential buyer asked me about this piece, I kept steering them to something else, until I finally realized it was because I didn’t want them to take it away. So I bought it for myself.”

They kept geeking out over Nia, then about other artists his gallery had featured. He told her about why he’d wanted to open the gallery in the first place, how so many galleries were run for wealthy people, helping them collect art for the purpose of enriching themselves even further rather than for the sake of enjoyment or real love. He wanted to change that, to make things accessible while still helping artists thrive, to feature people who maybe weren’t at the top of everyone else’s list. He made her crack up with the way he imitated some of the blowhards he’d met in the art collecting world. And she made him laugh too with her academic perspective, which was an odd feeling, because she’d never thought of herself as funny. Perhaps sharing an office for however long it took to get the pipes fixed—it couldn’t be more than a couple weeks—would not only be peaceful but actively pleasant.

At home that night, as she and Rob ate dinner, Rob asked her, “Are you all right? You keep touching your face.”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s odd. The tops of my cheeks hurt.”

“Too much sun, maybe?”

But that wasn’t it, she realized. Her muscles were sore from smiling.

As the semester passed, she and Michael began to get to their office earlier and earlier, staying later and later. Whenever she hit a dead end, she’d groan, and he’d shut his computer and spin around. “Talk it out,” he’d say, and she would, with him challenging every weak spot in her argument, forcing her to defend and rethink.

One day, a few weeks in, they’d both eaten big lunches and were starting to get sleepy in the midafternoon despite having a lot of work to complete. “We need to wake up,” Michael said. He clicked a button on his computer, and the iconic opening to Biggie’s “Hypnotize” began to blast. She turned around, and he was rising to his feet, shrugging his shoulders in time.

“Oh no,” she said.

“It’s happening.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

In response, he leapt into rapping the first verse. He did it with the infectious enthusiasm of someone who had worn out this CD as a teenager. When it came time for the woman’s part, Michael pointed at Zuri. She demurred at first, covering her face, but he danced closer.

So as the second Biggie Biggie Biggie, can’t you see began, she broke into a grin and began to sing along too, getting to her feet, her body moving of its own accord. And when Biggie started the next verse, she kept going. Because she’d also worn out this CD as a teen, though she hadn’t thought about it in forever. Somehow, she’d stopped listening to music over the past few years. During commutes or chores, she put on podcasts instead, not wanting to waste time on songs she already knew when she could be enriching her mind. When had she become so rigid?

“Oh! Okay!” Michael yelled, as Zuri rapped the second verse, and then they did the rest of the song together, a couple of minutes of unbridled joy, finishing it breathless and alert, their former sleepiness totally gone.

After that, whenever they needed a midafternoon pick-me-up, he’d blast a song from his computer and make her dance around with him in order to wake themselves up. (Not with him, exactly—he would not swing her around the room. They would simply dance at the same time for the length of one glorious song, spitting the lyrics at each other.)

She ignored it for as long as she could, this strange tension between them. But over Thanksgiving break, when she took Rob home to feast with her family and they pumped them for details about the wedding, she couldn’t stop herself from checking her phone to see if Michael had texted. And when they all went around the table to say what they were thankful for, Rob squeezed her hand tight before turning to the rest of her family and saying, “I’m thankful I get to spend the rest of my life with your daughter,” and Zuri felt a tiny curl of dread begin to grow in her stomach.

This thing with Michael was simply a crush. Cold feet. A side effect of forced proximity. She was a sensible woman, not the kind to spin out fantasies of throwing away everything good in her life to do long-distance to Phoenix with him. (Although the drive was under two hours. Plenty of people commuted for longer than that every day.) Besides, he was a charmer. Owning a gallery required one to be a salesman, and he was selling her on himself. Perhaps he left a trail of swooning office mates everywhere he went. Yes, she could tell he was attracted to her from the way he looked at her lips sometimes when she talked. But that didn’t mean she was special. If anything, he wanted a quick secret fling for the semester before he went back to his real life.

And she would never do that. She was not a woman made for lies and late-night texting and frenzied, clandestine couplings in a car parked down a back road.

And Rob. Rob was so good and loved her with a steady commitment and was all she’d dreamt she wanted in a man. Not flashy and smooth and a little too confident like Michael, which meant she could trust Rob, could trust that their life together would be safe.

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