Page 25 of The Note

Nate and May had known each other since she was twelve years old, but it wasn’t until her junior year in college that he suddenly kissed her after a night out drinking with Kelsey and their fake IDs. By then, May’s virginity existed only in her mother’s imagination. At May’s insistence, they kept their hookups a secret. Sleeping with your best friend’s brother felt like a violation of the sister code, she said. The truth was that her privacy about sex wasn’t limited to Nate. Maybe it was all those lectures from her mother that had made boys all sound so mean and dangerous, but once she finally went there, she wanted to keep that part of herself strictly to herself—and the guys she chose to share it with.

Even though May thought she knew a thing or two about guys by then, being with Nate felt like graduating from the bunny slopes directly to a Black Diamond. Good-looking, cool, confident, and—from what she could tell—very experienced.

After a few carefully planted questions to Kelsey, May began to worry about what she had gotten herself into. According to his own sister, Nate was a “babe magnet” who tended to get bored easilyand move on—the same approach he had shown both to school and life in general. “I love him, but as a boyfriend? I wouldn’t wish him on my worst enemy.”

May was determined not to get hurt, telling herself that the two of them were just having fun. It was all going according to plan until May’s senior year when Kelsey showed up at Harvard unannounced, a DVD ofWorking Girlin her purse, hoping for a break from her BC roommate and an impromptu slumber party in May’s single. Her brother was already there. After a split second of surprise, the explanation became obvious, and May prepared herself for the onslaught.How could you sleep with my little brother? How could you lie to me?

But Kelsey wasn’t mad. Quite the opposite; she was ecstatic. She literally clapped her hands like a kid getting a present. Kelsey was the founding member of Team “Mayonate,” as she quickly dubbed them. Once the secret was out, May no longer had an excuse to keep her relationship with Nate covert, which meant it became a “relationship,” whether it had been one before or not.

If Nate was rattled by the small yet sudden shift in their status, he didn’t show it. Their illicit one-on-ones were replaced by group hangs where Kelsey was usually around too, and that changed the dynamic in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Perhaps it was inevitable in every trio thatsomeone would end up feeling odd-man-out at any given moment—how many times in the past few days had she wondered whether Lauren and Kelsey were the real friends, while she was just an add-on?

When May was dating Nate, any one of them could occasionally feel like the third wheel in different contexts. Sometimes Nate was the dude crashing the gal-pal lovefest. Sometimes it was Kelsey who needed to take a hint that her friend and brother wanted to be alone. And May still recalled the sear of the bizarre sense of jealousy she sometimes felt around them. Jealous of the brother who seemed to know her best friend’s every secret even before she did. Jealous of the friend who was always going to be her boyfriend’s closest confidante, the one who promised she’d never abandon him the way their father had.

But usually? The three of them just clicked. As time passed, May found herself thinking about a future with Nate and how gorgeous their children would be. She and Kelsey would literally be family. Their children would be cousins. How perfect would that be? Kelsey often egged on the fantasy, talking about the day they might all share a house on the Cape.

But whenever May allowed herself to believe it might actually happen, she’d remember Kelsey’s warning:I wouldn’t wish him on my worst enemy.Kelsey knew Nate better than anyone.She had said that for a reason. What had been hot hookups with a hot guy had become another thing for May to worry about.

She was almost relieved when she got dinged by Harvard Law, meaning she’d move to New York to attend Columbia. She’d be the one to pull the plug before he got around to dumping her. But then he began talking about moving to New York after graduation, and she suddenly found herself in a long-distance relationship with a guy who was supposedly constitutionally unfit for any relationship at all.

She became determined to make it work. She’d find a way to keep Nate interested until he made the move to the city and figured out what he was going to do with himself. May had always been the girl who needed to excel at whatever she tried, and keeping things hot with Nathan Thorne became almost an obsession. She started reading those stupid women’s magazines that promised to teach you the ten ways to make his thighs quiver. She watched porn to learn how to give the best oral.Pull my hair. Do it harder. I’ll let you do anything.One day in class, her torts professor called on her and she was unprepared because she’d spent the previous night messing with her iPhone to figure out the best angles for a homemade sex video.

And then, on spring break, she forewent the opportunity to travel with the moot court teamto Stanford and visited Nate instead. Years later, she still tried to block out how ridiculous she had been. The lingerie. High heels. Handcuffs. A stand to hold her phone as a makeshift amateur camera. Oh my god, the stupid plastic phone stand. It cost $4.99 at the CVS and kept tipping over, and Nate would have to be the one to fumble with it because May was incapacitated by the handcuffs. When it was over, she grabbed her phone and said she was deleting the video because it would be more slapstick than hot and steamy.

But when she was alone on the train at the end of the weekend, she put in her headphones and watched. She had wanted to seem confident and bold, but she looked so nervous. Small. Ashamed. In a society that sexualized and fetishized women who looked like her, she had cast herself in a demeaning role of her own making. And why? Just to hold on to Nate? Nate, whose own sister said he wasn’t serious enough for a relationship. Nate, who had only chosen a major after Kelsey and May convinced him that poli-sci wasn’t that much harder than the blow-off subjects he was considering and would keep his employment doors open after graduation. Nate, who had been cut off financially from his stepfather but nevertheless seemed to assume he’d someday see a piece of the Ellis empire. She shouldn’t compromise herself for any man, but especially not for one who wasn’t a serious person.

She never told him why she was breaking things off, or even that she had made a final decision—not initially. She just stopped visiting, and when he offered to come to New York, she begged off, claiming she had too much schoolwork. He kept pushing, calling to ask her where she was and what she was doing. He went from being the guy who was her incentive to get a term paper finished early so she could sneak in a night in his room, to the guy whose name on the phone flooded her with guilt. He eventually asked her point-blank whether they were still a couple. Her reply was unnecessarily cold. “I’m not sure we ever were.”

Kelsey had called her, begging to know what was going on. Instead of admitting her own insecurities, May reminded Kelsey of what she had once said about Nate. Kelsey initially insisted she was only kidding, but eventually conceded that Nate had a lot of growing up to do while May had a huge career waiting in front of her. Mayonate was over.

Four years later, she saw on Nate’s Facebook page that he was leaving his marketing job behind and moving to New York to get more serious about his acting. Kelsey was the one to arrange a reunion between the two of them, jokingly referring to it as a “play date.” It was immediately clear that Nate was nowhere close to becoming a working actor. He searched ads inBackstageeveryday but didn’t even have an agent. He wasbartending in Hell’s Kitchen. When he asked to walk her to her building, she’d been tempted. He was still cool, funny, sexy Nate. But she politely declined, listening to her head instead of the parts that wanted to take him home. And she’d been telling herself that she had made the right decision ever since.

Over the years, she’d find herself thinking about Nate on occasion, but it wasn’t until Josh made it clear that he was serious about her that she began comparing the two of them. Josh was safe: smart, serious, and well employed. He was also fun to be with and completely devoted to her. He had all the traits she had been ingrained to look for if she were ever going to take the leap. Even May’s mother approved. He did not, however, make her feel the way Nate used to. But weren’t those feelings precisely the ones she had decided to avoid when she ended things with him? Of course she had made the right decision.

*

The blast of a horn made her realize that she was half a block behind the next car. She also realized she had taken the single memory of saying goodbye at the house and turned it into a way to rethink her entire relationship with Nate. Why was she like that? Because maybe that was one part of May’s personality that hadn’t changed. When May was anxious, her fears ate at her until she found areason—a concrete, rational reason—to put them away, hopefully for good.

Before she realized exactly what she was doing, her turn signal was on. She’d make one quick stop in Sag Harbor. Just to put her mind at ease about David Smith and that note on the windshield, and then she’d never think about it again.

16

It had been two days since May had been back in the city, and with each passing hour, it seemed possible she would never have to think about David Smith or the whole parking space incident ever again.

But when Joe, the swing-shift doorman, called up to say that two police officers were in the lobby for her, that cocktail napkin left on a windshield was the first thing she thought of.

“Did they say what it’s about?”

“Nah, I don’t ask questions, you know?” Joe said. “Especially when it comes tothe NYPD. Figured they’re working on one of your cases. Want me to ask?”

Joe obviously assumed she was still at the District Attorney’s Office. It’s not as if she sent out a memo to the entire building about the change in her résumé.

“No, it’s all good, Joe. Send them up.”

She had already pulled her Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt over her head and was slipping on a bra when Josh followed her into the bedroom, trailed by Gomez. “Are we having people over? I didn’t see anything on the calendar.”

“Nothing scheduled.” They had begun sharing their calendars with each other after the official engagement. She was still getting used to the idea that he was aware of how she spent each minute of her time, even when they were apart. “I guess the police are here to see me about something.”

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