Page 30 of Guy's Girl
Adrian’s kiss still tingles on her lips. She raises her fingers, wanting to feel it, to remember his warmth, but the cold air drifting off Finch is slowly wiping it away. “Good.”
Finch nods without looking up.
Clay and Tristan, unaware of the tension, usher Ginny over to the couch and pour her a glass of wine. They sit to either side of her, bouncing up and down. “Well?” asks Clay.
Ginny looks into her glass of cheap chardonnay. In her peripheral vision, she sees Finch glance over. “Well, what?” she asks.
“Well, how did it go?” Clay asks. “Better than last time?”
She watches as pale-yellow liquid swirls about the inside of her glass. Finch’s stare is a hot light burning into her cheek. What is that? Anger? Jealousy? Neither? She is certain of one thing: what she says next is important. It means something to him.
She just doesn’t know what.
At last, she looks up from her glass into Clay’s warm blue eyes. As always, they’re crinkled at the edges, a result of the near-constant grin on his face. Seeing those eyes makes her instantly warm, wiping away the chill that seeped into her the longer Finch stared.
Ginny smiles. “It was perfect.”
It’s Saturday, and Adrian is working. Again. An IRR, urgent, that his associate says he needs first thing tomorrowor else.
His phone pings with a text from Ginny. He lifts it and sees that she’s asking if he wants to get coffee at the ELK on Charles Street. He does. Lord knows, he would rather get coffee than sit scrunched up at his laptop at the tiny desk in his tiny studio. But he has no other choice.
Ginny will be disappointed. He knows she will. She wears her emotions like brightly patterned scarves; they’re the first thing you notice and the last thing you see as you walk away. Their colors fill the entire room.
They’ve been on two dates now. Adrian is approaching his limit. The place at which he normally cuts things off with girls. He should probably do the same with Ginny. Should give the monologue he’s recited hundreds of times now.
And yet—
And yet, none of those girls wereher. None of them laughed the way that she does. None of them rollerbladed through Manhattan or spent their free time writing novels. None of them asked him so many questions about Hungary that he ran out of stories to tell. None of them made him forget the need to pretend.
Ginny is the first girl who’s made him want to stay.
But he can’t. Not right now. If all the dates he’s had to cancel are any indication, Adrian is physically incapable of maintaining a serious relationship in his current job.
Why is he still with Goldman? It’s not like he wants to climb the ladder. Become an associate, then a VP, then an SVP, then anMD. Buy a house in Fairfield and have kids he never gets to see. He told Ginny he wants to work in movies, but sometimes, he’s not even sure that’s true. Sometimes, he’s not sure of anything.
When his mom uprooted their family and shipped them across the ocean, Adrian had neither warning nor say in the matter. All he could do was board the plane and accept his new life. After that day, he understood that this is the natural way of things. That we do not have control over our own lives. That we are leaves adrift in the wind, following whichever breeze is the strongest, the most logical.
Maybe that’s why he’s never been in love. Maybe love is a choice. One he’ll never be able to make.
Ginny is proud of this week’s newsletter. She went above and beyond her usual three sections—articles, HR resources, Win of the Week—by interviewing two coworkers and including snippets from the conversations as internal spotlights. She didn’t even ask Kam for help. She did it all on her own.
Words have always been Ginny’s specialty. As a child, she carried a notebook all over the Soo. She filled it with descriptions of her brothers and the bridge and the fudge store on Interstate 75. She wrote everything down, a hoarder of details and memory. She dreamed of one day writing books,real, full-length.
In college, she traded her journal for a spiral notebook. There were essays to write, textbooks to underline. She found a new, more immediate dream: to stay afloat. She let her old dream fall into the Charles and drift far, far away.
Now, in New York, Ginny does the same. She sets aside the short stories that filled her time in Minnesota in favor of emails and newsletters and hour-long meetings with their PR contractors. She stays late at the office. She wants to do well. She wants to impress Kam.
Between meetings, she finds ways to puke discreetly.
It’s much easier to hide vomit than you’d think. In the movies, puking is always this big event: it’s sprinting to the bathroom, tearing open the door, falling to the floor, and maneuvering your face over the toiletjuuuustin time to let loose a waterfall of red-green stomach acid, most of which will splatter the clean porcelain anyway. But that’s not the truth. At least, not for Ginny it isn’t.
The trick is to not make a big deal out of it. Speed-walking to the restaurant bathroom and retching like a barn animal? Yeah, no. That’s amateur hour. Ginny can vomit an entire bowl of popcorn into a coffee mug while snuggled up next to her roommates on the sofa. Seriously. All she has to do is quietly open her esophagus and let the puke leak back up into her mouth. Then she lifts the mug to her mouth and pretends to sip something inside while really spitting out the half-digested buttery popcorn, letting it dribble down the ceramic and pool at the bottom. Then she does it again. And again, and again, repeating the action over and over until her stomach is wonderfully, blissfully, fabulously empty.
That’s all. That’s it.
For work, she buys an opaque Nalgene and keeps it at her desk, the way Kam does. But instead of filling it with coffee or water, she fills it with breakfast or lunch, leaking it slowly back out until she is clean again.
Every evening, she scrubs the bottle out with dish soap, but the tangy stink of vomit never fully washes away.
