Page 41 of Guy's Girl
“Stop.” Clay waves a hand. “I can’t hear about men wanting to fuck you without needing to beat them up.” He pauses, then winks at Adrian. “Present company excluded, of course.”
Ginny hits Clay with a wooden spoon.
“Hey,” Tristan says. “Save some of the Adrian-and-Ginny innuendo for me.”
Ginny hits Tristan even harder.
She doesn’t look at Adrian. She’s too scared of what his face will show. “To change the subject as fast as humanly possible,” she says. “Now that we’re a year out of college, how does everyone feel about postgraduate life?”
“What in particular?” Finch asks.
“I just feel like... I don’t know. When I moved to Minnesota, I was constantly plagued by the feeling that I wasn’t doing something I was supposed to.”
“You mean like... homework?” Clay asks. “Come on, Gin. Tell me you don’t miss homework.”
“No, not that. Well, maybe. I don’t know. All I know is... for my whole life, my path was prescribed: grade school, high school, college. Then what? We’re all thrust out into the world, free to do essentially whatever we want, so long as we can pay our bills.”
Tristan tsks. “Notwhateverwe want.”
Ginny rolls her eyes. “Well, for everyone who isn’t Tristan and didn’t come out of the womb modeling leveraged buyouts—”
“I love it when you talk dirty to me,” says Tristan.
“You can do essentially anything. You can get a corporate job, or you can go to med school, or you can work for the government, or you can live in a fucking tent on the beach and get all your meals by spearfishing. You can doanything.And don’t you think... don’t you think that’s chaotic? Doesn’t it feel like too much? In Minnesota, I would come home from work and sit on my couch and just think—What the hell now?” She sighs. “That’s why I started writing. Just to fill the hours.”
“I know what you mean, Gin,” says Finch. She meets his eyes over the table. “That’s how I feel about music sometimes. Like, if I’m not studying or in lecture, I need to be doing something at least semiproductive. I can’t just be sitting on my ass.”
“Yes.” Ginny smacks the table. “That’s exactly it. I cannot allow myself downtime.”
“Well, I have no idea what that’s like,” says Clay. “All I ever want is downtime.”
“I would kill for a Saturday off,” says Tristan.
“No, you wouldn’t,” says Clay. “You’d kill for more hours to wipe your MD’s ass.”
But Ginny doesn’t listen to their back-and-forth. She’s too busy staring at Finch.
She loves this side of him. The one that listens. The one that gets it. Freshman year, she would lie with her head in Finch’s lap for hours as they peeled apart their childhoods, their sadness and insecurities, trying to make sense of why they were the way they were. They never ran out of things to talk about.
Her eyes flit to the side, to Adrian, then back to Finch.
No. Stop. This train of thought cannot go anywhere good.
“I just...” She pulls herself out of her own thoughts. “Maybe it’s because my family was so close growing up, and then, in college, you don’t think twice about where you’re ‘supposed’ to be;but in Minnesota it felt like... I don’t know. Like I didn’t have a home anymore.” She shakes her head. “Does that even make any sense?”
“Yes,” Adrian says, his first words in several minutes. “Yes, it does.”
Ginny looks over in surprise. Adrian has been fairly quiet over the course of the dinner. Several times, she caught herself worrying that he wasn’t having fun. They hold each other’s gaze for a long moment, and something passes behind his eyes that she can’t read.
“Well, Ginny—that won’t be an issue anymore.” Tristan gestures around the apartment, ignorant of their staring contest. “You’re in the big city now. No time to think, let alone have an existential crisis.”
“Thank God,” Ginny says, pulling her eyes away. “I would pay literally every cent in my bank account if it meant I didn’t have to think anymore.”
Tristan tuts. “There are far more profitable investments if you’re looking for a place to put your money.”
“Shut up, Tristan,” say Ginny and Clay together.
“Why do you say that?” Adrian asks. “That you wish you didn’t have to think anymore.”
