Page 117 of Bad Words

I told him how they’d cut me off in college, about our fits and starts in the intervening decade. Somewhere in the retelling, I hit the limit of my ability to speak. “Sorry,” I said quietly, “this is strange for me. I hardly ever talk about it.”

“Don’t apologize.” Parker kissed my forehead. “I can’t imagine. Just the total opposite of my parents.”

I laid my head on the pillow beside him and let myself look at his sympathetic expression. My feelings for him just then, the intensity of them, terrified me.

“To be honest,” I said, “part of the reason I don’t like to talk about it is that I feel like the average person will assign it this dominating importance, and then that’s all I’ll be for the rest of my life. Someone with a dysfunctional family.” I hesitated. “The way most people see me, even if that’s a tyrant or an aesthetic snob or whatever, I think that’s closer to what I am.”

A small smile made the shadowed contours of his face curve.

“What?” I asked.

“I said that to Emily at the bar after the festival. I said, people know Selina how she wants them to know her.”

I found myself smiling too. “What about you?” I brushed his cheek, and he moved infinitesimally toward the touch. “Do people know you the right way?”

“What do you think?” he said.

“I’m not sure.” I hesitated. “The way people spoke about you online, and wrote about your work. It made me so frustrated. I felt like … but it’s ridiculous.”

“Tell me.”

“I thought, they’re not listening to what he’s saying. They’re not seeing everything I’m seeing. Or not understanding it like I do.” I moved a strand of hair from his forehead, my fingertips lingering at his temple. “But maybe I was just imagining that.”

He took my hand in his, kissed my palm, and whispered, “You weren’t.”

Chapter Twenty-ThreeParker

I stayed at Selina’s right through the weekend, unable to make myself leave. Every time I considered going back to my apartment, this urgent, irrational feeling stopped me, as if the instant I walked out the door, what was happening between us would collapse, and she would snap out of some hypnotic trance and remember that she didn’t need me, maybe didn’t even want me the way she seemed to want me.

But she did seem to want me. On her bathroom sink, and against the wall, and tangled in the bedsheets that smelled like her grapefruit body wash, she seemed to want me.

“I can go, if you need,” I said, Saturday night, lying strewn across the bed. She’d reappeared in the illuminated doorway wearing a nightrobe of emerald satin, her hair tousled.

“Do you want to go?” she asked, pausing in the doorframe.

“No.”

I felt so free, saying even something as simple as yes or no to her, undefended, unjustified.

She came to the bedside, knelt down, and kissed me. “Then stay,” she said.

Part of me still couldn’t believe any of this. The idea that Selina Chan looked at me like I fascinated her. The sheer fact of waking up to her head upon my shoulder, and the way I’d started to see her laugh, always turning away to do it, her eyes sometimes straying back to me.

The days felt bizarre and giddy, cut with too-bright sun. She took me to her favorite dive bar, where a steel-eyed Russian bartender scanned me in obvious judgment, and to her local bookstore, owned by a graying, motionless man who looked as though he hadn’t left the desk in fifty years, and who, when Selina asked if he had a copy of Can Xue’s Frontier, grunted, “Shelf 113,” immediately, without checking. We bought coffee from a hole-in-the-wall whose brick interior hung dozens of portraits of Victorian women, painted over to imagine them holding steaming mugs. Selina and I cooked in between, simple, hearty meals with whatever she had in her pantry, one of us sitting on the counter while the other stirred at the burner. We walked fifty minutes to the riverfront on Sunday, a bitterly cold afternoon we spent shouldering between the intermittent slaps of wind off the water. When we got back to her place, we stripped off our freezing coats and flung them in no direction and burrowed back into her bed, making each other laugh and jerk with our icy fingers against each other’s backs and stomachs.

“Parker, stop,” she gasped, her eyes tearing, as I touched the back of her neck. “That’s awful.” She tried to retaliate, but her hand was growing warm against my chest, and I pushed closer to her, gliding my other hand up the smooth curve of her back, hoping her thoughts were steadily turning the way mine had been, nonstop, for two days. And soon enough her laugh faded, her eyes dipped to my mouth, and she pushed me onto my back and I grappled her on top of me, hungry for the sweet slip of her lip balm, and time slid out from under me again.

Ok where are you, Arthur texted me several hours later.

Sorry, I said, I met someone.

Bro who?? A bank robber in charge of a hostage situation??

Lol, I said, I’ll explain later.

That night, Selina warned me her alarm would go off at seven on the dot, but at two in the morning we were still whispering. I couldn’t help it. I wanted another day of this, and another after that. As the night deepened, I began to think exactly how much more I wanted; how, if Selina had touched me in that unexpectedly gentle way and said, Let’s go somewhere, I would have canceled my launch event, ignored everything Coronation sent my way, and walked onto a plane with her. But I didn’t want to crowd her. I had this feeling as though I’d held out my hand and a bird had landed there in my palm, and if I tried to bring it too close to myself, it would realize what I was and startle, flying off for good.

I woke up to her appalling radar alarm at seven the next morning. It was so awful, I started laughing, bleary-eyed, into the pillow. “Jesus Christ,” I said, “is there not, like, a birdsong or string instruments option?”