“Thanks,” I said as I righted myself again, my whole body going pleasantly alert inside my parka.
Ian smiled a little shyly. His hand was improbably warm. “No problem.” He started to let go, but before I knew what I was doing I tightened my grip, like a reflex. Ian’s eyebrows shot up in the darkness, but he didn’t comment. “It’s just down here” was all he said, nodding at a quiet side street.
Ian lived with two roommates in a scuzzy student apartment near the Fens, a listing walk-up where the narrow stairwells reeked of weed and Bagel Bites and his mail was perpetually getting stolen. The living room was drafty and cavernous, with tall coffered ceilings and molding that had been painted thickly over so many times it had lost all its detail; in the hallway, the colorless carpet was worn completely bald. The linoleum was peeling up in the kitchen. The windows rattled inside their frames.
It was Friday, and Ian’s roommates—a kid named Harvey who was studying engineering and stayed at his boyfriend’s most nights, plus a girl named Sahar who played in a punk band in Somerville on the weekends—were both out; the apartment was quiet, save a faint, irregular scratching in the walls. “It’s a mouse,” Ian confirmed, when he caught me tilting my head to the side to listen for it. “He’s basically our fourth roommate, I’m not going to lie to you. He doesn’t even have the decency to scurry. He just, like, strolls through the room while you’re watching TV or making a sandwich or something. Harvey calls him Old Chum.” He grimaced. “You’re rethinking your decision to come over here now, aren’t you.”
I looked at him evenly for a moment, then shook my head. “No.”
Ian’s ears got faintly red. “Okay,” he said, clearing his throat a bit. “Well, good.”
He got me a beer from the ancient fridge and burned some popcorn in the microwave; we sat on the sagging IKEA futon in the living room and watched a Friends rerun on cable. It was late, nearly time for the T to stop running, and I knew I should head home, but the longer I sat there the clearer it became that I didn’t actually want to go back to my tall, sterile dorm building. I wanted to stay here, in this warm, scruffy place.
“Your socks are wet,” Ian observed suddenly, reaching out and flicking the bottom of my foot; on TV, Joey and Chandler had just left a baby on a bus.
“My feet are freezing,” I confessed, tucking them up under me.
“They are?” Ian made a face. “Why didn’t you say something? Hang on, wait a sec.” He got up off the couch and disappeared down the long, narrow hallway, his shoulders so broad he seemed to fill the entire space. When he came back he was holding a thick pair of navy blue socks.
“They’re clean,” he said, handing them over. “I’m not a monster.”
That made me smile, surprised and delighted; then I felt my face fall. He was being too nice to me, I thought, suddenly as close to tears as I’d been that very first morning in the library. I didn’t deserve it, after everything that had happened. I didn’t deserve him. This was a guy who’d read to little kids at a Head Start for his senior service project and confessed to being the Dungeon Master for all his friends’ D&D games one of the very first times we hung out together. He’d been honest and good from the beginning. The last thing he needed was me stomping into his calm, steady life with my talent for drama and flair for catastrophe, leaving my muddy tracks across his floor.
I thought about leaving. I thought about getting up and making my excuses, calling an Uber and waving good-bye and keeping a safe distance from Ian’s sturdy, affable self until this longing—and that’s what it was, I realized as I watched his fingers curl around the neck of his beer bottle, longing, a physical ache in my chest—had passed.
Instead I waited for him to sit down beside me, and I swung my feet into his lap.
Ian looked at me for a long moment. Then he set the beer bottle down. He reached forward and peeled my wet socks off, pressing one careful thumb against my chilly instep; I shivered. “Your feet feel like a cadaver’s,” he informed me, smirking a little.
“Rude,” I said, but I was smiling. He squeezed my toes once before sliding the wool socks on with a surprising gentleness, pulling them all the way up over the bottoms of my jeans.
“Better?” he asked, and I swallowed.
“Much.”
Ian nodded. Outside it was snowing again, tiny flakes visible in the yellow glow cast by the streetlights outside his building. It felt like we were bears hunkering down for the winter, as if the world couldn’t get us up here.
Ian looked down at his grip on my ankles, then back up again; the moment that passed between us was so heavy I felt like I could reach out and hold it in my two shaking hands. He smelled like off-brand boy soap from the drugstore. I wanted to wrap him around me like a coat.
“Ooookay,” I said, suddenly breathless, sitting back on the futon. “I—huh. Okay.”
Ian let go of me abruptly, like he was worried he’d read me wrong. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
“No no no.” I paused for a moment, trying to steady myself. “I know I told you I wanted to be friends,” I said. “And I really like that you were so cool about it.”
“Well, I’m cool,” Ian joked, gesturing down at his work shirt and flannel-lined khakis. “I mean, clearly.”
“No, I mean it,” I said. “You can always tell when a guy is trying to make something that isn’t supposed to be a date into a date, or when they’re secretly annoyed that it isn’t a date, and you just—you’ve never been like that.”
Ian tilted his head to the side, lips twisting. “I’m trying to figure out if that’s emasculating or not.”
“Can you just take the compliment?” I asked, more shrilly than I meant to.
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Yes.”
“Look,” I said, leaning my head back against the futon, curling my knees up in front of me. “Here’s the deal. Without sounding super dramatic or like I’m in a Lifetime movie or like I’m being really vague on purpose, there’s stuff about myself that I don’t necessarily . . . like to talk about. Stuff you don’t know about me.”
Ian nodded. “Without being super vague on purpose,” he echoed pointedly.
“I’m serious!” Deep down I knew this was silly, that by virtue of being so mysterious I was probably turning my past into a bigger deal than it needed to be. But what was I supposed to tell him? I spent the bulk of my high school career playing the hypotenuse of a ridiculous love triangle that you can read all about in my author mom’s international bestseller? “I’m not trying to be an asshole, I just—”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Ian interrupted.
I huffed a bit, surprised and—absurdly—a tiny bit offended. “No.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.” I smiled.
“Are you a Republican?”
That one made me laugh. “No,” I said, kicking lightly at his thigh with one socked foot. “I’m not a Republican.”
Ian shrugged. “Then whatever it is, I don’t care.”