Milkrun (23 page)

Where's a pay phone? I need to find a pay phone. I find a pay phone and dial his number before I change my mind.

Why am I doing this? It's ringing. What if his parents answer? I can't talk to his parents. What if he's not there?

“Hello?” It's his voice. He's home. He's on the phone. I'm on the phone with him.

“Hi,” I say. “It's me.”

“Hey!” His voice feels both strange and familiar. “How are you?”

“Good. How are you? Happy to be back?”

“A little. Happy to be clean. Miss the life. You know.”

“Of course.” Not really. What does
a little
happy mean?

“How's Boston?”

“Good,” I lie. My job sucks, I have no friends except for Nat and Sam, and I miss you. “How are your mom and dad?”

“Good. They're away. Hawaii.”

“You didn't want to go with them?”

“I just got back. I'm trying to settle in.”

Pause. I can't hold in my whereabouts any longer. “I'm here.”

“Here? In New York?”

“In New York.”

“Where in New York?”

“Outside Macy's.”

“Come over,” he says without hesitation.

Do I want to go over there? Of course I want to go over there. “Okay.” I need to find a place to change. Good thing I brought along Wendy's knapsack with my knee-high boots, black tights, a cute skirt, and my first-date shirt. Just in case.

 

I step out of the cab in front of his parents' apartment building on the Upper East Side. I smile at the doorman, and he calls up to the eighteenth floor to tell Jeremy he has a visitor. Two, three, four…you'd think such a fancy building would have a faster elevator. What am I doing what am I doing what am I doing? Don't think don't think don't think. About twelve hours later, the elevator opens. Why am I here? Why do I always react based on primal instincts rather than on rational thought?

He's leaning against his door, his arms crossed in front. Our eyes lock and I'm moderately concerned my knees may do the same.

The first time you see an ex after a substantial time, you kind of hope he looks a little worse. Not ugly—you don't want to wonder what you were doing with him in the first place. You want him to be just slightly less attractive to prove to yourself that he's not doing quite as well without you around.

He looks at home in dark jeans, a navy sweatshirt that make his eyes look even bluer, and an incredibly sexy twelve-o'clock shadow.

And he's tanned. So much for him looking a little less attractive.

“Hi, there,” he says.

“Hi.”

Why does he have to be wearing that cologne? The one he knows I love?

I lean over to kiss him on the cheek, kind of, and he pulls me into him. Before I realize it, his lips are on my lips, my neck, and then back on my lips. We're still in the hallway and I'm touching his shirt, his arms, his face, and his hands are in my hair, on my back, on my skirt…

And so it goes.

 

“Do you want to see pictures?” he asks, wrapping the covers over my shoulders with one hand, fingering my belly ring with the other.

“Sure,” I reply sleepily. “Only if it involves us not getting out of bed.”

“No problem, they're right here.” He kisses my forehead and pulls out two packages of photos from the drawer in his nightstand. “I haven't had a chance to put them in an album yet.”

Only two rolls? I'm surprised. On one of our weekend ski trips he took four rolls. I guess he was too busy this time to be camera happy.

I wade through a stack of photos of him standing next to native Thai people. When he pulls out the second batch, I'm sure I'll have a heart attack. “This is the group I traveled with for about a month,” he explains. “We moved through the country together.” The first picture is of him, some French guy named François, and four girls. Two of the girls are tall blondes, one is a skinny redhead, and one is a short brunette. How do I know which one is the bimbo? I can't ask. Why is he showing me this picture? He shows me about five more pictures of the same group. Is he trying to kill me? I'm going into cardiac arrest.

Wonderful. A bikini shot. Which one is she?
Which one?
Could he have slept with all of them? Maybe he was sleeping with all of them. For some sick reason that makes me happier. If he was sleeping with them all, he couldn't be in love with only one, right? Maybe when he wrote me that he'd met someone, he actually meant he'd met more than one someone.

There are no pictures of him and some girl posing in front of a sunset on the beach. No cover shots. Hmm. He usually buys rolls of thirty-six. Have I seen seventy-two pictures? I don't think I have. I think I've only seen sixty-six, maybe sixty-seven. Gasp. He must have taken some out! He's hiding them! Or maybe some of the pictures were overexposed. It happens.

He places the photos back in their envelopes. “I'm going to take a shower. Wanna join me?”

“No, thanks. I'm too comfy.” I want to have a better look at these photos, without him surveying over my shoulder.

I wait to hear him turn on the water. I remove the pictures from the envelopes and look through them again. I'm guessing one of the blondes. But that would be the obvious choice, wouldn't it? He expects me to think that, but it's really the brunette.

I'm unclear as to what happens now. Are we back together? Do I just forget the last few months? Can I do that? Can I trust him again? Earlier when he reached into the drawer of the nightstand to get a condom, I noticed the box was open. Did he take home an opened box from Thailand? It couldn't have been here before he went over there, because for the last two years I was with him, I was on the pill.

It would be really wrong if I searched through his drawer to investigate the matter further. Really wrong. Morally wrong. Legally wrong.

Hmm. I can still hear the pounding of the water against the tiles.

I open the drawer and take out the box. Let's see. It says on the package there should be twelve condoms inside. And the box is in perfect shape—meaning that there's no way it was anywhere near a backpack. So he didn't take it back with him from Thailand. It could have been a new box, mind you, and he could have opened it just after I called. In expectation. In eagerness. I'll buy that. But there had better be eleven in there, since we used one. Let's see. Four. There are four condoms left. Four? Only four? Is there a secret compartment? Like the spare tank in your car when your gauge says empty? Why are there only four? Where are the missing seven?

More importantly, where
were
they?

The water stops and I frantically return the box and the pictures to their original homes.

Seven. He's had sex seven times in the last two weeks. His vacation sex I'm prepared to forget about. But New York sex?

I am having difficulty processing this information.

When he walks back into the room, I'm sitting cross-legged on his bed. The lower half of his body is wrapped in a black towel. The wet tips of his hair fall in front of his eyes. He is so
cute
wet. Very distracting.

“I'm starving,” he says.

I pull him back to bed. “What do you want to do for dinner?” I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt—for now. He could have bought the box months ago, intending to bring it to Thailand, but at the last moment decided to take only seven condoms.

“Actually…”

Yes? Order in? Dine out? He rests the back of his head against my knee. “I have this Christmas Eve dinner thing tonight,” he says.

“Oh.” That sucks. I guess I'm going to make Wendy take the whole day off from work, after all. “You can't get out of it?”

“Unfortunately, no. You didn't tell me you were coming in.” I watch as his eyes change from blue to gray. They do that sometimes, depending on the light. “If you had given me some sort of notice, I would have been able to take you.”

Excuse me? A look of death must be clouding across my face because I sense him tensing up. Or maybe he's tensing up because he realizes what he's just said and knows he's busted.

“You're taking someone else.” This is not a question.

“I…”

I just slept with him and now he has a date. I just
slept
with him and now he has a
date.
Tonight. After I slept with him. I shove his head off my knee. “Who? Who's your date?”

He pauses. Again. “Jackie, I don't think you want to know.”

Omigod. I know. I know who it is. “Are you dating Crystal Werner?”

Another pause. This man sure takes a lot of pauses when he's being busted.

“You're dating Crystal.” I'm going to kill myself. Did he always like her? Did he like her while he was dating me? Was he just waiting for her to break up with her boyfriend? Was I just the bed warmer? “Good for you, guys. I hope you two have a long and happy life together.”

He laughs. I can't believe he laughs. I'm contemplating suicide and he's laughing. “It's not serious. It's really casual. We don't want to get too attached to each other. I'm moving to Boston in a week, remember?”

No, I do not remember. He never did give me a date as to when he was coming. And what does he mean by “we”? Is he saying that he would have considered getting serious with her if he
weren't
moving to Boston? Which makes me now wonder about our whole relationship. Did he sleep with other girls when we were together and tell them that we weren't serious, that we were only casual, because he was going to Thailand?

If he cared about me, even a little, he would not have done this. He would not have started up with Crystal. He would not have started up with anyone, in Thailand or elsewhere. He would not have made me an afterthought, an if-nothing-else-works-out-there's-always-Jackie kind of girl.

I have to get out of this apartment immediately. If I stay here a moment longer, I might explode—and I mean into actual physical pieces, not verbally. Where are my clothes? Where are my damn clothes? I hate him. I really hate him. I hope he dies. I hope he dies an excruciatingly painful death. Like getting eaten by a shark. While still conscious. Or being burned to death, but not passing out from the smoke. I wish I had one of those sock puppet voodoo dolls. I know exactly where I'd prick him.

As I step back into my skirt and boots (I would put on the comfy clothes that are in the knapsack, but I don't want him to know I dressed up for him), I feel him watching me. I ignore his gaze. “Have a merry Crystal Christmas,” I say and slam the apartment door behind me. I am not going to cry. I will not let him matter that much to me. I will not cry. He is not worth it. Raindrops on roses? Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes?

 

I walk into the closest grocery store and ask the woman behind the counter where the nearest phone is. She points me to a phone booth near the fridge at the back of her store. I need to speak to Wendy.

“Hi,” she says. “So are you staying at Jeremy's?”

“No. I want to go back to Bubbe Hannah's.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I answer, my voice shaking. I won't cry. I can't cry. I cannot start sobbing while the grocery woman is watching me while she stocks the fridge with milk cartons.

“What happened?”

“He's dating Crystal Werner.” I am not going to cry in a grocery store. I am crying in a grocery store. The grocery woman passes me a tissue.

“It's okay,” she says soothingly (Wendy, not the grocery woman). “He's an ass. Nothing new.”

“I know.” The tears are now running freely down the sides of my face. “So why am I surprised? It's not as if he's inconsistent.”

She tells me to stay where I am. She's coming to pick me up in a cab in half an hour.

I wander around the store for five minutes, buy a chocolate bar, and then decide to try Sam's cell.

“Jack! How's New York?”

“Horrible. I hate this place. When will you be home?”

“Day after tomorrow. The twenty-sixth. What happened with Jer?”

I don't feel like revisiting the experience just yet. “Me, too. I'm coming home.”

“Aren't you supposed to be coming back on the twenty-eighth?”

“I'm coming home early. I don't want to talk about it. Tell me about Florida.”

“I met the cutest lifeguard at the pool!” she exclaims excitedly, and goes on to describe all the men she's met.

Twenty minutes later (good thing I memorized my dad's calling card number way back when), I see a yellow cab pull up outside the store. I hang up in the middle of some story about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and, sobbing, join Wendy in the backseat.