Halfway Perfect (17 page)

Of course Janessa Fields is here. Of course my elation with the idea of spending a carefree day with Eve while fulfilling my duties to Elana would have some kind of glitch.

Eve and I both freeze, staring at each other and still standing way too close to be just friends. From the corner of my eye, I see Janessa shaking her head and then she laughs.

“I want nothing to do with this phony relationship story, do you understand?” Janessa's gaze bounces from Eve to me.

Eve nods and finally whispers, “Okay.”

Janessa helps herself to a carrot stick from the veggie tray and dunks it in the dip before taking a big bite. “Does the French teen know?”

Does Elana know? Good question. She has to know.

Eve looks at me and I take a step back and clear my throat. “Yeah, I think she does.”

“Good. Then consider this"—she waves her arms around as if drawing boundary lines on the apartment—"a safe space. But I want nothing to do with the story. I'll deny ever knowing anything. I'm taking pictures, not selling my soul. Is that clear?”

Relief washes over me. “Very clear.”

Janessa smiles and snatches another carrot before heading out and calling over her shoulder, “Happy Thanksgiving, by the way.”

“I had no idea she would be here,” Eve says.

“She seems cool with it.” I pick up the knife again and resume cutting vegetables.

After a couple of minutes, Eve starts laughing really hard, and I look over at her. “What's the joke?”

She shakes her head, still laughing. “I'm just trying to figure out how we ended up here. Having Thanksgiving with Elana and Janessa. Also, I'm cooking, which I pretty much have never done in my entire life.”

“Correction, you're peeling, not cooking.” I toss a slice of zucchini in my mouth and chew it quickly. “Holidays can get pretty fucked up. Probably why some of the best comedy movies take place on a holiday.”

“We have odd dates, don't we?” Eve says.

“Very odd.”

But this revelation only makes me more excited for future dates. I love that we have no plan and there's always this possibility of crazy awesomeness around every corner. I wouldn't mind if some of the craziness involved fewer people and possibly less clothing. I would totally be down with that. But for now, I'll take whatever I can get of Eve Nowakowski.

November 28, 9:30 a.m.

I can feel the aches in my muscles and the chills and sneezing that come with the first signs of a cold.

And yet I'm outside, in SoHo to be exact, jogging with Alex.

My toes are numb inside my running shoes. The high-tech running tights I borrowed from a girl in my dorm are not keeping my legs as warm as they claim to.

“I think I might have considered college if I knew there were teachers like Professor Larson,” Alex says. “He seems like the kind of dude who would be above giving grades or some liberal artistic move like that.”

I laugh. “Yeah, right. He grades tough. I'll be lucky to get an A in his class. Actually, I got an A minus in my independent study course.”

“Well, I guess it is Ivy League. They're all about grades.”

We get to a street corner and have to wait at the crosswalk. I bend over to catch my breath and then spend thirty seconds coughing into my elbow, like a good citizen.

“You caught that kid's cold, didn't you?” Alex says, eyeing me. “I saw the runny nose and knew we were in for some germ exposure.”

“I'm in denial.” He's talking about Olivia, Professor Larson's three-year-old granddaughter who was at Thanksgiving dinner. I'd seen the runny nose too and I was worried about it. I probably mentally contracted the virus just from worrying about it. The only cold I got last winter turned into pneumonia. I don't have time for pneumonia right now.

We cross the street and Alex pauses again and touches my red nose. “We should stop. Let's go have breakfast somewhere.”

“We've only gone two miles.” My protest is weak, because my body is weak at the moment. Then it's like the world is trying to stop us, or actually give me pneumonia, because the sky opens up and pours icy cold rain on top of us.

Alex covers his head with both arms. “Shit!”

It only takes about thirty seconds for my shoes to get soaked through and my teeth to start chattering. He looks over at me and points in a different direction than the one we were originally headed in. “Change of plans.”

After running another four blocks with shoes that weigh an extra twenty pounds from water, Alex pulls me under the awning of a tall apartment building. His gaze darts around the street, then he removes a pair of sunglasses from his coat pocket and puts them on my face. He pulls the cold, wet hood of my jacket over my head.

“What are we doing?” I ask.

“Going inside.” He's still looking around as he leads me through a door, nudging me in front of him. He walks in the lobby and bypasses the elevators. “We'll take the stairs, just to be on the safe side.”

I stop at the first landing. “Is this where you live?”

“No, I like to hang out in stairwells of random apartment buildings.” He's already charging up the next flight.

I have no choice but to plunge ahead after him. “I thought your place was off limits?”

“Desperate times.” He glances over his shoulder and grins. “I didn't see anyone outside, did you?”

“I don't know. I wasn't paying attention. What about your roommates?”

“Gone.” He finally stops at the fifth floor. “They're both in Brazil doing some summer catalog shoot. We can leave separately, later, after we dry off and regain feeling in our toes.”

He's right, I can't feel my toes, but I
can
feel my heart speeding up when he unlocks the door and allows me to walk through first. It's a good-sized place, not all that different from the agency apartment I used to live in. I move to take my shoes off at the door, but Alex nods for me to follow him.

“Don't bother,” he says. “Let's leave all the wet stuff in the bathroom.”

On the way to his room, I peek into the two roommates' personal space. Both have unmade beds and clothes on the floor, but nothing too disgusting like I'd imagined there'd be from a trio of single guys.

Alex's queen-sized bed
is
made and the only thing on the floor is a laundry basket of neatly folded clothes sitting beside the desk. He's also got a fancy-looking speaker system and a big flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. Throw in a microfridge and I could live in here for weeks.

“You make your bed?” I shift around, trying to find a spot where I'm not going to drip on anything electronic.

“My mom forced me to for eighteen years,” he says. “Old habits die hard, right?”

“Eighteen years? I'm sure your infant self didn't know how to make a bed.”

“Okay, maybe like thirteen years.” He opens the door to the bathroom, and I'm surprised that he has his own and doesn't have to share the one I saw in the hallway with his roommates.

Yes, I could definitely live in here.

“How did you swing this?” I ask, pointing inside the bathroom.

“I got it after the last guy moved into his own place. Jason and Landon came after me, so they were stuck with the other rooms. I'm sure there'll be bloodshed over this room if I ever move out.”

I walk tentatively into the bathroom and put the toilet seat down before sitting on it and beginning the process of removing my soggy shoes and socks. My teeth are chattering so hard now, I probably won't be able to talk. Still in the bedroom, Alex closes and locks the door, then digs in the laundry basket. His hair looks much darker wet and drops of water keep falling into his eyes while he sifts through clothing. When he enters the bathroom, he hands me what looks like two folded towels and a T-shirt and boxers.

“You want me to wear your underwear? That seems serious,” I say as I'm pulling the rubber band from my hair and watching the water get squeegeed out of my ponytail and onto the tile floor.

“You're more than welcome to hang out naked while we wait for your clothes to dry.” He grins and then reaches into the shower, twisting the metal knob and turning it on. “Give it a good five minutes to warm up, and be careful, because the hot water heater is set at like a thousand degrees.”

He's already turned around and is reaching for the doorknob to close the door behind him.

“Are you leaving?” I blurt out. I'd figured he'd at least try to make the most of this situation.

He spins slowly to face me again. “I don't have to.”

I stare at his feet, feeling warmth return to my face. My heart is now an Olympic sprinter. Six weeks may have passed, but we haven't had this moment yet. We haven't ever been alone like this. “Aren't you going to take off your shoes?”

His eyes stay on mine as he kicks off one shoe at a time.

After, he reaches down to pull off his socks.

Then his shirt.

My teeth are still chattering, making my move a lot less sexy, not to mention the fact that removing a skintight long-sleeved shirt that's soaking wet is much harder than it looks. Alex steps closer and takes the hem of my shirt in his hands and slowly raises it over my head. He has that deep look of concentration I've seen on him when he tries to flip his skateboard in the air and land on it. His hands skim the length of my sides and then he wiggles my soaking wet sports bra down my body until it lands around my ankles.

My gaze travels down his body. I'd seen him shirtless so many times during the week of the CK shoot, but the only time I've really let myself look is when I'm studying the picture on my wall of him from that first
Sevent
een shoot.

And of course that photo is only half of the reality.

I place my palms flat against his chest and rest them there, feeling the thud of his heart pulsing through my fingers. Then my fingers curl around his sides, my thumbs trailing down his stomach. I could spend hours covering every inch of his skin just like this. I hear his quick intake of air when my thumbs land on the waistband of his shorts.

Steam rises from over the shower doors. Alex glances at the shower and then quickly slides off his shorts and steps into the shower. I go through the process of tugging the tights off my legs before he reaches a hand out and pulls me under the stream of hot water. My skin is so cold it stings at first, but then Alex kisses me and I don't feel the sting anymore.

The water suddenly shifts from lukewarm to icy cold. I have no idea how much time has passed or how many kisses we've racked up or whether it all just counts as one long kiss, because that's what it feels like.

Eve and I jump apart and I fumble around for the knobs, quickly twisting them, shutting the water off. She's out of the shower before my eyes open again, a towel wrapped around her body and a folded one in her outstretched hand.

I take the towel from her, dry my face, wrap it around my waist, and then try to read something in her actions. She's quickly turned her back to me and is already sliding into the boxers and T-shirt I gave her.

I'm not sure I had a specific post-shower agenda for us, but I know whatever it was, it didn't include getting dressed. We were so close, pressed together the whole time in the shower, that I didn't really get to look at her and now all I want to do is lay her across my bed and study all the parts I have yet to see.

I stand there like an idiot for several seconds while she towel dries her hair, and then because I don't know what else to do, I scoop all our wet clothes from the floor and gather them in my arms.

“I'm gonna toss these in the washer.” After I get the clothes started on their twenty-eight-minute cycle, I return to my room and lock the door again, drop my towel to the floor, and grab a pair of boxers from the basket for myself.

Maybe I went too fast? But we were just kissing.
Naked
kissing
. Some roaming hands. But still, I'd been ready to walk out of that bathroom before she stopped me. Okay, 90 percent ready.

I snatch my towel off the floor and walk back into the bathroom to hang it up. Eve stops squeezing water from her long hair and looks at me in the mirror.

“I'm confusing you, aren't I?” she says. “Mixed signals or whatever.”

“A little,” I admit.

She turns around and I take the towel from her hands and hang it beside mine. She looks embarrassed. “I'm sorry. I think I've kinda let myself forget how this all goes. It's been a while.”

The giant ball of confusion in my head finally unwinds itself.
Eve
is
nervous
. I let out a sigh of relief and lean back against the shower door. “There's no script to follow here and certainly nothing to apologize for. In fact, I'm starting to wonder how I've gone all these years showering solo. Such a mundane activity all alone.”

She laughs and rests her forehead against my shoulder. Already the dread and panic I had a couple of minutes ago fades.

“Isn't there a really nasty word for girls who get naked and then put their clothes on before…before…”

“Maybe,” I jump in to rescue her from searching for the coolest way to say the word sex. “But I think you're exempt from that word if you put
my
clothes on.” I pull her out of the bathroom and toward my bed. “We've got seventy-two minutes before your clothes are ready. What do you want to do?”

It's not a loaded question. I'm honestly asking her because me setting the pace probably isn't the best idea right now. If she says she wants to watch CNN, I'll watch CNN. Whatever keeps the awkward moments away because those don't really go with
us
.

She lifts her eyes to meet mine, but I'm focusing on her teeth sinking into her lower lip. That sense of dread returns. I know I'm going to say or do the wrong thing and send her running out of here in my underwear.

“I'm not sure I want to…you know…” she says, braving the eye contact but not the use of the word. “But that's all. Everything else is—”

More relief washes over me. I lean in to give her a quick kiss on the mouth. “Okay.”

The confidence we had ten minutes ago under the stream of hot water returns. She lets me pull her down onto the bed and tug the borrowed T-shirt off her and onto the floor. The rain is still hitting the pavement outside, creating this entrancing sound, like we're on an island with no other humans in sight. Like we have an infinite number of hours, even if we don't. It makes me want to slow everything down so I can stow it into my memory frame by frame.

It's been a while since I've done this in-between stuff.