The Partner Track: A Novel (18 page)

I began to relax a little, resting my head back against the cushions. I was aware of my long shiny hair fanning out gently along the top of the couch the way I knew it would. I murmured, “This is a great song.”

“The best,” he agreed.

We sat there together in the semidarkness and listened without speaking to the perfection that was Dusty Springfield—the husky notes hanging thick and low in the air, the high notes curling upward into the stratosphere.

I was still petrified about what would happen next. It had been such a long time since I’d been in this situation, with
anyone,
let alone with Murph himself, the most dazzling of all of the golden boys I knew, the heir most apparent, who’d been the source of all my consternation, who’d been keeping me up at night.

I closed my eyes.
Please, please don’t screw this up.

I finally worked up the resolve to turn my head toward Murph. When I did, he was already looking at me. He reached over and stroked my cheek very gently with his fingertip, and it felt so good that my eyes nearly filled.

Oh, sweetie, you
are
in trouble,
I thought to myself.

And then he flashed me a smile, and it was such a specific smile, so perfectly disarming, so well calculated, that I couldn’t help it, I actually
giggled
—because I was nervous, because I needed to break the tension of the moment, and also because it struck me as sort of funny, this very particular, sideways smile that I knew must have closed the deal for him on many a previous occasion.

Murph’s expression grew solemn again. He looked at me for a long moment, and I thought happily that there was absolutely nothing else like it—this moment when you know for sure he’s going to kiss you.

I tilted my face toward him at the same second he bent down toward me, and his kiss was so soft and so gentle that I would have been hard-pressed to pinpoint the precise instant when our lips actually touched. Then we were kissing in earnest. Murph pressed one hand against the small of my back and with the other gently traced the curve of my shoulder. I felt a delicious shudder. Goose pimples rose on my arms. It had been a very long time since I’d felt like
this.

It struck me as ridiculous that after eight years of banter and flirtation delivered in sleek boardrooms high atop Manhattan, and at cocktail parties and formal dinners in elegant dress attire, Murph and I were finally getting together while wearing disgusting dirt-stained Parsons Valentine Prosecutors T-shirts. It was absurd. It was absurd, and it was perfect.

I let out a soft laugh.

He looked up. “What?”

I shook my head, smiling. “Nothing.”

I stood up. Grabbing both of his hands, I backed slowly toward the hallway leading to his bedroom.

“Come here,” I said.

He did.

*   *   *

I lay on my side with my head resting on Murph’s chest, listening to his breathing slow down and even out, and then I flipped onto my back, exhausted and happy and close to sleep.

Murph raised himself up on an elbow and asked quietly, “Do you want some water?”

“Sure,” I said, and my voice came out scratchy. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Water. Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll be right back.” He kissed my cheek, disentangled himself from me, and rolled deftly to the side.

I sat up in Murph’s platform bed, my back resting against the low angled headboard, the covers drawn self-consciously up over my chest, and watched as,
un
self-consciously, he shoved into gray boxer briefs before crossing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows on his way out to the hall. In another moment, I heard him opening and closing kitchen cabinets, as he belted out an old Aerosmith song at the top of his lungs.

He was singing it off-key, Broadway showstopper style, and I knew he was trying to be funny for my benefit. I hugged my knees to my chest and grinned to myself. I had gotten my old Murph back, only better. And I really,
really
liked him.

I felt around underneath the covers for my clothes. They weren’t there. I experienced a fleeting panic before noticing that my softball jersey, underwear, and leggings had been neatly folded and draped across the back of a chair—and I found it oddly touching that he had taken the time to do this.

I retrieved my underwear and lay down to tug it back on, grateful that I’d had the random luck yesterday to have been wearing a pretty pair of robin’s egg blue panties.

Feeling less vulnerable now, I sat back up and peered more closely around Murph’s bedroom.
So this is where Jeff Murphy lays his head at night,
I mused happily.
And probably where he’s laid a whole lot else, too.
But I quickly banished this thought.

On Murph’s nightstand sat a Bose SoundDock, his iPhone, and two snapshots in simple black frames. I waited a moment, then, when I was sure Murph was still busy banging around his kitchen, picked up both photographs and examined them.

One showed a tanned, unshaven Murph with his arms slung lazily around the shoulders of a couple of other grinning college-age men. They were all good-looking guys, wearing windbreakers and baseball caps, holding beers and standing on the deck of a beach house, with hillocks of sandy dunes and scrubby yellow grass visible behind them. The roommate’s fabled house on the Cape, I presumed. It was a charming house, shingled and gabled and weathered gray and white in the solid old New England style. It was handsome and tasteful, and looked completely assured of its place in the world, not unlike Murph and his friends did themselves. So
unlike
the suburban McMansions that my parents and their friends all lived in back home, with faux marble columns and yawning two-story foyers, houses with something to prove.

I set the photo back down on Murph’s nightstand and peered closely at the second one, an old-fashioned snapshot of a young family. An earnest-looking mother and father posed next to a fire truck with two kids—a beaming ponytailed girl and an adorable towheaded boy easily recognizable as a four- or five-year-old Murph. Murph was hauled up onto his dad’s shoulders, high in the air, and he was wearing a red fireman’s hat that was too big for him. Murph’s father, I was not at all surprised to see, was himself a handsome man, striking and well made, and quite dashing in a black dress uniform of some sort with fancy epaulets and big brass buttons. Murph had an astonishingly beautiful and happy-looking family—the sort you would expect to see pictured on the front of a catalog, wearing linen and seersucker and dungarees, running along a beach, or cheerfully knotting a necktie onto a Labrador retriever.

I heard Murph’s footsteps just outside the door and quickly arranged both picture frames exactly the way I’d found them.

Murph strode back into the bedroom and handed me a glass of water. He stood next to the bed, raised his own glass to his lips, and took three or four long swallows.

“Is this your family?” I asked, nodding toward his nightstand.

“What?” He glanced at the photograph. “Oh. Yeah. Those would be my folks.”

“It’s a nice picture. Your parents make a really handsome couple.”

“Thanks. They try.”

“Is that a fire chief uniform your dad’s wearing?” I asked.

“Captain.”

“Oh.”

“He never made chief.”

“It must have been fun as a kid having a dad who was a fireman,” I said.

Murph didn’t respond, draining the rest of his water. Then he asked, “What does your old man do?”

“He’s a college professor. Of economics.”

He smiled as if I’d said something funny.

Then he said suddenly, “Hey, you hungry?”

I glanced at his phone. It was after one in the morning. Neither of us had had anything to eat since lunch the day before. I hadn’t felt hungry at all, but as soon as he asked the question I realized I was starving.

Murph retrieved a stack of delivery menus from his kitchen and splayed them out in accordion fashion on his bed. We ordered from the all-night sushi place down the block. Then we slurped miso soup and gorged ourselves on shrimp tempura and spicy tuna rolls while sitting across from each other on his mattress, Murph in navy blue pajama bottoms and me wearing an ancient Williams College Baseball T-shirt of his that smelled of sweat and deodorant and reached nearly to my knees.

In faded letters it read,
WILLIAMS MEN DON’T STOP AT THIRD BASE,
which made both of us laugh.

TEN

“Tell me
everything
!” Rachel commanded, stirring a cube of brown sugar into her chamomile tea.

Rachel and her little daughter, Isabel, were in the city running weekend errands. We were having brunch at our favorite Upper West Side café—a bright, bustling place where delicious crepes and quiches were served on large communal tables. Rach and I used to come here a lot back when we lived together in Morningside Heights. The preppy Saturday morning brunch crowd here was equal parts earnest new couples on the Morning After and their counterparts five years later, now parents with kids in tow.

“I mean, why
now
? After eight years?” Rachel pressed. “What finally
happened
?”

“I’m not really sure why now,” I tried to explain to Rachel—and to myself. “It just finally felt right, I guess.”

Rachel raised one perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “And even
more
importantly,” she smirked with barely restrained glee, darting a look over at four-year-old Isabel, who sat coloring quietly at the table,
“how was it?”

Ah. The Question. I’d been wondering how long it would take Rachel to get around to asking it. My married friends were
much
more interested in hearing about their single friends’ sexual exploits now that they themselves had, in front of God and everyone, committed to a single penis forever after. These happily married women thought it downright rude
not
to ask after my love life, when of course the opposite was true. Single career women did not like to feel that we were out here getting our hearts trampled on for our married friends’ entertainment. Revealing our romantic humiliations and our most vulnerable selves for the sake of a funny anecdote or two at someone’s next book club.

Rachel often liked to say that she lived vicariously through me—still single in the city, still keeping crazy hours, still chasing the brass ring after she’d given it up for a wedding ring. To which I often apologized that she wasn’t having more vicarious fun.

But this time felt different. This time, it was Murph we were talking about.

“Well, it was—kind of great,” I murmured vaguely.

“Elaborate.”

“It was really nice, actually,” I said, noticing a pleasant pull in my stomach as I thought again about Murph, the gentle way he’d kissed me good-bye at the door, the message he’d texted me during my short cab ride home:
You were worth the wait.
I thought once again about our sweet, half-remembered conversation in the Oak Hollow clubhouse. And I realized with a slight stab of guilt and surprise that some moments were too perfect, too private to share, even with Rachel.

“Isn’t he the one you said was a
huge player
?” she shrieked. An older couple at a neighboring table glanced over at us.

I felt a ping of annoyance. I took a big swallow of coffee and decided to change the subject. “I just don’t know how we’re supposed to act around each other at the office. I mean, is he going to act like my boyfriend now? Does
he
think he’s my boyfriend? Do we tell people at work we’re together? What?”

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I think you should just play it close to the vest for a while,” Rachel said.

“Mommy?” piped up Isabel, next to me. “What does ‘play close to the vest’ mean?”

Rachel leaned across and bent down, speaking softly into her daughter’s hair. “It means to keep some things to yourself. Now, Isabel, remember you promised you would let Mommy and Auntie Ingrid have our grown-up time this morning. Okay?”

Isabel nodded, turning back to her coloring book. I looked down at the page. She was studiously giving a fairy princess a pretty fringe of curly brown hair like her own. Like Rachel’s. My heart melted.

No one would ever describe me as oozing maternal instinct, but Isabel completely disarmed me. I remembered babysitting her when she was still very tiny, and sitting there by her side in the semidarkness for a long while after she fell asleep, just staring, marveling at her ten perfect little fingers and ten perfect toes and the gorgeously long eyelashes she already had. A few months ago, when Rachel and Josh had a black-tie benefit to attend, I’d gone up to Westchester to stay with Isabel and her baby brother, Jacob. While eleven-month-old Jacob slumbered upstairs, Isabel and I had entertained ourselves by drawing movie posters and designing jewelry for each other. I showed Isabel how to make a chain-link construction-paper bracelet with the letters of her name drawn onto each link in bright rainbow colors, and she’d insisted on making one for me. Isabel had been delighted to discover that our names not only both started with the letter
I
but were also each six letters long. She’d worn her I-S-A-B-E-L bracelet and I’d worn my I-N-G-R-I-D one the whole evening. When Josh and Rachel came home and she woke briefly, Isabel murmured sleepily, “Auntie Ingrid, don’t take off your bracelet until you get home, okay?” “Oh, I won’t, honey.” And I didn’t. I’d kept it on all that weekend and only took it off, reluctantly, when it was time to go back to the office. I still had it, in a cloisonné jewelry tray on top of my bedroom dresser.

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t exactly planning to broadcast our hookup in the firm newsletter, Rach.”

“No, I know. I just mean, okay, so you guys have hooked up once. It’s exciting and everything, but that could be it. You don’t know if this is actually going to
go
anywhere, right? There are all kinds of issues with dating someone at work, obviously.
Especially
for you, this year.”