Without warning, I am back on the piano bench, Julian’s face hovering right before mine. His gaze ticks slowly from my eyes to my lips and back. This memory of him—because that’s what this has to be, a memory, though I’m not sure Julian had leaned in so close, so long—seems strangely solid. I can feel the heat of his body radiating close to mine, the final notes of the piano dispersing like smoke. I resist the urge to reach out and touch him, and as if he can hear my thoughts, he smirks, the corner of his mouth turning up in an expression I’m quite sure I haven’t seen before.
“So…?” The word forms around Julian’s mouth, rounding his lips to an O, but the sound produced isn’t his voice or his intonation.Winona’s, my mind supplies sluggishly, remembering where I am.She’s talking to you.
I wag my head to shake him away, but Julian lingers, seared into an afterimage on the back of my closed eyelids.
“Oh, she got a real close look,” another voice answers for me.
All at once, my vision clears enough to catch my goddaughter peeking through the railings of the stairway. Heat rises to my face. The little snitch.
“I know you know better than to be in grown folks’ business,” I say.
“And you should know better than to lie,” Sophie taunts. “You were about to kiss him. I was there. I saw. Which is really weird because you, like,justmet him.”
Oh, I cannotwaitto use that line on her in four years or so when she asks her Auntie Sean to cover for her teenage debauchery.
“Bed, Soph,” Winona says with some force, and we endure a few minutes of whining (“I’m not a baby, Mom!”) before Sophie’s bedroom door finally slams shut.
The instant it does, her mother rounds on me.
“You almostkissedhim?” Winona hisses. When I don’t immediately deny it, she smacks me with a throw pillow. “Oh my god, Sean! How could you not lead with that?”
“It felt wrong,” I admit, ashamed. “I shouldn’t have even entertained him.”
Winona might claim that me cavorting with her ex-husband’s new wife’s best friend would be the perfect revenge, but I know that a dalliance like that could cause distance between us. Julian is Leila’s. He’d walked her down the aisle and everything. How could I have let myself forget that, even for a moment?
“We aren’t twenty-two anymore,” Winona says, interrupting my thoughts. “There aren’t rules of engagement like there used to be.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Winona shrugs.
“You know, that we can’t talk to each other’s exes or be friends with girls I don’t like. All those guidelines we had to follow to demonstrateour loyalty. We’re past that. You know as well as I do that life is too short for all that BS.” Winny grins.
“You’re my soul sister, Sean. And I would very much like for you to have some fun. Even just so I can get the tea later.”
“Winny…” I start.
Winona holds up a hand.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she says. “I do, however, want to hear about this guy. And spare me no details. I want to know name, height, build, ethnicity, and how you ended up all snuggled up.”
I snicker, then indulge her.
Sleep descends upon me that night. One second I am slipping under a pink paisley comforter in Winny’s guest room, and the next I’m immersed in a realm of darkness, trapped in a purgatory of consciousness between wakefulness and slumber. And then suddenly a snap, a room. It is familiar, bustling, the colors oversaturated and blurred like I’m staring at it through tear-filmed eyes. I recognize it as Brews and Beans, the coffee shop at my hospital.
There is a man sitting at a window. He is well-built, tall. His long legs stretch elegantly out under his table, his broad shoulders angled toward the street. I feel a desire, suddenly, for him to perceive me. Want more than anything for his eyes to meet mine and hold. I know what they will look like: amber, burning like hot coals in a sculptural face.
As if he can sense my interest, the man turns and gives me a syrupy smile.
“Dreaming of me, Sean?” Julian says, and I startle awake.
Four
Monday rolls around. I drive to work with circles under my eyes, knowing that I will be desperately needing to stop in at the very coffee shop that haunted me all weekend for my much-needed caffeine fix. I’ve been sleeping like crap for the last two nights, no thanks to a certain unwelcome visitor who keeps infiltrating my dreams. It seems like every time my eyelids flutter shut, Julian is there behind them, giving me the same infuriating, knowing grin from a table or behind the espresso machine or at my kitchen counter. I jolt awake what feels like every few hours, my body humming with so much frustration that I almost text Dave, the cute but self-impressed law professor who’d bought me a drink a few weeks back, to come over and relieve it.
What is wrong with you? I think as I step into the back of the line at Brews and Beans.He’s just a pretty man you had one sort-of romantic moment with. Get over it.
My phone buzzes: one of the cath lab nurses, Pamela, sending me a text.