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I wag an index finger at my shelf of magazines. “Relatable.”
This self-aware, self-deprecating side of Miles is new. I wonder if this is what he’s like at home, with Dr. Okamoto and Dr. Kasher and a brother he maybe doesn’t get along with. I don’t hate it, and I’m desperate to make it last as long as possible.
“My mom went here too,” I continue. “I never thought I’d go anywhere else. There are pictures of me as a baby in a tiny purple onesie with a W on it, posing with Dubs and crying because I wanted to take him home with me. I guess I spent so much time building it up in my head that I thought it would, I don’t know… change me, in some way.” I fight a grimace as I say it, worried it sounds melodramatic.
“Well, is it?” Miles asks, surprising me not for the first or even second time tonight. “Changing you?”
“To be honest, it’s been a bit of a letdown so far. This physics nerd–slash–film buff won’t quit following me through space and time.”
When he laughs, the sound is so unexpected that I nearly drop my takeout container. It’s warm and rich and a little too loud, and maybe that’s why it startles me: because everything else about him is so measured, so calculated. This laugh, where he almost forgets himself for a moment… it might be my new favorite thing about him.
“Anyway,” I say, forging forward, unsure why I’m struck with the urge to make him laugh again. Probably because my mom’s the only one who’s ever laughed at my jokes. “I have a lot of my mom’s taste because I grew up with all her favorite things, and she was just the coolest person in the world to me. My first concert was the Backstreet Boys’ twentieth-anniversary tour. Take me to any early-2000s trivia contest, I’ll know every answer.”
My dorm bookshelf is so low that Miles is able to stretch a hand upward and grasp one of my magazines without any effort at all. “So you’re a bit old-fashioned,” he says, paging through a Vanity Fair. “You know you can find all of this online, right?”
“That interview with Jennifer Aniston is really great,” I say. “And sure, but I love the realness of a physical copy. I feel more connected to a story that way.”
“This is what you want to do?” He finds the cover story, the one where Jen opens up about her divorce for the first time, not just getting emotional but also shutting down sexist comments lobbed at her over the years. The author turns a larger-than-life personality into a person. “Articles like this?”
“Well, not exactly that,” I say. “It’s not just wanting to write about famous people or getting celebrities to spill tea. And I’m not talking about the articles that are like, ‘So-and-so gingerly pokes at her shaved fennel salad, contemplating the meaning of life,’?” I say in a faux lofty voice. “I want to dig deep, get inside someone’s head, hear the stories they don’t always tell. And I guess I just… want to make people care about something they didn’t know they could care about.”
“No one’s gingerly poking at salads in your stories,” Miles says with a quarter smile, which would be undetectable on anyone else. “No, I get it. Very specific taste, and I respect it.”
I gesture to my laptop screen, indicating the reason Miles came over in the first place. This conversation took an unexpected turn, and something about him holding my magazines while I tell him about my career aspirations feels almost… intimate. Personal—that’s a better word for it.
“And that includes Groundhog Day. Not to be dramatic or anything, but I kind of feel like I was born for this?” I flex my fingers, aware of his gaze on me and how it feels different, maybe, from how he’s looked at me before. Probably because he hasn’t been annoyed at me in at least five minutes. If his eyes are lingering, it’s only because I’m talking.
It is definitely time to start the movie and stop thinking.
I reach for my laptop, nearly bashing Miles’s head with it in my eagerness to position it at the top of my bed. When I swerve at the last moment, the laptop crashes into a bottle of Coke and sends it right into his chest.
“Shit—I’m sorry!” I say as the liquid pours down his shirt.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he says, scrambling to catch the bottle before it hits the floor.
I jump off the bed and grab the first napkin-looking thing I see, which turns out to be my gray cardigan.
“You sure you want to use that? It might stain.”
“If we wake up on Thursday morning, you can buy me a new one.” I kneel beside him, realizing too late that the liquid has spread to his groin, which I am currently eye level with. Where I am currently swiping at him with the wet cardigan.
“I—um—I think I’ve got it,” he stammers, holding out his hand.
I drop the cardigan and spring away from him, smacking my elbow against my bed frame. Lock me up. Please. I am a menace to society.
“Do you want to go change?” I ask.
He dabs at his shirt and jeans while I contemplate whether a Jewish girl would be permitted to enter a nunnery. “Sexiled, remember? They go to a party afterward, but that’s not for another hour.”
“Oh. You can borrow one of my shirts,” I say, because shirts are safe. Shirts are not pants, and even better, they are not Miles’s soda-soaked pants I was moments away from groping him in.
My closet is full of old pajama T-shirts, some mine and some stolen from my mom. And, well, the fact of it is that I might be shorter than Miles, but I’m positive I weigh more than he does. If I give him a shirt he ends up drowning in, I may perish.
I toss him a NEPTUNE HIGH T-shirt that’s a little tight on me. He accepts it, hooking a finger in the collar of the one he’s wearing. “Do you mind, uh, turning around?”
“Right. Of course.”
And I do. I swear I do. But it’s not my fault that he lifts the hem of his shirt a split-second before I’m fully turned, and I catch a sliver of tan skin above the waist of his jeans. Apparently I’m not just learning more about Miles today—I’m seeing more of him, too. It’s the briefest flash, but it’s enough to bring heat to my cheeks. Which is frankly unacceptable. Clearly we’ve been trapped in this room, trapped in Wednesday, for too long.
