Page 81 of All Our Almosts

I know I always rush things, always push my partners to want too much too soon. There is no way I’m going to let myself make that mistake with Andy. No matter what happens, I won’t let myself take more than he’s ready to give.

After seeing Lia out, Andy comes back to bed, the portrait of temptation as he crawls over the covers towards me. And I feel every emotion at once—lust curling low in my belly, hope stretching its wings in my brain, nervousness sparkling like pop rocks in my chest.

“What should we do for the rest of the day?” he asks, trapping me beneath him.

“Hear me out,” I reply, twining my fingers in his hair as he starts to kiss my neck. “What if we just don’t leave the bed? We can order take out. Have a lot more sex. Maybe read our books. But the floor is lava. Everywhere but the bed is lava. We have to stay here.”

“Is there a bathroom break clause?” he mutters against my skin. “It won’t change my answer, just trying to make a hydration plan.”

“Bathroom breaks are negotiable.”

“You’re a generous overlord,” he says, then picks up right where he left off.

25

My Ashmore interview is tomorrow, and I can’t focus for the life of me. I spend half the workday imagining catastrophic interview scenarios—they’ll quiz me on organic chemistry, or ask me why I didn’t have a summer internship between sophomore and junior years, or tell me the Principal Investigator of the lab I’m interested in is moving to Portugal—and the other half of the day lost in memories of my weekend with Andy—the positions he put me in, the sounds we made, then the way he made me laugh until real tears were streaming down my cheeks.

I text him for support.

Me: Can we go out tonight? My brain is mush and I think I’ll go crazy sitting in the house

Andy: Yes. I will make a dinner reservation.

After a thorough and systematic review of online ratings, menus, and photos, Andy makes a reservation for us at a new speakeasy across the river in Cambridge. We enter through a black door in an alley, marked only with a crescent moon. Hand-in-hand, we descend a flight of stairs, following the sounds of airy female vocals, then duck through a night blue curtain into a dimly lit single room. There’s a long bar against the back wall, soft blue and purple uplighting illuminating the herringbone wallpaper, and mismatched velvet chairs around mismatched wooden tables.

We’re given a table in the corner. I sit in a red armchair, and Andy takes the long wooden bench against the wall. The menus are leather bound books with ink illustrations, and I am absolutely delighted by them. When our cocktails and food arrive, my drink is garnished with some kind of dried fruit that looks like a tongue, and I can’t resist doing bits with it. Every time Andy reaches for his fork I use it to lick his hand until he’s hanging onto his sanity by a thread and I’m cracking up.

“If you lick me with that thing one more time you’re gonna regret it,” he says, batting my fingers away before finally taking a successful bite of his meal.

“Oh yeah? What are you gonna do about it?”

He puts his fork down, gaze searing me from across the table. “Maybe I’ll just have to lick you back.”

Suddenly I’m not just hungry for the food on my plate.

I lean forward, dragging my lower lip between my teeth. “Don’t threaten me with a good time, Walsh.”

Then he breaks our eye contact with a laugh, scrubbing his hands over his eyes and shaking his head. “Yeah, that’s not good.”

“What!” I shriek. “You started it. You—” I point at him across the table “—are not allowed to make fun of me for trying to be sexy while we’re on a date. That’s like… a low blow, dude.”

“It’s not… you’re not…” He sighs the world’s biggest sigh, then leans across the table towards me, voice dropping to a whisper. “You’re making me hard in public, Sophia.” He says my name like it committed a crime. “Biting your lip like that, when I spent the whole day imagining things I want to do to your mouth. Fuck.” He tears his gaze away, looking to the left and up and right and anywhere but at me. “Say something really unsexy,” he begs. “Please.”

I’m fighting a losing battle with a grin. “Mmmmmm….. Okay, I’ve got it! When I was a kid we had a bunch of chickens on the farm, and they used to lay eggs that we could sell or use in our own cooking or whatever. And one time I was baking a cake—I don’t remember why—and I needed eggs, so I went out to the yard to get some, and there were plenty to choose from, and when I got them inside they all looked perfectly normal. So, I started cracking them into my batter, and I was adding the very last one, but when it cracked open it was bloody. Like—have you ever seen a bloody egg? It was like mucus-y streaks of red and purple instead of a normal yolk… absolutely disgusting. I almost vomited into my cake batter. And it wouldn’t have even mattered if I had, because I had to throw the whole thing out anyway. And that was the day I decided I hate cooking.”

Andy stares at me in horror, blinking slowly. “Okay… That was pretty good. I think it got me down to a semi.”

My laugh shoots out like a bullet, ricocheting off the walls until it hits Andy in the chest and he starts laughing too. We’re almost hysterical when we realize the tables on either side of us are glaring. But honestly, it’s hard to care when everything else is perfect. Even Andy, who’s usually so desperate to fade into the background of everyone’s attention, offers me a beaming two-dimple smile from across the table, like these strangers’ glares are simply less important than the moment we’re sharing.

It’s such a small thing—for anyone else it would be nothing—but with him it means the world.

“Do you ever miss living on the farm?” he asks.

I shrug. “I miss some things.”

“Like what?”

“Like the chickens and the ducks. They always had a really chaotic energy, and they each had their own personality, which I loved. And we had a pond with a whole ecosystem that evolved every year. I think I’ve told you that’s what got me interested in biology originally—watching the plants and animals in the pond change over time. I just miss the little things like that. But I could never see myself going back.”