Page 79 of We Could Be So Good
“How do you usually greet Jeanne?” Nick has finished cooking and is now showering with the door open.
“I kiss her cheek,” Andy calls out.
The taps turn off. “Then do that.” Nick steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around his waist. “Should I shave?”
Andy is surprised enough by the question that he drags his attention away from Nick’s damp chest. Nick always shaves. Sometimes he even shaves twice a day. But apparently he’s noticed how obsessed Andy is with Nick’s stubble. He might have noticed this because Andy has said so, out loud, maybe a dozen times, usually while running his lips over Nick’s jaw.
Andy grins. “You know what my answer’s going to be.”
“Pervert.”
Andy kisses Nick’s jawline as he passes by on the way to the bedroom. “Your pervert.”
“What do I wear?” Nick stands in front of his closet.
“No tie. Gray pants. Sleeves rolled up.”
Nick shoots Andy a skeptical look over his shoulder. “Sleeves rolled up? That’s part of the dress code?”
“Yeah. It would be bad manners for you to hide those away,” he says, gesturing at Nick’s forearms. “Sorry you didn’t know that.”
“Lucky I have you around.” Nick drops the towel, which is unfair since Andy has to get into the shower immediately if he wants to have time.
“Such a tease,” he laments, and strips off his own clothes.
Nick has no restraint, no scruples, noethics, because he kisses Andy and kisses him again and follows him into the bathroom and into the goddamn shower and it’s nothing short of a miracle that they’re both decent when the buzzer sounds.
“Should I go downstairs?” Andy asks.
“I could throw them the keys?”
Andy is of the opinion that throwing keys out a fifth-story window is a surefire trip to the emergency room and possibly the police station, but they’ve already had this conversation, and Nick insists that the throwing of the keys is entirely normal apartment-building behavior.
“We could both go down?” Andy counters.
Nick nods. He goes to the window, leans out far enough that Andy yelps, and shouts that he’s on his way.
On the last landing, Nick grabs Andy’s shoulder. “Even if you’re awkward, she won’t be. Emily Warburton is the antidote to awkwardness.”
This is an excellent point. “Thanks.”
At the front door, the question of air kisses versus hugs is rendered moot because Jeanne immediately hugs Andy. He briefly wonders if the sisters settled it between them beforehand, because it’s the perfect solution: after Jeanne and Andy hug, of course Emily and Nick have to, and then it’s natural for Emily and Andy to hug as well.
It’s all significantly less bizarre than it might have been, embracing the woman he once thought would be his wife, the mother of his children, his partner through thick and thin. It shouldn’t be this easy. It feels like greeting an old friend.
Upstairs, they knock on Linda’s door, and she must have made a real effort because she’s noticeably less paint-splattered than usual, with only trace quantities of plaster dust in her hair. Emily and Jeanne enter the apartment armed with anecdotes to smooth over any awkwardness—Emily talks about her new job atVogue—she’s still writing about sofas, but very expensive ones now—and Jeanne talks about a cat that had kittens in the broom closet at the museum. All Andy has to do is pour drinks and make the appropriate conversational noises.
Emily has on slim black trousers, a white sweater, and flat shoes, and it takes Andy a moment to realize that he’s never seen any of these clothes before. He also hasn’t seen her hair that way—sort of half up but loose around her shoulders. When they hugged earlier, he noticed that she changed her perfume.
It’s strange, how he can look at her and see that she’s beautiful, see all the things that used to make his heart race and his hands ache to touch her, but not feel anything about it other than a diffuse and not unpleasant sort of nostalgia.
Nick puts on a record—the kind of jazz where the individual notes refuse to organize themselves into a melody—and Andy keeps everyone’s wineglasses filled.
One afternoon this week they went to Andy’s old apartment and packed up a couple things to bring to Nick’s—Andy’s summer clothes and tennis gear, a dozen wineglasses (“a dozen people could not fit in this apartment, Andrew”), four chairs, and a stack of dishes. When they sit at the table, Emily looks at the dishes and does a double take, probably not expecting bone china to make an appearance in Nick’s apartment. She glances at Andy and raises an intrigued eyebrow. Andy smiles as if he has no idea what she’s getting at. So what if he brought his grandmother’s wedding china with him to Nick’s, carried in the back seat of a cab like a sack of groceries? It doesn’t have to mean anything, and it isn’t as if Nick knows. Besides, the wineglasses are from Woolworth.
The dish Nick made is chicken stewed in tomato sauce with mushrooms and fried eggplant, and he serves it along with a bowl of spaghetti. “Chicken cacciatore,” he says, plonking the dish onto the table as if daring anyone to argue with him.
“Nick,” Emily says after a few bites. “I had no idea you could cook.”
