Roomies by Christina Lauren

ten

So what now?

Ahead of us, Lulu and Mark are trading small talk—about jobs, New York, weather.

Calvin and I are in a weird bubble right behind them. The wind is sharp and cold, and we’re bundled up, heading down the last block to Gallaghers Steakhouse, unspeaking. He’s a nice person, I’m a nice person. As our two dates have demonstrated, we get along just fine . . . but I’m sure we’re both reeling with the awareness that we’re married.

Married. Calvin is my husband. I am his wife.

I glance down to the ring on his left hand and, in response, the metal on my finger seems to grow bitingly cold.

“You all right?” he asks.

Startling at the sound of his voice, I shift my attention to his face. His nose is pink, and adorable. Ugh. I’ve married him, and he has no idea I’ve been writing Holland/Hot Busker fic in my head for months. How is this a good idea?

I go for breezy: “Yeah, of course—it’s my wedding day.”

When he turns his face forward again, I can barely see it peeking out from the hood of his black down jacket. But I do catch the smile. “You’re quiet. I haven’t known you that long, but what I do know isn’t quiet.”

Well. He spotted that quickly.

“You’re right, I’m not.” I smile faintly back. My face is numb, it’s so cold outside. “I’m just thinking about all of this.”

“Regrets?”

“No, more of the ‘What now?’ kind of thinking. I need to tell Robert.”

“Maybe we could talk out here, away from prying ears.”

I look over at him again. We’re less than half a block away from Gallaghers now, and he’s got a point. Once we get in there, everyone will be able to hear us, and will for sure see the awkward navigation through the What now? if we leave it until the end of the meal.

I stop, bending as if adjusting the strap on my shoe. Calvin calls out to Lulu and Mark. “Yeah, keep going,” he says. “We’ll catch you inside.”

And then he crouches, meeting my eyes. “This is big, what you’ve done.”

“Yeah.” I’m caught in the intensity of his expression.

“I can see why you’d be left a little speechless.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe I could go with you when you talk to your uncles?”

“Okay.”

Use your words, Holland. Tell him it isn’t so much that you’re feeling regret as you’re feeling sheer panic at the prospect of sharing an apartment with a stranger who also happens to be the hottest man you’ve ever touched. What if you fart in your sleep?

“I want you to know,” he continues, “despite my misdemeanor candy theft, I’m not a creep. I would never hurt you. But if you would feel more comfortable staying separate places—”

“We can’t.” Although it’s true, there is a vague tremor of nausea in my thoughts now. I’m ninety-nine percent sure Calvin isn’t a rapist or rampant drug abuser. But now taking him into my apartment seems somewhat impulsive—and not just because I might fart in my sleep.

“I want you to know how much I appreciate this,” he says, “and I won’t take anything for granted.”

I’m unaccustomed to being thanked so profusely, and stammer out a few sounds before nodding.

“Is the plan that I come home with you tonight?”

Heat spreads up my neck and over my cheeks. “I think so.”

“You have a couch?”

I nod.

“Your bedroom door locks?”

I pull back, looking at him. “Do I need it to lock?”

He shakes his head quickly. “Of course not. I want you to feel safe.”

“You must think I’m a maniac.”

His grin charges something to life inside me. “Well, aren’t you? I think that’s why I like you, Holland Bakker McLoughlin. That and your freckles.”

We straighten in slow unison, and the whole time he grins down at me from several inches above. I finally manage to respond to this: “You think I’m taking your name?”

“I’m sure of it.”

My jaw drops through a grin. “I married a caveman?”

“Just a personal preference. Want to make a wager on this?”

“As in,” I say slowly, “I lose and take your name. You lose and I keep mine? What’s really in it for me?”

“If I lose, I’ll take yours.”

What is even happening right now?

He slides his hand around my fingers. “So . . . uncles tomorrow?”

I blink up from our joined hands. “I’ll make sure they’re home.”

“Good. Now let’s get inside and make that wager. I’m freezing my bollocks off.”

I nearly trip on the sidewalk.

As Calvin holds the door for me, I hurry inside where Lulu and Mark wait and a blast of warm air hits that’s so amazing, we groan in unison.

Lulu walks over, cupping my elbow. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just had to fix the strap on my shoe.”

“Okay, good.” She seems placated and motions to where a group of busboys are clearing a table. “About five minutes, they said.”

“Cool, thanks for doing that. And thanks for coming with me today. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

Her smile goes soft and she wraps her arms around me. “Are you kidding? The craziest thing I’ve ever seen you do is try to change the date on your expired Saks coupon so you could still get half off. I wouldn’t have missed this.”

I laugh and press a kiss to the side of her cheek. “You can be kind of great sometimes. Not often, but . . .”

“Very funny. Now pardon me, but I’m gonna go live it up and harmlessly flirt with your husband’s friend.”

Calvin watches Lulu leave and returns to my side, taking my hand. The touch is so unfamiliar and awesome, it makes my stomach vault around in my belly.

“Hungry?” he asks.

“The wager?” I remind him.

“I’m getting there—it’s related to my question.” He lifts his chin to the meat locker. “They have good steaks here.”

And just like that, I’m interested in whatever he’s suggesting. “They do. What’re you thinking?”

“They have a porterhouse for two, three, or four.”

I haven’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours, and the idea of a big juicy steak has me salivating. “Yeah?”

“So, I say we split the one for three, and whoever eats more wins.”

“I’m going to guess their porterhouse for three could feed us both for a week.”

“I’m betting you’re right.” His adorable grin should be accompanied by the sound of a silvery ding. “And your dinner is on me.”

For not the first time, it occurs to me to ask him how he makes ends meet, but I can’t—not here, and maybe not when we’re alone, either. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I think I can handle treating my wife to dinner on our wedding night.”

Our wedding night.My heart thuds heavily. “That’s a lot of meat. No pun intended.”

He grins enthusiastically. “I’d sure like to see how you handle it.”

“You’re betting Holland can’t finish a steak?” Lulu chimes in from behind me. “Oh, you sweet summer child.”

As we get up, I groan, clutching my stomach. “Is this what pregnancy feels like? Not interested.”

“I could carry you,” Calvin offers sweetly, helping me with my coat.

Lulu pushes between us, giddy from wine as she throws her arms around our shoulders. “You’re supposed to carry the bride across the threshold to be romantic, not because she’s broken from eating her weight in beef.”

I stifle a belch. “The way to impress a man is to show him how much meat you can handle, don’t you know this, Lu?”

Calvin laughs. “It was a close battle.”

“Not that close,” Mark says, beside him.

We went so far as to have the waiter split the cooked steak into two equal portions, much to the amused fascination of our tablemates. I ate roughly three-quarters of mine. Calvin was two ounces short.

“Calvin Bakker has a pretty solid ring to it,” I say.

He laugh-groans. “What did I get myself into?”

“A marriage to a farm girl,” I say. “It’s best you learn on day one that I take my eating very seriously.”

“But you’re only a tiny thing,” he says, looking from my face to my body and back again.

It’s as though his gaze drags fire over me.

“Not that little.” At five seven I’m on the taller end of average, and while I’ve never been overweight, I’ve never been thin, either. Davis used to say I came from sturdy stock, not the most flattering description, but not the worst. In short, I have a body made for sport, but hand-eye coordination made for books.

We push out of the restaurant and convene in a small huddle on the sidewalk. It’s too cold for a prolonged goodbye. Mark asks if we want to go out for a bit longer, but when Calvin hesitates, I jump on board, saying—honestly—that I’m sort of wiped, even if it’s only ten.

But that means they hug us goodbye, give another congratulations, and then turn, hailing cabs and going their separate ways.

It was easy for Calvin and I to play at comfort during dinner—we had a distraction: the bet. And nearly as soon as we sat down, Lulu ordered wine, Calvin ordered appetizers, and conversation exploded easily, as it always does when Lulu is around. I used to refer to her as social lubricant, but Robert made me promise to never use that phrase again.

Now it’s just us—me and Calvin. There’s nowhere to hide and no one to hide behind.

I feel the warm slide of his gloved hand around mine.

“Is this okay?” he asks. “I’m not trying anything, I just feel fond.”

“It’s fine.” It’s more than fine. It’s making it hard to breathe, and—shit—this is a terrible idea. Every bit of that disarming honesty and affection he shows me is going to make it that much harder when the run of the production ends and we can part ways.

“Which way are we?” he asks.

“Oh.” Of course. We’re just standing here in the freezing cold while I internally melt down, and he has no idea where I live. “I’m on Forty-Seventh. This way.”

We walk quickly, strides matched. I forgot how weird it is to walk while holding someone’s hand. Weirder still when it’s cold, and we’re rushing, but he holds on tight so I do, too.

“How did you meet Mark?”

“We played in a band together while I was at school.” His shoulder brushes mine as we turn on Eighth. “He just did it for sport, though I was quite intense about it. After he graduated, he went on and got an MBA.” After a pause, he adds, “I’ve been living at his flat in Chelsea.”

Well, that answers one question.

“Paying rent,” he quickly adds. “He was sad to lose the extra money, but as he put it, will not miss the sight of my white arse.” He laughs. “He suggested I invest in pajamas.”

My eyes widen and he quickly clarifies. “Which I have, of course.”

“No . . . I mean”—I press my palm to my forehead. My face feels a thousand degrees. “I want you to be comfortable. Maybe just warn me if you’re going to . . . be—I’ll knock before I come out in the morning.”

He grins and squeezes my hand. “Anyway, I can put that money into yours now. It’s only fair.”

My stomach clenches. This is all really weird. I know sterile details about Calvin from the marriage license, like his birth date, full name, place of birth. But I don’t know anything relevant, like how he makes money other than street performances and cover bands, who his friends are, what time he goes to bed, what he eats for breakfast, or—until just now—where he’s been living.

And of course, he doesn’t know these things about me, either, but from what I understand he’ll need to. Immigration will want us to know things some couples don’t know even after years together. Is this how we do it? With this sort of frank, transactional honesty?

I dive right in, blurting: “Robert and Jeff pay about two-thirds of my rent.”

“Really?” He lets out a low whistle.

“Yeah. Surprisingly, I don’t make much selling T-shirts and taking pictures of people backstage. Not enough to live in Manhattan, anyway.”

“I don’t imagine.”

Nausea rises. Is this a good thing to admit, or bad? Have I just revealed to him that Jeff and Robert are totally loaded?

“I try not to take advantage,” I say, oddly humiliated. After all, Calvin just admitted to relying on a friend, too, and I know he makes money, at least in part, from playing gigs. “I was going to live in New Jersey and commute, but they found me this place when a friend of theirs moved out”—died, actually—“and . . . yeah.”

“Do you like living alone?”

I laugh. “Yeah, but . . .”

It seems to register what he’s just said and he laughs, too. “I promise to stay out of your way.”

“No, no. I like it,” I clarify, “but I’m not someone who needs to be alone, if that makes sense.”

Calvin looks over at me, smiling. “It makes sense.” He hesitates. “I make decent money for what I do. Probably make fifty bucks every time I busk. Make a couple hundred for the bar shows. But it’s not a real job.”

I look over at him. He’s got his face tilted up to the sky, like he’s inviting the shock of the cold.

“What do you mean, ‘real job’?”

He laughs. “Aw, come on, Holland. You know what I mean. I like that, actually, that you know exactly what I mean.” Looking straight into my soul, he says, “I make money, but it feels like cheating, like I have this ability I’ve worked so hard for, and I’m not doing shite with it.”

“Well, now you are.”

A smile spreads over his face and I wish I could describe it. It’s the expressive equivalent of an eraser, wiping away any doubt I had about this.

“Yeah,” he says. “Now I am.”

Because there was no way I could sleep before the wedding, I cleaned the hell out of my apartment last night. I’m not a slob, but I’m not meticulous, either, and cleaning kept me occupied for a solid two hours until there wasn’t even a bit of dirty grout left to scrub with an old toothbrush. So I started writing out a list of pivotal moments in my life.

To date, my longest relationship was with a guy named Bradley. He was from Oregon, and I met him during undergrad at Yale. We dated for two and a half years, which I now know to be the point when you’ve heard most of the stories and some of them you’ve heard a few times. But with Bradley—who was a completely nice guy but sort of boring (also his penis turned dramatically to the right, and as much as I tried to pretend it wasn’t a big deal, it always felt in my hand like a bone that needed to be reset)—I learned those things gradually, over time. Our getting-to-know-you had happened in sleepy doses during pillow talk, or at a bar, as we got progressively drunker and more physical. We broke up under completely pedestrian circumstances: I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. After a week of quasi-dramatic begging, he gave up and within a month was dating the woman he would eventually marry. Two and a half years, and the entire thing—from start to finish—was completely unremarkable.

I’m thinking about all of this—the strange way we’ll spew out our histories almost as if we’re downloading data—as I walk inside with Calvin, so when I see the list on the counter, I want to burst out laughing.

“Wow.” Calvin steps in, eyes wide as he looks around. My place is tiny, but it is pretty great. I have a giant bay window in the living room, taking up the majority of the wall. The view isn’t postcard-worthy or anything, but it looks out over rooftops, and into other apartments. I have a sleeper sofa, a coffee table, a television. Beneath the coffee table is a rug with swirling oranges and blues that Robert and Jeff got me as a housewarming gift (despite my protestations that the apartment itself was the housewarming gift). There are two bookcases loaded with books that bracket the television, and then nothing. That’s all I have in here. It’s clean, and simple, and cozy.

“This is so nice,” he says, moving closer to read the spines of my books. “Mark’s place is amazing, but he’s got twin two-years-olds who visit, and it’s super cluttered.”

I mentally file this bit of information away in my Immigration Interview Bank, and he runs his fingers along the edge of a book by Michael Chabon.

“This . . . I like it sort of simple, like this.” He wanders to the tiny kitchen, peeks in at the minuscule bathroom, and then stops, turning to me. “It’s really nice, Holland. Well done.”

He’s being so adorably awkward, I can’t help but say, “You can look at the bedroom.”

Beneath his olive skin, blood rushes to the surface. “That’s your space. That’s all right.”

“Calvin, it’s just a room. There aren’t, like, naked posters of me in there or anything.”

I can’t tell if the sound he makes is a cough or a laugh, but he nods, joking, “Well, that’s a shame,” as he moves past me into my bedroom.

It’s my favorite space. I have a wrought-iron-framed double bed with a white coverlet, a dresser, an antique standing mirror, a couple of lamps on the nightstands, a few photos of my family, and that’s it.

It’s bright and sparse.

“I think I expected it to be girlier.”

“Yeah.” I laugh. “I’m not super girly.”

He picks up a pair of pink scissors from on top of a pink photo album. Sets them down next to a pair of rose gold sunglasses. He glances dubiously to my doorless closet; it’s clear that pink plays a leading role inside there, too.

“Well,” I amend, “except for a few things, I guess.”

He motions to my arm. “Purple cast.” And then, quieter, “And you were wearing pink the night you were shoved.”

My fingers tingle in this weird way when he says that, like blood has evacuated my extremities and rushed to fill my chest. He meets my gaze head-on, like he wants to cover this now, first, before we do anything else; our conversation at the bar was such a scratch of the surface, and now I know that he didn’t intervene because he wasn’t here legally.

“Tell me what happened that night,” I say. “I don’t remember much.”

“Well, yeah. You were rather unconscious.” With a little beckoning tilt of his head, he turns, leaving my bedroom and heading out to the sofa. He pats the seat beside him.

For a few seconds filled with blinking embarrassment, I realize this means he saw me in complete disarray.

My saggy tights.

My skirt at my waist.

And, later, my shirt unbuttoned to my navel.

“Oh God.”

He laughs. “Sit.”

“I was such a mess.” I drop down beside him.

“You landed on the subway tracks and knocked your head.” He looks at me quizzically. “Of course you were a mess.”

“No,” I say, groaning into my hands. “I mean you probably saw my saggy crotch and my boobs.”

A strangled laugh comes from beside me. “I wasn’t really thinking about crotches and boobs at the moment. I jumped up, telling the bum to wait, but he ran. I tried to reach you but couldn’t. I worried if I tried to fetch you, we’d both be stuck down there. I called the paramedics, called the MTA. The ambulance arrived, and that was that.” When I look back at him, I find him studying me. “It happened so fast. I wasn’t sure what he was doing at first, but then he came for you. I don’t have a legal ID or residence. I was paranoid. That’s really it.”

“Okay.”

He nods to my cast again. “How much longer do you need to wear that?”

Tracing a finger along a line in the hardened bandage, I say, “I get it off in three weeks.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore.”

He nods, and the silence swallows us.

We look around. At the dark television, the window, the bookcases, the kitchen. Anywhere but at each other.

My husband.

Husband.

The more I repeat the word in my head, the more it sounds fake, like it’s not a real thing.

Calvin clears his throat. “Do you have anything to drink?”

Booze. Right. This is the perfect situation for some booze. I jump up, and he laughs, awkwardly. “I should have thought to get champagne or something.”

“You bought the dinner,” I remind him. “Obviously the champagne was on my list and I dropped the ball.”

Pulling a bottle of vodka from the freezer, I set it on the counter and then realize I have nothing to mix it with. And I finished the last beer the other night.

“I have vodka.”

He smiles valiantly. “Straight-up vodka it is.”

“It’s Stoli.”

“Straight-up mediocre vodka it is,” he amends with a cheeky wink.

His phone buzzes, and it sets off a weird, giddy reaction in my chest. We both have full lives beyond this apartment, which remain complete mysteries to each other. One difference between us is that Calvin likely doesn’t care about my life outside of this. Yet I care intensely about his. Having him here feels like finding the key to unlock a mysterious chest that’s been sitting in the corner of my bedroom for a year.

Buzz. Buzz.

Looking up, I meet his eyes. They’re wide, almost as if he’s not sure whether to answer.

“You can get it,” I assure him. “It’s okay.”

His face darkens with a flush. “I . . . don’t think I should.”

“It’s your phone! Of course it’s okay to answer it.”

“It’s not . . .”

Buzz. Buzz.

Unless, maybe, it’s some Mafia drug lord and if he answers his ruse is up and I’ll kick him out. Or—gasp—maybe it’s a girlfriend calling?

Why had this not occurred to me?

Buzz. Buzz.

“Oh my God. Do you have a girlfriend?”

He looks horrified. “What? Of course not.”

Buzz. Buzz.

Holy shit, how long until his voicemail puts us out of our misery?

“. . . Boyfriend?”

“I don’t—” he starts, smiling through a wince. “It’s not.”

“ ‘Not’?”

“My phone isn’t ringing.”

I stare at him, bewildered.

His blush deepens. “It’s not a phone.”

When he says this, I know he’s right. It doesn’t have the right rhythm to be a phone.

I lift the vodka to my lips and chug straight from the bottle. The buzzing has the exact rhythm of my vibrator . . . the one I tucked beneath that cushion on the couch days ago.

I’m going to need to be pretty drunk to deal with this.