Sam made a low noise and pulled her close for a kiss. Not his usual good night kiss. A searching, openmouthed kiss that included one thumb brushed over a decidedly erect nipple.
Oh, yes. Liv’s sex days were not over yet.
They made a plan. For a weekend when Claudia had custody of Dottie, and Ben could sleep over at his grandmother’s. A plan with enough time for Liv to fit in a few workouts and buy impractical lingerie and raze the jungle sprouting between her legs. Liv purchased the underwear online, squinting at the tanned leather stomach of the child-model in an effort to picture it on her own, normal body. Working out was harder. Gyms were made for people under forty who were already in shape. Liv wanted a toned tummy, but her greatest ab workout was sneezing.
“Come for a run with me!” Savannah jogged in place in the office doorway, a headband keeping a tight blond ponytail off her face. She was wearing a lot less makeup these days. It didn’t just make her look prettier. It made her look more confident, somehow. “It’s lovely out!”
Day after day, Liv found an excuse—emails to send, vendors to call. But as Sex Date crept closer, and Savannah kept pestering, Liv finally broke down. She unearthed sneakers that hadn’t been worn since Obama was president and joined Savannah for a very slow, very difficult run-walk.
“I’d forgotten… how hard… this is,” Liv managed between pants. Her face was on fire.
Savannah kept pace with her. “It’s just practice, Liv! You’re doing great!”
“I want… to die.”
Savannah laughed gaily. “I had a thought about Eliot. Something that might help you get to the bottom of why everything worked out the way it did. Why don’t you try asking Google for his Gmail password?”
Liv pictured scaling a mountain to find a socially awkward thirty-year-old in sneakers at its peak: Please, Mr. Google, I’m old: help me? “Sounds hard.”
“Not really.” Naturally Savannah had already researched exactly how this was done: copy of the death certificate, proof of an email exchange between Liv and Eliot. “Maybe there’d be something in his in-box that would explain the will.”
It was not a prospect Liv coveted: reading Eliot’s flirtatious messages to a naive Savannah, sandwiched in between the terse updates to his wife.
“I can do the application,” Savannah offered.
“Fine,” Liv puffed. “Ooh. I think I have a stitch.” They’d gone two blocks.
The days fell away:
Sex Date was next week.
Sex Date was tomorrow.
Sex Date was tonight.
Liv woke with a palatable feeling of dread. Snap out of it, she told herself. This is supposed to be fun! Relax!
But she couldn’t. Fear hung around her like a watchful black crow. No matter how busy she made herself with washing the sheets and applying various serums and dropping off Ben at her mother’s, the dark bird was there. Judging her jiggling belly and post-childbirth vagina, which felt roomy enough to house an entire murder of crows. What if it wasn’t as good as sex with Eliot? What if it was better? What if she couldn’t get into it, or got too into it and said, “I love you!” when she really meant, “I’m coming!” She knew she needed to calm down and be an adult about the whole thing. But sometimes being a calm adult was really hard, and it was a lot easier to be a panicked non-adult.
As the sky darkened, Liv slipped into a robe, then jeans, then back into the robe. Mild panic upgraded itself to borderline terror. She needed something to take the edge off.
She couldn’t remember who’d given her the joint: it’d appeared in the foggy non-time immediately following Eliot’s death. Liv was an uncommitted weed smoker in her youth, but stopped altogether while trying to conceive and never got back into it. Back then, everyone smoked limp little joints that got disgustingly damp at the filter when passed around. But this elegantly rolled object looked factory-perfect and made getting baked seem extremely sophisticated.
Liv lit it and took a tiny hit. Easy enough. She poured herself a glass of wine, which disappeared in no time, so she poured herself another. That was one of the pleasures of drinking at home—a country club pour every time. But the wine barely made a dent in her nerves, and the weed, well, that didn’t seem to be working at all. Sam would be there in less than thirty minutes, and she was still jumpy with nerves.
Screw it.
She took a longer, deeper drag, and then one more for good measure, enjoying the way it burned her throat and made her eyes water. That meant it was working.
Relax, she instructed herself, bringing the wineglass to her lips. Relax.
57
The Strand bookstore on Broadway was packed and buzzy by the time Darlene and Zach arrived. Zach hadn’t RSVP’d, but after he turned on the charm for the woman with the clipboard, the sold-out event wasn’t sold-out for him. Oddly, Darlene seemed irritated by this.
The book launch wasn’t a date. It was a punishment. And Zach had no idea why.
Things with Darlene had gotten a little… cool. It might be his dumb paranoia, but she seemed to take a giant step away from him after The Kiss That Mattered. The first kiss they hadn’t documented for social media (and what a handy excuse that’d turned out to be). The first kiss where he let her have him, all of him, every desperate, driving, needy part of him… but then she’d backed off. Not disappeared, they were still in their stupid fake relationship, which he was both annoyed by and thankful for. But she was no longer asking him to kiss her, with those blown dark eyes and pink parted lips. Instead, he’d begged to be her plus-one for a book launch. Not just any book launch. Awful Charles’s book launch. Her ex.
“He’s in conversation with Rachel Maddow,” Darlene had said, after Zach spotted the invite stuck to her fridge.
“The tennis player?”
“No! The journalist. On MSNBC. You definitely know her.”
Zach maybe knew her. “I didn’t think you were still in touch with Charles.”
Darlene had shrugged, grabbing a bowl of the shrimp lo mein he’d brought over. “I ran into him. He invited me. I said yes.”
“Why?”
“I can’t spend all my time with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not actually a couple.” Her voice hitched before she regained control. “It’s healthy to have a wide circle of intellectually stimulating friends.”
Who happen to be your ex. So here they were, front row, in seats reserved with Darlene’s name, which she was obviously impressed by. On the stage were two chairs, a fifteen-foot projection of the book cover—Mistakes Were Made: The Paradox of the Working-Class Revolution—and a photograph of Awful Charles boasting the confidence of a pop star in the pasty body of a garden gnome.
“Look, there’s Jon Favreau,” Darlene whispered, side-eyeing a handsome dude in a suit. “And, omigod, is that AOC?”
More people Darlene knew that he didn’t, perfect.
His beautiful bandmate was a Virgo, and Virgos were cautious with their feelings, unlike his Libran self. Libras were suckers for love, and yes, Zach’d had his fair share of bedfellows. But he never felt comfortable letting those women know the real him. They saw fun Zach, good-time Zach; vacation flings, nothing real. Darlene knew him better than anyone: as a musician, a son, a creative collaborator. She knew all his flaws. He cared about her. Respected and trusted her. But he got the feeling her tight jumpsuit and natural curls weren’t for his benefit tonight. The look she gave his wrinkled button-down was almost derisive. Zach searched the room. “Don’t tell me there’s no bar. Aren’t all writers alcoholics?”