Caroline had two guys fighting over her outside the club, and I think Tris must have been with Nick at that point, because I was all alone with Tal with nothing else to do. It was soon after our fifth and supposedly final breakup, and all I wanted from Tal was for him to shut up so we could get down to business. Tal generally preferred to read the Forward while whacking off in his dorm room instead of have sex with me, so it must have been a dream come true for him in the back hallway of the club—there I was, doing the work for him, without wanting anything in return. He was satisfied to let this happen and not speak to me or touch me back.
I was dead inside then, my hand cramped from the motion. Tal didn’t protest when I left the hallway to step into Lou’s office. He knew where I was going. He liked to be kept waiting for his release. I found the Jergens in Lou’s office. I had intended to finish what I started, but stepping out of that moment, however briefly, changed my mind. I thought, I can be up on my straight-edge high horse because I don’t drink or smoke or do drugs, but what does that all matter in comparison to this new low I am stooping to with Tal? He’s kind of a creep; he doesn’t even like me. I wondered—was it that I was frigid or that we just had no chemistry?
I placed the Jergens bottle back on the desk and snuck out the rear office door to the alley to release myself. I hadn’t seen or heard from Tal since, until tonight. She talks a great game, but when you actually get to the field, you realize it’s f**king empty. Maybe I shouldn’t be so mad at Tal’s review of me to Nick earlier tonight. I did last leave him with blue balls.
I am curious how Tal came to be back in my world, but getting out of this cab to ask Tal the question—Why did you come back to Manhattan?—may be more of a waste than the meter I am allowing to run through my time and money while I sit in this backseat. Why does anyone come here? Mere words defy that answer. The question is too big.
Whatever Tal came back here for, I’m sure he didn’t come back here for me. But if he did, he’s even stupider than me. How is it that two people with near-perfect SAT scores could have so little intelligence when it comes to each other?
Patsy’s finished falling to pieces, and now it’s Merle Haggard’s turn to taunt me from the radio. The song is “Always Wanting You,” a favorite of Dad’s, where cynical, heartsick Merle croons about always wanting but never having his love, and about how hard it will be to face tomorrow cuz he knows he’ll just be wanting her again. Doomed.
If I could have stayed in that closet with Nick, I might have figured out new degrees of wanting, tried out new moves, ones Tal never inspired in me. With me and Tal, it was straight Up/Down or In/Out. If Nick had me pinned against a wall right now, I’d be more imaginative than I ever was with Tal, stroking instead of pulling, kneading and threading, groping along with grazing, two hands instead of one, the soft scratch of fingernails included. Maybe I could inspire Nick to be a little imaginative with me, too. When Tris broke up with him, she said she knew she’d broken his heart, but she’d done him a favor, too. She’d sent him back out into the world with skills the women of his future could thank Tris for, because he certainly didn’t have them when she discovered him. Fuck Tris and her Tantric knowledge.
Tomorrow is already here and I’m truly feeling Merle’s bittersweet song. I shouldn’t, but I do. I still want Nick.
I should have trusted him.
A gush of tears streaming down my face have replaced the light sprinkle Patsy’s song inspired.
Fuck him. Fuck me.
Happy endings don’t happen. Merle Haggard knows it, and now I know it.
Okay, I know one thing I want, something that I can have. I want to conclusively end the Tal regression spiral. So maybe I lost out on Nick. But at least now I know. There are Nicks out there.
I also really want some borscht about now. “Could you please turn the lights back on?” I ask the driver. I direct him to the 24-hour Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village that’s the one place Tris, Caroline, and I ever agreed on. Since we first started coming into the city on our own to hear music—as we’ve successively stretched parental boundaries until the restrictions and curfews have not only been lifted but banished, because we’re big girls now, we might f**k up but we’ll figure it all out, eventually—the three of us sometimes cap off our nights out, at least those that don’t end in fights or hooking up or passing out, at the restaurant with the great borscht and the clean bathroom. I wonder if we three will ever go to this restaurant together again, or if that era is over, like mine and Tal’s, and Nick and Tris’s.
“Good choice,” the driver tells me. He’s been watching Tal’s sweeping motions from the window.
I consider taking a catnap for the short drive over to the East Village but my chest is ringing. What the f**k? I forgot I was wearing Nick’s—I mean my—jacket. I reach into the chest pocket to pull out a crumpled ten-dollar bill and a small, flip-up cell phone that has a photo-booth sticker of Tris stuck on it. I wouldn’t have figured Nick to be the cell phone type, but then I remember, Tris gave him the phone at Christmas. When she wants to keep tabs on a boy, when she’s in that mode with him, she means it. I remove the Tris photo sticker from the phone and place it on the city map beneath the taxi’s back plastic divider, above the Empire State Building image, in a position so that the building appears to be giving Tris the finger.
I don’t know if I should answer Nick’s phone. The name flashing is “tHom.”