By April of her senior year, Avery Lang could do the math without meaning to.
Two and a half years. A hundred and something nights—she’d stopped counting at a hundred, on purpose, sitting on the floor of the dorm shower with her knees pulled up. Four semesters of texting tonight? from library stacks and lecture halls and once, memorably, from the back row of a Title IX training. One brick loft above a closed storefront three blocks off Main. One man.
She was twenty-two now. She had a résumé with a real job offer on it, a capstone presentation in three weeks, a roommate who had been her roommate through two dorms and one terrible off-campus apartment with a mouse named Gerald, and a locked folder on her phone labeled Receipts that contained no receipts at all. Just a contact with no last name and a thread of texts going back to a Thursday in October when she was twenty and stupid and brave.
Malik was thirty-six. He’d gotten a little gray in his beard last winter and she’d teased him about it until he pinned her wrists to his kitchen counter and made her take it back, slowly, one apology at a time.
Nothing had changed. That was what she told herself.
Discreet. Honest. No ownership.
Everything had changed. That was what her body told her, every time she walked up those loft stairs and felt like she was coming home.
Jordan Pierce was in her capstone group because the professor assigned groups alphabetically by middle name, which was the kind of thing that only happened at a state school.
He was the same Jordan from the group chat sophomore year, the soft-eyed one, the one who held doors. He’d grown up in the meantime, the way boys did in the gap between twenty and twenty-two—his shoulders had filled out, he’d stopped wearing the same quarter-zip every day, he’d gotten into a finance program in Chicago that started in July. He was still kind. Annoyingly kind. He was the only one in their group who actually did his slides on time.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
They were the last two in the library study room at 11:15 on a Tuesday. Rain on the window. Cold coffee. Their group’s other two members had bailed an hour ago with promises to look at it in the morning, which meant they would not look at it at all.
“Doing what?”
“Checking your phone like it owes you money.”
Avery put the phone face-down on the table. Malik hadn’t answered her tonight? from forty minutes ago, which was unusual and also none of her business, because no ownership meant no ownership in both directions.
“Sorry,” she said. “Slide nine.”
“Slide nine is fine.” Jordan closed his laptop. He looked at her across the table in the fluorescent light, and he had nice eyes, she’d always thought so, a clear plain gray like a lake in November. “Can I say something weird?”
“You’re going to say it anyway.”
“I’ve had a thing for you since sophomore year.” He said it to the table and then made himself look up. “Like, a big thing. Everybody knew. Tessa definitely knew. I never said anything because you always seemed like you were—somewhere else. Taken, kind of. But you never had a boyfriend. So.” He let out a breath. “So I’m asking. Do you want to get dinner? Real dinner. Not Taco Bell after group meetings.”
Avery sat very still.
She thought about saying no. It would have been easy. She’d done it to three other boys since October of sophomore year, gently, with a vague smile, because there was no room in her life for a boy when there was a man who could make her forget her own name over the back of his couch.
But she was twenty-two. She had a job offer in Chicago. In five weeks she was going to walk across a stage and the loft was going to be ninety minutes away instead of three blocks, and she had never once, not one time, let herself think about what came after.
“Yeah,” she heard herself say. “Okay. Dinner.”
Jordan’s whole face changed. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m going to make it so weird,” he said, grinning, and walked her home in the rain under one umbrella, and at the door of her building he kissed her—soft, polite, a little nervous, his hand on her elbow like he was afraid she might break.
It was nice. It was really nice.
She went upstairs and stood under the shower for twenty minutes and her phone buzzed on the sink at 12:02.
Sorry. Late job. Door’s unlocked if you still need me.
She didn’t go.
It was the first time in two and a half years she didn’t go.
She went on Thursday instead, and she told him at the door, before she lost her nerve, still in her coat.
“I’m seeing someone.”
Malik was barefoot in a gray T-shirt, a dish towel over his shoulder. The loft smelled like garlic and the cedar candle she’d bought him junior year that he pretended not to like. He looked at her for a long moment with that same assessing stillness she’d fallen for in a sticky campus bar, the stillness that never had any panic in it.
“Okay,” he said. “Come in out of the hall.”
She came in. He took her coat the way he always did, like removing a spell. He hung it on the hook. Then he went back to the stove and stirred something and said, without turning around, “Who?”
“A guy from my capstone group. Jordan. He’s—you’d hate him. He’s so nice.”
“I don’t hate nice.”
“He’s twenty-two and he’s going into finance and he does his slides on time.”
Malik laughed, low. “I definitely don’t hate that.” He turned the burner off. Turned around. Leaned on the counter with his arms crossed over his chest and looked at her, and she couldn’t read him at all, and she hated it.
“Say something,” she said.
“What do you want me to say, Avery?”
“I don’t know. Something. Be mad. Be—anything.”
“That wasn’t the deal.” His voice was gentle. “No ownership. You remember. I don’t get to be mad that you went to dinner with a nice boy. I’d be a hypocrite and a fool.”
“So that’s it.”
“I didn’t say that’s it.” He came across the kitchen then, slow, and stopped in front of her, close enough that she could feel the heat of him, not touching. “I’m going to ask you the same thing your roommate asked you about me, two years ago. You told me about it. You remember?”
She swallowed. “Is he good to me.”
“Is he?”
“Yes.”
Malik nodded. Something moved behind his eyes, there and gone. “Then I’m glad,” he said. “I mean that.”
“Then why do I feel like I’m going to cry?”
He didn’t answer that. He put his hand on the side of her face instead, his thumb brushing her cheekbone, and she turned her face into his palm and closed her eyes, and that was the end of the talking.
He didn’t take her to the bed. He took her to the couch—the old leather one by the high windows, cracked at the arms, the one she’d fallen asleep on a dozen times with her feet in his lap while he did paperwork. He sat down and pulled her into his lap facing him, her knees on either side of his hips, and kissed her like he had all the time in the world and wanted her to know it.
She had been kissed on Tuesday. This was not that. This was his mouth slow and deep and certain, his tongue stroking hers until she was rocking against him without meaning to, his big hands sliding up under her sweater and spreading warm across her bare back. He knew exactly where to press. He’d had two and a half years to learn.
“Arms up,” he murmured, and she lifted them, and he pulled the sweater over her head and dropped it on the floor. Then her bra. Then he just looked at her, sitting in his lap in the lamplight, pale and flushed, and ran his thumbs over her nipples until they were hard and aching and she was gasping.
“Did he see you like this?” he asked quietly.
“No.”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet,” she admitted, and he made a sound low in his chest that was not quite a growl and not quite a laugh, and put his mouth on her breast.
She came apart slowly. That was what he did to her—took her apart slowly, piece by piece, until she couldn’t remember how she’d been put together in the first place. He sucked one nipple and then the other until she was clutching the back of his head, and he unbuttoned her jeans with one hand without looking and slid his fingers down inside them, and found her soaked.
“Already,” he said against her skin.
“Shut up.”
“Always already.”
“Malik—”
He rubbed slow circles over her clit, then pushed two thick fingers into her and curled them, and she cried out and dropped her forehead to his shoulder. He fucked her with his fingers, unhurried, the heel of his hand grinding against her, and she rode his hand in his lap with her jeans half down her hips like a teenager in a parked car, and came the first time with her teeth in his T-shirt and her toes curling inside her socks.
“Off,” she panted. “Everything off. I want you.”
They undressed clumsily, laughing, her jeans catching on her ankles, his T-shirt tangled around one arm. And then he was naked under her on the cracked leather and she was naked over him, and she wrapped her hand around him the way she had a hundred times and still—still—felt that same lurch she’d felt the first night. Thick and heavy and dark in her pale fist, hot, already slick at the tip. Her fingers didn’t close around him. They never had.
She rose up on her knees and lined him up and sank down.
Slow. So slow. The stretch of him opening her inch by inch, the burn turning sweet, her thighs trembling as she took more and more, until she was sitting all the way down on him with her whole body full and her mouth open in a silent cry. Malik’s hands were on her hips, not pulling, just holding. His head was tipped back against the couch. His eyes were on hers.
“There you go,” he breathed. “There’s my girl.”
He had never called her that. In two and a half years, not once.
She started to move.
She rode him the way he’d taught her—long, slow rolls of her hips, rising until only the thick head of him was inside her and then sinking back down until he was buried to the hilt and she felt him somewhere under her ribs. The leather creaked. The rain had started again on the high windows. His hands moved from her hips to her ass and spread her and helped her, guiding her down harder, and she braced her palms flat on his chest and rode faster, harder, her breasts bouncing, the wet sound of her taking him loud in the quiet loft.
“Look at me,” he said.
She looked. His face was dark and intent and more open than she had ever seen it, sweat at his hairline, his jaw tight, and she understood that he was not going to say anything. That he was never going to ask her not to go to dinner with a nice boy who did his slides on time. That he had built the whole thing—discreet, honest, no ownership—so that she would always be free, and that he was going to hold to it now, when it cost him, because that was the kind of man he was.
It made her furious. It made her come so hard she sobbed.
He held her through it, her body clenching and fluttering around him, her toes curled so tight against the leather that her feet cramped, and then he wrapped his arms around her and stood up off the couch with her still impaled on him, her legs locked around his waist. He carried her three steps to the brick wall by the window and pinned her there and fucked her—hard now, his hips driving up into her, the brick cold against her shoulder blades and his body hot against her front, each thrust punching a moan out of her.
“Malik—Malik—oh my god—”
“Tell me,” he said in her ear, rough. “Tell me what you want. Just this once.”
“You,” she gasped. “I want—you—don’t you dare step back—don’t you dare—”
He came with a deep, shuddering groan, buried as deep as he could go, pulsing hot inside her while she clung to him, and she came again with him, her heels digging into the backs of his thighs, her nails in his shoulders, her mouth open against his neck.
They stood there a long time against the wall, breathing.
“I wasn’t going to step back,” he said finally, very quietly, into her hair. “Unless you asked.”
“I’m not asking.”
“Okay.”
“I’m never asking.”
He laughed, a little shaky, and carried her to the shower.
It turned out you could be a person who went to dinner with a nice boy on Saturday and to a loft above a closed storefront on Wednesday. It turned out you could be a lot of people at once.
Jordan was easy to be with. That was the strange thing. He laughed at her jokes. He texted her good morning. He took her to an Italian place with paper tablecloths and crayons and drew a very bad horse on hers. The first time she slept with him, in his apartment with the IKEA bed and the poster of the Chicago skyline over it, he was sweet and eager and a little too fast and asked her three times if she was okay, and she was okay. She liked him. She liked the weight of him and the way he kissed her collarbone and the way he fell asleep afterward with one arm flung across her stomach like she might float away.
She lay awake in the blue light of his window and thought about the brick wall.
“So let me get this straight,” Tessa said, two weeks before graduation. They were packing her side of the apartment into liquor-store boxes. Tessa was moving to Denver. Avery was trying not to think about it. “You’re dating Jordan.”
“Yes.”
“Jordan Pierce. Slides-on-time Jordan.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still—” Tessa made a vague gesture that meant Main Street, loft, older man, shower at one in the morning.
“Yes.”
Tessa taped a box shut very slowly. “Does Jordan know?”
“No.”
“Does Malik know about Jordan?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s—fine with it?”
Avery sat back on her heels on the carpet. “He says it’s not his to be fine or not fine with. He says that was the deal.”
“Ave.” Tessa set the tape gun down. “That’s not an answer to the question I asked.”
Avery didn’t have an answer to the question she’d asked. She had a locked folder on her phone and a pair of gray eyes like a lake in November and a dull, sweet ache between her legs from Wednesday night that she could still feel when she walked down stairs.
“You’re going to have to tell one of them something,” Tessa said gently. “Eventually.”
“I know.”
“Claire still asks about him, you know. Your mystery guy. At the bar last week she said, and I quote, I’m still waiting on my introduction for research purposes.“
Despite everything, Avery laughed. “She’s said that for two years.”
“And Maya didn’t say anything,” Tessa said. “Which is how you know Maya’s thinking about it too.”
Graduation was a Saturday in the middle of May, bright and windy, the whole football stadium snapping with black polyester and silver tassels.
Her parents drove down from Naperville and sat in the twelfth row with a homemade sign that said GO AVERY!!! in glitter glue, which her mother had made and her father pretended to be embarrassed by. Jordan’s family sat three sections over. Jordan sat four rows ahead of her in the alphabet with a fake sunflower duct-taped to his mortarboard, and turned around every ten minutes to grin at her.
She didn’t look for Malik. She had told him not to come. She had told him it would be weird, and it would be crowded, and her parents would be there, and he’d said, Okay, the way he said okay to everything she asked for.
She found him anyway.
It was right after they turned their tassels, when the whole class of graduates was screaming and throwing confetti from party cannons and somebody’s air horn was going off. She was laughing and hugging Maya and her cap was crooked, and she looked up into the stands for no reason at all, and he was there. Way up at the top, in the very last row, standing alone against the rail in a dark button-down with his sleeves pushed up to the forearm. Not waving. Not smiling, exactly. Just watching her, the way he’d watched her across a sticky bar when she was twenty.
Her chest went tight and hot.
He touched two fingers to his brow, a small salute. Then he turned and went down the stadium steps, and was gone.
She made it through the family dinner at the Olive Garden on Route 9. She made it through Jordan’s parents, who were lovely, and her parents, who loved Jordan instantly the way she’d known they would, and her father’s toast, and the tiramisu. She made it through Jordan kissing her in the parking lot and saying, “Tomorrow we look at apartments online, okay? I found a two-bedroom in Logan Square. I mean—if you want. No pressure. We can talk about it.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, and kissed him back, and meant it.
Then she told everyone she was going to a party at Claire’s, and she drove her own car three blocks off Main, and parked in the alley behind the closed storefront, and climbed the loft stairs in her black graduation gown with the cap in her hand.
The door was unlocked. It was always unlocked.
He was standing at the window with a glass of whiskey, and he turned when she came in, and looked at her—the gown, the cap, the stupid gold honor cord around her neck—and set the glass down very carefully on the windowsill.
“You said you weren’t coming,” she said.
“I said okay. I didn’t say I wouldn’t come.”
“That’s a lawyer answer.”
“I’m not a lawyer.” He leaned against the doorframe of the kitchen and crossed his arms, and she saw his throat move. “Congratulations, Avery.”
She dropped the cap on the floor.
She crossed the loft in four steps and he caught her, and it was not slow this time. It was not careful. His mouth came down on hers hard and hungry and she climbed him like a wall, her fingers in his shirt, popping buttons, and he got both hands on her ass through the polyester and lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around him and the gown rode up her thighs.
“What’ve you got on under this?” he said against her mouth.
“Nothing.” She grinned at him, wild, breathless. “I changed in the car.”
He made a sound like he’d been shot.
He carried her to the kitchen counter—the same counter where he’d made her apologize for teasing him about his beard, the same counter where he’d bent her over a hundred times with her jeans around her ankles—and set her on the edge of it, and shoved the gown up around her waist, and dropped to his knees.
His mouth on her was rough and greedy, nothing patient about it. He ate her like he was starving, his tongue thick and flat against her clit, his big hands spreading her thighs wide and holding them open while she braced her palms on the counter behind her and threw her head back and moaned at the ceiling. The honor cord swung against her breasts under the gown. She came fast and loud, her heels drumming against the cabinet doors, toes clenching in the air.
He stood up and opened his belt.
“Here,” she said. “Right here. Like this.”
He pulled her to the edge of the counter, and pushed into her in one long, deep, unstoppable thrust, and she cried out his name loud enough that if anyone had been in the closed storefront downstairs they’d have heard it. He fucked her on the kitchen counter with her graduation gown bunched around her waist and the gold honor cord bouncing between them, his dark hands gripping her pale thighs, his hips driving into her so hard the dish rack rattled. She held onto his neck. She watched his face. She watched the place where they joined, the thick shine of him sliding into her and out and back in, and thought, wildly, that she had spent two and a half years and a whole college education learning exactly one thing, and it was this.
“Mine,” he said, low, almost too low to hear. Then, like it hurt him: “No. Not mine. Never mine.”
“Say it again,” she gasped.
He shook his head, jaw tight.
“Say it, Malik—”
“Mine,” he growled into her neck, and drove deep, and came, and she came around him clenching and shaking and sobbing, her toes curled hard against the backs of his thighs, the gown damp with sweat, the counter edge biting into her and not caring at all.
Later, they lay on the cracked leather couch under a blanket. The gown was on the floor. The cap was still by the door where she’d dropped it. The rain had cleared and the high windows showed a few stars over Main Street, and somewhere a block away a group of new graduates was singing badly.
“He wants me to move in with him,” she said. “In Chicago. Logan Square. Two-bedroom.”
Malik’s hand kept moving in slow circles on her bare back. “Do you want to?”
“I think so.” She pressed her face into his chest. “I think I actually do. He’s—he’s going to be a good life, Malik. He’s a good person. I can see the whole thing. A dog. A kitchen with a window. Thanksgiving with his parents.”
“That sounds good.”
“It does.”
“So why are you here?”
She lifted her head and looked at him. In the dim light his face was just shapes—the beard with its new gray, the steady eyes, the mouth she’d learned better than her own.
“Because it’s always going to be you,” she said. “I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how that works. But I sat in that stadium today and I looked up and I knew. Whatever else happens. It’s always going to be you.”
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, “I took a contract. In the city. Started talking about it in March, before—before any of this.” He paused. “It’s a two-year job. I’ll keep the loft. But I’m going to be in Chicago four nights a week, starting in August.”
Avery stared at him.
“It’s not because of you,” he said.
“Liar.”
“It’s mostly not because of you.”
She started laughing. She couldn’t help it. She laughed with her forehead on his chest until her eyes were wet, and he laughed too, his whole body shaking under her, and the new graduates outside sang something by Taylor Swift completely off-key.
When she finally drove home at two in the morning, her phone buzzed twice at a red light on Route 9.
The first was from Jordan: Sent you the Logan Square listing. It has a window over the sink. I know you said you always wanted one. Love you. (Too soon? Not taking it back.)
The second came from a contact with no last name, inside a locked folder labeled Receipts.
Chicago’s a big city, Malik had written. But I’ve always been good at finding you.
The light turned green. Avery sat through it with both halves of her life glowing on one small screen, the gown on the seat beside her, her body still aching sweet and deep from him—and for the first time in two and a half years, she understood that discreet and honest and no ownership had never been the rules of a fling.
They were the rules of a life.
She just hadn’t known yet whose.
