The First Affair by Emma McLaughlin Read Free Book Online Page B

now I walk out to the kitchen and it’s my mom and I’m like, ‘You’re not my friend. Where’d my friends go?’ I’m a total bitch, but I can’t help myself, I just miss you so fucking much.”
    “Me, too,” I said over the swelling in my throat, as I was gripped by What Ifs. What if I got stuck on the East Coast or, worse, back home, and couldn’t afford to visit her? What if her job took off and she got even busier, if that were possible, and made all new friends, and our lives diverged into the high-flying money manager and the barista? Was this just—it?
    “ Something will come through.” We hugged as I struggled against tears and she told me there was no one else like me.
    “You, neither.” I forced myself to let her go.
    Back on the metro, so palpably without her, I tried to pull myself together but couldn’t. Memories tumbled, making me alternately smile and tear up. The time Lena called a dorm meeting because someone had taken a shit in the middle of the student lounge and she grilled us like Hercule Poirot. The time she put my grandmother’s silk scarf over the lamp for hook-up ambience and burned a hole right through it. The Ferragamo one she bought me couldn’t really replace the sentimental value, but I never told her. I knew she felt awful. Then I was thinking about my grandmother and family—and suddenly I remembered Mike’s text.
    Given what you know about him, it’s probably impossible for you to understand why I responded. But I can only tell you the story as it happened, and with Lena’s plane taking her farther from me by the minute, I felt a desperate need for unvarnished connection. Mike had always known what to say to calm my panic. In fact, he’d been the one to help me through my first attack. It was a summer weekend after sixth grade. The firehouse carnival. The plan had been to “run into each other” and do one ride together. Instead, Erica had shown up with a tongue pierce. More than a few beers down Dad had gone ballistic, and as soon as Mike saw the state I was in he turned in a way that encouraged me to follow. There behind the tents he squeezed my palm and told me to breathe through my nose. The colored lights were blurred by the hazy heat and the thumping house music amplified my heart. I remember that he finally started dancing goofily until I was laughing. He looked so relieved, and it was only then that I realized how much I must have scared him.
    “Hey there. I just graduated, actually. Interning at the White House. Glad to hear all is well. Take care. JM.” Feeling the phantom flutter in my pained chest, I stared at my phone and wondered, would that be it?
    “Which house is that?” pinged right back. Followed by, “Really proud of you, James. Not surprised at all.”
    I smiled and wiped my cheeks. “Just dropped my best friend at the airport,” I replied. “Lonely.”
    “In a room full of people,” he responded as the clouds shifted outside the curved glass. “I’m lonely, too.”
    I managed to leave it at that.
    • • •
    I was pulling my ticket out to exit the station when I discovered Rachelle’s card in my bag and sent her a text at the first glimpse of sky. She texted back, “Drinks, pronto,” and sent me the address of a restaurant by the water where she knew the bartender. When I arrived, an older crowd was finishing a late brunch, and I apologized for my appearance.
    “Please.” She dismissed me, looping her thin arm through mine to weave me around the umbrellaed tables. Rachelle, looking like an MTV stylist had dressed her to deejay a military lunch, was wearing a khaki romper with gold buttons and matching platform espadrilles. “I’m so happy to be out of my apartment I could scream,” she said conspiratorially. “My roommate, who, like, subsists on spray margarine, is doing her calorie splurge tonight and won’t stop talking about what she’s going to order in. It’s disgusting.”
    I commented that this explained her