Cameron is spiraling. He’s eating sushi on Gigi’s couch, on the brink of being Baby Canceled. They are watching Love Is Blind. He’s gazing down at his reflection, rippling in a swimming pool of soy sauce. When Alice finds out what he did, she will leave him. And when she leaves him, he will unravel back into Cameron Before Alice, a self-pitying alcoholic sex addict. Cameron Before Alice is distinct from The Real Cameron, and is his personal Satan.
The show blares over Cameron’s ringing ears: “She didn’t care what I looked like,” a contestant tells the camera. “I really didn’t care what she looked like. But it really helps that she turned out to be, like, so hot. Love is blind for sure.”
A minute ago, Meg’s incriminating tweet sprang up on Cameron’s screen. His imperfect sex life has finally caught up with him. Turns out, the things he did drunk were not transient. For years he conflated his own blacking out with everyone he knew blacking out for the same exact interludes he did. He has a long-standing reputation as a fuckboy, as his kind is called these days, but never as an almost-rapist. His run of luck has been long, his thirties fairly consequenceless. It was nice while it lasted.
He’s planning to propose to Alice tomorrow, when she returns from Boston after dancing in a run of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. Alice is perfection; Alice is everything Cameron wants to be.
“You good?” Gigi asks.
He lifts his head.
“Sorry,” he says. “I saw something weird on my phone.”
“What was it?”
“I think Meg just subtweeted me? About the date we went on last year. I’m freaked out.”
Gigi lifts a pair of chopsticks to her lips.
“Why are you so anxious?” she teases, slapping his knee. “You’re a straight white man. The world was literally made for you.”
“It’s not my fault I look like this,” he mutters. “All I did was be born.”
She drops a thick cut of glistening salmon into her mouth and smirks. She curls up on the opposite end of the couch, wearing cotton drawstring shorts and scrunchy socks. Her bronze knees are drawn into her chest, the bottoms of her feet pressed into the seat cushions.
She is his favorite friend, as well as his ex, or at least the closest thing he has to one. They dated briefly a decade ago, an origin that gives their friendship a special kind of depth that all his others lack. She dumped him because his compulsive flirting made her miserable. Thursday is his favorite night of the week because they do this: nothing together in her apartment for hours. He’s proud of the fact that, unlike many men, he can be friends with women, even the ones he is attracted to. They have sex once a year or so, but only once a year or so. They sometimes fall asleep together when he comes over, which they tell each other is because she lives in Brooklyn and he lives in Manhattan. He makes a mental note not to let it happen tonight. He loves her gravelly voice, her extremely frizzy blond hair, and that of all the names in the world, her name is Gigi.
Other than Alice and Gigi, he’s never had a love life, only hundreds of one-night stands and the occasional fling. Now, after all these years, he thinks he finally has the thing he deprived himself of his whole life: normal relationships with people.
“This is the part where you tell me no one is mad at me and I have nothing to worry about,” Cameron says, side-eyeing Gigi across the couch.
The takeout is spread between them on a coffee table: two neat grids of colorful maki, two cups of miso soup, a bowl of edamame, two cans of lime seltzer, and a stack of napkins.
“I don’t know if I can reassure you, bud,” Gigi says, half laughing. “Who am I to say your fears won’t come true?”
“Please don’t say things like that.”
“Shut up, Cam,” she says. “You’re not relevant enough to be canceled.”
Cameron shushes her.
“Britney could hear you,” he whispers, cocking his head in the direction of Gigi’s roommate’s door.
Gigi rolls her eyes. She’s right, he knows she’s right. Cameron is not famous enough to be canceled. He’s only famous enough to be a little canceled. His older brother Aaron was the face of New York’s early-aughts indie-rock scene, and Cameron has his floppy hair, angular cheekbones, and tilted, lanky body, easy to picture spinning around a microphone stand. The resemblance makes it satisfying for people to recognize him. “Oh,” he often hears them realize to each other in whispers. “I totally see it.”
The girls he sleeps with tell their friends they almost fucked a rockstar, and apparently girls really like to tell everyone they almost fucked a rockstar. His body count is pushing three hundred. His face has a touch of femininity, the way that Timothée Chalamet’s does. It pisses other men off, especially the gym rats, limited by the reality that no amount of reps will make them pretty. They side-eye each other when women swoon over Cameron’s skinny ass.
But now, he’s thirty-nine and his star is falling. He decreases in relevance every day. Fewer and fewer of the people he came up with go out anymore, and most of the younger crowd doesn’t know who he is. They haven’t heard of Interpol, they were born after the Strokes’ prime. That music doesn’t even appeal to them nostalgically, the way the Killers and flip phones do. That’s a real thing. He just discovered that quarter-lifers are buying flip phones to take shitty pixelated photos that they then digitally transfer to their actual phones. Gen Z’s taste baffles him, but more importantly, he hates anyone born after ’99 because flirting with them makes him feel like a creep.
Cameron is a musician like his brother, a singer and songwriter, but was too fragile to survive the comparisons made in his early career. The only place he makes music anymore is his bedroom. He vowed to seriously pursue other things, and a decade after he made that promise, he’s starting to enjoy artistic success. He finished his novel, landed a book deal, and opens at the Comedy Cellar. He suspects his wins aren’t a hundred percent his, that as always, they have something to do with his brother, but tries to enjoy them regardless. He also now belongs to an artistic community, Gigi’s writing group, which is changing his life. The meetings are another occasion that brings Cameron to this apartment, which has become his second home, and another thread that binds him to Gigi, who has become his gravity. Things are finally going well, and the only thing that he wants but doesn’t have is to be famous again.
“Since you’re not capable of regulating your mood without me,” Gigi says after watching Cameron continue to brood, “just show me the source of the stress.”
“Here,” he says, thrusting his phone into her hands. “Look.”
Cameron reaches for the remote and jabs the mute button. Gigi pushes her fashionably oversized glasses up the bridge of her nose, squints, and slowly reads Meg’s tweet aloud:
“PSA: Women writers in New York,” she snickers, “beware if a deceptively cute, B-list writer-slash-comedian cold messages you that he ‘likes your work.’” At this line, she starts to laugh; he tries not to look at her shaking body but can’t stop himself; he watches her belly button ring jiggle below the hem of her tank top. “This is his signature line. Once he gets you on a date, he might treat you to a monologue on Joan Didion. Or he might”—her body stiffens and her voice flattens—“practically assault you after drinks.”
There is something decidedly unfunny and unsexy about the phrase “practically assault,” and the vibe dies. The echo of those two words loudly rings between them. The happy chatter of Britney on the phone in her room becomes audible and fills the awkward silence while Cameron grasps for the memory of Meg. He practically blacked out on their date, which is now over a year ago. A few flashes of that night fly across his mind: the dizzy blur of wallpaper shifting, unzipping a skimpy black halter dress, pushing Meg onto the bed with her legs wrapped around him, and—it couldn’t have been for more than three seconds, he told himself—sort of choking her.
He’s aware that this is what Meg is referencing with those damning two words, “practically assault.” Did she tell him to stop? She couldn’t have. Or could she have? A wave of nausea ripples from his gut to his throat; the taste of soy sauce comes back up and burns the roof of his mouth. He scans his memory for the word “stop,” but it’s nowhere, and for the words “I didn’t like that,” and same, and for any soft remark along the lines of “that wasn’t cool,” and there is nothing. That being said, he has hardly any crisp memories to scan in the first place.
He tries to feel bad but he simply does not. A little choking? It’s a degree-and-a-half past vanilla. If there’s any sexual act located in the gradation between choking and “making love,” he doesn’t know it. There are worse things he could do, which he definitely has.
“Eleven likes,” Gigi says, staring at the screen. “Sorry to disappoint you but no one seems to care.”
“Why aren’t you taking this seriously?” he says. “It’s obviously me.”
“Are you the only…” she smiles and breathes in, winding up to say the phrase as a single word, “deceptively-cute-B-list-comedian-slash-writer in all of New York?”
“Honestly, yes,” he says.
For a couple minutes, they stare at each other and giggle—because it’s funny. Their faces flicker in the white shimmer television light. It’s funny. The tension he felt when Gigi spoke those threatening words—“practically assault”—dissolves into nothing. The warmth of her acceptance is like lying on a sunny beach. If Gigi thinks it’s funny, it is funny, and Alice will think so, too, and if Alice is wrong and can’t take a joke, at least he will have Gigi. In a sick way, this is his deepest fantasy realized: being adored in all his shittiness. That’s what real love is—real friendship is. They inhale three more rolls each.
Gigi chews a stale strip of seaweed, her eyes glancing down and to the right.
“So what exactly did go down with Meg that night?”
This question strikes him as an annoying and stressful turn. He already got what he needed: reassurance. He had been hoping that after that, the conversation would change.
“It’s fuzzy.” He rubs his temples. “I was drunk. And I was sleeping with a lot of people at the time,” he says, omitting the choking of it all. “They all kind of blend together.”
The energy in the room sours. Gigi’s face starts to darken after he says this; she has flipped. Was the laughter they just shared fake? Had she been joking because she couldn’t think of any other way to respond? Because she wanted one last minute of joy before the remainder of the conversation wrecked the night?
“Fuzzy? That response is so intentionally vague,” she says bitterly. “It’s like you want me to soothe you without having to feel any shame. I’m not your mom.”
He chooses his words more selectively; he doesn’t know if he can trust her anymore and reframes the conversation as a cross-examination.
“We were drinking at a bar and she came home with me. We had rough sex,” he explains. “I thought it was okay.”
“Define rough,” she says.
“It was just, I don’t know. Kinky.”
“Define kinky,” she says.
“There was some hair-pulling,” he says, avoiding her eyes. “Some very light hair-pulling.”
“You can’t pull someone’s hair on a first date,” she says.
“I know,” he says.
Her eyes narrow.
“Is that all you remember?” she asks, her face split by a shadow like a half-moon under the light of a hanging lamp. “You’re my friend and I want to believe you. And it’s hard because I know that you were actually drinking so much at that time, so it’s not an implausible excuse, but it’s also convenient.”
“How could you think I’m lying? Gigi, it’s me.”
“One more question,” she says.
“What?”
“How many women did you DM that you ‘like their work’?” She glares at him. “That part feels personal to me.”
“Come on,” he says.
“How many?”
“Three. Well, four. Three who I actually met up with.”
“Three? It’s a pattern. How am I supposed to defend that?”
He snorts.
“People in the writing group could bring it up,” she says.
“It has nothing to do with the group,” he says. “And I didn’t intend it as a pick-up line; it was a sincere compliment.”
“I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable,” she says, “and it would look shitty on my part to pretend nothing happened.”
“So that’s what this is about,” he says. “Your reputation.”
“No,” she says, “This is about you wrecking things.”
“I didn’t wreck it. I’ve never hit on anyone in the group.”
“I might have to ask you to stop coming for a month and see how people feel.”
“It won’t happen again,” he pleads, visualizing the group’s eight writers circled in this apartment, laughing at his expense. “I’m different now.”
She says nothing.
“You don’t, like, hate me or anything?” He laughs nervously. “Right?”
She sighs. “I mean, I don’t hate you, but you don’t make it easy to be your friend.”
Gigi slowly drags a roll through a river of soy sauce, pushing it around in circles. She sighs and, in the same breath, says, “I make so many passes for you.”
“I really am sorry.”
She picks the batter off a shrimp tempura roll and asks him, “What are you going to tell Alice?”
“I’m not,” he says. “I’m going to try to convince Meg to delete it.”
“You have to tell her,” Gigi says. “Even if Meg takes it down, Alice could hear about it.”
“If I tell her,” he says, “she might leave.”
“If she leaves,” Gigi said, “you’re only back where you started.”
Back where he started? No.
“I was going to propose to her tomorrow,” he says. “You know this. We’ve talked about this. The ring is in my coat pocket. I brought it with me to show it to you tonight.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gigi says. “You’re not ready, anyway. You idealize her. You idolize her. You don’t want to be with her, you just want to be her.”
It’s obvious to everyone that Cameron has gone from copying his brother to copying Alice.
Gigi goes on, “She’s everyone’s type.”
Alice is a disciplined ballerina whose beauty and virtue Cameron worships and strives to emulate. He templates his new life after hers: the sobriety, the dozens of supplements, the six a.m. alarms. Gigi wants to say more. She wants to say that to be with Alice, Cameron needs to be a good person in his own way, not someone else’s. But she stops. Maybe he has no self to be. His touch of fame, the way people mirrored him when he was young, have made him as glossy and shallow as an ice-skating rink.
Cameron interrupts her thought and blurts, “Okay, fine. I sort of,” he pauses, playing with a loose thread on the cuff of his sweater sleeve, “choked her. During sex. In a sexual way.”
“Oh.”
“Not, like, dangerously or anything.”
They break eye contact and both look ahead at the television screen.
“I’m not surprised that it was something like that.”
“Can you explain why this is so bad, though?” he says. “Don’t you feel like choking—nonviolent choking—is pretty,” he searches for the right word, “standard?”
“She doesn’t know you. Maybe she was thinking you could murder her.”
Cameron laughs. He doesn’t look like a murderer.
“There’s no way she was thinking I would murder her.”
Gigi sighs. “You exhaust me.”
“Cameron?” Gigi says, glancing at her bitten-down fingernails.
“Yeah?”
“Sometimes, I think about how I wish I never met you.”
“That’s not true,” he says, starting to cry. “You know that’s not true.”
They look down at the half-eaten spread of sushi and cold soup for what feels like a while. Gigi coldly pats Cameron’s knee.
“Can I get you some water?” she asks.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
She places the glass in his hands. He thinks at that moment she could slap him. He gulps until the glass is empty, then stutter-steps into the bathroom. It’s clean and inviting, just like the bathroom he shares with Alice and nothing like the grimy, dive-bar-disgusting bathrooms that belonged to Cameron Before Alice. A yellow candle flickers by the sink, and eucalyptus branches are fastened to the showerhead with twine. Their mint green leaves release the scent of peppermint. He runs the faucet, closes his eyes, and splashes his face with cold water.
He lifts his face and looks in the mirror, relieved and a little surprised that he’s still hot. He admires his reflection: his swoosh of dirty blond hair, his refined jawline, his dark brown eyes. He’s relieved to be reminded that thanks to his face, no matter how many women hate him, he can always replace them without having to do anything. He looks at himself a minute longer and his features shift. He’s looking at his brother Aaron. Then he’s looking at Cameron Before Alice. Then at The Real Cameron. The three heads hover side by side, transparent and shimmering in the air like holograms. All at once they drift toward a central nucleus and merge, overlapping then blurring together into a single image.
When he emerges, Gigi is doing the dishes. Clouds of steam rise around her, silhouetting her figure. He walks past her and climbs onto the couch. He tries to move on to another topic, see if he can salvage the night.
“How’s your new job?” he asks, with her back to him.
“Good,” she says.
Water is loudly rushing and dish soap bubbles sail through the air over Cameron’s head.
“What are the people like?”
“They’re kind of dipshits.”
Cameron holds his phone up to his face and looks at himself in the selfie-facing camera screen, turning his head left and right. His diamond earring catches the light.
“Do you think it would be cool if I swapped my stud for a dangly earring? Or would that be, like, appropriating queer culture?” He spreads his fingers apart like a star and glances at his right hand. “Or if I painted my nails?”
Gigi doesn’t look at him. Maybe she doesn’t hear him. He raises his voice over the sound of the running water and clashing ceramics: “Do you think I’m starting to look old?”
The water screeches to a halt and there’s a long pause. Gigi turns to face him:
“How the fuck are you thinking about your nails?”
Cameron looks at the floor.
“True.”
He crouches down to tie the shoelaces of his black Chucks, then gets up and reaches for the brass doorknob.
Looking back over his shoulder, he says, “Well, have a good night, Gigi.”
He pushes through the door and staggers down the staircase. There’s the familiar vibration of Britney’s laughter echoing through muffled walls, the scent of garlic frying, the fuzzy hum of the television from three or four apartments. A sculpted mahogany rail spirals all the way down, making the building feel like a ship. He can feel the warmth of life pulsing, the togetherness on the other side of the doors. It’s hard for him to breathe. He’s hit with the fear that tonight is uniquely different, a turn, that he has exited Gigi’s apartment and crossed a threshold into a new universe, a universe in which all the doors he knocks on have locked him out and he has nowhere to go, nothing to do but drift through the streets like a ghost. He is running, running, all the way down. Who will he be without other people? He scrambles down the final flight of stairs. His feet land on the ground floor with a thud and he blows through the front door and stumbles onto the windy street.
***
Cameron’s evening with Gigi concludes earlier than expected. It’s only nine and he has the night to burn. He steps away from her building, skips a block away, and leans against a cement wall covered in a peeling coffee shop mural. This neighborhood is nothing like Manhattan. It’s horizontal, with low, flat buildings, elevated train tracks, and canyons of street art. He leans his back against painted swirls of a woman’s hair and lights a cigarette, deciding where to go next.
He unlocks his phone. After surfacing from a brief lapse of dissociation, he discovers he has texted Priya, Anna, and Amy the same seemingly inoffensive message: “Hi! How are you?” They’re the three writers he reeled in on social media. He’s testing them, fishing to see if they’ve conspired with Meg, who he shoots a final text, laying the foundation to campaign for the deletion of the tweet: “I’m sorry.”
He decides to call Alice. He dials her number, but after six rings, it goes dead instead of to voicemail. He tries again a couple times.
The sky is getting darker; the moon is getting brighter. It’s so full it’s like it’s spilling over itself, and freakishly bright, like a Times Square billboard polluting the horizon from miles away. He decides it’s bad luck and that the night is cursed. The best option is to give up and go home, where within constrained conditions there is the lowest likelihood of catastrophe, where bad luck would be the least detrimental. He can take the L back to his apartment in the East Village.
Branches tremble over his head and acorns shower him, scattering the sidewalks like marbles. He pulls the collar of his corduroy jacket up and his flannel shirt close to his neck as he stalks off. He clambers down the subway steps into the Jefferson Avenue station. A fluffy old lady wearing wire-frame glasses and layers of shawls is the only other person on the platform. Standing side-by-side, they watch a pack of rats scramble over the tracks.
“Train approaching.”
The L train barrels toward them and screeches to a stop. A flood of passengers pours onto the platform, wearing identical silver glitter on their faces like a school of fish. It’s shockingly packed for a Thursday. The mass of people pass him by, pushing and shoving, all bound for the same destinations but singular in the way they move: Busy… aimless… bored… alone… unrelatably pretty… unrelatably plain… different kinds of lonely. The old lady shuffles upstream with him, against the tide of twenty-somethings bound for the area’s converted warehouse nightclubs. One of them knocks into her knobby, jutting elbow, and Cameron sees her huff at whoever it was.
“Hey!” someone shrieks. “That hurt!”
There’s a loud, sharp crunch. The crowd disperses and through the spaces between bodies he sees she was punched in the face, her glasses snapped in half, her nose gushing blood. Her hands are on her knees; she’s panting. He doesn’t know what to do; he doesn’t do anything; he steps onto the train car, shaking with the realization that New York might be the worst place in the whole world.
The train pulls forward. He stares ahead, leaning on a pole. He pictures the shawled lady standing on the platform alone in shambles and detests himself for being such a gutless bystander. He glances up at the advertisements, trying to forget she exists. The car is lined with banners of fluorescent blue Durex ads.
Unprotected sex is Cameron’s most frequent transgression. Condoms are not romantic. Now that the mental image of the lady’s broken nose has faded, he pictures a constellation of hundreds of scrunchy little blood-red babies scattered all over the tri-state area, screaming their veiny heads off. He tries to breathe smoothly into his diaphragm and “check the facts” like Alice has taught him to do when he worries. He grips the pole until his knuckles turn white.
“Check the facts,” he whispers under his breath: “It’s New York. All women in New York get abortions.”
Don’t they? Everyone knows this. The next possible consequence flicks onto the projector of his imagination: infectious disease. He wonders how it’s possible that he hasn’t yet been outed as an STD-super spreader. The babies wriggle out of his head and the piss pours in: He pictures the urine of hundreds of women streaming into plastic cups for chlamydia and gonorrhea tests, accidentally spraying their hands.
The train stops at Grand Street and the metal doors clatter open, snapping Cameron out of it. He was so far gone that he hadn’t noticed the landscape of the train had completely turned over. A woman who looks just like Alice is inches from him. He looks her up and down to make sure she isn’t actually Alice, because on a night like tonight anything could happen, but she is not. Her hard, shiny, hot pink fingernails are gripping the same pole as his, and she’s texting, smiling at her phone. She’s almost too close to look at, but only almost. He glances at her briefly, and he sees her see him glancing. They go on like that, taking turns flicking their eyes at each other for fractions of seconds. He glimpses the short slope of her freckled nose, the slight curves of her chest. Just like Alice, she has the perky breasts typical of a dancer’s build, and just like Alice, she has shiny, dark hair that is Oreo-brown. She has sexy, toned, long legs like Alice. Her lips are glossy and she’s smacking a stick of gum. A soft, slouchy bag is slung over her shoulder.
They are almost touching. Maybe their knees are touching. He wishes he could reach out and brush her waist, which is cinched in a creamy dress with tiny green flowers. He could get away with it, but he is a man of some principles. The moment is suspended for just a few stops. At Metropolitan-Lorimer, along with multitudes of others who are more conventionally dressed than the crowd at Jefferson, she steps off, lightly. Cameron lingers, waits for her to get three steps ahead, and follows.
He remains mesmerized by Almost Alice, but because she got off at Metropolitan-Lorimer, she is no longer perfect to him. This Williamsburg Bermuda Triangle of bars is a thirsty cesspool of transplants. Alice would never. But he knows what he wants.
He steps onto the street next to Kellogg’s Diner and follows Almost Alice past the fifty-person line snaking from a birria food truck, past the red neon lights, toward the BQE overpass whooshing with an ocean of cars, and across the street to Union Pool, where he instantly becomes a cliché. A chalkboard out front reads: Karaoke Tonight! The bar is a fish tank swimming with conventionally good-looking twenty-two-year-old women, dressed as if they live in this trendy neighborhood, and thirty- and forty-something-year-old men, dressed like they drove in from Jersey. Almost Alice disappears into a group of women who look like a clique of mermaids. They’re in line for karaoke, and Cameron hears someone tone-deaf crooning “Drops of Jupiter” whenever the door swishes open and closed. He flees the dance floor and makes a beeline for the enclosed outdoor patio, where paper lanterns bob in the air and a fake taco truck lives. The tackiness of Metropolitan-Lorimer is redeemed when Cameron remembers this taco truck. As he’s waiting in line, he checks his phone for replies, but the lock screen is blank.
Someone taps his shoulder. He whips his head around, and it’s Almost Alice, whose real name is Elise. She persuades him to take tequila shots while her friends are waiting in line for karaoke. The Real Cameron wouldn’t, but this night is different because The Real Cameron has ceased to exist, has revealed himself to be an illusion when he looked in Gigi’s mirror. He becomes extremely turned on by the idea of being with another woman who looks so much like Alice, as if he’s getting to cheat on her with her evil twin. They skip across the patio to the bar. He was an idiot to attempt this night sober in the first place. Elise thinks he’s Aaron, and he lets her, a compassionate lie. They do two more shots together, and he orders a beer.
Elise’s friends are at the front of the line now. She pulls him along to join them, her thumb gently touching the underside of his wrist. He watches them annoyingly shriek to “Dancing on My Own,” and as he leaves for the bathroom, senses Elise behind him. She’s recently single, emerging from the rut of a stale relationship, energized by this closeness to a man who inspires her. Her nails brush his forearm, and she slips in when he does. She unbuckles his pants and drops to her knees. Cheating makes Cameron feel blissfully unrejectable. Even if Alice rejects him tomorrow, she can’t really reject him. He is unrejectable. His phone vibrates in his pocket, and while Elise is occupied, he glances at the screen and sees a notification, a single reply to Meg’s tweet, tagging him: @the_real_cameron.
He had thought being outed was the worst case scenario, but instead he feels diminished. The single comment’s smallness makes him feel like a speck of dust. He tries to brush these thoughts away, focus on Elise, and be present, as Alice has been teaching him to be. Now men are shouting, slamming hard on the other side of the door and telling him to get the fuck out, but he tunes them out and takes his time.
***
It’s five in the morning, and now Cameron is the one pounding his fists on the door—Gigi’s—shouting her name over and over again. He entered the building with the keypad code, which he knows by heart. The truth of his life is no longer obstructed by the rigidity of sobriety. He loves Gigi, he needs her; she is the only person in the world who knows him, actually knows him, and she is the only person who has ever given him that radiant feeling of acceptance. She’ll take him back, she always does.
“Shut the fuck up!” People stick their heads out from their doors; unfamiliar voices scream in the stairwell: “If I had a gun I would shoot you.”
The ring is still in his pocket, and he knows what he has to do with it.
He slams his body against the door and waits.
***
Alice arrives home earlier than expected. Her hard-shell suitcase glides alongside her clicking heel boots into the open-plan studio apartment she and Cameron share. It’s not quite dawn and the living room is cast in cobalt blue; the furniture and household objects are outlined in the supermoon’s brilliant silver light. Something is different, something is off; she can feel it. It’s too bright, too quiet. Something is missing. She has a few missed calls from Cameron; she didn’t feel like talking to him last night. She’s disappointed with him for reasons she can’t identify. He didn’t do anything wrong, to her knowledge, but it feels like he did. She wonders if the source of discomfort is her intuition or her avoidant attachment style. She’ll see him and make up for ignoring his calls in a minute, she thinks, lay her head on his chest, interlace her fingers with his, and make him feel the opposite of abandoned. But she can’t shake the clouds of doubt hovering. She doesn’t know about Cameron; she just doesn’t know about him. She puts on a pot of coffee, soothed by the toasty, chocolate aromas and the machine’s burbling sounds. She skates across the hardwood floors of the loft, toward the brick half-wall that sections off their bed, where she anticipates finding Cameron and his pretty face settled in a lovely and deep dreamy sleep.
