Super in the City Read Online Free

restaurants, even if I was rarely at them with him. The door buzzed.
    “Ooh, gotta go, he’s here!” I hung up on her and checked myself in the mirror. I had on a perfectly worn, soft, clingy gray T-shirt that made my stomach look flat and my boobs round, and boxer shorts that suggested a trail of past lovers. My hair was down and wild and the whole look was calculated to look sexy- sleepy- messy, not like I’d been eating tekka maki solo. It was calculated to get us into bed, the place where our putative relationship flourished. I rubbed my cheeks, licked my lips, and flung open the door.
    “Mmm,” he said, letting his eyes run over me. “God, it’s good to see you after a hard day.” Which prompted visions of firing up the camping stove in the middle of the Sudanese jungle, following a day covering guerrilla warfare. Hayden would report and I would take awe- inspiring photos for
National Geographic.
At night we’d make love in our moldy tent and, sometime after that, we’d hold hands at the Pulitzer awards ceremony before our joint acceptance speech. We were going to have a great life together.
    If I could just ignore the two beers he swigged while he was inside me. He placed an empty on the headboard and reached for another from under the bed. “Want one?” he asked.
    I shook my head in a way that I hoped wouldn’t be taken as judgmental, even though I was pretty sure this wasn’t normal.
    “You don’t drink?”
    My non- drinking was frequently an issue with boyfriendsprecisely because there was no issue. No ascetic streak, no hidden pieties, no alcoholism in the family, and none in me— though sometimes I was tempted to darkly hint that I was “recovering” because it seemed a lot more interesting than admitting I’d never developed a taste for spirits. Getting buzzed was fun, getting bombed was fun, and I had no problem with people who wanted to do both those things—I would have liked to join them more often, but I just couldn’t get enough liquor down before surrendering to Pepsi.
    “Eh,” I told Hayden, hoping to avoid the conversation.
    “Are you an alcoholic?” he asked eagerly.
    “I’d rather not discuss it,” I said quietly, trying to suggest that I was a founding member of AA.
    “Is it a problem for you to be around this?” He held up a Red Stripe nervously.
    “No,” I reassured him. “I’m pretty strong.” He looked relieved and popped open a third bottle.
    I made the mistake of running this behavior by the Sterling Girls.
    “You mean, he drinks after sex, like a cigarette?” Tag asked.
    “No … during,” I said, realizing I should never have brought it up.
    “That’s disgusting,” proclaimed Mercedes.
    “Now, wait, don’t
judge
her,” Lucy reprimanded, her social worker’s license burning a hole through every single interaction in her life.
    “I’m judging
him,”
Mercedes told her flatly.
    But then Hayden would surprise me and actually show up for a date on time and we would stare into each other’s eyes over candlelight. I’d ask him about his career and his past and I’d throb all over with the novelty of having a truly adult relationship.
    And he really was a grown- up: I was a fetus when he wasgoing through puberty. I had hoped to hide our age span from my parents indefinitely Actually I had hoped to hide Hayden from them indefinitely His past may or may not have included a brief marriage, and he had a mysterious rift with a brother back in California that kept him at arm’s length from his whole family. I, on the other hand, lived downstairs from my parents and couldn’t have kept a hangnail a secret from them if my life depended on it.
    Only months after the relationship finally, finally ended for the final,/m
a
Ztime was I able to admit to myself that our dates had been elaborate products of my own imagination. I asked Hayden lots of questions and he murmured vague assents, never taking his hand off of mine, never looking away from me, and I had