Super in the City Read Online Free Page B

giving myself a tour after he opened the door. He had tried to kiss me hello, but I was going to make him beg for it—if I could just keep my shaky legs (purposely on display in last season’s floral Gap skirt and painfully high slingbacks on loan from Mercedes) from collapsing out of sheer desire.
    “It looks like a Crate and Barrel showroom,” I snorted.
    “It does,” he admitted with a hint of self- pity. “I didn’t have the time or know- how.” He grabbed my hand and held it tightly between both of his. “Zephyr?” he said plaintively.
    Four and a half months of whatever we’d been doing, and he had managed never to utter my name, not on the phone, not to my face. I’d tried not to think about it too much. At that moment, insanely, all the “Hey you”s seemed worth it just to finally hear him say my name. I let him pull me behind a rice- paper screen and onto his bed.
    Because there was no beer involved, because he had finallylet me see his apartment, because he had said my name, I made myself believe Hayden had changed. We were at his place. He couldn’t slip out the door before sunrise and I sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere until morning, so for the first time we spent the entire night together.
    I surrendered to bliss. I lay on his khaki sheets listening to the garbage trucks make their pickups and studying his sleeping face, something I’d never had the chance to do before. I told his unconscious self that I loved him. I imagined a wedding in shorts and hiking boots atop a craggy Mayan ruin, exchanging vows in the mist on a quick break from a dangerous assignment. I imagined advising panicked women in volatile relationships, telling them how many great marriages had rocky beginnings. Just look at Hayden and me! But it took effort to tune out my mother’s frequently repeated axiom about relationships: the beginning, at least, should be heavy on the happy. Otherwise you don’t have a whole lot to work with when the going inevitably gets tough.
    I didn’t sleep much that night because I couldn’t stop prowling around his apartment. I trolled through his medicine cabinet, his linen closet, his refrigerator, his utensil drawers. I flipped through his magazines and peeked behind his shower curtain to examine his soap scum. My brain was growling for more information about him, but he may as well have lived in a hotel suite for all I could glean.
    In the morning, Hayden did everything right. He made me eggs and toast and coffee and went back to staring into my eyes, only now he couldn’t stop saying my name.
    “Zephyr, Zephyr, Zephyr …”
    What?! I wanted to yell. What? Are we back on? Are we getting married? Will you start showing up for dates? Will you tell me whether you want kids? Whether you like ice cream?But I just popped the yolk of my over- easy and smiled enigmatically at him.
    I was exhausted from my night of snooping, which made it easier for me to leave: what I really wanted was to chain myself to his kitchen table until he outlined our commitment to each other. Instead, I purposely left my earrings next to the bed. That way he’d have to see me again.
    “Seriously?” Mercedes said later that night as the Sterling Girls sprawled around Lucy’s mother’s Riverside Drive living room, picking at cold pad thai and waiting for
ER
to begin. I could barely keep my eyes open, but there was no way I’d have stayed home. It was Abigail’s last week in town before she was to become the youngest tenure- track professor of dead and obscure languages at Stanford, and she was terrified of venturing more than a hundred miles west of the Hudson River.
    Even Lucy was having a hard time defending my reunion with Hayden.
    “I don’t think it’s healthy,” she began tentatively. Tiny, blond, frequently exclamation- pointy, Lucy worked at a free clinic in Bed- Stuy. To our continued amazement, her clients loved her. It seemed like she should be the one heading for the froufy West Coast, while