Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(64)

After all the parts where he thought of me, taking himself in hand.

After I thought of him, putting my hand between my legs.

It made me wonder, though, who I was thinking of? I was thinking of C, but who was C in my brain?

Fingers? Words?

Had I gotten so isolated that I could make love to an idea?

More than pictures of close-up things and games where we pretended to be someone else or verses of pornography, I liked the C that worried about me getting out of the house to see an Andy Warhol exhibit.

Who wanted to meet and eat mashed potatoes.

So I logged on and went to his blog and opened the message box.

You’re certain you want to meet? Is the first thing he asks.

Yes. I’ve turned over this new leaf, this new snowflake, I guess. Where I say YES all the time.

It takes a long time, but he finally answers,

I’m a little surprised to see you here, it’s later, and I thought maybe we were … taking a break? Until we met. Not that we have to, I just wasn’t certain.

I think about that. Maybe he’s feeling the same kind of sea change I am. That we need to be friends, start there, after we’d gone so far as strangers and words.

What’s more, Evan. There’s a sea change there, too.

It won’t be easy to meet C, I don’t think, because we have all these disconnected pieces of deep intimacy between us, but no normal introduction, no basic friendliness. I look at my blinking cursor, then I open my hard drive.

I choose a corny picture my mom took of me when I moved into this place, a kind of “kid on the first day of school” picture.

I’m wearing cargo shorts with hiking sandals and have on a black tank top and my hair is in two braids like a little kid—it was so hot that day. Coming from Seattle, Mom and I had been unprepared for the heat and it took us forever to bring my stuff in from the little trailer we’d rented.

I look sweaty and kind of red-faced, and normally I’d be a little shy about a picture where I’m wearing shorts and have cleavage and upper arms on display, but I’m standing in front of a stoop he knows and has walked up and down a million times, so that’s the one I upload into the message box.

I take a huge breath when I hit SEND.

So really meet me, or be introduced. Jenny Wright. Postdoc in microbiology, in the Blasdel Lab. I’ll be there, at Potato Mountain. Christmas Eve’s Eve.

I hold my breath.

You’re beautiful. So beautiful. I don’t even feel like I have the right to say that because you don’t even know who I really am, but I can’t help it. I think you’re so beautiful.

I don’t know why I expected that, but I do. I’m not surprised he thinks that I’m beautiful, it doesn’t scare me that this sort of stranger believes that I am and would tell me.

Even if all those times we typed things to each other in the dark he might have been thinking of some other image, I still don’t doubt that this man believes I am lovely.

I am. I look at my picture. I look happy in it.

If he would show me who he is, I think I would think he was beautiful, too.

Will you?

Three pictures load, not in the message screen, but on his blog.

The colors are warm; look warm to touch. I think, at first, it is because I am looking at sand dunes, then I realize it is the hollow between a man’s clavicle and his neck and the next is a smooth curve of muscle—a shoulder maybe. The last has another curve of skin, and the edge of a black-ink tattoo that looks like a fancy lowercase f.

Bits and pieces.

I’m not sure what to say. The pictures are gorgeous, erotic even, but I feel let down. I look at the pretty dips and shadows of his pictures, then the overexposed, raw composition of mine.

He’s curated himself, and the perspective is too close-up to see anything.

In my picture, it’s just me, tall and smiling and kind of naked.

Those aren’t pictures of you. Those are just pictures.

Then I shut the lid of my laptop.

Tears burn in angry drips from my eyes—in the middle of my new resolution to say yes, here was somebody, something, that was a no.

I lost him, or he lost me.

I was ready to tell him he was beautiful, and he didn’t give me anything to look at.

I don’t have any patience for anyone who would keep me in the dark.

Not even myself.





Chapter Seven


Let It Snow


I call Evan’s office first thing, and I’m told he’s out of the office. When I leave a message, to call me, the person on the phone tells me she’s sure he’d want to hear from me and asks if it’s okay if she passes on my message for him to call me personally.

For the first time, ever, it makes my heart race, sharp, painfully, to talk to him, but he tells me he’ll meet me for lunch.

It’s early, so I have to occupy myself until then, and since I’ve turned over a new snowflake, I decide to leave the house for the entire morning, before meeting Evan for lunch.

So I am crunching over the salted sidewalks in a little neighborhood between mine and campus where all the good shopping and eating is, and I am buying Christmas presents to send to friends, and to have ready for my mom when she comes on Christmas Day, and you can already feel the snow in the air, ready to fall.

It’s perfect, and finding a beaded curtain for my mom made with hundreds of teeny mirrors and SOMEBODY IN OHIO LOVES ME T-shirts for my friends and letterpress stationery for Melissa, who’s obsessed with all things handmade, makes my whole world feel a little bigger, in a not-scary way.