The Futures(47)

“What, are you going to Russia for that vodka?” Adam said to Nick, raising his voice over the chatter.

“Hey.” Nick flashed his white-toothed smile, cutting a lime into wedges. “You want your drink or not?”

He handed us our glasses a moment later. Heavy cut-crystal tumblers. My hand dropped under the weight. I felt like I was at a party at my parents’ house.

“So, Julia,” Nick said. “Tell me about yourself.”

“Oh.” I hated that kind of question. What the hell was I supposed to say? What were the things that made me interesting or special? “Well, right now I’m—”

“Nick. There you are.” A brunette woman in a red dress appeared next to Nick. She laid her left hand across his chest, and an enormous diamond flashed from her ring finger. “Sweetheart, pass me the seltzer? Someone spilled in the living room.”

She noticed Adam and me standing there. “Hi,” she said, turning to offer me her other, ringless hand. “I’m Megan. Nick’s fiancée.”

“Julia. Thank you so much for having us.”

“You go with him?” She pointed at Adam.

“She’s my date for the night,” Adam said. “We’re old friends from college.”

“Well.” She smiled tightly. “Welcome.”

Fiancée? I thought as Megan walked out of the kitchen. Engaged? I didn’t know anyone who was engaged. When I saw that diamond sparkling on her finger, I felt the gulf that separated me from the rest of the partygoers crack wide open. It made sense. She and Nick had to be in their late twenties. Their kitchen, their artwork, their furniture, their clothes. Poised right on the cusp of bona fide adulthood. Only a handful of years separated us, but I felt further away from them than I did from my childhood self. I was about to turn twenty-three years old, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine it, real adulthood.

The thing was, it hadn’t always been so impossible to imagine. We had never actually talked about it, never said the word marriage, but that summer Evan and I spent in Europe—hot nights walking around Rome, sunny days on the Greek coast, afternoons in Paris—I thought about it more than once. I held his hand in mine, wrapped my arms around his neck, and felt myself consumed by love. A love that could endure anything. A love that had changed me. I grew dizzy from it sometimes. Of course we would be together forever. Of course we would get married someday.

But then everything changed. I regarded the Julia from a year and a half earlier with pity. That girl had known so little about what was to come—had been so naive about what it took for a relationship to work in the real world. I could never marry Evan. Never, ever. Evan wasn’t someone I could have a life with. We were too different, and he didn’t care about me. That’s why it felt so natural, sliding into this new thing with Adam. Evan and I were clearly headed for a breakup. It was only a question of time.

So why didn’t I rip the bandage off? Why keep living with someone for whom I felt nothing? Ending things would have kept me from cheating on Evan. It would have prevented so much of the collateral damage. But that decision would have taken conviction. Planning and execution. And, frankly, it would have required that I find my own place to live, which was annoying and prohibitively expensive. And in that moment, I liked the doing. Abandoning myself to impulse. Besides, I thought. The coming holidays might precipitate a breakup. They always had a way of throwing gasoline on the fire. Evan wasn’t any happier in this relationship than I was. If I waited, he might just do it himself.

“Let’s mingle a little longer, and then we can go,” Adam said.

We talked to more of his friends. They were so different from the people at parties I’d gone to with Abby and Evan. A filmmaker working on an indie documentary. A consultant traveling four days a week to Omaha. A literary agent who had just sold a novel for seven figures. But even in this crowd, I could sense that Adam was exceptional. People were drawn to where he stood like iron filings to a magnet. He was as charming and commanding as he’d been in college. In this apartment, in this room full of people, Adam was still the brightest star in the universe.

And he had chosen me. In the cab afterward, he took my hand.

“You’re so beautiful. You know that, right?”

“Come on. Stop.”

“I mean it. I adore you.”

He leaned over and kissed me. We were sailing up 8th Avenue, no sign that the cab was going to go across town. Adam must have given the driver his address. My heart sped up. This was it. We stopped at a brick building at the corner of 80th and Riverside Drive. “You have to come up for a drink, at least,” Adam said, giving me an excuse that I didn’t need. “I have a great view.”

Adam’s apartment was on the twelfth floor. He tossed our coats on an upholstered chair in the foyer and led me to the far end of the living room. Family money: there was no way he could afford this on a journalist’s salary. He steered me to the window and slipped his arms around me from behind. The Palisades looked dark and velvety across the river, and the lights of Weehawken and Hoboken sparkled in the southern distance.

“Amazing, right?” he said, brushing his lips along my neck.

“Mmm.”

“I’ve wanted you to see this for a long time.”

“It’s beautiful.”

He turned me around, sliding his arms down my back, keeping me tight against him. He kissed me, and for a second it ran through my head like a siren, the last time we’d been here—but then it disappeared. I wanted this. There was no hesitation this time.