No One Knows Us Here(43)

Seth was a nice guy, I told Margorie. A little controlling, perhaps. He liked me to wear certain clothes, to do my makeup in a certain way.

Margorie snorted a laugh at that. Someone was pounding on the door.

“Just a minute!” Margorie yelled.

“We should leave,” I said.

“So what’s wrong with him?”

“What makes you think something is wrong with him?”

“He’s controlling,” Margorie reminded me.

“Yes, and—okay.” I laughed nervously.

“Try not to move your face.”

I told her the rest, barely moving my mouth while Margorie dabbed at my skin. I told her how Leo—“Seth”—wouldn’t sleep with me. He seemed attracted to me. Very attracted to me. I didn’t know what was wrong with him.

What I didn’t say was that I didn’t know what was wrong with me. If I was supposed to be doing something, if Leo expected something I wasn’t giving him. If I wasn’t doing it for him, he could find someone who would. Maybe sex wasn’t what he wanted—but then why had he sent me to that shady doctor? I had even gone back to the doctor so he could cram an IUD into my uterus. It just didn’t make any sense for Leo to go to all this trouble, to pay all this money, just to keep me hanging around my apartment baking cookies all day. Two months had gone by, and we had only been on a handful of dates. It was easy. Too easy. I wanted to count myself as the luckiest woman in the world, but I didn’t feel lucky. I felt like I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Maybe he’s a virgin,” Margorie said.

“He had a girlfriend,” I told her. “A very serious girlfriend. Six years. She was beautiful, too. I saw a picture.”

“He showed you a picture of his ex-girlfriend?”

I had done my due diligence and learned all I could about Leo Glass and his love life. According to my research, he’d had only one long-term girlfriend, and that had been back in college. He met Jamila Heath-Jackson at Reed College their freshman year. They dated all through college and two years after that. They lived together, they founded Lookinglass together, and then—poof. They parted ways. She cut ties with Lookinglass for “an undisclosed cash settlement,” according to one online source.

The internet didn’t have much to say about Jamila Heath-Jackson after that. I found only one image of her online—a picture of her and Leo from their college days.

They had been featured in WIRED magazine, a Q and A about some new software they’d invented together, the facial-recognition technology they would eventually put to work in Lookinglass. In the picture, they were sitting on her dorm bed, “where it all started.” They both sat cross-legged, facing each other. A laptop on each of their laps. Their heads turned to the photographer. They were smiling.

I had studied the picture carefully, examining it for clues. Leo was surprisingly unchanged since his sophomore year in college. A little skinnier, maybe. At the same time, his cheeks were plumper. His hair was longer, dark curls springing out every which way. His eyes were the same, all-pupil, wide open.

And Jamila. She was beautiful.

She was very tall—even seated, it was obvious, just by the length of her limbs and neck. She was cool and bohemian, with her natural hair, the artfully tied headband around her hairline, perfectly faded jeans and halter top. She was also some sort of genius, the first Black woman to win the Turing Award when she was barely out of college.

Leo had been with this woman for six years—practically a lifetime when you’re young.

“What are you doing to my face?” I craned my head to look at myself in the mirror, but Margorie wouldn’t let me.

“Maybe he’s impotent?”

“He’s not impotent.” I said this with such emphasis that Margorie let out a laugh like a squawk.

Since that awkward striptease on our first date, I had been unsure how to proceed with Leo. He didn’t like for me to be too forward. He didn’t like me to take the lead. We would kiss sometimes, and he would seem into it—really into it, breathing hard, pressing his body against mine, squeezing my breasts over my clothes—and then he would break away, scoot back, straightening out his clothes like we were two teenagers making out in the basement, afraid of getting caught by our parents. That’s enough of that, he would say.

“Abstaining for religious reasons?”

The knocks on the door grew more persistent. “All right, all right!” Margorie yelled. “I’m pretty much finished.” She whirled me around so I could check out my reflection. I looked like a caricature of myself, with chiseled cheeks and painted-on brows and iridescent highlights all over.

“Beautiful,” I said.

We stumbled out of the restroom and found Steele and William playing pool. After their first game, Margorie and I joined them, and we drank more and raised our voices and knocked the balls around the table with our cue sticks, inventing new rules as we went along.

When fast songs came on, we danced. I flung my arms around Steele’s shoulders and he whirled me around, and we laughed, and I remembered those first days with him, when I thought we might actually make it. We had been a terrible couple. I knew he wanted me to go home with him, and if I kept drinking like this, maybe I would. I didn’t miss him, but he was familiar. I remembered what it was like, to just be normal, to actually have fun. With Leo, I might be on a tropical island or eating in a Michelin-starred restaurant, but it didn’t seem fun at all. It seemed like a job, a job I wasn’t very good at.