The Seven Year Slip

JAMES WALKED ME TO the subway station, though he’d called for an Uber to take him . . . I wasn’t sure where he lived, actually, but it most certainly wasn’t the Monroe. After Miguel had sung “Oh my darling, Clementine,” I thought I’d end up choking on a chip. James had quickly changed the subject to how Miguel had proposed to Isa—in the middle of the food truck, actually, on a rather rainy spring day three years ago. No customers, just them two, and steak that was going to spoil. I would’ve been charmed by their story if my mind wasn’t still reeling from the conversation before.

“He never shut up about her,” Miguel had said, just before singing the song, and thinking about it gave me butterflies in my stomach.

He couldn’t shut up about her—about me.

“Tonight was fun. Thank you for entertaining my friends. They can be . . . a lot,” he said, his hands in his pockets.

“If you think they’re bad, you should hang out with Drew and Fiona,” I replied with a self-conscious laugh, because thinking about the four of them in the same room together felt like a panic attack waiting to happen. I stopped just in front of the stairs that led down to the train platform, and he lingered there beside me. Both too close, and too far away.

As if we were both waiting for something to happen.

I turned and asked, trying not to sound too coy, “So, Clementine, huh? How many girls named Clementine do you know?”

His mouth twitched into a grin. His eyes were soft pools of gray. Maybe I’d paint them with watered-down green instead—with bits of yellow and blue, opalescent clouds. “Only the one,” he replied softly, and took his hands out of his pockets.

Those butterflies in my stomach turned ravenous. “She must’ve been lucky, then.”

“She’s also smart, and talented, and beautiful,” he went on, counting my qualities on his fingers, and took a step closer.

This close, he looked so much more handsome than I was prepared for, his thick dark eyebrows trimmed and the freckles across his nose speckling his skin like constellations. His gaze was guarded—and I wished, I wished so terribly, that he was still that wide-eyed man from my aunt’s apartment.

I raised my hands to his face, tracing the laughter lines around his mouth, feeling the barely there stubble. I closed my eyes, and I felt his mouth hovering close to mine, and I wanted him to kiss me—I realized that with a pang of dread. I wanted him to kiss me more than I wanted anything in a very, very long time. Being close to him felt like a story I didn’t know the ending to—the fizzy-rock feeling in my bones I always got when my aunt smiled at me with all of her teeth, her eyes bright and wild, and asked me on an adventure.

He was an adventure. One I suddenly knew I wanted to take.

Without a shadow of a doubt, I wanted this.

I wanted him.

But a second passed, and then another, and the buoyant feeling in my stomach quickly began to sink. I opened my eyes as he shifted away from me, and planted a kiss on my forehead instead.

“And she’s supremely off-limits,” he finished, his voice against my hair. My heart twisted in the ultimate betrayal. He stepped away from me, a pained look on his face. “Always the wrong time, isn’t it, Lemon?”

“Yes,” I whispered, my voice tight—because he was right, and I was mortified that he had to be the one to point it out. I couldn’t look at him. “I should—I should get going,” I muttered, and fled down the steps.

“Lemon!” he called, but I didn’t stop until I was through the turnstile and heading toward the subway platform.

I’d almost tossed my career away, and for what? Some quick-hearted feeling that wouldn’t stay, anyway? Because nothing stayed.

Nothing would.

But what scared me wasn’t the fact that I hadn’t even thought twice about kissing him—it was that I hadn’t cared about my career at all. About what Rhonda would think. About throwing away seven years of overtime and sleepless weekends and papercuts.

That was what scared me most, that the thing that I had been working toward so harshly was something that, in a split second, I didn’t even care about.

The train came into the platform, and I got on. I still felt the impression of his hands in mine, and my stomach burned whenever I thought about how close he had been. The smell of his aftershave. The warmth of his body. How he had stopped himself, the almost- silent sigh.

“Always the wrong time, isn’t it?” he had asked.

Yeah, I guess it was.