Kit
I don’t say it back.
Not Saturday night, when Ben gets me home and takes all my clothes off in the foyer, then carries me upstairs, not taking his mouth from mine until we’re both so worked up that neither of us can say anything at all. Not Sunday morning, either, when he leaves for the yard and I leave for brunch, both of us late again from oversleeping, over-touching, over-kissing.
I don’t tell Zoe and Greer.
Instead, I hear him say it, over and over, right against the shell of my ear—Kit, I’m in love with you—even though he hasn’t said it again, either.
But there’s something different there, between us. Long after we’d been home from the party on Saturday, Ben and I had been lying in my bed, warm and rumpled, Ben’s hair still sweaty at his temples from exertion, and he’d told me more about Richard, his mother, their wedding, the way it all still got to him a little, even though he’d forgiven her, he’d said, he really had. I had my doubts about that—I didn’t forgive my mother for leaving me, and since I couldn’t pick her out of a line-up, probably, that was a massive waste of energy. But that’s the way it is with parents, I think. You’re always hauling around some of that baggage.
And we’d talked about Houston too. It’d been me, this time, to bring it up, to ask him to tell me about his place there. He’d had this look on his face at first, a bit startled, and I wasn’t sure he’d answer—except for the brief exchange we’d had on the way to the Ursinus, we’d only really ever talked about Texas in the context of my moving there to work for Beaumont, and I was curious about his life there.
“It’s an apartment,” he’d said, his voice low, sandpapery, the way it always is late at night or first thing in the morning. “Fifteenth floor of a luxury high-rise where Beaumont owns some units. There’s a gym and a Starbucks on the first floor. My best friend—Jasper, you’ve heard me talking about him—he lives a few doors down. I’ve got a view of downtown, so I can never get it all the way dark in my bedroom. Most of my furniture came with the place, except for an armoire I refinished my last year here, one my dad kept for me until I got a place of my own. I’ve got a cleaning service that comes, grocery delivery once a week. There’s a pool—it’s really big, actually, something you’d find at a resort. People love it.”
“Do you like it?”
“I don’t dislike it. I don’t—I guess I think of it as doing the job.”
“Doing the job of what?”
Here he’d rolled onto his back, gusting out a sigh before staring at the ceiling for a long, silent minute. “Of giving me a place to sleep. To eat. To occasionally mainline a season of The Americans on a weekend when I’m recovering from travel.”
“That’s a really good show,” I’d whispered back, and we’d both laughed softly in the dark.
It didn’t sound like any kind of place I’d want to be, me with my mostly mismatched furniture, my messy piles of home design magazines and scientific journals, my haphazard food supplies. And with this skin, I’d probably blind the guests at a pool. But if it’s Ben’s place, I’d thought—I should know it. I’d thought that we should talk about my visiting, if we were going to do long-distance, if he really was leaving next week, if we were going to start saying I love you, but it’d been late and before either of us spoke again we’d both drifted off.
On Monday morning, though, it’s Ben who brings up Houston again, right before I’m about to hop out of his truck to head into the lab for the day. “We should talk more, about my going back. About what we’ll do.”
“Okay,” I say. “I want to do that.”
But it’s not going to be today, or tomorrow. Today Ben’s going back to his dad’s to work, morning conference calls all day for Beaumont, and this afternoon he’s driving out four hours for an auction in North Carolina, where he’ll stay until Tuesday evening when it’s over. Both have been sources of frustration with him, so far as I can tell. Last week I’d walked in on a call between him and Jasper, which had sounded decidedly unpleasant—I told you, we’ll deal with it on Monday, now get off my ass about it—and the auction had been a sticking point between him and Henry. Ben hadn’t wanted to go, but Henry hadn’t missed this particular auction in fourteen years.
“Fuck,” Ben says, clutching the steering wheel. “I don’t want to go.”
I think, given that thousand-yard stare out the windshield, he’s probably talking about both North Carolina today and Texas next week, but I focus on the immediate. “It’s only one night,” I say. “I’m going to the movies with Greer on Tuesday night, but I’ll call you after. You can come over if you want.”
“I want,” he says, and leans over to kiss me—hard, long, probably too much than is appropriate for outside my place of employment, but who cares. It’s right now I want to say it back, I love you too, but when Ben pulls back, he preempts me with an “I’ll miss you.”
So I say that back, instead.
* * * *
It’s only a couple of days, but during it I get a glimpse of how it might be if Ben and I were to be apart, to try this thing long distance. He sends me texts from the road Monday night, a couple of pictures—one of a motorcycle gang outside of a 7-Eleven, big, tough guys with handlebar mustaches but one of them is reading a People magazine featuring the British royals on the front, and one of the shitty motel room he’s booked into, surely a contrast to his usual luxury travel. It reminds me of the pictures Alex usually sends me from the road, but my reaction to these is different. I see Alex’s pictures and I feel admiration, or excitement for him. I see Ben’s and all I feel is longing.
So when I go to work on Tuesday morning, I’m thinking about this, about how I’d do this with Ben for any length of time. The money I have, it would allow me to travel to see him, to visit him in Texas or to meet him other places. But do we have that yet, that kind of foundation, to deal with a lot of time apart? What’s Ben like, really, when he’s home in Houston? I know the Ben who takes care of his dad, of River, the Ben who does manual labor at a salvage yard and at my house. I don’t really know the Ben who puts on a suit every day and flies all over the world making deals. No surprise, I don’t even really enjoy traveling all that much. I hate the cold impersonality of hotels, and I hate being away from my own things. And anyway, I don’t know if I want to know that Ben—this Ben, the one I’ve let into my home, into my life here, is the Ben I want. Thinking of knowing something different about him, about having to somehow integrate his other life with mine feels as threatening as any of those days I’d come home from school, finding our scant belongings stuffed into extra-large black garbage bags, ready to be moved again.
But thinking about not knowing him at all feels worse.
And that’s how this thin, delicate thread of a thought enters my mind—wispy, hard to catch, so much that sometimes I don’t even know if I can take it seriously. Can I imagine living somewhere else, if Ben is there with me? Is Ben home?
At work I preoccupy myself with tedium. When Marti finds me, I’ve secluded myself in one of the upstairs labs, sorting through a tray of samples that one of our recent graduates has left behind, apparently forgetting that you could still make good experimental use of leftover materials. She’s got this face on that I know well from the years I’ve worked with her. There’s a tight set to her mouth, one eyebrow raised a hitch higher than the other. Probably someone has broken something in the supply room, and my money’s on the coffeemaker, since I’ve got a better history of fixing that than she does.
“Good, you’re here,” she says.
“Give me five minutes. I swear I’m going to replace the cord on that old thing, fix the short. Or buy a new one, actually. That’d be smarter.”
“Not the coffeemaker. I think you ought to come down and talk to Dr. Singh, though.”
Something in her voice sends a tiny alarm bell ringing in the vicinity of my chest, a trill that shakes through me. “Is he all right?”
Marti shrugs. “I was hoping you could tell me that. He came out of his office—he’s had the door closed all morning—and asked if I could track you down. He was a little short, actually.” That’s all she needs to say, really, because all of these details are odd—usually, Dr. Singh has his door open all the time, unlike most of the faculty, who keep theirs closed on occasion to keep students from interrupting work time, and usually, when he has a question for me or news to share, he simply finds me himself. And he’s never, ever short with anyone. Once when I was over at his and Ria’s house for dinner, one of the girls—Asha, always the troublemaker—had taken an extra-large blue Sharpie marker to the living room wall while we’d set the table, and Dr. Singh had barely batted an eye before ushering Asha to the couch, speaking to her in calm, firm tones about what she’d done wrong, settling her into a lengthy time-out before returning to his stack of plates as if nothing had happened.
But now that I think of it, it’s Tuesday afternoon, and I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. In general, we’re at least passing in the halls or collaborating on something in the lab, or meeting up in one of our offices to talk over some situation with a wayward graduate student. It’s a bit weird not to have seen him at all.
“I don’t know what it’s about,” I say, curious but not nervous, not really. When I first started my job here, any time I’d get summoned to a faculty member’s office or lab I’d get this immediate, hot feeling of dread—maybe I’d messed something up and not realized it? Maybe I’d done something wrong, out of order, against tradition? But in the last couple of years, I’d gained confidence, gained a better sense of myself and my own work. I trusted what I did, and trusted my ability to defend decisions I made. Marti and I exchange a concerned glance, and I do a quick hand-wash at the utility sink before we head downstairs.
Dr. Singh’s door is still closed, and Marti shrugs her confusion before reaching quickly into her desk drawer to hand me a small Reese’s cup. “I took this off your desk earlier. Maybe you need it more than me, huh?”
I smile at her, tucking it into my pocket. “Maybe,” I say, turning to give a soft knock on Dr. Singh’s door.
He’s leaned back in his chair, his elbows perched on the armrests, his fingers steepled in front of his mouth. He looks tired, his thick brows furrowed, and barely glances my way when I come in and take a seat in one of the chairs across his desk. “Dr. Singh?” I don’t know what else to say—his expression is as glum as I’ve ever seen it. A scary thought crosses my mind: Did something worse happen with his funding? Is he going to have to leave the university? To think of this place without him—it fills me with an almost breath-stealing panic.
“Ekaterina,” he says, dropping his hands and looking up at me, and I know that whatever’s happened, it’s got to do with me—it’s something I’ve done wrong. He looks so disappointed, and my stomach clutches in fear, all my confidence and professionalism gone. “I received a call yesterday from Beaumont Materials.”
Forget clutching. My stomach pretty much drops right out of my body, which has gone ice-cold, stiff.
“I haven’t—I didn’t accept any offer from them,” I say, so fast and forceful it makes me sound guilty, though I have nothing to be guilty about.
“That’s what I’m given to understand. I understand that you’ve turned down some very attractive proposals to work in a lab down there, to be involved in some very interesting research projects.”
I’m numb with shock, my mind racing to catch up with what’s happening here. I think of Ben’s conference calls last week, the snappish response I’d walked in on him giving to Jasper over the phone. Has Ben called to speak to my boss? Could Ben have done that, the Ben whose arms I woke up in yesterday, the Ben who’s just told me he’s in love with me? Is this his solution to the distance, or to his work crisis, to go behind my back, to get the person I respect most in the world to go after me about turning down the job?
“I don’t want to work for Beaumont. I’ve been very clear with—them about it.”
“I would like you to tell me about that,” he says. It’s the Sharpie-marker voice he’s using, and I find it infuriating at the moment. “I would like you to tell me why you do not want to work for them.”
“I don’t even know why you would have to ask me that,” I snap back, angry and flustered. I inhale through my nose, a conscious effort to stay collected in the face of this. “You know I feel very strongly—as strongly as you do—about the pitfalls of corporate science. You know I’m very fulfilled at my current position.” I clear my throat, look right into his face. “You know that I have been very happy making a home here, that it’s most important for me to stay here.”
He looks back at me, considering. Then he says, “And the money is not at all attractive to you?” There’s something in the way he says this, combined with the way he’s looking at me—it’s something that makes me feel flushed, embarrassed, dishonest. It’s no one’s business what happened to me six months ago, but there’s something awful about a friend not knowing. But I had made the decision early on not to tell anyone at work. I’d told myself this was because I hadn’t wanted people to question why I’d come back.
The truth was, I hadn’t wanted them to think someone else needed the position more than me.
But the way he’s looking at me—I have the feeling he knows. That Ben has told him.
“No,” I answer. It’s firm, decisive. “I do not want to work for Beaumont. Under any circumstances.” Not now, I add to myself, silently. Not after what he’s done. My head is a mess. Beaumont, Ben—it’s all mixed up, and I feel prickles of sweat on my lower back. If I could just call Ben, see if he has an explanation for this—there has to be something. One part of me knows that Ben would never do this. But there’s another part of me, the one that’s been turning things over in my mind all morning, that thinks—you don’t know all of him, though.
“I wish you would have felt that you could speak to me,” he says, and it’s here where his disappointment is, in my secrecy about the offer.
“I didn’t speak to you because I never considered it as a real option.”
He nods once, then leans forward in his chair, rests his now-folded hands on his desk. He takes a deep breath before looking up at me. “Beaumont has offered me a funding package for the fractography project.”
“They—what? What?” I can’t be more coherent about this—this entire meeting has been such a shock, personally and professionally.
“They have some projects that dovetail with my work, which of course I knew. But as you know I had not considered this path, private funding. They feel I could contribute,” he says, and breaks off for a pause. “Of course they would need someone from their own team to run oversight.”
I expect a sarcastic jab to follow, some snarky commentary on how “oversight” usually means total control, annoying interference at every level, impossible hurdles to publication. But instead, he says, “They proposed that you could do such oversight, should you take on a role at Beaumont.”
Oh. It’s at this moment that I notice my heart must have been pounding up to this point. I notice because right here, I think it stops for a beat.
A trade.
Beaumont is proposing a trade: funding for Dr. Singh if I go to work for them. Funding for my boss, my advisor, my mentor, my friend, who needs the money to keep doing the work that inspired me to become what I am now. The same man I’d said I’d do anything for.
I’d said that to Ben.
For the barest of seconds, I think I might actually get sick, right here on Dr. Singh’s desk. Instead, I straighten in my chair, smooth my hands over my legs, take a deep breath to keep myself together. I think about who I was all those years ago, when I showed up to learn in Dr. Singh’s lab, when I was full of ideas and energy and nerves, and he showed me how to direct them. I think about how he advocated for me to stay on as lab tech here, how much time he spent talking through the job with me, cautioning me—but not condescending to me—about what it would mean to take on this role when I could be thinking of the PhD, of jobs in the field. I think about the way he accepted my decision to stay on, not pushing or judging, and making it easier, at every turn, for me to form relationships in my new role in the department. I think of the way he’s encouraged me, just in the last few weeks, to branch out, to take the lead author credit.
I can’t count all the ways I owe Dr. Singh.
“Do you want to take their funding?” I ask.
What he says is, “I have no interest in bargaining your happiness for funding.” But what I hear—unfairly or not—is maybe. I swallow twice, a third time, that sick feeling back again.
“I appreciate that,” I manage.
“Let me be clearer about this, Ekaterina. I wanted to speak to you to find out what your reasons are for not wanting to work for this company. I wanted to make sure those reasons were…your reasons. Not reasons that have to do with your loyalty to me. If you do not want to go work for Beaumont, then I don’t want you to, either. No matter what package they offer me.”
“Loyalty is a good reason for doing something,” I say.
“So is ambition. So is wanting to challenge yourself, or to try something new.”
“I know that,” I snap back, then stand from my chair. What he’s said—does this mean he thinks I should take it? “I’m sorry. This is—this has been a shock,” I say, which is the understatement of the year, and I say this as a person who won the freaking lottery. “I need some time. I need to…” I need to cry my heart out over this, over what Ben has done. “I need to take the day.”
He’s looking at me with such naked concern on his face that I turn, reaching for the doorknob. I’ve hardly ever “taken the day.” Even on the rare occasions I’ve been too sick to come into the lab, I’ve done work from home, called in to walk someone through a scan setup or a repair, kept an eye on my email. But right now, I want to be away from here, to be as far away from Dr. Singh as I can get. To think that he could have this funding, funding that would ease a lot of his professional anxieties, and I’m the one who could solve his problem if only I give up this entire life that has made me the most happy?
It’s intolerable.
I don’t even make eye contact with Marti as I leave Dr. Singh’s office. I’m already pulling my phone out of my pocket, SOSing to the only two people I want to see right now.
* * * *
The inside of Zoe’s condo is something straight out of Architectural Digest. It’s all clean lines and white furniture and fancy glassware that makes you feel at first like you should absolutely not touch anything. But what’s funny is that once you know Zoe, you know that she keeps it this way not so you feel you can’t touch anything, but so you don’t feel you have to. It’s a place totally free of distraction, of little messes or the chaos of life, and it’s the perfect place for me to be right now, crying it out on a stool at her kitchen island, a mug (white, of course) of tea in front of me, steaming up my glasses.
It’d taken me a while to get the whole thing out to Zoe and Greer. At first, I’d been shuffled into the condo and placed in my current seat, Zoe getting to work on the tea and Greer scooting her stool right next to mine, tossing an arm around me so I could rest my head on her shoulder. After a few minutes of soaking in their presence, letting that high-strung initial response loosen, I’d finally managed to tell them about my meeting with Dr. Singh, about how Ben had tried to trade me for money. I’d also managed—and this had been the worst, sobby, choked-voice part of the whole thing—to tell them about what he’d said to me Saturday night, while we’d danced at his mother’s party.
At first, it’s all the stuff I’ve come to expect from my friends—we do a sort of shared three-minute shock and awe (how could he do this), then we do some collective indignation over it (what a jerk), then we do the thing where I cry and they coo and fuss over me and then make promises to defend my honor (I wish I could punch him right in the dick). It’s pretty much a script we’ve mastered over our years of friendship, anytime we’ve been wronged at work or a social gathering, or anytime one of us has gone through a breakup. But this time, it feels like a script. We’re all going through the motions, because I think we all know there’s something bigger happening here, that this is the most upset they’ve ever seen me.
And maybe this is why we cycle through it a bit more quickly than usual, why we’re definitely approaching the stage where we’re supposed to get rational, to get to the part where one of them starts giving out the advice that I’ve come here for anyway.
“Okay, but…” Zoe says cautiously, and I already know I’m not going to like what I’m going to hear. “Have you called him?”
“No,” I say, taking off my glasses to wipe them on my shirt. I appreciate, for a few seconds, that the world goes blurry around me.
“Maybe you should call him. Let him explain.”
“Let him explain that he basically used me? That he’s been sleeping with me and telling me he’s not involved with my recruitment anymore? While he’s—I don’t know what. Gathering information he can use against me?”
“Kit,” Greer says. “It doesn’t seem that way.”
“How does it seem?” I ask, putting my glasses back on, looking back and forth between them. “Explain how I should take this a different way.”
“No,” Greer says, dropping her eyes. “You’re right. It does seem lousy. I just…it’s terrible. You seem to like him so much.”
I love him, I think, and just as quickly, I think, thank God I didn’t say it back.
“I’m not defending him, Kit,” says Zoe. “But it’s worth talking to him. Corporate stuff—it’s complicated, fast-moving. This might not be him. Or if it is him, it might’ve gone a different way than he intended.”
I shake my head, unwilling or unable to see how to reinterpret this. I feel so upended. That’s the best way I can describe it. I feel like I’m going to wake up tomorrow and everything, once again, will be different. Everything will be new and I’ll have to relearn things, meet new people, steel myself all over again. It doesn’t matter if that’s not what’s really happening—it’s how I feel.
My phone rings from my purse, and I ignore it, my doing so another implicit answer to Zoe’s suggestion. I can sense them looking at each other as it rings, waiting, but I concentrate on sipping my tea. It would be good to go back to the collective indignation stage—that part at least seemed to stem the surge of tears I keep feeling welling up in my throat, behind my eyes. It’s not that I’m never going to speak to Ben again. Obviously, at some point, I’m going to have to be an adult and find out what the fuck happened between him telling me he loved me and him selling me out to his fucking horrible company. But I don’t have to make it easy on him, either. I don’t have to talk to him now, when I’m weepy and freshly devastated.
The phone goes quiet, but only for the barest of seconds before it starts ringing again, and it’s twice more that way before Greer finally slides off her stool and goes over to my purse, pulling it out to silence it. But she must look down at the screen before she does, because she says quietly, “Oh. It’s your brother.”
I haven’t talked to Alex since he left a few weeks back, aside from a few brief emails, him letting me know when he got back to the States, nothing about our fight. I’d wanted to give him time, space—to be on his own, the way he’d said he’d wanted. And I’d been wrapped up in Ben too, the happiness and excitement I’d felt about being with him dulling what I know, at any other time, would be a lot of pain and grief over what Alex had said during our argument. But Alex calling me this many times in a row, it sends a current of fear through my already overloaded system, and I’m off my chair headed to take the phone from where Greer holds it out to me.
I don’t even get out a hello before Alex says, “Kit. I’ve got bad news.”
Barely three hours later, I’m on a plane.