Chapter 6

A month of this job had turned it into a reflex — the way you check a stove burner you know you turned off, just to be sure.

I had sent him everything this past month: a picture of a genuinely terrible campus sandwich, a pigeon that had walked into the student center and refused to leave, the fire alarm at two in the morning with all of us standing on the sidewalk in our blankets.

Half of it went unanswered. Some of it I could see he had read and simply left alone. But I kept sending, because every time he did answer, the answer was better than nothing, and because a chat that stays open has to be kept open by somebody.

I had meant to send him a sticker after that doorway business and never did — Marcus had knocked it clean out of my head. Too late now, probably. Where he was, it was the middle of the night, and he would be asleep. I let it go and was about to close the app when the feed shifted, and I stopped.

A photo. Posted about half an hour ago.

No caption. No location tag. Just the image.

He was standing against a dark car, the city going soft and blurred behind him. Looking at the lens the way a man looks at something he has not fully decided to trust.

The jaw was sharp and lit from one side, the mouth closed and faintly disapproving, a heavy ring on his right hand catching the light. His shoulders were set like he had somewhere better to be.

My face went hot. Actually hot, standing in a stairwell with fluorescent lights and the smell of old carpet. I was looking at the face of a man I had just called handsome without any evidence, and I had been right, which was somehow more embarrassing than being wrong would have been.

"Eve." Rachel had materialized at my elbow. "What are you doing?"

I closed the app. My thumb slid off the screen and I fumbled the phone, and because I was already off-balance I came down wrong on the last step and Rachel grabbed my arm and hauled me upright.

"What is happening with you right now?"

"Nothing. I was thinking about the paper."

"You looked like you'd just seen something."

"I'm fine. Where are we eating? I'm genuinely starving."

She let it go, which was one of Rachel's better qualities.

He had posted it half an hour ago. Same afternoon. A few hours ago I had sat in a lecture hall typing that he was handsome, and he had called me ugly, and now his face was on the internet with no caption and no explanation, uploaded in the middle of his night.

He wanted me to see it. He wanted me to look at it and think about what I had said, and know that I had been right.

Petty, I thought. Absolutely petty. I was almost impressed.

We had made it half a block toward the dining hall when Brenda jogged up behind me and threw both arms around my waist, walking in my steps with her chin on my shoulder.

"You smell like that candle you keep by the bed," she said. "Also, you have a body like that and sooner or later some man's going to get it and not even know what he's got."

I took one of her hands off me and gave it a pat. "Relax. I probably won't be dating anyone until the debt's gone, so you can all stop planning my wedding."

"That's bleak."

"That's a timeline."

Rachel fell into step beside me. "You don't have to make it that hard on yourself, you know. You have a face. You could find someone who wanted to be very generous about it."

"It's not that I've decided against it," I said, and it was true, and I had never said it out loud before. "I just haven't met anyone I actually liked. I'd rather have nothing than something I have to talk myself into."

Rachel nodded once. "That's the most sensible thing anyone's said today."

"Chloe," Brenda said, "you've been quiet for four blocks. It's unsettling."

"I'm thinking." Chloe pushed her hair back. "Eve. My mom's shop just picked up a couple of projects and they're short-handed. They need someone on the computer side — breakdowns, scheduling, that kind of thing. It's mostly commercial work, some television."

"Is it in an office?"

"No, that's the whole point. Half of it you can do from a laptop. The pay is spectacular, and it's your field."

I stopped walking. "Send me the contact tonight."

"I'll text her after dinner."

"Tell her I'm reliable. Tell her I'm enthusiastic. Tell her whatever gets me in the door."

Chloe grinned. "I was going to tell her you're a little terrifying in a productive way."

"Even better."

We ate. I had the pasta because it was the cheapest thing that would actually keep me full until morning, and I listened to Rachel argue with Brenda about whether the new place on Bleecker was worth the wait, and I laughed in the right places, and the whole time the photo sat in the back of my head like a splinter I couldn't quite reach.

Back in the room, Brenda was asleep on her comforter with her shoes still on before nine. The others had drifted to their corners. I got into bed with my back to the wall and the phone face-down on the mattress beside me, and I told myself I was going to review the reading for Thursday, and I did, for about eleven minutes.

Then I picked up the phone.

The photo loaded the same way it had loaded the first time. The car. The ring. The city falling away behind him. The expression of a man who did not want to be photographed and had done it anyway.

I lay there with the phone on my chest and looked at the ceiling for a while.

Then I opened the chat. I typed it before I could think it through in a way that would have stopped me, read it back twice, and sent it anyway.

based on that body, there had better be abs under there.