Roomies

My verbal filter is apparently gone: “Does that mean we didn’t consummate?”

He giggles and pulls a pillow over his face. “The sex is the consummation, not the orgasm.”

A hundred questions fly into my head, birds flapping in the confined space.

But, without the orgasm, did he like it?

Did he mean for us to . . . yaknow?

Does he feel weird about it?

Do I? I mean, obviously I’ve wanted to have sex with him since the beginning of time, but I didn’t really want it to happen like this—drunk, messy, and where the emotional implication is so vague.

“You okay?” he asks, dropping the pillow. “I mean, mentally and . . .” He nods to my body beneath the covers.

“Yeah. You?”

This makes him laugh, like he doesn’t even need to answer, and there’s some consolation in that.

“Don’t look,” he says, grinning over at me. “I gotta pee, and I’m going to walk naked to your bathroom because I think you ripped my clothes off by the front door.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “It’s your bathroom, too.”

Once he’s gone, I bend over, picking up my phone. I immediately want to text Lulu and tell her about this insanity, but I hesitate. Lulu used to feel like my bestie, the person I wanted to share every tiny detail with. But the past few weeks, she’s been hard to read, and I don’t like the sense I have that she would eventually use this story against me somehow.

I’m just starting to turn my screen back off when I catch the number of texts in my iMessage app.

There are 364.

“What the hell?”

I open it, reading the one up top from Jeff, delivered only three minutes ago.

I’m assuming you’re still asleep. Careful where you get your hangover breakfast today.

What?

There are seventy-three texts from Lulu, and the bottom ten are in all caps. I only need to read the most recent one to begin to understand what’s going on.

OPEN YOUR GODDAMN TWITTER.

I open the app. Oh my Jesus.

I scroll, and scroll, and scroll.

In the other room, the toilet flushes, the water runs, and the door opens. Calvin comes back into the bedroom, wearing only boxers.

“Let’s head down to Morning Star,” he says. “Get some greasy eggs. Some bangers. Some solid hangover food.”

“I think we have eggs here.”

“No, Holls,” he says, flopping down at the end of the bed. “Food.” I don’t even care that the movement has tugged the sheet off my boobs and he’s getting his own eyeful.

“I’m not sure we should go out and about today,” I say, looking up. I’m trying to fight the hysterical bubble that’s formed in my throat. “You’re trending on Twitter.”

nineteen

Honestly, despite the looming awkward of the drunken sex in our rearview mirror, it’s all fun and games for two hours of social media surfing until we come across ads for penis enlargers in the #ItPossessedHim tag. With a surprised grunt, Calvin slams my laptop shut, and we turn to stare at each other in shock.

“I don’t know where to start,” he says. “Do we talk about the social media thing, the sex we sort of had last night, or whether or not I should invest in the penis enlarger?”

I can’t maintain eye contact when he goes there because I think my brain starts bleeding, so I look over to the bookcases when I say, “I don’t think . . .”

“. . . that we should talk any more about the social media thing?”

I laugh. “That’s the only safe topic.”

In my peripheral vision, he nods. “So you’re saying I need a penis enlarger.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” My face hurts from all the embarrassed wincing I’ve done since we woke up.

“I’m trying to make light of this. That’s what I do.”

“I’m getting that.”

He nods slowly, licking his lips. “Good. Hungry?”

I’m starving. The problem is we’re both hungover and terrified of exiting the apartment. It’s not that he’s recognizable yet; it’s that, from my living room window, we can see three photographers lazily wandering back and forth in front of my building.

Calvin’s Twitter account went from a paltry twenty-two followers yesterday to over sixty thousand this morning, and every time we look it’s higher. He’s tweeted three times in two years, and the third one—which he tweeted this morning and is a photo I took of him and Ramón after their first rehearsal together when they’re shaking hands and laughing incredulously (because, really, the two of them together are magic)—has been retweeted over seven thousand times.

So, there’s that. Also, apparently Lin-Manuel Miranda was there last night, as was Amy Schumer. I’m not sure I can rally my meager cerebral resources to comprehend this while at the same time calculating the true contrast of his talent to my meh.

I think I’m in some sort of shock. I can’t interact like a reasonable adult even when Calvin is asking me direct questions. We had sex. We are married. He’s a trending topic on Twitter. I honestly—truly—do not know how to proceed here.

On the one hand, I could just ask him: “Be honest: how much do you regret the sex last night?” The worst thing he could say is a little, which of course I would understand, and then we wouldn’t even bother to pick up the pieces—we have a matter of months of required marriage left—and instead, we’d figure out how to move past them down the road.

On the other hand, it might be better for both of us if we just keep on joking and move past it without any serious conversation. His making light of it makes me think—

“Hollllllllland.”

I startle as Calvin leans into my field of vision. “Are you alive?”

Based on the playfully exasperated look on his face, I’ve missed something. “Sorry. What?”

He shakes his hair out of his eyes, and I get the full impact of both of them, smiling over at me. “I asked you whether you wanted eggs. And when you didn’t answer, I decided you would want eggs, but then asked whether you wanted the bollocks American bacon in the fridge, or something greasier, like delivery burgers.”

“When did you say all this?”

“When you were mouthing your thoughts at the bookcases.”

I frown. “I was mouthing my thoughts?”

He nods.

“What was I . . . mouthing?”

A grin flirts with the corner of his mouth. “I dunno. You tell me. I bet it was something about sex.”

I don’t even know what to say right now, so I just throw out: “Let’s get burgers.”

He seems to like this answer, snapping his fingers decisively and walking to the counter to get his phone.

I want to say something, not only to pull my brain out of the frantic recollection of every savory detail from last night, but because I’m not sure how to feel about how easily he seems to rebound from having emotionally murky drunk sex. “You have a performance tonight,” I blurt. As if he could forget. It’s a rare week without a matinee, but they had planned for Luis’s departure, and the schedule is a little light as a result.

Looking around into the kitchen to the clock on the stove, he says, “Robert said I need to be there at five.”

He’s still wearing only boxers. I hear him on the phone, ordering our lunch—burgers and “chips, no—sorry—fries”—and I’m happily staring at him unobstructed—Oh my God, we had sex—when my own phone buzzes on the coffee table.