Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,11

say to me about her tomorrow when we’re alone.”

Steven slipped into his side of the bed. Leah gave him a smile before he turned out his light. She felt a slight pang—very slight—when she thought about how their first night of vacation used to end. The tank top she’d just put on would quickly be coming off. But it had been a while since “going to bed” together meant anything more than going to sleep. The worst part of this was that she didn’t mind.

There had been a time when Steven’s touch could have made the entire world recede. Her love for Steven had been so strong it had overwhelmed her at times. Their attraction had been like a force, a storm that overtook her, and she hadn’t had to think about responding to him any more than she had to think about breathing.

The first night she gave in to her feelings for Steven, it had been a co-worker’s birthday. After the last shift at Murray’s Cheese, a bunch of them went to a bar on West Fourteenth Street. This was before the Meatpacking District had been turned into a glittering outdoor mall. The streets were desolate, some of the butcher shops still in operation by day but dark and secured with pulldown grates at night. Rumor had it that the bar they were going to, the Cooler, had until just recently been a meat storage facility.

The Cooler was dark and crowded, with raucous live music and a red cast to the lighting that gave her a headache. She sipped her beer and stayed longer than she otherwise would have because she happened to have a huge crush on the cheese shop’s assistant manager, Steven Bailey. She had a weakness for men with light eyes and dark hair, that striking combination known as “black Irish.” Steven was reserved and kind, even when someone messed up by not letting the cheese rise to room temperature or missed a shift. Plus, he was working his way through Columbia Law, so she had a lot of respect for him.

Or maybe it was just the eyes.

Either way, by midnight, even the pull of Steven Bailey’s charms couldn’t keep her at the loud bar another minute. She said her goodbyes, and surprisingly, he offered to walk her out.

Standing on the corner of Ninth Avenue, she said, “Okay, well—see you Monday.”

He just stood there, looking at her in a way that made her stomach do a little flip.

“I’ll walk you to the subway. It’s pretty late,” he said after a moment. A group walked by, laughing and debating the merits of two nearby bars. Steven watched them pass and said, “Look at the type of shady characters this neighborhood attracts. It’s really not safe.”

She laughed. “I’m not taking the subway. I live on Bank Street.”

After she’d graduated college and discovered that she wouldn’t be returning to the North Fork after all, she’d rented an apartment in a West Village brownstone, a fifth-floor walk-up that she shared with a roommate she’d found through a service. It was run by a man working out of a shoe box of an office in Chelsea. He had chain-smoked and shuffled through three-by-five cards like a matchmaker from the old country, but he did find her someone compatible. Keira worked in fashion and traveled constantly. She and Leah had barely exchanged more than a few sentences in the entire year they lived together. They kept track of whose turn it was to buy toilet paper or clean the kitchen by a magnetic whiteboard on the refrigerator. Sometimes Keira’s exclamation points could feel a little passive-aggressive, and Leah looked forward to being able to afford her own place. Her parents had offered to help with her rent, but out of pride she’d refused.

“I’m taking the Six, so Bank is on my way,” Steven said. “Unless you really don’t want company.”

Again, their eyes met.

“Company would be great,” she said softly.

To this day she remembered the details of that walk: stopping at the Korean deli on the corner of Fourteenth and Eighth (now the site of a high-rise condo) for a bottle of water, and the way it smelled like grease from the hot buffet (if she’d been alone she would have gotten a container of fried rice). When they reached her building, a long-haired tabby cat occupied the top step, and when they walked up it jumped to the adjacent garbage bins.

She couldn’t recall what they talked about, but she could still feel