Esme—and realized she really, really needed to sit him down and make him choose, not just dance around it as she had the other night. She needed to explain why he was being a dick and what a terrible precedent this set. Not just for him but for those girls too. Making them feel as if it were one or the other, making them wonder if they needed to be something more than they were for him, making them morph themselves into something they weren’t.
Or maybe teen girls these days would just shove a middle finger in his face and recognize that he was the problem, not them. That actually seemed more like it.
Lucas stopped, turned back. “Sorry, that came out harsher than I meant it to. I just meant that not all men are the enemy. And I doubt Ben’s dad is.” He swiped his hair from his face and disappeared into his room for what would be the rest of the night. Like it was that simple. Men and women. How people make you believe that what you see is who they are.
Cleo slunk back into her chair. Of course all men aren’t the enemy! She noticed her search results still in her tab. Alexander Nobells. But sometimes, it’s just a fact that they are.
Cleo had arrived at Professor Nobells’s apartment on the Upper West Side with a bottle of wine that she hoped was good. No one had really taught her how to buy wine—her parents were dead by the time she realized that she should know about it, and her sister was across the country now, working and therapizing and doing a good job being an adult (surprising), and Cleo wasn’t going to bother her to ask about vintages and grapes, especially after she’d screamed at her when she came to help just after Lucas’s birth. Besides, Cleo was busy raising a baby on her own, and thus the long and the short of it was that she hadn’t been drinking much wine anyway.
But the nice man at the wine store recommended this Italian merlot, and though she wasn’t a fan of trusting people without doing her own research, she had to acknowledge that this time, she simply was not an expert. Nor could she become one between the time Nobells invited her and now. So she swiped her credit card and hoped for the best. She didn’t love wine or any alcohol to begin with. It made her lightheaded too quickly and sometimes it flared up her rosacea, though that was unpredictable at best. If Cleo liked anything in life, it was to be in control, so whether it be wine or a skin condition, she did whatever she could to mitigate unpredictability. (The irony of her unplanned pregnancy was not lost on her. Maybe a therapist would tell her that part of her skipped the condom intentionally, so she had something, someone to call her own. Cleo wasn’t sure. Georgie probably had some thoughts too, but Cleo wasn’t interested in asking.)
His building was fancier than she expected, though she didn’t know why. Maybe it was his low-key professor vibe, which quelled his smarmier, flashier law-partner vibe. The doorman called up and announced her; then she was shown the elevator, and then Professor Nobells was opening the door to his rambling three-bedroom. He had books stacked upon books and a bunch of oil paintings that looked expensive. Cleo hadn’t taken Art History at Northwestern, but these paintings, in gilded frames and highlighted with overhead lights, reeked of wealth, and Cleo felt a little bit over her head. After retiring from the ballet, Cleo’s mom had painted for the love of it, to keep that part of her alive; though she had a following in Seattle, it wasn’t as if her works were commissioned by MoMA, and Cleo had never paid close enough attention to differentiate what set good art apart from great art. Georgie had taken most of her mom’s paintings when she, Cleo, and their grandmother packed up the house; Cleo had a few in a closet wrapped in Bubble Wrap.
“I brought wine,” she said, and she was already embarrassed. This wasn’t a date, for God’s sake! He was her teacher, and he was married with two children a little bit older than Lucas! “I didn’t know if you and your wife drink red, but here you are.”
The apartment smelled like butter and chicken and rosemary, and though Cleo didn’t wish for a man