Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

heated and complicated between the two of them. She’d trained for her first marathon with him, and it was really more the running than the lab that had gotten them into trouble, and even though the relationship had ended in disaster and she was relieved, glad, that it was all over and done with, sometimes even now she found herself crying a little as she ran.

At least there was a full bar, according to our guide. “The crispy cod cakes come recommended. Also the short-rib ravioli.”

“I’m not saying that going out to dinner automatically makes him a boyfriend. I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead of myself, as I have the tendency to do.”

Sitting cross-legged in the chair, she planted her elbow on her knee, and then her chin on her palm. She gazed out the window at our air shaft, where the daylight was already starting to disappear. “Do you realize that Sunny is the first guy I’ve liked before he liked me?”

We stopped listening for a moment to wonder which of us had liked the other first, and how, when things happened so naturally and fast, it was possible to tell.

“Which seems significant somehow,” she was saying. “Even if nothing comes of tonight, even if he never asks me on a date ever again. I’ll still feel hopeful. In a general sense. About me and love.” She inhaled. “Please forget I said that word.” And then, recalling her audience, she smiled at us trustingly. “But you probably use it all the time.”

We did, of course, and contrary to what we thought, it didn’t necessarily make us authorities. We believed strongly and without any evidence that Sunny had liked her all along, even back in the days of Sheri and the garbage bags, and we told her so. From where our confidence came we couldn’t have exactly said, but it struck us as indisputable, the rightness of Julia and Sunny, and on this feeling alone we were willing to stake our new friendship with her, and not to say a word when she leapt out of the chair and put on her coat while still wearing the cheap dress, which wasn’t nearly nice enough for the restaurant where he was taking her. We experienced not the slightest protective urge as we sent her out the door.

In fact, the wrongness of the dress only served to further endear her to him, as did, we were to learn soon enough, her half-drunk insistence upon paying her share of the bill and her less-drunk attempt at getting him to sleep over. Julia had predicted correctly that he would never ask her on a date again. It seems miraculous to us now, the quantity of mistakes we all made, mistakes that should have sunk our romances straight off from the start: the hasty tumbling into bed, the disproportionate demands, the declaration of feelings. How did we manage to stay together despite all those offenses? Today young people are so cagey. Always keeping their options open, hedging their bets. Sure they have a lot of sex with near strangers, but that’s not the same as being heedless in love. Not like us! Before we knew it, Sunny was making dinner for Julia most nights and cleaning up afterward. He was, he is, a terrific cook: cassoulets, curries, the most remarkably ungreasy fried chicken. We had never liked lentils before trying his. The card table set for four, the yellowish glow from Julia’s thrift-store lamp, our textbooks, open to the same page, spread like stepping stones across the floor, the steam rising from whatever rich, soupy thing Sunny had just placed in front of us … It was a very sweet time.

Incredibly, he liked us back. That was the great, unhoped-for gift of it all, that Sunny—whom we had admired from both near and far, from our plastic seats in the lecture hall and over bagels at our apartment, who had so enchanted us with his distracting good looks and breezy style and eccentric remarks—appeared to find pleasure not only in her company but also in ours. It now seems negligible, his being six years older, but then the difference in age felt meaningful to us, as if we were being paid a serious compliment. Often, he would send us into spasms of private delight by doing that thing that comedians do, a callback, he was so good at doing that, plucking out of thin air some throwaway line we’d mentioned days earlier and then making it sound hilarious and intimate by referring to it again. He was listening, he was remembering! Even his impatience made us happy. Once, we were driving home from a camping trip in the mountains, and after sliding up and down the radio dial a few times, he finally landed on something he liked, turned up the volume, and then swiveled around to grin at us from the passenger seat. It was a song we hadn’t heard before. Neither had Julia, clearly. She was driving with her eyes fastened on the road and a small, polite smile on her face. “Guys. Really?” Sunny looked at us in despair. “It’s their best record. With the kudzu on the cover?” He let out a low groan. “You probably weren’t eating solid foods yet.”

So much of that is irretrievable now. The papers haven’t been signed and filed yet, but Julia and Sunny, as a couple, are over. We’ve needed to keep reminding ourselves of this fact, only because it is so easy to slip into the habit of hoping otherwise. Our hope has remained quite stubborn for the most part.

“I met him at that physician wellness conference,” Julia told us, and started to cry. This announcement occurred in Utah, about six months after our last time all together at the lake house. We were chopping things atop the kitchen’s glittery granite counters while the children, stripped down to their long johns, watched television upstairs, and Sunny drove back to the grocery store because