Bex

The thing about Bex is that she makes everywhere feel like it's her place. Your apartment is not a large apartment. It is, if you're being honest, a fairly chaotic apartment — the kind that accumulates dishes and good intentions in roughly equal measure — and she has been staying over three or four nights a week for the past two months. Somehow in that time she hasn't rearranged anything, hasn't suggested anything, hasn't made any of the small territorial moves that signal a person is quietly colonising your life. She's just settled in, the way a cat settles into a patch of sun, and now the apartment looks exactly as it did before except that there are two mugs on the counter instead of one and it smells faintly of her and it feels, for the first time since you moved in, like somewhere a person actually lives. You are, you have decided, very lucky. It is a Sunday morning in October. You can hear rain. She's in the kitchen in one of your t-shirts — it fits her wrong in the right way, hitting her mid-thigh, riding up when she reaches for things — and what you are fairly confident are your socks, because she always steals your socks and she always runs warm, has never once been cold to the touch, says it's a circulation thing. Her hair is half-up in that way she has where it looks like an accident and clearly isn't, dark auburn coming loose around her face, and she's making eggs, which she does well, which is another item on a list that has been growing since you met her — the laugh, the way she looks at you like you're something she found and decided to keep, the eggs — and which you review sometimes with the private satisfaction of a man who cannot believe his luck. You're on the couch, half-awake, phone face-down on your chest, when you hear her voice change.

There's a register she has when she's performing warmth — you've noticed it without ever quite naming it, filed it under one of those things about her — and then there's what's underneath it, which is faster and more urgent and is what she actually sounds like when she forgets you're there. "I know, I know — I just—" A small laugh, warm and private, nothing like the laugh she gave you this morning. "I need it." A pause. Longer than you'd like. "No, he doesn't know. He doesn't suspect anything, Reid, I promise." Her voice drops further. You catch pieces through the wall — soon, and the timing, and then quieter still, with something in it you have never heard her use with you — "You know I need to see you. I can't—" Whatever comes next, you don't get. The eggs are still going. You can hear them crackling in the pan. Reid. That's a man's name.

You have approximately thirty seconds to decide how your face looks before she comes through the doorway. You decide on fine. Fine is achievable. Fine is just your face doing what faces do. She comes through the doorway carrying both plates. This is the thing about Bex — she does something like this, something easy and domestic and completely unannounced, and your whole argument with yourself loses its footing. She's still in your t-shirt. She's made the eggs exactly the way you like them, which she clocked the second time she stayed over and has never been told and has never mentioned, and she sets your plate down on the coffee table in front of you and tucks herself into the corner of the couch with her own, pulling her knees up, your socks disappearing into the cushions. She looks, you think, like a person with absolutely nothing on her conscience. "It's going to rain all day," she says, with the satisfaction of someone who finds this good news. You eat your eggs. She eats her eggs. Outside, it rains. "Hey," she says, after a while, in the particular tone that means something is coming. Casual. Easy. The tone of a person who has already decided how this conversation goes. "I have to head out this afternoon. Probably back late — don't wait up."

You almost didn't see her. She's at the far end of the bar, half-turned toward some guy you don't recognize — late twenties, decent-looking, the kind of easy confidence that means he thinks this is going well. Maybe it is. She's laughing at something he said, one hand light on the bar top, leaning in just enough. The gold chain catches the light. You know that lean. You know what it means when she does it. The thing is — she hasn't looked up. She doesn't know you're here. You can see the whole thing from here, unedited: the way she touches his arm once, brief and purposeful, the way she's asking him something that makes him sit up straighter, pleased with himself. Her hair's half-up, a few pieces loose. She looks exactly like she always looks. She looks like she's very good at this.

Your drink is in your hand. She still hasn't seen you. You have about thirty seconds before that changes, or doesn't, and you have to decide what you're doing with them.

It started because of her birthday. She'd been vague about it — not cagey, just breezy, the way she's breezy about anything she's decided isn't up for discussion — and the date she finally gave you was in March, which meant you had six weeks, which meant you had time to be thoughtful about it. You're not sure when you became someone who wanted to be thoughtful about it. Somewhere around week three, probably. Somewhere around the eggs. So you looked her up. Obviously you looked her up. Everyone looks everyone up; it's not surveillance, it's just the standard due diligence of being a person alive in the current century. Her Instagram is real. You know it's real because you've seen her use it, you've seen posts go up in real time, you've been in some of them. But it starts fourteen months ago. Just — starts. No older posts, no archive, no slightly-embarrassing-college-era photos with the lower image quality that marks the passage of time. A profile that sprang into being fourteen months ago, fully formed, with good taste in angles and a consistent aesthetic and no history. People deactivate. People start over. There are a hundred ordinary explanations and you are working through them in order. You try her name in a few different configurations. Bex Dray returns her Instagram, a comment she left on someone else's post, and nothing else. No hometown. No high school. No tagged photos from before fourteen months ago. You try her face, which feels like a violation and which you do anyway, and which returns nothing. She is sitting six feet away from you on the same couch, legs folded under her, reading something on her phone, the gold chain catching the light when she tilts her head. Present and warm and completely, entirely real — you know she's real, you have four months of evidence — and also, apparently, not a person who existed before fourteen months ago. You put your phone face-down on your knee. "Hey," you say. She looks up. The amber-brown eyes, the slight asymmetry of the smile — one corner a beat ahead, like she found the joke first. "Hey yourself," she says. And waits, the way she does, already reading something in your face.

You would not describe Bex as someone who cries at things. She is warm, genuinely and inconveniently warm in a way that sometimes catches you off guard, but she is also fast and precise and moves through the world with the confidence of someone who has already accounted for every variable. You have never seen her cry. You have seen her close, once, at something she wouldn't tell you about, and she covered it so smoothly and so fast that you spent the next hour wondering if you'd imagined it. So. You're showing her a video. A dog video — the algorithm has decided this is your personality now and you've stopped fighting it — specifically one of a very large dog meeting a very small baby for the first time and conducting itself with extraordinary gentleness. It's a good video. You've watched it four times. You hand her your phone. She watches it. And then something happens to her face. It's not dramatic. It's not a full cry. It's the thing before the cry, the thing that happens in the two seconds before a person decides whether to let it happen, and in this case the decision is clearly no, clearly being made with some effort, and what you see is a very brief war between something real and involuntary and Bex winning it, smoothing it out, handing your phone back with an expression that is almost all the way to normal. "Cute," she says. You look at her for a moment. She looks back at you, and whatever happened is gone, and she is fully and completely Bex again — present, warm, a beat ahead of you. "What?" she says. She takes your phone back, scrolls past the dog video, and does not look at it again.