Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [43]
Mary snapped her head up quickly, causing her to cough and choke for a few seconds before she could speak. “No,” she finally said. “I’m not a smoker. I’m quitting.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.” He pulled out an unopened pack of cigarettes and hit them against the heel of his hand, then unwrapped the plastic and crumpled it into a ball, never looking away from her. “I’ve been quitting for years.” He raised his eyebrows and took a cigarette out of his pack, held it in his teeth, and smiled.
Mary gave a weak laugh and held her cigarette low. “I really thought I would’ve quit by now,” she said. “But it’s been a harder adjustment than I planned on.”
“Because I make you nervous?” Brian asked.
“What? No!” Mary said. She sounded too forceful. She’d meant to sound calm, but it came out in a little yell.
Brian laughed. “It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, when I first started, even the secretaries made me nervous. Everyone knew more than I did.”
“Oh,” Mary said. She realized that he had meant something very different, and she made herself laugh again. “Yeah, well. I guess it goes away eventually, right?”
“That it does,” Brian said. He blew circles in the air.
Brian and Mary started smoking together at night. She always hoped she’d see him and she always felt sick when she did. She should not be doing this, she told herself. He was a partner. He was her boss. But she looked forward to their conversations all day. When two days in a row passed without them running into each other on the roof, she felt desperate. When he returned on the third day, she almost jumped off the bench.
Every piece of information she got about him felt like a gift. She gathered all that she knew and went over it in her head. He had two brothers, he was the youngest, he liked gherkins and sour Altoids but hated any kind of soda. He was a Yankees fan, called his grandfather “Oompa,” and looked best in light pink shirts.
They talked about college, and she found out that he’d played lacrosse. “Well,” she said, “that’s no surprise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked her.
“Just that, you know, you kind of look like a lacrosse player,” Mary said.
“Really?” Brian asked. “How do you mean?”
“I mean, you just look like you went to prep school and played lacrosse. I don’t know.” Mary took a drag of her cigarette and tried to sound not stupid. “All the boarding school boys at my college, they all played lacrosse and just had a look.”
“Well, I did go to prep school,” Brian said. “But I didn’t go to boarding school. My roommate did, though, and he was weird.” Brian stopped talking and Mary wasn’t sure if he was done. Then he flicked his cigarette and continued. “I’d never send my kids to boarding school,” he finally said. “It fucks them up.”
Everything she learned in these five-minute conversations just made Mary like Brian more. And once when she was assigned to his case in a big meeting, he winked at her, and she thought that maybe she didn’t have control of her brain anymore. With each day, there was a greater chance that she was actually going to act on one of her totally absurd thoughts. There was no going back.
Mary told her friends that there was a cute lawyer at the firm, but that’s as far as she let herself go. They were out for drinks one night and she just wanted to say his name, so she said, “There’s this guy at my firm, Brian, who’s pretty cute. He’s a partner, though.” Then, because she regretted saying his name, she said, “I’m not interested in him or anything. Maybe he’s not even that cute. I can’t tell anymore.”
Lauren nodded and said, “It’s probably the cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome.”
“The what?” Mary asked.
“Cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome,” Lauren repeated. “You know, when you spend all your time in a class and it’s boring and you get a crush on a guy, who looks super cute in the class but then when you go out in the real