“Air ball,” he said. “Safe at any hour of the night.”
I smiled back. He was standing so close, I could feel heat coming from his legs. I worried he could feel my heart beating. Even if he couldn’t, I could tell he was looking to me for clues as to what to do. I didn’t want to stand there and make him feel like he had to say anything to me, but I couldn’t make myself leave either.
“You missed him by about six minutes,” he said, switching the ball over to the other arm. “He just left.”
“Josh?”
He nodded. “He said he was going to head over to the pool.”
“The Scarsdale pool? Why?” I put my hand up. “You know what? I take the question back. I don’t want to know.”
“I won’t tell you then. I won’t even give you a hint.” He paused, and I could tell he was having trouble figuring out what he was trying to say. “But you should know, about earlier, I mean about us . . . I was stuck in the bathroom. I didn’t just disappear on you. I wouldn’t do that.”
I shook my head. “You don’t have to explain.”
“No, I know. But I was. Stuck there. I heard your mom rummaging around in the linen closet and I didn’t have my pants on and I didn’t know how to go out there without causing alarm. For a minute I thought she was opening the bathroom door, and I jumped into the shower.”
I felt myself starting to smile. “You could have actually been in the shower, you know. You could have actually been sleeping there, even,” I said. “You are Josh’s best friend.”
“See? Where were you with that kind of guidance when I needed it? This is what they call a day late and a dollar short.”
I started laughing, so did he.
But then we stopped.
“The thing I’m thinking, Emmy, is maybe we should talk about this,” he said. “About what happened. If you want to talk about it.”
I started to say I did, but really I wasn’t sure I could. If he was just going to say something to try to make me feel okay about it—make me feel okay about us going our separate ways—I’d rather just leave the whole thing where it was. In a place where, for a few moments, I felt really happy again.
“What’s there to talk about?” I said. “Isn’t this just the part when you save my life?”
He smiled at me—a big, round smile. And for a second, I thought that was what he was going to say he wanted to do. As if he could. As if anyone could do that for me now but me.
“What if I said that you always have a place to stay in San Francisco? If you ever need one?”
“I’d say that sounds great,” I said. Then I squeezed his hand, squeezed it like I meant it, and started to walk away. But he reached for my arm, holding on. He really held me there.
“You know,” he said. “You could plan to need a place to stay. We could make a plan for that sort of thing. People do that.”
“Which people?” I said.
“Just some people I know,” he said. “People who can actually, you know, admit they like someone a little.”
“Ha, ha,” I said, looking down. I was blushing, my face getting redder by the second. And I knew that even in the dark, he knew that I was blushing. And he knew I couldn’t stop.
He flipped the ball into the air, caught it. “You don’t have to say it now or anything,” he said. “Just one day.”
“One day,” I said, looking at him again. “But before I start planning any trips, I definitely have to go back to Rhode Island for a little while and quit my job and get my stuff and move it somewhere.”
“Back here?”
“No, I can’t make my mother that happy,” I said. “It would be bad for the team. I’m thinking Los Angeles. Film school, maybe, or just getting a job somehow more related to film than fish.”
“But no more Narragansett?”
“No more,” I said. And it sounded right. It sounded so right, I couldn’t deny it. The documentary was over. I wasn’t going to start it again, even though, in theory, I could. I could try to get it right this time. But really, I had no idea how, and I knew I couldn’t spend any more time trying to figure it out: how to really start again, or to steer it toward where I thought it needed to go. I understood, now, that I could say the same thing—the exact same thing—about Matt.
“I just don’t think that I really have anything to go back to there,” I said.