The Story of the Intern

“Don’t you remember?” the intern had said to me earlier that day. We’d been at work. He’d wandered into my office with that traditional sly smile of his. “You said you’d come out with us tonight.”

It wasn’t a good idea, considering we worked together. It wasn’t a good idea, considering I was attracted to him and he had a girlfriend waiting for him not so far away. 

That evening, when I pressed foundation onto the dark circles beneath my eyes, I repeated the phrase, hoping that it would stick this time. 

It’s not a good idea. 

That night, I passed him furtive glances.

Nothing. A younger boy, tanned from his weekends out in the sun shooting fireworks into the sky for his family’s business, gave me nothing in return.

Of course. 

My chest ached. It ached from the loss of Richard, my ex, and the memory that he'd only just left behind not one month before. The imprint of possible love in my subconscious. The idea that it could have happened like footprints in sand. 

They haven’t washed away yet. Who can wash them away?

I look to the intern and he doesn’t look back. Figures. My beautiful best friend, the one dancing beside me in this seedy club, is the one who’s caught his attention. 

Or maybe it’s his girlfriend, hiding away in Denver, peeking out at him through his Instagram feed. 

Miss you! She calls out to him in the comments. Her casually typed words are like echoes in my mind every time I steal one of those expectant glances his way. 

He’s drunk. He doesn’t hear them like I do.

He wobbles towards me. “Did you see the way that guy was all up on Ellen?”

I shake my head. He moves closer to me, presses his arms against my hips. 

“It was like this.” He continues pressing into me, and now our hips have clicked together and his arms are draped over my shoulders. I blink at him through the curtain of alcohol over my eyes. 

“Mm-hmm,” I manage to say, leaning into him. 

“It was like this, Lenny,” he continues, leaning his face towards me. For a second, I think he might kiss me, but then he leans backwards, pulling his hands away. “D’you know what I mean?”

For a moment, I want him to do it again. Then, the echoes return. 

It was so good to see you this weekend, love.

No one has ever called me ‘love’ before, but she has, to him. Him, who just leaned into me like he’s probably leaned into a million other girls he’s ‘just friends’ with. 

Get it together, stupid, lonely girl.

We go to the next bar, and then the next. I haven’t had this much alcohol in a long time. It makes me want to smoke when he puts a pipe in front of my mouth. I don’t suck in, and he laughs. 

“This isn’t my first time smoking, I promise,” I say through a smile. He leans over me again. He’s so tall.

“Whatever, loser,” he laughs. He lights the weed. I suck in. I feel nothing. I breathe out and smoke envelops my face in a cloud of beautiful white. I feel nothing.

I have to feel nothing.

Eventually, like all nights do, this one ends. We all walk home together, bumping against each other like magnets, bouncing away again when we get too close. Ellen goes into her building and waves goodbye at us. 

“Get in an Uber, okay?” She commands me, “Get home safe.” 

She closes her door. We’re standing outside. I should get an Uber. 

“We should go smoke some more,” he says, leaning into me again. “My house is just down the way.”

“Isn’t everyone asleep, though? Won’t they be bothered?” I ask. 

I mean, won’t she be bothered, wherever she is?

“Nah. They won’t care.”

Translation: this means nothing. Of course I know it means nothing. 

We walk to his house in a drunken stupor. I thought about how, if this was Case and we were drunk and we were walking home, he’d put his arm around me. I’d lean into him. We’d kiss in a cab back to his apartment. I miss that feeling, the feeling of knowing your night is going to be reckless and wild and gulping down every gorgeous minute of it. 

This night will be tame. He has a girlfriend, I know that. We work together, and he’s interested more in my beautiful best friend, anyway. 

But I still walk into the house. 

I set my purse down in his basement. I look around at all of his art. “Wow,” I say like I always do when I’m in someone else’s house, “This place is great.”

“I’ll give you the tour,” he says, leading me upstairs. We end up in the kitchen. “Hey, watch this.” He puts his arms out as if he’s a politician making an announcement. 

“Alexa,” he begins, “Turn on theater mode.”

Alexa dims the lights and makes them green. The bare kitchen table, which seemed boring before, has now become a shadow of jade. In anyone’s sober mind, it would’ve just been a colored light. To me, though, it felt like I was on another planet. Maybe I did smoke the right way.

He climbed up on the kitchen table and leaned back on it, staring up at the glowing green light on the ceiling. “Hey, come lie next to me.”

I hesitate in the doorway. I hesitate, thinking of her. Thinking of me, and how I always romanticize everything. Every look, every touch, every magnet bump on the sidewalk.

We’re just friends, I remind myself, Aren’t you capable of being just friends with anyone?

I am, I decided. I climbed up on the kitchen table. I lay on my back beside him. Our shoulders touch. 

“I’m going to play you some music,” he whispers, “Close your eyes.”

I do. Suddenly, the lights fade to pink. A song comes through the speakers, loud and echoing through the near-bare kitchen. His shoulder presses against mine harder. He’s moving closer. 

“I like this song,” I whisper back, and I’m not lying. I’m telling the truth. It’s beautiful, the way the words drift in and out of the room like a spirit, bathed in a rose glow. 

The song ends and he fades the lights back to blue. It’s a shock from the green, from the delicate pink— it’s a shock of reality. 

“I have to call an Uber,” I say decisively. “I have to go home.”

“Yeah, okay.” He pulls himself off of the kitchen table. “Where’s your phone?”

“Downstairs.”

He leads me down there. My phone is in— oh god— his room. Did I notice that the basement was also his room? He flicks the lights on, and his bed is right there, and I think about laying down on it, and how he could take his shirt off and lie right next to me…

“I’m going to go wait for it outside,” I say, and in his drunken stupor he thinks nothing of it. 

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

I stand outside for ten minutes. Every now and then, I glance back at the house behind me— he’s in there somewhere, probably curling up in bed, wiping his tired eyes, yawning at the ceiling, checking his phone…maybe even saying goodnight to her, or her, not me. 

I am on the side of the street. My feet are hurting and I feel like I might hurl from all of the alcohol. How much of this, I wonder, will I remember tomorrow?

Probably all of it, unfortunately. I’ll remember how I felt lying next to him on the kitchen table: frustrated. Because if he wasn’t seeing anyone, we could have done anything. We could have done everything. 

But would that have made things better, or worse? Would I still be on the side of the street at the end of it? Maybe. 

I get into the Uber. I drive home. I go to sleep and in the morning, I hurl. I sit on my couch. My best friend wonders why I got home so late. She asks me if I hooked up with the intern. I tell the truth. I say no. 

But I think about what the day could be like if it had been yes. What would it have been like if I had tilted my head, and he’d lifted his lips, and we’d come together on that kitchen table in a cloud of connection and drunken lust?

I’d probably still be here, I note. I’d probably still be alone the next day. 

Because that’s the way it goes.