Who We Are Now by Lauryn Chamberlain

Author:Lauryn Chamberlain [Chamberlain, Lauryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The next morning, she woke up to two voicemails. Her phone had died overnight, something she rarely allowed to happen—Dev made fun of her for being the kind of person who had to find a charger the minute her battery dipped below seventy-five percent. But she and Aaron had let a second glass of wine turn into a third, and after a tipsy walk through the West Village and a good—no, great—first kiss outside her door, she had run upstairs and fallen into bed with her phone in her hand, forgetting the charger completely. She felt like she had slept more deeply than she had in the past year.

The first voicemail was from Aaron. Seeing his name in her missed call log, she felt her heart do a strange stutter step, the kind of fluttering excitement she hadn’t felt in a while. Certainly not since her mom had been back in treatment. If she was being completely honest with herself, she maybe hadn’t even felt something like it since the early days with Dev. There had been other flings that made her feel validated or wanted, even those that had made her feel crazy turned on (once again, the Bushwick artist—why did the men who were the best in bed always have the worst apartments?). But it had only ever been Dev who inspired her to think about her feelings with romance-novel vocabulary.

“Hi, Rachel.” Aaron’s deep baritone voice spoke into her ear. “I think this might be a little too forward. Actually, scratch that, I know it is. But I couldn’t wait to ask you on another date. Do you think I’m crazy? Don’t answer that. But if you want to, too, call me back. I’d love to take you to dinner.”

She grinned and stretched out in her bed, loving the feel of her soft Frette sheets against her back, loving that she now had the upper hand with Aaron, whom she really did like, loving the knowledge that she could call him back right away or that she could make him sweat it out a little bit. Happily, she clicked through to the next voicemail.

Dev’s voice.

“Rach, sorry to call in the middle of the night.” He paused and groaned. “I’m just so fucking blocked on this book. I’ve been up all night; I’m not getting anywhere. You always have the best ideas, so I just thought . . . I don’t know. Call me whenever.”

Rachel was surprised he had called, more surprised he had admitted something vulnerable, and she wondered if he had been drunk. Then she let the compliment settle over her for a moment; she knew she had given good feedback on his first novel, recommended changes that he had ended up making, even though he had never formally acknowledged this. She wished she could see her own work as clearly as she could see his.

She looked at the phone in her hand. She clicked from one contact name to the other, imagining.

Finally, she called Aaron.

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