The whiskey in my hand was cold, but it went down warm as I walked around the party the following night, trying to have a good time and failing miserably.
Jude had the idea to throw a party to celebrate our dreams coming true, and maybe if I’d lived in New York for more than a month, I would have been having a better time. Maybe if I knew anyone in New York besides Jude, Phil, and Penny, I’d have someone to talk to. But Jude was busy working the crowd, Phil was busy with Angie, and Penny was, of course, not there.
I paced through the people scattered all over the roof of our building, a common space strung with lights and dotted with islands of chairs. Everyone seemed to be having a good time — we’d even sprung for a DJ who spun actual records and a bartender who we’d tipped extra to get everybody tanked.
I walked to the edge of the patio, looking toward Central Park, the strip of darkness cradled in the light of the city with Penny on my mind, as she always was.
Jude and I had come home from Rockaway the day before with almost complete silence between us. Well, Jude had talked a lot, and I’d listened and responded when I was supposed to. But the whole way, I had thought about what he’d said, and when I had been alone in my room, I’d held my phone in my hand for a long time, thinking about calling her.
Because he was right; she deserved the chance to tell me what she wanted, and I needed to know. I just didn’t know if I was really ready to hear it if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
And that was the real truth of it. It was easier to leave that door open and wonder than to hear that she didn’t want me like I wanted her.
But Penny had bolted after all, and I couldn’t make her stay. In the end, she’d bucked me off and left me stranded.
She was wild, and I should have known better than to try to hold on to her.
Of course, the other thing about loving something wild was how it changed you. And I’d found myself changed for the better — having held her for a moment — and for the worse — the wounds from my grip on her still fresh and tender.
A deep sigh did little to vent the pressure in my chest, and I turned to head inside, exhausted beyond measure.
Jude was striding toward me looking suspiciously subversive, and my eyes narrowed. He’d been barring me from going downstairs all night.
I held up a hand. “I’m going down. Don’t try to stop me.”
He smiled. “It’s cool. I won’t. You’ve fulfilled your obligations tonight, so go ahead and mope all by yourself while we party until dawn.”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “That trick doesn’t work on me.”
Jude shrugged. “Had to try.”
He clapped me on the shoulder, and I headed for the stairs, lost in my thoughts, grateful to be alone as I trotted down to our apartment.
Except when I walked inside, I wasn’t alone at all. And when I saw her standing before me, time stopped.
Penny stood in front of our computers next to a blank chalkboard on wheels looking afraid and hopeful and absolutely beautiful. Her hair was purple again and spilling over her shoulders, her fingers toying with the short hem of her gauzy black dress that was sweet, almost demure, though she hung onto her edge with the deep V and strip of broad lace around her waist where her skin peeked through.
My heart jumped in my chest like it was reaching for her, and my throat closed up, jammed with a hundred things I felt and wished for and wanted. A question was on my lips, and I opened them to speak, but she took a breath and beat me to the punch.
“They call me Pi because I’m irrational and I don’t know when to stop.”
A single laugh burst out of me, and she smiled, relaxing just a little as she stepped closer to the chalkboard.
She drew a line with a shaky hand, then drew another perpendicular line in the center to make a right angle. “I’m not always right.” She drew another line at about the one hundred twenty degree mark. “And I know I’ve been obtuse.” Her final line was at around the forty-five degree point. “But luckily I’m acute psycho, which makes me a little easier to deal with.”
I folded my arms and squeezed, heart thudding, smile on my lips, disbelieving as my eyes and ears sent signals to my brain that my heart had always known.
“It’s all fun and games until someone divides by zero, which I did when I took you to that godforsaken concert and that zero came between us. But even before that, I should have told you something I was too afraid to admit,” she said as she drew two right triangles, backed up to each other to make a whole. “You and I are so right.”
She drew a box on the chalkboard underneath the triangles with an anatomical heart inside without a single mistake, like it was second nature.
“I can’t let you go, not without telling you how I feel, but I had to think outside the quadrilateral parallelogram to figure out how. Bodie, you’re like a math book; you solve all my problems. And like decimals, I have a point.”
She turned and moved toward me with her eyes so full of questions and answers and secrets and love that it broke my heart and healed it. My hands fell to my sides, my breath shallow, when she stopped just in front of me.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was afraid, and I’m sorry I hurt you. You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I want to return that gift. I want to be your everything if you’ll take me back. Because there’s no equation in my heart that doesn’t put you and me together and end in infinity. I’m all in, Bodie. All three hundred sixty degrees of me.”
I took a breath and stepped into her, bringing her into my arms as my lungs filled with air, filled with her.
“You are one well-defined function, Penny,” I joked quietly, holding her against my beating heart, searching for words. “This was all I needed — to know how you felt. If we’re going to work, you’ve got to tell me. You’ve got to trust me.”
“I do,” she said softly. “Does this mean …”
I gazed down at her, drunk on her, smiling. “You know,” I said as I brushed her hair from her face, “they say the best angle to come at something is the tryangle.”
“Do they say that?” She smiled, her eyes shining as she leaned into me, her breaths short.
“They do,” I answered, thumbing her cheek, searching her eyes. “I don’t want to lose you either, Pen. So I’ll take your three-sixty and give you mine. It was already yours,” I said against her lips.
And with the smallest of shifts, we connected, breathing out relief and breathing each other into its place.
Her lips were so sweet, the feel of her in my arms so much better than I’d been daydreaming about since I’d held her last. And all my fears fell away. All except one.
Slowly, reluctantly, I broke away slowly.
“You changed your hair again,” I said as I slipped a lock through my fingers.