Page 44 of Caught in a Storm

Sleeping with Margot would’ve felt too fast. Not in a puritan way. We’re done saving ourselves when we’re in our forties. It would’ve felt too fast because Billy still hadn’t wrapped his head around the fact that she was here in the first place, in Baltimore, in his apartment. For that he needed a minute.

And now she’s quietly breathing beside him.

A bed is such a different thing when there’s someone else in it with you—like a whole other structure entirely. For starters, the topography is off. It’s a fine-enough mattress, but their combined weight creates the slightest dip in the middle, giving him the sensation that he’s being drawn to her physically. Secondly, her warmth is unignorable. It practically hums.

“Are you asleep?” she whispers.

Billy laughs, because he couldn’t be further from asleep. If asleep is the sun, Billy is Pluto, or some other demoted celestial object, hurtling through darkness. “Well, I was,” he says. “Thanks a lot.”

They roll at the same time, facing each other. The lights are off, but it’s not fully dark because of Fells Point outside. Margot is wearing a plain, threadbare T-shirt and lounging pants. It’s not sexy but also incredibly sexy in that way that anything can be sexy in the right context. Her bare foot brushes his shin.

“I’m not scared of sex,” she says.

They’re close enough that her breath is warm. It smells like toothpaste—his toothpaste, because she packed her toothbrush but not toothpaste.

“Okay,” he says. “You can be, though. Sex is kind of scary. Nobody talks about that.”

“You had a crush on me when we were young, right?”

This has been established. Still, Billy is embarrassed. “I did.”

“Why?”

“I…” he says.

She watches him while he thinks. It’s a difficult question to answer.

“You liked how I played?” she asks.

“That was part of it,” he says. “But it wasn’t just that. I had a crush on…on you.”

“You were attracted to me?”

“Of course.”

Margot asks him to close his eyes. He asks her why and she tells him to just do it. It’s a vulnerable feeling to be this close to someone you can’t see.

“When did you start having a crush on me?” she asks.

“The first time I saw you.”

“When was that?”

“That first SNL performance, I think. Yeah, definitely then.”

“Right,” she says. “I was nervous. We all were. Anna puked before the show.”

Billy doesn’t know if having his eyes closed means that he’s not supposed to touch her—the rules aren’t clear here. He chances it, though, and pushes through a tangle of comforter to find her hip. His eyes are still closed. “You didn’t seem nervous.”

“Yeah? Okay, well, think of what I looked like then.”

They played “Power Pink,” then a song called “On the Run.” She wore a tight black T-shirt. Her hair was up for the first song, then down and wild for the second. His mind quickly wanders to other stored imagery. Rolling Stone spreads, maybe a dozen TV performances, album art, promotional materials, tabloids, Margot being carried by a movie star.

“Okay, open up.” She’s looking directly at him. “See. I’m not that person anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you had a crush on me. I’m not saying I was ever hot, like Nikki. But I was professionally lit. Makeup experts spent hours on me, tending to my appearance. And I was young. I’m not now. I’m…this.”