Appetites Excerpt
Fridays were Sarah’s favorite day. She was the kind of person who counted down her vacation. Once she hit the halfway point, she would start to get depressed about running out of time. She could barely enjoy Sunday evenings because Monday was just hours away. So Friday was the only day she could really luxuriate in because the whole weekend lay ahead of her.
Friday was her easiest day, too. She almost always worked from home, like nearly everyone else at F&T. It didn’t mean you could goof off entirely, but Sarah was usually able to crank out most of her work in the mornings. The emails from Europe would stop by noon, and especially in the summer, the U.S. ones would slow to a trickle, meaning that an email check every 15 minutes provided the illusion of work. Usually at F&T, it was considered rude if you didn’t answer an email within the hour, and God forbid you didn’t get back to your boss within five minutes. And now there were those horrible instant messages that demanded a nano-second response, blinking at the bottom of your screen, like a too friendly waiter who kept interrupting your dinner. But they were much rarer on Fridays. At six, Sarah was able to power down and unplug.
The problem was, she hadn’t made any plans—not tonight, or Saturday, or Sunday. Most of her friends from work lived nowhere near her. It was one thing to get together for happy hour, but if someone in Manhattan had a weekend party, the thought of driving through the tunnel was exhausting. Adele, her best friend from F&T who lived in New Jersey, was busy this weekend. And Sarah didn’t have any non-work friends. When she’d moved into the condo, she’d imagined getting to know her neighbors and perhaps even finding someone to date. But when she went to the gym on weekends or the pool during the summer, no one ever seemed interested in exchanging more than a quick hello.
She also had to admit that she had a weekend full of nothing ahead of her because all she really wanted to do was stay horizontal in front of the TV and eat. She had never gotten back on her diet after her session with Barbara two days earlier.
Just before she turned her laptop off, she decided to make one of her very sporadic Facebook visits. She had a friend request—probably one of those idiots from high school who had been pestering her to connect, even though they hadn’t exchanged more than two sentences at school. But when she clicked on the icon, a jolt ran through her body.
The request was from Harry Jones.
She didn’t think she would ever see that name again. Confirm or Not Now? She took her hand away from the mouse and beat a rhythm on the desk with her fingers.
How often had she imagined hearing from him? Every few years, she would re-read his old letters, thumb through all the photos of their life together, and look yet again at the faded newspaper clipping announcing their engagement.
She looked more closely at his profile photo. He was at the Great Wall of China and she could barely make out his face. But it was definitely him.
She had met Harry the summer after she went to London for a semester abroad. She signed up for a three-week archeological dig on the border of England and Scotland, looking for bits of Hadrian’s Wall. Five minutes into their first conversation, she knew they would soon be naked.
Maybe it was the long wavy brown hair, the mustache, or the soft brown eyes. No, she thought, closing her eyes for a moment. It was the smile that came so easily, complete with straight, white nice teeth—so rare for an Englishman. Then there was the way he spoke—like he was dictating a book, using long words she had never heard anyone say aloud before, in a Masterpiece Theater accent, minus the stuffiness. And then there was his body—he was a little shorter than what she typically liked, but he had a soccer player’s build, with just the right amount of muscle and an absolutely perfect bottom, as they called it.
Confirm or Not Now? She got up from the desk and walked out onto her second floor balcony. There wasn’t much of a view; just a few trees sprinkled around the condo complex. She stared into the bright blue sky and thought about how perfectly their bodies fit together from that very first time.
The first night of the dig, everyone sat around the fire drinking beer. Her flirting with Harry had grown so intense that everyone else gradually moved away from them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like either of them had a hotel room, or even a dorm room where they just had to get rid of a roommate. The organizers of the dig had brought three trailers for everyone to sleep in—the guys in two and the girls in one.
When the sky finally began to darken, Harry leaned in and whispered in her ear. “Let’s find a place we can be alone, alright?”
She nodded. He grabbed the blanket they had been sitting on and they walked a quarter of a mile from the trailers, past where they had begun the dig, to a flat, grassy area behind a small stand of trees. He began kissing her, dropping the blanket. His tongue was firm and probing, but his lips were soft. She could stand there forever in the moonlight kissing him.
