Lisa Unger: Under My Skin

“I saw your profile online,” says Ben. He peers over his glasses, a gesture he thinks makes him look wise, worldly. It really doesn’t. He’s far too young to be either of those things.

Putting the snow globe down, I lean back in my chair and frown at him.

“What are you doing on an online dating site, a young hottie like you? They must drop like flies.”

He shoots me a faux-smarmy eyebrow raise. “That’s what we do. The millennials? It’s how we roll . Tinder, OKCupid, Match.com. Love is just a swipe away.” He makes a wave motion with his hand.

“So, it’s not just for old people, then?” I sift through the tiny white sheets of paper. “The divorced, the forever single—the widowed.”

Widowed. I hate that word; it evokes black veils and wails of grief. It defines me by the loss of my husband, as though I’m less now that he’s gone. Of course—I am. I regret saying it as soon as it’s out of my mouth. The word hangs in the air between us. When I look up from my messages, Ben has me pinned in a thoughtful gaze. Another youngster with an old soul; it seems we have a type in our small firm.

“If you must know, it wasn’t my idea.”

“Let me guess.” He shifts forward, puts his elbows on his knees.

“Layla came over. Wine was consumed. The next thing I know, I’m back in the dating scene.”

I don’t think you can clinically call what I’m doing dating. In the olden days, we used to refer to it as sleeping around. A relationship? A boyfriend? No. I don’t want those things. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But, wow, does it ever feel good to be touched again. I don’t share this with Ben, who is studiously massaging that hipster beard he’s so proud of. I wish he’d cut it off. It’s borderline offensive, though I can’t say why precisely.

“It’s a good thing,” he says finally, rising. “And Rick sounds like kind of a nice guy. He’s hot, too. Looks like he could have money.”

“You checked him out ?” I say, mock mortified.

“Uh,” he says, widening his eyes. “Yeah.”

I smile at my young friend, my assistant who has outgrown his position but still likes it. If he has a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—or whatever—he never says so. I open my email; an impossible number of messages await.

“Two calls in a day,” says Ben, moving toward the door. “I like his confidence. A man who knows what he wants.”

“Confidence or arrogance?” I ask. “Desperation?”

“Let’s call it—” Beard rubbing, word searching. “Assertiveness.”

“Send him an email, will you? Tell him drinks on Thursday?” I ask.

“From you or from me?”

“Would it be weird if it was from you?”

“Seriously weird,” he says, then rethinks. “Well—more like pretentious. Have your people call my people? Do you want to be that person ?”

“Fine—from me.”

Ben frequently sends emails at my direction from my account. Never anything big, just setting meeting times, quick one-line answers to various questions.

“Where?”

I shrug. “I don’t care. He can choose.”

Ben hesitates in the door a minute, his lanky form in my peripheral vision. Then he leaves me and I am alone with that image staring back at me from my smartphone. I close the photo app and put the device down, shut my eyes and draw in a few deep breaths. That’s the other thing you’re supposed to do when you’re trying to move on, to smooth out the edges of the panic, sadness, anger or whatever overtakes you—focus on the breath. Breathe, they tell you.

Whatever that pill was, it has smoothed out the edges some, for sure. I’m lighter, less shaky.

But—honestly—I’m scared; fear tickles at the back of my throat. There’s a white noise of anxiety in the back of my head. It’s not just the man in the shadows, on the train. He is scary, sure. If there really is someone following me, then yes, it’s weird and frightening. What’s scarier, though, given my history, is if there isn’t .

* * *

I finish out the day, and work late, pushing everything else away. There are contracts to review, emails to answer, a dispute between a fashion photographer and a model she supposedly came on to, then ejected from a shoot when he refused her, another dispute between a feature photographer who’d submitted photos to a travel magazine, filed for payment via their Kafkaesque system, and ninety days later still hadn’t been paid. Work is easy, a cocoon that keeps the chaos of life away.

When I look up from my desk again it’s after seven and all the other offices are dark. The refrigerator in our break room hums, a familiar and weirdly comforting sound. Half of the hallway lights are off, leaving the space dim and shadowy. I know Ben was the last to leave and he locked me in on the way out, reminding me to set the alarm when I finally took off for the night.

As I’m packing my bag, a phone starts ringing in one of the offices. It bounces to the main line, and I reach over to pick it up. There’s no number on the caller ID, but I see that it came from Maura’s extension. Maybe it’s Alvaro; he used to call late for Jack. We’ve drifted since Jack’s death, not that he and I were ever really friends. In fact, despite his extraordinary talent, and his close friendship to Jack, I’ve always considered him a giant asshole. I really hope, for Maura’s sake, that she hasn’t fallen for him.

“Lang and Lang.”

There’s just a crackling on the line.

“Hello?” A strange sense of urgency pulls me forward in my seat.

There’s a voice but so much interference that I can barely make it out. I hang on awhile longer, listening. A strain of music. The blast of a horn. That voice, it’s throaty and deep, talking quickly, unintelligible through the static. Is it familiar?

Poppy. I think he says my name. Something about it sets my nerve endings tingling.

“Yes, this is Poppy. Sorry—I can’t hear you.”

I press my ear to the phone, cover the other to hear better. But the connection finally just goes dead, and a hard dip of disappointment settles into my stomach. I wait, thinking the phone will ring again. But it doesn’t.

With a niggling sense of unease, I move away from the phone. That voice. My name on the line. Or was it?

I pack up my bag and loop the office, making sure lights are down and doors are locked. It’s a small space; there are only five of us. Walls are made from glass, so there are few places in the office that can’t be seen from wherever you stand. Still, I feel uncomfortable, like I’m being watched. I lock the door behind me, head down in the elevator.

“Working late,” says Sam, the night security guard at the desk. He has a worn paperback novel in his hands. He and Jack used to talk about books, sharing a love of science and history. I glance at the title: The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku.

“Light reading?”

“The brain,” he says, tapping his capped skull. He has dark circles under his eyes, a strange depth to his gaze. An insomniac who works nights, a veteran who did two tours in Iraq. “It’s the ultimate mystery. We know less about it than we do about space.”

Jack would know what to say; he’d probably have read whatever Sam was reading. They’d chat for ten minutes while I kept busy answering emails on my smartphone. But I just nod, aware of the sad way he looks at me. Most people look at me like this now, at least sometimes. The widow.

“Take care of yourself,” he says as I head toward the door. There is a gravity to his words, but when I turn back, he’s already gone back to his reading.

* * *

On the street, shadows fill doorways and pool around parked cars. But no hooded man, just a young couple walking, hands linked, leaning into each other, an old woman with a shopping cart, a lanky kid walking and texting. A yellow cab swiftly pulls to the curb. Safe inside, I turn to look behind me once more.