The Wrong Way In

Right off, I'm twenty-three years old and I should have known better. The hoodie cost like thirty bucks. Thirty bucks at the outlet mall and this whole stupid night never happens. But it was my favorite hoodie, gray with a faded logo from a bar I've never even been to, Sonny won it at trivia night, and I left it on the back of his chair twenty-one days ago when we did the whole "let's be adults about this" breakup talk.

Three weeks. Twenty-one days, if you want to get technical about it, and I'd been counting, which is its own problem.

So there I was on a Tuesday night in late September, standing in the hallway of his building like some kind of stalker, working up the nerve to knock. The hallway smelled like somebody's curry and the overhead light flickered the way it always did. I'd texted him from the parking lot. Hey, can I swing by and grab my hoodie, ten minutes in and out. He'd texted back a thumbs up, which I took as a good sign, because a thumbs up means it's fine, come on over, no drama.

Except then I sat in my Corolla for fifteen minutes rehearsing what I'd say. Hi, just here for the hoodie. That comprised the entire script. Don't ask how he's doing. Don't mention the breakup. Don't notice if there's a second toothbrush in the bathroom. Get hoodie, leave, cry in car, go home, order pad thai, move on with my life.

I rode the elevator up. I knocked.

The door opened and it was not Sonny.

It was a woman, maybe twenty-five, tall, dark hair in a bun with a pencil stuck through it, wearing one of those bartender shirts with the sleeves rolled up. She looked at me and then she smiled. Not a polite smile. A knowing smile. The kind of smile you give somebody when you think you're both in on something.

"Hey, you must be here for tonight," she said, stepping back and holding the door open. "Come on in, he's just in the bathroom. I'm Joan."

I stood there with my hand still half raised from knocking. "I'm... sorry, what?"

"Tonight," she said again, like that cleared anything up. "You know. The thing Sonny mentioned. He said you might run late, but honestly I ran late too, so no judgment. I'm Joan, I already said that. Wine? He's got that cheap merlot you probably know all about."

My brain was doing that buffering thing. The thing Sonny mentioned. The thing. There was a thing? There was a thing and this woman knew about the thing and I did not know about the thing.

"Actually," I said, and my voice came out about an octave too high, "I'm just here for a hoodie."

She laughed. She actually laughed, this warm little laugh, and waved me inside like I was being shy about it. "Sure, the hoodie thing. That's cute. Sonny said you'd play it cool at first. It's okay, I'm not weird about it, I promise. I did the whole nervous first-timer thing two months ago and everybody survived."

Two months ago. She'd been seeing him two months. She met him at the bar she works at, I knew that much from the one mutual friend who keeps me updated whether I ask or not. But nobody mentioned a thing. There was a thing.

I stepped inside because the alternative was standing in the hallway having a crisis where the curry people could see me, and his apartment looked exactly the same as it always did. Mismatched furniture. A pizza box on the coffee table with one sad slice left in it. The hoodie, my hoodie, gray and beautiful and worth every bit of this humiliation, draped over the back of the green armchair like it had been waiting for me.

The bathroom door was shut. Water running.

"Sit, sit," Joan said, waving at the couch while she went to the kitchen. "So how do you two know each other? He was real vague about it, which, honestly, was kind of annoying, but I figured he was being careful because of his ex. The ex before me, I mean. You're not the ex, right? He said the ex was done, like totally done, that's why he felt okay with all this."

"I'm the ex," I said.

She came back around the corner with two glasses of merlot and stopped walking.

"Well, shoot," she said.

"That's me. Chrissie. The done ex."

The water in the bathroom shut off. I heard the toilet flush, which, great, fantastic, he was going to walk out into whatever this was with his hands still wet. Joan was looking at me with her head tilted, doing math, and I could see the exact moment the math finished, because her face did this thing where the knowing smile came back but different. Warmer, somehow. Curious.

"Wait," she said. "Wait wait wait. Sonny said he was expecting a friend of Al's from the shop. A guy. I figured you were with him, or the plus-one, I wasn't going to quiz you at the door. For the... thing."

"What thing?" I asked, for the second time, and I swear my voice cracked on it.

The bathroom door opened.

Sonny came out drying his hands on his jeans, saying something about how the good glasses were in the dishwasher, and then he saw me and he just stopped. Full stop, mid-step, one hand still on the doorknob. He's twenty-four, my ex, still had the same flat affect he always had, except right now his face was doing nothing at all, which for Sonny is basically screaming.

"Chrissie," he said.

"Hey," I said. "Hoodie."

"Hoodie," he repeated, like the word was in a language he'd studied in high school and forgotten.

We all three stood there. Joan looked at him. Sonny looked at me. I looked at the hoodie. Somewhere in the walls a pipe knocked, twice, like it was counting us.

"Okay," Joan said finally, setting the wine glasses down on the coffee table next to the pizza box. "Somebody explain, because I think I just invited my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend over for a threesome."

The word threesome landed in the room as a dropped wrench would. Sonny made a noise. I made a different noise. I would like the record to show that up until that exact second, the word had not entered my head even once, and now it was sitting on the coffee table next to the cheap merlot and it was not leaving.

"I did not," Sonny started, and then stopped, and then started again. "Okay. So. I might have joked. To Al. That it'd be fun to, you know. And Al knows this guy. And I might have said tonight. And I never, ever said it was Chrissie, because Chrissie and I are..."

"Done," I said. "I'm the done ex. I've heard."

"I literally just came for the hoodie," I said, pointing at it, and my finger shook a little, which I hated. "I texted. He said thumbs up. That's it. That's my whole crime."

Joan picked up one of the wine glasses, held it out toward me as a peace offering, and said, "Well, this is awkward, but you're here, and honestly you're way prettier than I pictured, and Sonny, babe, breathe."

Sonny breathed.

"I'm not here for that," I said. "I want to be fair to everybody, I'm flattered? Confused, but flattered? But I dated him for eight months and we broke up three weeks ago and I am in no emotional state to..."

"I know, I know," Joan said, waving the glass. "Bad joke gone wrong. Sit down, have half a glass of wine with us, get your hoodie, and we'll all laugh about this in like six months. Deal?"

And here is the part where I should have taken the hoodie and left. That was the smart move. That was the move the version of me who does not end up in stories like this would have made. But Sonny said "yeah, stay, five minutes" in that quiet way of his, and Joan was already pushing the glass into my hand, and I was tired, and the couch was the same couch, and I sat.

We did the small talk. It was agonizing. Joan asked how long we'd dated and Sonny said eight months and she said "aw, babies" because she's twenty-five and apparently that makes her an elder. She asked what I do and I said warehouse, inventory, forklift certified, which got a genuine "hell yeah" out of her. Sonny hovered near the kitchen like a man afraid his own living room might go off.

Then Joan, reaching across me to put her glass down, knocked the whole thing over. Merlot, my shirt, my one clean work polo, everywhere. Cold and purple and spreading.

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry," she said, grabbing a dish towel off the counter. "Here, take it off, I'll throw it in with his stuff, he's got a washer right there, please, I do this at work like twice a week."

"I'm fine, it's fine," I said, blotting at it with the towel, which was doing nothing, because merlot does not blot, merlot colonizes.

"Take it off or wear wine for the rest of the night," she said. "Your call. I've got a shirt you can borrow. Or, well. The hoodie's right there."

And that is how I ended up standing in my ex-boyfriend's living room at nine on a Tuesday, pulling my wet polo over my head while his new girlfriend watched and my ex stared at the ceiling like it had answers, with my stupid gray hoodie, the whole reason for this disaster, sitting six feet away on the back of a chair.

I stood there in my bra, dripping purple, and Joan took the polo out of my hands like we'd known each other for years and threw it in the washer with a swirl of detergent that smelled like fake flowers. Then she disappeared into the bedroom and came back with a soft old band shirt.

"Here. It'll be huge on you but it's dry," she said.

"Thanks," I said, and pulled it on right there, because at that point dignity had already left the building and taken the polo with it.

Except it wasn't huge. Joan is taller than me but apparently not that much, and the shirt sat close across the chest and stopped at my waist, and I caught Sonny looking and then looking away fast, at the ceiling again, the ceiling being his new best friend.

"Sonny, go get the hoodie, it's hers," Joan said. "And grab my wine refill while you're up."

He went. Joan looked at me. I looked at her. The bedroom door was half open behind her and I could see a lamp on in there, warm yellow, a bed with a blue quilt.

"You're shaking," she said.

"I'm cold."

"You're shaking," she said again, softer, and it was true, my hands were doing that thing they do, and it wasn't the cold. She