Vicki

Joe was looking at her so intently, his eyes so focused. Not sexually, Vicki thought as she listened to Joe’s excited ramblings about his weekend getaways to the Mojave Desert.

“You should come see it,” he said, a glass of wine still in his hand. “For East Coasters like us, it’s a shock to the system. It’s just such different terrain. Suddenly you’re in the wilderness. It’s like being in some old western.”

Vicki leaned in as he went on about a restaurant near his apartment that serves cactus. She took a bite of her crab cake, which was rife with Old Bay Seasoning. A breeze blew through the tent, brushing her long bangs over her eyes. She smelled salt water.

“Do you smell that air?” she interrupted. “It smells like a beach in here.”

Joe smiled sheepishly. He placed his hands flat on the table so her pinky finger touched his. She didn’t pull away.

This attention from Joe, while not romantic, Vicki thought, wasn’t paternal either. Joe was a friend, a flirtatious one, the kind she would have had back in college. He was the kind of guy who gave her enough attention to make her nervously tuck her hair behind her ears. Their conversation was teeming with potential, but that’s all it was, the excited energy that comes with meeting someone who understands you.

Back in college, when they were all single, healthy, attractive people with no commitments, everyone talked to each other like this—intensely and full of confidence and hope. They laughed uncontrollably and never got bored of each other, not even on freezing nights when they were prisoners in their secluded dorm rooms, sometimes not leaving for forty-eight hours straight. Vicki’s college friends had been drawn to one another as eighteen-year-olds, and even though they’d coupled off by twenty—Hannah, in secret, with Rob and eventually Tom, and Vicki with the musician-environmentalist Rich, who was now living in Nova Scotia after spending three years with the Peace Corps—it always felt as though the twosomes were just a part of a greater whole. Like it was all just one big romance, no matter who shared the same bed when they all went to sleep.

Back then there were few boundaries and everyone was permitted to have his or her own private friendships and secrets. Once Tom had joined the group, he and Vicki developed their own inside jokes without upsetting Hannah. They watched movies together while Hannah was at the theater, flipping a coin to determine who would drive through the snow, down the slippery hill, to Syracuse Stage, where Hannah would be waiting in her puffy coat on the corner. And while Rob never pursued Bee physically, he’d loved her, staying up all night to edit her papers even though he should have been writing his own. Bee and Tom also became close by taking Wine Tasting 101 during their last semester. They’d tease Hannah during dinner at her apartment, telling her that that her six-dollar bottles of chardonnay tasted oaky and buttery.