The following is from Kate Greathead’s The Book of George. Greathead is the author of Laura & Emma. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and on PRX’s The Moth Radio Hour. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Teddy Wayne, and their children.
George, 29
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Rarely did it snow anymore, really snow, and so George was disappointed but not surprised when, after all the fuss and anticipation—the excessive salting of sidewalks, the fleets of sanitation trucks outfitted with plows, the Soviet-style lines at grocery stores as people panic-bought beer and bread and toilet paper, the overstimulated weathermen gesticulating at pixelated maps—what was supposed to have been a major blizzard turned out to be just rain. A fierce, slanted rain that brought down what remained of the leaves, which should’ve all been gone a month earlier, Jenny pointed out.
“When I was a kid,” George said, standing beneath the sheltered part of the stoop as he smoked his first cigarette of the day, “I was pretty worried about global warming, but it seemed like acid rain, or the hole in the ozone layer, was kind of an abstract thing. But here it is, I guess . . .”
“Don’t worry,” said Larry, who was also a smoker. “Nature will have a chance to recuperate once humans kill themselves off.”
Larry was in his late sixties and the most cynical person George had ever encountered. His cynicism did not mask a tender heart, and there was nothing performative about it. He was the real deal, a genuine misanthrope who could exist only in New York City, and George took a certain pride in living above him, though it also made him a little nervous—from various comments Larry had made to George in the year they’d lived in the fourth-floor walk-up on Henry Street, it was obvious that he could hear much of what went on in their apartment.
George finished his cigarette, but Larry had no qualms keeping him there as he rattled off his usual litany of complaints: the rising cost of the neighborhood, yuppies, parents who called their toddler “buddy,” the word super used as an adverb, bike lanes, a new kind of shoe people were wearing that had toes, the national obsession with gadgets and fitness.
When George returned to the apartment, Jenny was on the phone in the bedroom. It was Saturday, and she would be home all day. A shrill, escalating tremor in her voice carried through the closed door, over the thrum of rain, the hiss and spit of the radiator.
George reclined on the couch, which was strewn with knitting materials. Jenny was making scarves and hats for the friends she’d made at Occupy Wall Street. This was her new project now that it was colder, and she was going to Zuccotti Park less frequently herself—something she felt guilty about, which was ridiculous considering how remarkable it was she’d made the time to go at all while juggling her law school workload and shifts at the immigration clinic.
There was a brisk breeze as the bedroom door was flung open. “That was my mom,” Jenny announced. “I told her we’re not going there for Christmas anymore.”
George sat up. He was surprised to hear this. Surprised, and a little irritated.
In the past, he and Jenny had spent Christmas with their respective families. But this year, Jenny had asked him to join her family for Christmas. It was hard for George to imagine not waking up in his childhood home on Christmas morning—he told Jenny he’d have to check with his mother. He’d assumed that Ellen would object to his absence on Christmas, might even forbid it, but she’d been fine with it. She’d made plans to spend a week visiting a friend in Milan. She was flying there now.
“What happened?” George asked.
“She invited Sadie’s parents.”
“Oh.” George was confused as to the problem. Sadie was Jenny’s sister’s girlfriend—or fiancée. Now that it was legal, they were getting married.
Jenny’s face gleamed with righteous indignation. “We’ve been together for half a decade and she’s never even had your mom over for dinner. They’ve been together for barely a year and my mom’s inviting Sadie’s parents to Christmas?”
It wasn’t in George’s best interest to point out that he and Jenny were not engaged.
“Maybe it’s because they’re gay,” George said. “Maybe it’s to show her support.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” Jenny insisted. “She’s never taken our relationship seriously. Even though we live together. Even though she knows I’m supporting you . . .”
Jenny looked at him nervously. “I didn’t mean that.”
“That’s okay,” George said. “It’s true.”
Jenny was paying his portion of the rent from a small family trust she had access to.
George was surprised she’d mentioned their arrangement to her mother. Jenny didn’t like to talk about money. He wondered if she’d volunteered this information, or if Jenny’s mom had asked how George was paying rent without a paying job.
In either case, George understood Jenny’s mother’s ambivalence about him. He saw himself through her eyes. It was unfortunate that he’d called her by the wrong name this past summer (Suzie, when her name was Cindy). At least she’d laughed about it: “George, you’ve known me for how long?”
“So, what’s the plan now?” George asked. “Where’re we going to go?”
Christmas was in less than a week; it was a little late for a change of plan.
George got up and walked to the window. They had a view of all the gardens on their block, though only some of them could actually be called gardens. You could tell who owned each property from what they did with the space: the synthetic grass carpets and cheap patio furniture of the remaining Italian-American households; the raised-bed vegetable gardens of the new young families who tenderly cultivated their snatch of earth; the sad, neglected lots attached to buildings like theirs, which had been divided up into rental units with high turnover.
“We won’t go anywhere,” Jenny said. “We’ll have our own Christmas here.”
*
Jenny woke George up at ten the next morning. She wanted to go get bagels. She liked to make a thing out of Sundays.
As they stepped outside, Larry was berating a passerby for depositing something in their building’s private trash bin.
“Fuck you,” he yelled as the offender strolled off. “And fuck your family!”
Seeing George and Jenny had witnessed this, Larry explained, “Fuck you doesn’t have the impact it used to. Which is why I say, ‘Fuck you, and fuck your family.’”
Larry winked at George. “You throw the family in there, that really gets them!”
The bagel shop on Smith was extremely popular on weekend mornings. As usual, there was a line out the door, and everyone on it was young and inscrutably stylish and radiated the nonchalance of people who never question their good fortune. George wondered if, to an outside eye, he blended in. He certainly didn’t feel it. The couple ahead of them had a Bernese mountain dog. When they got to the part of the line where you could step inside, an employee approached to say the dog had to wait outside.
“But he’s an emotional support animal.” The woman spoke coolly, placing a slender hand on the man’s back. “He was in a terrorist attack.”
The employee didn’t question the claim, but George suspected he shared his skepticism.
“Which terrorist attack?” George wanted to ask.
When it was finally their turn to order, they were out of everything bagels.
“I guess I’ll take an onion,” George said after a pause. “Cream cheese?”
George nodded. “Toasted?”
George hesitated to answer; if the bagel had just come out of the oven and was hot, no. Otherwise, yes. He wondered if such a request would make him seem fussy and entitled.
“George.” Jenny looked exasperated. “Do you want your bagel toasted?”
“I guess.”
Jenny ordered: “Poppy. Cream cheese. Not toasted. Thank you!”
They ate their bagels on a bench in the park, even though it was cold. Afterward Jenny wanted to go for a walk.
They headed down Court Street. As they approached Yesterday’s News, their path was obstructed by furniture and people perusing folding tables of knickknacks.
George noticed a desk. An old mahogany desk with an embossed leather top supported by two columns of brass-knobbed drawers. It was a beautiful desk; he was surprised to see it was only one hundred fifty dollars.
“You could use a desk,” Jenny said cheerfully.
George envisioned himself sitting at such a desk, and the image summoned a familiar despair. It had to do with his father, whose fetish for fancy things he’d come to see as evidence of a tragic defect in his character.
“I have a desk,” George said.
“That diaper-changing table you found on the curb?”
“It’s not a diaper-changing table,” George said.
“Bar cart, whatever it is, it’s not a real desk,” Jenny protested as they moved on. “You deserve a real desk. A grown-up desk.”
Jenny’s attention was diverted by a black velvet cloak in the window of a vintage clothing store.
George followed her inside, where the sales clerk greeted her with a warmth that suggested she was in here often.
“Isn’t that special?” the clerk said when Jenny inquired about the cloak. “It just came in today. As I was putting it up, I thought to myself, I don’t think this is going to last very long! ”
The clerk chuckled, and Jenny chuckled back—a chuckle that was part affirmative and part giddy, the release of something she’d been trying to restrain.
Jenny was a shopper. She loved buying things, especially clothes. She had a lot of them. George hadn’t realized how many until they’d moved in together and began sharing a closet.
The clerk removed the cloak from the mannequin, and Jenny took off her coat and tried it on. Her arms protruded from the slits. “So soft,” she crowed, stroking the material as she faced a full-length mirror.
“What do you think?” she asked George.
“It reminds me of something my sister would’ve worn in high school.”
Jenny made a face. Nineties Goth was not the look she was going for.
“To me it looks Victorian,” she said.
“Super Victorian,” the clerk concurred.
“How much is it?” Jenny asked, fingering the tag in back of her neck.
Rather than announce the number, the clerk unfastened the tag and discreetly passed it to Jenny, who nodded solemnly.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
George wondered how this scene might have played out differently had he not been present.
When they were back on the street, he asked how much the cloak was. She timidly revealed the number.
“Three hundred and eighty dollars!”
“Re-lax,” Jenny said. “I’m not going to get it.
“It’s not very practical,” she added wistfully. “I don’t know where I’d wear it.”
“You could wear it to keep warm at Occupy Wall Street,” George said.
“You’re mean,” Jenny said, and started walking at a prickly clip.
George fell behind, but after a block Jenny paused at a red light and he caught up.
“Some people go through life trying to build others up,” she said, refusing to look at him. “You like to poke holes.”
The light turned. Jenny’s gaze remained fixed straight ahead as they crossed. “It makes you feel better about yourself.”
George couldn’t dispute this. He did not want to be such a person.
“I don’t think you’re a hypocrite for getting involved in Occupy Wall Street,” he told her.
Jenny finished the thought. “Even though I have a trust fund whose value is directly tied to Wall Street.”
“No,” George said. “If anything, it makes your commitment to the cause all the more meaningful.”
He should’ve left it at that. But as they approached their stoop, George couldn’t resist saying something else:
“It’s your money, it’s your business how you spend it. I do sometimes wonder how you, who are so concerned about waste and landfills, reconcile that with owning so many clothes.”
“Yes, George, I am concerned about waste and landfills, which is why practically everything I own is consignment or vintage. Have you never noticed?”
George knew this was an exaggeration, but he struggled to challenge the claim by questioning specific purchases. He was not particularly observant when it came to the particulars of Jenny’s wardrobe.
*
When Jenny first proposed paying the entirety of the rent so that George could write full-time, he’d balked. It was only after she’d disclosed the existence of her trust that he’d accepted the offer, and only after insisting he would pay her back upon selling his book, which he was confident would happen now that he’d abandoned his original novel and started a new, better one about two guys trying to retrace the steps of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The idea had come to him upon overhearing two recent college graduates discussing their plan to do this in a bar on Smith Street. To beef up the word count and intellectualize the narrative, George was repurposing part of his college thesis on Schopenhauer, incorporating lengthy excerpts presented as the characters’ stream of consciousness.
On a good day, when his writing was going well, George didn’t worry about anything. Not the fact that he was smoking over a pack a day (which he felt walking up the four flights of stairs), the emails he’d neglected to respond to, the periodic pain in a back molar, his expired driver’s license, or the money he owed Jenny. Life felt on pause until he finished his book, at which point he’d deal with all these things.
But it resumed as soon as he heard Jenny’s key in the lock. However productive he’d felt during the day, her return triggered a feeling of panic, of time passing with nothing to show for it.
“Did you not see my text about defrosting the lasagna?” Jenny asked, flicking the kitchen light on.
“Shit,” George apologized.
There was no room in the kitchen for the refrigerator, so it was in the living room. George rolled his chair over as Jenny fished through the produce drawer.
“We don’t really have anything,” she said. “I’ll have to go to the store.”
Jenny went back out. When she returned, she went straight to the kitchen and made scrambled eggs and salad. When she was done, she carried their plates to the couch, where they ate their meals.
George could tell she was still irritated about the lasagna. She was usually chatty at dinner, but tonight was silent. Her legs were propped up on the coffee table, and when George nuzzled his foot against her ankle, she pulled it away.
“Jenny,” he said.
“What?”
“How could I stay mad at you?”
“You’re an idiot.” Jenny tried to repress a smile.
After eating, George did the dishes. That was the arrangement; Jenny cooked, George cleaned up. They did not have a dishwasher, so it was a production.
When George was done, Jenny stood looking out their bedroom window, which faced the street.
“We have to get a Christmas tree,” she said.
“But Christmas is in four days,” George pointed out. “Isn’t it a little silly to get one so late in the season? Hauling it up four flights of stairs, just to drag it back down a few days later?”
“Are you really going to be like that?” Jenny looked at him forlornly. “Please don’t be like that.”
She went into the kitchen and started making a lot of noise. Something Jenny felt very strongly about was that every night, before they went to bed, all the pots and dishes and utensils had to be returned to their proper place. God forbid a spoon linger overnight on the drying rack!
After some thumping and bumping, she tromped out holding a glass. She brought it over to George, who was lying on the couch.
“Do you see that?” Her fingernail tapped the rim.
George lifted his head and squinted. He didn’t see anything.
“That’s grease,” Jenny said.
“Oops,” George said. “Leave it in the sink. I’ll take care of it later.”
Jenny’s cheeks flushed.
“George, I just had to redo half the dishes. Half of them had food residue on them . . .”
George closed his eyes in weary exasperation.
“You say you’re ‘not good’ at doing dishes,” Jenny continued, “like it’s a special talent, something certain people are predisposed to, but doing dishes is not like learning a foreign language, or playing the piano. It’s about making the effort . . .
“You don’t see the point in applying yourself to activities that you don’t take pride in being good at it. Folding laundry, cleaning, cooking, taking out the trash and recycling, putting a new trash bag in the garbage pail, making the bed, wiping the sink down after you’ve shaved, making sure we don’t run out of toilet paper—you think I like doing these things? You think I take pride in them?”
Jenny waited for him to dignify her monologue with a response, but George was not in the mood. He was tired of this. Fucking tired of it. What was the point of doing the dishes only to be reprimanded?
“Where are you going?” Jenny demanded as George stood up and put on his coat.
“For a walk,” George said.
Discovering he was out of cigarettes, George walked to Food U Desire. As he entered he nearly bumped into Larry, who was hunched over the ice cream bin by the register. George’s instinct was to turn around and exit the store, but it was too late, Larry had spotted him.
George nodded a curt hello.
“Pack of Marlboros, please,” George asked the guy behind the counter.
“Wait,” Larry told George as he pulled out his credit card. “I’ll walk back with you.”
George waited as Larry circulated the aisles—fortunately there were only three—ultimately concluding, “Nothing I want here. Nothing I desire.”
Jenny was in bed with the lights off when George returned to the apartment. It was unclear if she was actually asleep, or sulking. Either way, she was unresponsive when George climbed in beside her and whispered, “Tomorrow, when you get home from work, let’s get a tree.”
*
When Jenny got home from work the next evening, he said it again: “Let’s get a tree.”
Jenny shook her head. “It’s impractical.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t be such a Grinch.”
They walked to a stand on Smith Street, next to the subway stop.
After surveying the inventory, Jenny led George to her choice. It was tiny, scraggly, the saddest little tree.
“That one?”
Jenny nodded earnestly.
“I think we can do a little better.”
“That’s the one I want,” Jenny said.
A sales guy materialized. “Ten dollars,” he said. “But I’ll give it to you for eight.”
“We can spend more than that,” George whispered. “It’s not about the money,” Jenny said.
“You feel sorry for it,” George said.
Jenny nodded and chewed her bottom lip. Christmas brought out a childish, sentimental side of her.
George was susceptible to it, too. “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” was playing on an outdoor speaker. He felt himself welling up as he watched the man bundle their pitiful little specimen in some mesh netting.
They walked home holding hands, George clutching the tree under his arm like a pet.
As they approached the entrance to their building, they were accosted by Larry.
“You bought that?” He pointed his cigarette at their tree.
“It was only fifty dollars,” George said. “What do you think?”
“I think they sold you a branch. A branch they pruned off another tree.”
Jenny shrugged. “If we didn’t take it, who would?”
“Is that what you thought when you met me?” George asked.
Larry loved this. “Now you know the truth! The truth of why she married you!”
“We’re not married,” George clarified.
Larry, who never looked surprised, looked surprised. “So, the verdict’s still out!”
*
“They’re having a candlelight vigil at Zuccotti tomorrow tonight,” Jenny told George the next morning.
“Oh,” George said. “On Christmas Eve?”
“It’ll be nice. Smaller than the typical event. More intimate.”
George nodded.
“I could be wrong,” Jenny acknowledged. “Maybe people who don’t normally go will go because it’s Christmas Eve and they want to be around other people. Maybe it’ll be big.”
Jenny’s shoulders rose in a childlike affect. “Either way, it should be interesting . . .
“I’d like to go,” she said.
“You should go,” George told her.
“But then you’d be alone. Alone on Christmas Eve.” Jenny gave George a pitiful look, and then, with a sudden false enthusiasm, as though the idea had just occurred to her, her face lit up. “You could come!”
“That’s okay,” George assured her. “I don’t mind being alone.”
*
It was actually for the best, Jenny’s absence that evening, because George still hadn’t gone Christmas shopping.
He wasn’t the only one. Court Street was teeming with last-minute shoppers. Everyone was in a rush. Bodies collided in the narrow aisles of the little gift shops and overpriced boutiques that were normally so quiet George wondered how they survived. Maybe this was how. The panicked atmosphere rattled George, but mostly it depressed him.
The crass materialism, the myopic consumerism, the corporate greed behind it all—how antithetical to the circumstances of Christ’s birth, to everything he supposedly stood for. George recognized these thoughts weren’t the least bit insightful or profound. They were the kind of thoughts he would have had at fourteen, and that would have made him feel wise and enlightened and above it all. But today, here he was, one of the sheep.
George found himself in another home goods store, flustered by the choices: irregularly shaped beeswax candles, fiber-flecked soaps, large wooden spoons, small wooden bowls, maps of Brooklyn a hundred years ago, maps of the subway today, culinary-themed posters. George could see Jenny liking these things—he could also see her finding them stupid and impersonal. There was something about the faux-urban-rustic curation of the miscellany that rendered the individual items inauthentic.
George bought a poster of onions, but it wasn’t enough. He thought he should get her something else. Something nice that she’d actually be excited about.
He walked to the vintage store with the cloak that Jenny liked. He struggled to open the door before realizing it was locked. It was just past six. Shops were shuttering. The sound of metal grates coming down gave George an anxious, existential feeling.
He continued down Court. He walked into the first store that was still open, which was CVS. By the entrance to the store, a set of risers featured a collection of decorative carolers, plastic-cast figures dressed in old-fashioned foppery, the size of small children, lips parted in song.
After some deliberation, George picked one up and got on line. It was long. It would make sense to have an express aisle, George thought, noting many of the customers had baskets or even carts full of items. Of the six registers, only two were open, and the employees who manned them appeared in no particular rush.
Ten minutes passed, and then twenty, and George was still on line. His phone buzzed with a text from Jenny reminding him to pick up toilet paper.
He turned to the woman behind him. “Do you mind holding my spot while I run and get something?”
The woman looked like she did mind. “I guess,” she said.
“I’ll be quick,” George assured her.
George dashed off in pursuit of toilet paper. After several minutes he asked for help.
“Lower level,” an employee told George, and pointed to the stairs.
When George returned to the line, the woman he’d asked to hold his spot had just stepped up to the register.
After some hesitation, George assumed the position at what was now the front of the line.
No one said anything, but in case they’d noticed, George glanced over his shoulder and explained, “I was on the line, I just ran to get some toilet paper. I was behind her.” He pointed to the woman at the register.
“You can’t keep shopping while you’re in line,” someone protested.
“You gotta go back to the end of the line,” another concurred.
George regretted saying anything. “Really? I only have two things.” He held up the caroler and the toilet paper.
Surly faces stared back at him. George interpreted the collective silence as permission to stay where he was.
But then a tall, bearded white guy who looked around George’s age, maybe younger, spoke up. George had noticed him earlier. His messenger bag was adorned with pins: ally. feminist. occupy.
“Classic,” he said.
*
Christmas morning, Jenny gave George a green crewneck sweater similar to the one he’d shrunk in the dryer, a hat she’d knitted, some dark chocolate, a burlap sack of organic pistachios, and a first-edition copy of Stoner.
“I found it in a pile of books on a stoop,” she claimed when George asked her where she’d got it.
George was touched. She was so thoughtful, his Jenny, she knew him so well, that she’d lie about acquiring it for free so that he wouldn’t feel guilty about the cost.
“It’s a poster of different kinds of onions,” George said, as Jenny unfurled her present.
Jenny managed a smile. “Wow. I never knew there were so many different varieties . . .”
“I got you something else.” George went and retrieved the caroler from under the bed.
“It’s a caroler,” he said, placing it next to the tree. “I didn’t realize when I bought it, but it actually sings.”
He pressed the button to make it sing.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Let your heart be light.
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight . . .
Jenny looked like she was on the verge of tears. George pressed the button to make it stop.
Jenny made pancakes. They ate breakfast. George cleaned up the kitchen while Jenny took out the trash and recycling. They took turns in the bathroom, made more coffee, got dressed.
It was only noon, and they still had the whole day to fill.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Jenny said.
They put on shoes and coats and went downstairs.
The neighborhood felt deserted, and that exacerbated the sad feeling of emptiness and what-to-do. It was one of those times when New Yorkers who had somewhere else to go went there.
Zombie Hut was open. That was a surprise.
It was Jenny’s idea to order vodka and Red Bulls. They were disgusting, but they got a nice little buzz on and so they kept ordering more.
For a while it was fun. They had silly, asinine exchanges, like two people who’d just met in a bar and were curious about each other:
“I don’t feel like an adult.”
“Me neither.”
“Do you think you ever will?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
A series of faux intimate disclosures somehow led to a conversation about Shakespeare. George referred to Shakespeare as funny, and Jenny said, “But does he really make you laugh? Like have you ever actually laughed out loud reading Shakespeare?” George wanted to say yes; he was pretty sure he had. As he tried to think of examples of passages in Shakespeare that had made him laugh, Jenny confessed that she’d never laughed at Shakespeare, not reading his texts or watching them performed. She wondered if this made her a philistine.
“Do you think I’m a philistine?” she asked. George shook his head.
“What do you think I am?” Jenny asked.
“What do I think you are?”
Jenny nodded. “How would you describe me?”
That was how it started. Jenny wanted George to describe her. And George obliged by coming up with a bunch of complimentary adjectives: kind, generous, idealistic, determined, humble, self-sacrificing, supportive, altruistic . . .
Jenny wasn’t satisfied.
“Sometimes I feel like you don’t really know me,” she said. “Or you’re not interested in getting to know the real me. You think I’m this simple person. I know you love me, but sometimes I wonder if you’re in love with me . . .
“Are you in love with me?”
George didn’t know the answer to this. He didn’t know what it was to be in love. They’d had this conversation before.
Jenny, who claimed to have no memory of what followed, would later refer to the episode as “our Leaving Las Vegas night,” as though it somehow didn’t count, as though it were a darkly humorous anomaly. But George, who did remember it, or most of it, saw it as a pulling back of the curtain, a peek at the hysterical, broken child who’d hitched her wagon to his.
George couldn’t tell Jenny the one thing she wanted to hear, needed to know, and that was how it started. All her fears and insecurities about their relationship came out in a torrent of tears and accusations, and there was nothing George could say or do to reassure her. It didn’t help that many of her concerns were warranted or resonated with George as questions he’d asked himself. Was he just biding his time with her until he “figured shit out,” did he consider her his “intellectual equal,” was this a “healthy relationship”?
Jenny was too far gone to care that she was causing a scene, and George had to coax her to leave the bar. They were halfway home when George noticed she’d forgotten her purse. Jenny seemed indifferent to this fact, but George insisted they go back and retrieve it.
By the time they got back to the apartment, she was mostly incoherent, and very angry.
Here George’s memory began to fray, but he remembered Jenny cornering him in the kitchen and that there was a physicality to her anger. She kept thrusting her face up in his, shouting, crying, spitting. She was trying to provoke him to hit her. That George remained calm seemed to enrage her further.
She picked up a glass and threw it. Had she been aiming for George? He would never know. It hit the wall and shattered.
Jenny was suddenly silent, and still. There was glass all over the floor. George was wearing shoes but Jenny was barefoot. He picked her up so she wouldn’t cut herself.
As he carried her out of the kitchen and to the bedroom, there was knocking at the door.
“Everything okay in there?” boomed Larry’s voice.
“Yep!” George answered. “We’re good!”
George laid Jenny on the bed. She looked up at him with fear and confusion.
“Did I break that glass?” she asked.
George nodded. “You threw it.
“I think you were aiming at me,” he added. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“That’s okay,” he told her.
He wasn’t sure what else to say, so he leaned down and kissed her. Her lips were salty with tears and sweat.
He placed a hand on her breast. He could feel her heart beating.
Wordlessly, with a seamless grace, they transitioned into sex, George slipping inside of her with a tender but feral conviction, and sustaining his erection for longer than he could recall having managed in his post-Lexapro life.
Afterward, they lay nude and entwined. Jenny quickly passed out.
“I do love you,” George told her.
__________________________________
From The Book of George: A Novel by Kate Greathead. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2024 by Kate Greathead. All rights reserved.
