Free The Clasp by Sloane Crosley

you or save you.’”
    â€œShould I keep reading?”
    â€œNo.” She shook her head and buttoned her shirt. “No, class dismissed.”
    The students silently filed out of class, avoiding eye contact with one another. The squall had passed but it left an awkward landscape in its wake. Nathaniel walked out with Victor. Neither of them had seen a professional adult break down like that. While they were old enough to know not to giggle, they weren’t quite old enough to know what to do with it. Instead they sat in Nathaniel’s room, cracking open beers on his trunk that doubled as a coffee table, playing video games, waiting for Paul to get out of Principles of Microeconomics so they could all get dinner. Nathaniel alighted briefly on the topic, just long enough to deem it “weird.” But Victor surprised him.
    â€œI think she’s lucky.” He put his can down. “I wouldn’t mind being that passionate about something.”
    It was the most emotionally in-depth conversation he and Victor had ever had.

    â€œNate Healy,” a nurse called blindly into the waiting room even though, by now, he and Victor were the only ones there.
    â€œNat,” he corrected her.
    She looked at him as if he had parroted back the exact same sound.
    â€œThe doctor is ready for you now.”
    Nathaniel got up.
    â€œNat,” Victor called after him, “what did you say to that guy?”
    â€œI told him to go fuck himself.”

EIGHT

Kezia
    S he hated Los Angeles as a concept, but she also hated it on a personal level. Los Angeles was dangerous to the human touch. Like a sleeping python. One never knows when it will shake loose from an açaí-berry coma, whip around, and say something god-awful to your face. And she wasn’t even in show business. The people with whom she took meetings on Rachel’s behalf mistook basic congeniality as an opportunity for intimacy. Kezia had been told, by people trying to befriend her, that she should inject stroke medication into her forehead, how many calories were in her meal, which stylist had dropped a bracelet down the toilet, how to minimize undereye bags, all leading, a few drinks later, to stories of molesting uncles and first loves who had perished in car accidents. Anyway, should we split the burrata?
    One particularly inappropriate crystal vendor told her she was “in great shape for someone who didn’t live here.” This was someone she was in the position of hiring, to whom she (well, Rachel) could give business. She couldn’t imagine dealing with these oddballs at her old job.
    â€œAre you an actress?” the vendor had asked her, tapping his loafer beneath a glass desk above Wilshire Boulevard.
    â€œNo,” she said, opening a binder of Rachel’s designs.
    â€œYou could be,” the vendor decided. “Trust me, I’m good at this. You could be like a young Carol Kane. Like a character actress.”
    â€œAre you a casting agent?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œThen there you have it.” She clicked her pen.
    On the bright side, she traveled to that cultural cesspool often enough to see Nathaniel. The novelty of temporary geography brought them together. Everyone else they knew was still on the East Coast and they were like pioneers. And old friends. If he made jokes better suited to a writers’ room gross-out competition, she didn’t feel obliged to laugh at them. If she called him an asshole, it was because he was being an asshole. But once night fell, something shifted. There was more flirtatious energy between them now than there had been in four years of college. Yet nothing ever happened. Was she too familiar? Lacking in model/actress/musician/designer slashes? Was it Victor? Some guy code that dictated she was never to be touched?
    Whatever it was, once she lost her steely emotional footing, she really lost it. She found herself peering out the airplane window, sinking