Short story: "I Want You to Be Happy"

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He had promised himself he wouldn’t talk about it and now here he was, talking about it.

Not just talking about it, but shouting specific details directly in her ear. Certain things, obviously, he left unsaid. Over her shoulder, he looked out at the dancefloor, at the other men and women. Briefly, he wished he were a decade younger.

After shouting solidly for the lengths of three entire songs, he came to the end of it. He had worried he wouldn’t know when to stop right up until he did.

She pulled back, nodding, eyes wide. ‘Pretty intense,’ she yelled.

‘Sorry,’ he yelled.

‘No-no, I like it,’ she yelled, a little quieter. ‘It’s like boarding a plane. You go baggage first.’

He tried to yell a laugh.

An interpersonal silence containing all the bar-noise surrounding them developed. He couldn’t think of a good thing to say next; was torn between wanting to move on from what he’d told her and wanting to re-apologise for having overshared—her being, after all, a total stranger.

‘It’s honestly fine,’ she yelled, after he’d yelled a few more sorries. ‘I did ask.’

That was true, he was happy with that. There were no immediate follow-up questions regarding anything he’d just said. ‘Let me buy you a drink.’ He turned around to face the counter.

And made self-eye-contact in the mirror behind the bar; glimpsed his posture. He straightened up. To her: ‘G&T okay?’

She smiled. ‘Sure.’

He ordered two doubles and got what really looked more like a pair of singles; glad, though, to have bought her something; to have a tangible claim on her attention.

They left the main bar area and stood by a wall perpendicular to it, facing the dancefloor sideways.

He winced; his drink was weirdly flat-tasting. ‘I think they might’ve put slimline tonic in these.’

She sipped hers. ‘Definitely.’ Another sip. ‘Love a guy who limits my calories.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, checking her face to make sure she was being sarcastic. ‘That was my plan all along.’

‘So, like—’ she said, at the same time as he said: ‘Do you—’ She gestured like: Go on.

‘Do you,’ he restarted, ‘live around here, or—?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, then explained her complicated sublet situation and its whereabouts.

‘No way,’ he said, ‘I used to live right by you. We could’ve been neighbours. Well, I guess that was, like, forever ago now.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty-five.’

‘Oh,’ she said, without hesitation, ‘I thought you were older than that.’

He laughed very hard to prove he wasn’t offended by her brute sincerity. He suspected, he said, being around all the young people at the bar tonight made him seem older.

‘Or you just look old for your age.’

He bobbed his head, pretending to weigh the thought. ‘Maybe. I think it might just be what I said, though. You’re what, twenty-something?’

‘-Three.’

‘Jesus.’

Now she laughed. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘No,’ he said, although it wouldn’t occur to him to seriously consider the issue until later that night.

He threw back his drink; felt flushed; took a moment to steadily place his empty glass on a nearby table. He was finding it hard to judge the exact distances of spaces between things.

‘Thirsty,’ he didn’t hear her say, but all the same acknowledged that she’d said something by replying: ‘Yeah.’

‘I might get another,’ he added, pointing at her—it was a question.

‘Sure,’ she said.

At the bar, it took him a while to get served; he worried, with the twenty-three-year-old woman out of his sightline for too long, he might return to find her gone.

He didn’t, though, and when she re-emerged into view as he cornered the L-shaped room, he made sure to downplay his relief.

She was intently typing a message on her phone. ‘One second,’ she said, without looking up.

He waited for her to finish texting, holding both their drinks in front of his chest. He resisted making a joke about the seeming length of her message, which, he knew, would just come across as passive-aggressive and annoying.

‘Thanks,’ she eventually said, locking her phone, accepting her drink.

‘Everything good?’

‘So far,’ she said.

He frisked his jacket pockets, slipped a hand into one of them, produced a pack of cigarettes. Before he could even ask, she said: ‘Yeah, let’s.’

*

Outside, he found himself surprised by the lightness of her hair; back inside, it’d just looked the same colour as the room.

The smoking area was wood-panelled, narrow, and if not busier, certainly more population-dense than the bar itself.

They shouldered through tens of people to sit on a bench occupying the warm circle of light cast by an overhead halogen heater.

‘So, who’d you come here with?’ the woman said.

The man cleared his throat. ‘Some friends. But I’m not sure where they went.’

He lit a cigarette, went to offer her one, realised she was vaping. ‘She vapes,’ he said flatly, and was surprised to hear her laugh.

‘I know, embarrassing. I started as an alternative to smoking, but now I just do both.’

‘Want?’ he said, offering her a cigarette; she accepted, almost lit it the wrong way round, lit it the right way round, smiled at him.

‘Wait, so,’ she said, exhaling a faint tobacco contrail, ‘where’d you say you live again?’

He said he hadn’t said, and that his apartment was roughly the same distance from the bar as hers but in the opposite direction.

‘Oh, cool,’ she said. ‘Live on your own?’

‘N— Yeah.’

‘Had to think about that.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Because of the thing I told you about. Earlier.’

She knocked the heel of her palm against her forehead, remembering. ‘Doy. I’m sorry. And where’s she at now?’

‘She’s been—’ he started saying, then interrupted himself. ‘Does it matter?’

‘No, not at all, definitely not.’ She busied herself fiddling with her nearest available physical distractions: cigarette; drink; her hands themselves.

The heater shut off, consigning them to cold and darkness; he reached up and pressed its timer switch, renewing the warmth and light. ‘No need to thank me.’

She bowed her head. ‘Thank you.’

He forced himself not to notice as she spilled her drink a little. He sipped his in slow-motion, careful not to repeat her mistake. ‘So, what’re you doing the rest of your weekend?’

‘Well,’ she rolled her eyes up at the night sky, then back down to him, ‘I’m working tomorrow.’

He discarded the butt of his cigarette and chained another; frowned. ‘Tomorrow’s Saturday.’

‘I’m aware. I work at a coffee shop on weekends.’

‘And on weekdays?’

Microexpression of discomfort crossing her face: ‘I also work at the coffee shop.’

‘So you don’t have, like, a real job?’ He knew, as soon as he’d said it, exactly how this question sounded; grimaced to play it off retroactively as a tease.

‘No, Father, I don’t have a real job.’

He was pleased she’d taken his words with unintended humour. He feigned concern: ‘Because this is an expensive city to not have a real job in.’

‘Insightful, thanks. And you are a—?’

‘Copywriter. Lead copywriter. At a creative agency.’

‘Wow. Sounds really real.’

‘It is, yeah,’ he said, refusing to take the bait. He withheld that he was lead copywriter at a barely solvent creative agency top-heavy with senior staff; redundancy looming every quarter. ‘And, so, working at a coffee shop. D’you have, like, an ultimate career path in mind?’

She pretended to gag. ‘No. Gross.’

‘Good to have a plan, though. Good to have, like, y’know. Dreams.’

Her voice pitch-shifted higher, defensive: ‘I do have dreams. Just not very career-y ones, I guess.’

‘Such as?’

Short pause while she decided whether or not to say. ‘I write stuff. I like to write.’

‘Write as in? Fiction?’

‘Actually poetry mainly.’

‘Poetry,’ he said softly, the word itself someway poetic. ‘I write too, sometimes. Or, I did write. I used to.’

‘But then you gave up on your dreams and now you just go to work all day and feel like something’s missing?’

Her words, though clearly spoken in jest, had struck at the central insecurity of his life with a precision and force that left him momentarily speechless; crushed.

After a second, he managed: ‘Something like that.’

He tried; couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about before they’d started talking about writing. He attempted: ‘So, d’you live near here?’

‘You already asked me that.’

He remembered now. ‘That’s right, I did.’ Then: ‘That was actually just a test. I was testing you.’

‘And I passed,’ she said, extinguishing her cigarette.

She offered to get the next round; he refused; she insisted; he relented. When she left, he pre-emptively reactivated the heater’s timer switch. He checked his phone; struggled to keep a steady eye on its screen: no new notifications.

He was fully drunk now, he realised—his attention kept digressing from whatever he tried to focus on. For stress-reasons, he hadn’t been eating much lately; imagined the night’s gin reservoiring up inside him with no real digested food to absorb it.

He had the feeling of knowing he was about to sneeze, but didn’t sneeze. Then a few seconds later, he did sneeze.

‘Bless you,’ the twenty-three-year-old woman said, approaching him.

‘It’s so busy tonight,’ the thirty-five-year-old man observed, just to say something as she set their drinks down, ice clicking in their glasses.

‘Payday,’ she said, reseating herself. ‘It’s why I’m out. Next Friday we’ll all be broke again.’

‘Right,’ he said, sipping and feeling guilty about the drink she’d bought him. ‘Thanks. For this.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she said.

They fell quiet. He looked around for something else to notice.

He asked her some basic life questions and she spoke about herself for several minutes. She didn’t ask him a single return-question but that was fine—it saved him the effort of having to try and be funny. He finished his drink.

That last drink made the already pretty woman seem even prettier; she was very pretty now.

‘What?’ she said, being nice. ‘Why’re you looking at me?’

He unfolded his arms; couldn’t recall having folded them in the first place. ‘I wasn’t.’

She smiled. ‘Creep.’

He should kiss her soon, he knew—if she turned him down, he’d still feel like he’d done his best.

He leant in toward her and only became aware that they’d kissed at the moment of their pulling away again. Their second kiss was deeper and tasted minerally. When they kissed a third time, their hands floated blindly toward each other. Eventually, she leant out of the kiss.

Afterward, the first person to talk was neither of them.

‘ There you are,’ called a new woman’s voice from further on down the smoking area. The voice’s owner was short-haired and appeared to be about the same age as the twenty-three-year-old woman; evidently they were friends.

‘Here I am,’ the twenty-three-year-old woman replied.

The short-haired friend interposed herself on the bench between the twenty-three-year-old woman and the thirty-five-year-old man, putting her arm around the former and totally ignoring the latter.

As the two young women talked, the thirty-five-year-old man sipped the icemelt at the bottom of his glass. He resisted the urge to check his phone.

After a while, the twenty-three-year-old woman raised her voice and, referring to the thirty-five-year-old man, asked her short-haired friend: ‘How old do you think he is?’

The short-haired friend surveyed the thirty-five-year-old man’s face; thought for a moment. ‘Forty?’

The twenty-three-year-old woman snort-laughed. ‘He’s thirty-five.’

‘Sorry but you do look old,’ the short-haired friend said, not even trying to sound apologetic. ‘Like, you have an old vibe.’

The thirty-five-year-old man made sure to react smilingly, even though he felt that the twenty-three-year-old woman had sold him out to amuse her short-haired friend. ‘Someday it’ll happen to you,’ he said.

The short-haired friend with her arm still around the twenty-three-year-old woman asked the thirty-five-year-old man to take a photo of them using her phone and he said sure. When he leant back and raised her phone to take the picture, both women tilted their heads to the side and smiled. He took a couple with the flash off, one with the flash on, gave her back her device, and watched as the women reviewed the photos.

The short-haired friend went on to ask the thirty-five-year-old man a few questions which he answered politely, waiting for their interaction to be over so the good part of his night could continue.

Eventually the short-haired friend booked an Uber home. The thirty-five-year-old man expected the twenty-three-year-old woman to announce that she was heading home also, but that didn’t happen. ‘I’ll stay here for a bit,’ she said.

Before leaving, the short-haired friend told the twenty-three-year-old woman and the thirty-five-year-old man to have fun; implored him: ‘Please don’t murder her.’

‘I’ll try my best,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ the twenty-three-year-old woman said as her short-haired friend receded from view into the smoking area; other bodies. ‘She can be a bit much sometimes.’

The thirty-five-year-old man lied: ‘I thought she was funny.’

He didn’t want to push his luck by trying to kiss her again too soon, and anyway his drink was empty. ‘Shall we go back inside?’

Headrush now as he arose from the bench, swaying a little when standing.

Inside, the music had gotten louder, the lights lower. She walked before him across the dancefloor, her back occasionally snapshotted into frames by a strobe light that flashed in rhythmic time to the very loud song.

They stood by the bar, close to where he’d first approached her.

‘When’s this place close, d’you think?’ he yelled.

She said something he couldn’t hear; he turned his ear to her; she repeated: ‘I don’t know.’

‘You like this music?’ he yelled. She shook her head.

‘Wanna go somewhere else?’

He lipread: Please.

*

After they left the bar, she said: ‘What about your friends?’

‘I think they’ve gone already,’ he said.

The air was damp and coldening—the first such night since the summer.

She clasped her hands together into a single fist and breathed on them. ‘Where to now?’

He spoke fast to get it over with: ‘How about back to mine?’

‘Sure,’ she said, either nonchalant or performing nonchalance.

He set them walking in the right direction, striding carefully so as not to trip—keeping ahead of his own drunkenness. The pavement was wet-dark and petrichor-smelling, but at no point had he been aware of rainfall. They walked between the misty illuminated globes of streetlights.

‘What’s your name?’ she said.

‘Charles,’ Chuck said. ‘But everyone calls me Chuck. I remember your name.’

‘I never told you it,’ she said, defiant, like she’d caught him in a lie.

‘You did, actually.’

‘I didn’t, actually.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Okay then, what is it?’

‘It’s Joey.’

Joey lowered her face. ‘Oh. When’d I say that?’

Chuck thought. ‘It was, like, the first or second thing you said to me. At the bar. Right after I said my name.’

‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘Sorry. My memory’s pretty bad.’

‘No problem,’ he said, cautious not to sound any more invested in her than she was in him, as though he could have just as easily forgotten her name.

‘I think you’re probably the oldest person I’ve ever gone home with,’ she said. ‘But I don’t usually do this sort of thing.’

He selectively ignored the first part of what she’d said. ‘And what sort of thing is that?’

After a longish pause: ‘This sort of thing.’

He took that as a cue to kiss her again so he turned to her and tried but she halted him midway; flatted a palm against his chest: ‘Wait.’

Immediately he felt afraid, horrified, like he’d done something really wrong; maybe the gap between their ages was problematic and he was a bad person. ‘Y’okay?’ he asked thinly; his heartbeat louder in his ears than his voice.

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘sorry, I think my breath is probably all cigarette-y.’

‘That’s fine,’ he said, so disproportionately relieved it felt like a religious experience.

‘D’you have any gum?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

When they next encountered an all-night corner shop she went inside. He stood outside alone and wondered what was happening with his life. Shortly, she came back out with an open pack of spearmint-flavoured gum.

‘Gum?’ she said, chewing.

‘No,’ he said. He ought to be nicer. ‘But thanks.’

*

He led them along a declivity to where the pavement met a flight of stone steps down to an embankment of the city’s easternmost canal.

They walked the towpath toward his building, talking and sometimes smoking. The dark, stilly body of water beside them made the night seem calm; above it, the moon looked small and far away—starlike.

Eventually they deviated from the towpath via an access ramp back to street-level. They passed several vacant commercial rental units and arrived at the awninged entrance of his canalside newbuild.

‘Here’s me,’ Chuck said.

He admitted them into the building by scanning a circular blue keyfob, which he then pendulumed in front of her eyes. ‘They can track whenever you come or go with this.’

‘Who can?’

‘Landlords,’ he said matter-of-factly.

They elevatored in silence to the fourth floor. In the hall, as they approached his front door, he wondered what she might be expecting. For personal reasons, he found the place depressing, although he had to imagine a barista her age would be impressed by it. He opened the door and let her enter before him.

‘Impressive,’ she said, a few seconds later, as if having read his thought.

‘Yeah, it’s okay,’ he mumbled.

Standing in the middle of the living room and pointing sequentially clockwise at four of the five doors opening off from it, he gave her an abbreviated tour: ‘Bathroom, kitchen, study, bedroom.’

‘Cool,’ she said.

He spun around and pointed at the fifth door. ‘And front door, obviously.’

She nodded and, a couple of times, loosely clapped her hands before and behind her waist. She circled the room; saw the open 35 cl gin bottle on the mantel of its imitation fireplace: ‘Pre-drinks?’

‘Yeah, a few of us started here,’ Chuck said.

Joey fell onto the sofa and removed her shoes. ‘Well, shall we have some post-drinks?’

Chuck’s mouth made a weird, suction-release noise as he went to talk; he hoped she hadn’t heard. ‘That’d be nice.’

Retrieving the gin bottle from its shelf, he discovered it was emptier than he’d anticipated; its waterline only a finger or two above dry.

He took the bottle into the kitchen and cleared away some leftover countertop debris from last night’s cyclist-delivered meal; tonight’s powdered meal-replacement shake.

He fixed drinks, breaking into a second, larger bottle of gin to supplement the end of the first, then carried them through to the living room.

There she stood in front of the picture window, gazing out at its widescreen view: the city skyline; distant lights glowing amber and gold; high-rises monumentally indifferent to the goings-on of their microscopic lives.

‘Jesus,’ she said to the vista, and stepped away. He watched fade, on the pane of glass, a little cloud her breath had fogged.

Taking her drink from his hand: ‘Literally how can you afford this place?’

‘Literally I can’t.’

‘Ha.’

‘No, really. Literally. The rent’s slowly— Well actually, it’s pretty quickly turning me broke.’

She sipped; coughed: ‘Strong.’

‘You have roommates, you said?’

‘Correct,’ she said.

‘Was your friend from earlier one of them?’

‘Good guess, but no. That was my best friend from uni. I wish I lived with her.’

‘You like them, though? Your roommates.’

She shrugged. ‘Sure. We’re not that close but, like—’

‘Right.’

‘We get along.’

‘Right.’

‘Way better than at my last place.’

‘Oh yeah?’

And she told a long story about people he didn’t know, referring to them all by first name as if he did. Throughout the story he imagined what it would be like fucking her.

He finished the drink in his hand; noticed she’d barely drunk any of hers. Both of them just standing there.

Should he put his arms around her? He put his arms around her. Then let them drop. ‘Wanna see my room?’

‘Alright,’ she said, though he lost her on the way.

From the study—next to the bedroom—he heard hysterical laughter. He U-turned between the adjacent rooms and found her holding a paperback with a photo of a smiling woman on its cover.

Laughing and flapping the book, she said: ‘Why d’you own a copy of Lean In ?’

He sighed, secretly pleased to have an opportunity to make her feel bad for him: ‘My ex.’

Shelving the book: ‘Ah.’ Then she kissed him, backing him into his room. ‘I’m just gonna get some water.’

‘Sure.’

‘You have two taps,’ she called from the kitchen.

‘Yeah, use the skinny one,’ he called back, staring at the bedroom’s almost white wall. ‘It’s filtered.’

She returned carrying his Nalgene, three-quarters full. She kissed him again, her mouth very wet.

He voice-activated the bedroom lamp. The light came on at full brightness and revealed a small freckle field across the bridge of her nose. She squinted. He spoke to the lamp and made it 70 per cent dimmer.

They kissed more in the semi-dark and moved onto the bed. She took off her shirt and then her necklace which she placed carefully on the bedside table, its thin silver chain spread loosely in a circle.

She undid her bra and he lay there looking up at her and his main thought was she was beautiful and without even knowing it he realised he’d just said it. She turned her face away from him and he apologised. She turned her face back and she was smiling.

She instructed him to remove his shirt and he did so. They lay side by side with the skin of their torsos touching. The moment felt someway ceremonial. She shed her remaining articles of clothing. He manoeuvred her on top of him, holding her hips like handles. Every action between them now was escalatory; advancing the moment he’d be inside her.

Her body was so perfect he didn’t know where to aim his eyes. He sat up and ran his mouth across her shoulders, neck, breasts.

She reached beneath herself and unzipped his fly. He couldn’t be certain, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t hard. The external pressure of her hand confirmed this.

But anyway, his own hand was on her pussy now so he tried to just focus on that. Her pussy was coated wet and smelled like life itself. His wrist hurt a little from the strange upward angle he was working it at, so at some point he had to switch hands.

He wasn’t getting any harder and in fact he seemed somehow to have gotten softer. She appeared also to have noticed this and dismounted him. Lying beside him, she worked her hand diligently on what shaft was available to her, pulling, he felt, a little too hard on the downstroke, only reducing the possibility of his erectness.

He continued reciprocally masturbating her and she spoke occasional monosyllabic, vowel-y non-words to him. He tried not to think about his penis, which resulted only in his being unable to think about anything else. He considered maybe trying to just stuff it inside her like a sort of marshmallow, but probably he couldn’t even do that.

He tensed and relaxed the muscles in his thighs and buttocks, hoping to manually alter the blood flow to his groin. His entire world shrank down to his desire to get hard for her.

He was revisited by a vague feeling of physical ineptitude that’d haunted him since childhood; failing to throw the ball properly on sports day at primary school, his father watching.

Futilely, she persisted in jacking him off. He could feel the sexual tension between them depreciating in real time. As if to grope his way toward tumescence, he cupped her breasts in his hands.

Briefly and without success she attempted to arouse his penis by oral means, a last-ditch effort which he knew from the outset was doomed—his mind and body having by now fully separated. His luck had turned on him; he would not get hard tonight.

Seeming to intuit this wordlessly, she lay back on her side, facing him. Her eyes were closed, but she smiled calmly in his direction.

He propped himself up on one elbow. He should explain, he thought. ‘I think it’s because,’ he said, ‘I don’t usually sleep with people I don’t know.’

‘Okay,’ she said, re-opening her eyes.

‘Old-fashioned.’ He pointed at himself. ‘Or maybe just old.’

She sympathy-laughed. ‘You said it, not me.’

He knew there was nothing more to say, but still he went on talking. ‘It’s really nothing personal. This kind of thing just happens, I think. I mean, it doesn’t usually happen to me or anything. I am normal. And so are you. You’re, like, super attractive. I just—’

‘It’s really okay,’ she said. She closed her eyes again and sleepily held his hand to her mouth and kissed it. It was the most straightforwardly affectionate thing anyone had done for him in a long time, and after it his face felt hot.

There followed a long interval of silence.

He heard her breathing slow. He wanted to say her name. ‘Joey,’ he said, maybe ten minutes later. She didn’t stir. He felt very alone and wished she hadn’t fallen asleep yet.

Next to her, he found he couldn’t sleep; couldn’t relax—the rotation of his thoughts only spinning faster and faster.

Why, he wondered staring up at the ceiling, did God create such a pathetic person as me? To watch me squirm around and suffer? All my little vanities, insecurities. My failures.

He was so tired, now, he could feel his blinks getting slower. But still he couldn’t sleep. Perhaps a little sulkily, he rolled away from her and faced the wall.

He found himself listening to the drone of traffic beyond his bedroom window, something he never normally paid attention to enough to hear. Then he must have fallen asleep because her alarm woke him up.

From his pillow, he looked out through the undrawn curtains: the increasing day; a paranormal-looking, red-orange dawn breaking across the city.

Drowsily, she stopped her alarm. She sat up with the duvet tented about her shoulders and started getting dressed under it.

‘It’s early,’ he said.

‘I know, sorry,’ she said. ‘I have work.’

‘When?’

She checked her phone’s lockscreen. ‘In, like, thirty minutes.’

He reached for his own phone; checked it. ‘It’s literally seven a.m., though.’

‘I’m opening.’

‘Oh.’

‘But that’s the grind, right?’

For the last few mid- and post-pandemic years, Chuck’s job had been entirely work-from-home; optionally, he visited the office some afternoons. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘You’re gonna be so tired,’ was the next thing he said, watching her put on her shoes by the apartment’s front door. He resented the way he sounded: worried, maternal.

‘I’ll live,’ she said breezily, compounding his self-resentment. ‘Can’t pay the rent with just my heart of gold.’

He refrained from asking whether she was going to shower or change clothes. ‘Well, nice meeting you.’

‘Yeah, it was,’ she said.

Awkwardly, they hugged. She seemed taller now. Then he remembered she was wearing shoes and he wasn’t.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t yet requested her number and he promptly did so; handing over his phone already opened at his contacts screen, leaving her no real choice but to comply. She inputted her number and saved her name in all caps: JOEY.

They exchanged a few touchless goodbyes and he let her out of the apartment. After he’d closed the door behind her, it immediately seemed like she’d never been there at all.

He stood by the living room window, waiting for the distant back of her head to appear above its sill. Then there she was. He watched as she crossed and turned away down the arced street in front of his building, into the new-day early-morning light and out of his life maybe forever.

__________________________________

From I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Strays & Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Jem Calder.