AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I take a sip. More than a sip. A gulp.
“See?” Maddie says. “You need this.”
“I do, but .?.?.”
“A toast,” Elena interrupts, holding out her glass. Maddie copies her and the two of them stare me down until I reluctantly hold out mine too, the three of us in a perfect circle. “Here is to Gracie, for being an amazing person who doesn’t deserve to have her heart broken. Here is to girls’ night. To being single and independent. To accepting drinks from sexy bachelors, because we donotdate pathetic little boys. We only wantmen.”
“Here, here!” Maddie cheers, and they clink their glasses hard against mine.
I force a small laugh, but I’m doing it again. Focusing too hard on the cutting edges of my heart. I suck in a breath. Elena is right – I do need this. A night with my girls, giggling over cheap wine in the club as the deafening music drowns out every painful thought. By the end of the night, I’ll be hugging a cheap pizza in the backseat of an Uber.
“I haven’t washed my hair in five days,” I admit.
“We can tell. Shower. Now,” Elena orders. She puts a hand on my shoulder and turns me toward the bathroom. “We’ll go through your closet and find you a dress. You just .?.?. get those sweatpants off.” She wrinkles her nose teasingly and shoves me into the bathroom, shutting the door on me.
I tap on my smart watch. It’s only eight. My birthday isn’t over yet, and if there’s a chance to salvage the day, I have to take it. Elena and Maddie are trying their best to make me feel the slightest bit more human. I have to meet them somewhere in the middle, and that requires effort.
Discarding my sweatpants on the floor, I turn on the shower faucet just as I hear Taylor Swift’s “22” blast through my apartment. Of course. What else would my friends play over my speaker on my twenty-second birthday?
Allof Taylor Swift’s albums, apparently. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” blares next, and both Elena and Maddie scream the lyrics at the top of their voices. I imagine them now, dancing in my living area, wine glasses held high.
Maybe tonight isexactlywhat I need.
WESTON
I hate Zeitgeist on the weekends.
It deserves its reputation as the most popular dive bar in downtown San Francisco. It’s grunge as all get-out, rough around the edges, and has the most bizarre rules. If you’ve never been grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged out by a bouncer, then have you ever truly visited Zeitgeist? It’s a rite of passage, given it’s famous for kicking people out over snapping a photo or sitting on a table. But it’s exactly the kind of rowdiness I need tonight.
It’s nearing ten and the patio is packed. Every single picnic table is overflowing with boozed-up patrons and there’s not much standing room left, either. I keep my head down as I navigate through the thick crowds and squeeze back inside the bar. Punk rock roars in my ears and I keep on pushing, past the long bar with endless beer on tap, past the pinball machines, and out onto the street. There’s now a small line to get in.
I stumble off around the corner and find a quiet spot. Leaning back against the graffitied wall, I sink down to the ground and draw my knees up to my chest. Out here, alone, the beers rush to my head. I blink away the stars and fish my phone out of my pocket.
There is a severe lack of notifications on my home screen. Not one single text, missed call or voicemail. Just a resounding silence in response to my pleas.
And I know I shouldn’t do itagain, but my desperation only grows stronger, consuming all of me. Her number sits at the top of my call log, emboldened in red, and I ignore the fact that I have (apparently) already called it nineteen times today. I dial it again.
It doesn’t even ring. It goes straight to voicemail. Am I blocked? Did her phone die? What the fuck?
I suck in a breath of fresh air, and tell her voicemail inbox: “Hey, listen, I’m a little drunk now. But I just .?.?. I just really want to hear your voice, babe. Please call me back so we can talk about this. I love you.I love you.Okay? Are you even listening to these or are you just deleting them as soon as they hit your phone? Because I wouldn’t mind if you deleted the voicemails I left around lunch. I was a crying son of a bitch then. I had a moment. I’m sorry. It’s just that I really do love you. I can be better.”
“Man, you really are scaring the fuck out of me. You arewhipped.”
I pull my phone away from my ear and look up. Cameron has followed me outside and now stares down at me with furrowed brows. Did he listen the entire time? Probably. I’m too drunk to have noticed.
I stand from the ground and stuff my hands into the pockets of my jacket, shaking my head helplessly. “What am I supposed to do?”
“For starters, you need to stop harassing her,” Cameron says, lighting up a cigarette as he leans against the wall next to me. He takes a drag and exhales a plume of smoke into the evening air. “Stop blowing up her phone. It’s been one day. She needs time before she can eventhinkabout reconsidering her choice.”
“But shouldn’t I fight for her?”
“Not like this,” he says, waving his cigarette at me as though I’m some sorry excuse of a man. Cameron is my closest friend, and that means he always tells me things straight. No bullshit. “And I’m not telling you to take Adam’s advice of flying off the rails, because that won’t help either, but you need to relax a little, man. Things happen for a reason, Weston.”
We don’t say much more as he smokes the rest of his cigarette. I stare at the sidewalk, at all the gum embedded in the concrete, and can’t possibly imagineevergetting over her. She has been a part of my life for four years and I took it for granted that she always would be. She knows it too. It’s why she left.
We head back through Zeitgeist to rejoin Adam and Brooks at our table in the beer garden, where a new round of tequila shots is waiting for us. Adam is wasted already, but he’s also superhuman in the way he can drink to obliteration every single weekend and not even have so much as a headache the next morning. His body is that of a sixteen-year-old. For me, one beer too many results in a very fragile experience the next day.
“Did you sneak off to call heragain?” Adam asks with a roll of his eyes. He slides one of the tequila shots across the picnic table toward me.
