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I hope she keeps it for the rest of her life.
I don’t know how long I watch her.
Rick lives just outside the city, but traffic at this time of morning typically isn’t that bad. It can’t be too long before I hear an approaching car. Elle doesn’t move, even as the grey dart of Rick’s sedan slides past and turns into my place.
When Rick steps out and calls out, “Miss Lark!” Elle turns.
She looks back over her shoulder and slowly raises a hand to him before bending to pick up her things.
Then she tilts her head up and punches me square in the chin with one glance.
She knows I’m here, watching her like the emotionally stunted creeper fuck I am.
My heart squeezes into a lump of coal as she stares at me, and the sloshing waves and the crying gulls become part of a hollow silence.
I’m definitely not expecting her to smile, thin and sad.
I don’t know how the fuck she can stand it, but she smiles at me for the briefest second, right before she ducks her head and walks barefoot across the sand to meet Rick.
I want to call out for her, but I don’t have the faintest clue what the fuck to say.
I’m left alone with my brain spinning, watching helplessly as she disappears from my life and into the waiting car.
XIII
SUNSHINE STATE OF MIND
(ELLE)
You know that meme with the stuffed monkey in the light-green shirt?
You know, the one people trot out when someone says or does something that deserves serious side-eye. And the monkey is just looking at the person, then away, like, “I’m gonna mind my business, but yikes.”
That’s how I felt, like everyone was looking at me, when I showed up at the office this morning—the morning after that night.
That night.
I felt like that was how Rick looked at me when he took me home. I’m sure he came because August called him.
August, who clearly didn’t want to talk to me or even see me. Despite spending God only knows how long watching me while I stood in the morning light, trying to pull my head together.
If I had any common sense, I’d quit this whole thing.
Crossing that red line with August was an epic mistake. Whatever silly infatuation I’d gotten into, August is so unreachable that he’ll just call that one quick crashing torrent of desire and wild sex a momentary lapse in judgment.
Maybe it was for both of us.
But what sucks the most is that we’d just started becoming actual friends, trusting each other with personal secrets.
That’s ruined now.
So hey. It would be really easy to let this bleed into our publicly advertised breakup moment, right? It’ll just happen sooner than planned.
That’s what I told myself on the drive home.
It’s what I told myself when I asked Gran to go back to bed, lied that everything was fine, and said that I’d see her at breakfast.
It’s what I told myself through a cold shower, curling up in bed to lick my wounds and cry a little more and fight off another creeping migraine.
