AllFreeNovel
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I rationalized all of it. Love is blind, they say, and it’s true. Being madly, deeply in love is like allowing the sun to blind you just because it also keeps you warm.
“Another?” the bartender asks. I look up. I’ve finished my glass. He passes me a cigarette and a book of matches.
I shouldn’t. I feel good, though. Angry and hurt, but also lightweight, nice. Blunted like a pencil that’s been pressed to the page too hard. “Sure. I’m just going to run out and smoke.”
He nods, and I pass back through the dining room to the exit. I don’t see Finn, but I’ll only be a minute. Outside, cold air nips at me as I light the cigarette. I take my first drag and manage not to cough. I don’t like smoking, but sometimes it feels just right, like now, when it goes straight to my head.
I get out my phone. Seeing the numbers rise—followers, likes, comments—it soothes me. It makes me somebody worth listening to and looking at and that’s hard evidence nobody can take from me. I was saving our last photo for tomorrow, but I decide to post it now. So we’ll hit our goal a day early—even better. It probably won’t technically happen until after midnight, and then I can show it to Finn in the morning for his birthday.
The app takes a few seconds to load before it crashes. I open it again, and the login page pops up, even though I never sign out—I haven’t even used my own account in months. I type in our username and password, but I get an error message, so I try twice more in case the alcohol’s making my fingers fat. It’s not that, though. The password’s wrong. I haven’t had to use it in a while, but I would never forget halstondecember.
Did Finn change it?
My hand begins to shake. I try halstonjanuary, halstonfebruary, and finally halstonmarch.
Nothing. I was online in the cab on the way over here, so I know it worked before dinner. Which means . . .
He locked me out—of our account.
I’m not sure I really believe Finn doesn’t want to share credit with me, but here’s my proof. He’s gone out of his way to make sure I don’t reveal my identity tonight.
Nearly vibrating, I shove my phone in my purse and stamp out the cigarette. Whipping open the door to the restaurant, I head for the dining room. My eyes laser onto Finn near the bar, where he’s talking to the bartender. Probably trying to find me so he can tell me how to live my life just like everyone else. But it’s far worse when he does it. At least Rich and my dad didn’t pretend to be something else to get me to trust them.
“What did you do?” I ask, my heels clicking the wood floor faster and faster.
Finn turns around. “It’s just temporary, until—”
“So it’s true? You changed the password?”
He glances behind me. “Only to prevent you from making an irreversible mistake.”
“A mistake.” The word makes me shudder. “Don’t you realize that makes you sound just like them?”
His face falls. He doesn’t need me to elaborate. He knows the them I’m referring to. “I’m not trying to hurt you,” he says. “This is for your own protection.”
I snort. “My dad thinks I can’t take care of myself. Is that what you think too? That I need to be monitored and manipulated and closed out of something I built.”
“Of course not.” His eyes dart over my head. “Please, Hals. They can hear us.”
“You know how important this is to me.”
He steps forward. “And that’s why I’m trying to keep you from ruining it. If you go public, it changes everything. People know who you are and how to find you. People will be looking at you.”
“Newsflash: they’ve been looking at me. You didn’t seem to mind when praise for your work was filling up your inbox.”
“That’s because right now, you’re a fantasy to them,” he says, his voice rising, “and if you take that away, you’re just you, my girlfriend, my Halston, on display. It’s not safe, and it’s not happening.”
“I don’t need you to protect me. That didn’t work out so well for Rich, did it? Is that what you’re doing? Saving me from myself?”
“I’m the opposite of them.” He sounds strangled. “I’ve tried to be everything to you they’re not, to give you what they can’t. I’m not them.”
“No. You’re worse.” Tears fill my eyes, and I steady myself on a barstool. “You pretended to care. You lifted me up to get what you wanted—for what? Your career? Was it even an accident, running into you at the coffee shop that day? Or did you follow me there like you did to the art gallery, so you could convince me to do this with you?”
“I . . . that isn’t the reason, but—” He grabs his hair in a fist. “It wasn’t an accident. I was waiting for you.”
I turn around.
“Not because I wanted your journal . . . I mean, I did, but not for this—” He calls after me. “Where are you going?”
My chest hurts. He was supposed to be my everything. My rock, my soul mate. I trusted him. “Away from you.”
“I told—no, I asked you not to take off.” He follows me through the restaurant. He was right, the guests heard everything. They’re silent as we pass through. “I don’t know how to reason with you without coming off like your dad,” he says. “I’ve been walking on eggshells since we met, trying not to come off like him, but you know what I think? Maybe you haven’t been completely fair to him. You’re not being fair to me.”
Siding with my dad, just like Rich. I really fucked up, thinking this relationship was any different. Even if Rich tried to keep me in a box, at least he didn’t pretend he wasn’t doing that.
I want to see him.
The thought surprises me, but it’s true. I want to see Rich right now—as a friend. I don’t have many of those, and Rich was my closest one for two years. For all his faults, he’s always been there when I needed him. My dad lives an hour away and if I show up drunk to his house, he’ll never let me live it down.
I exit the building to hail a cab.
“You’re going home, right?” Finn asks behind me.
“I don’t want to go back to that fucking apartment. I feel like I’ve been cooped up there for months.”
“I thought you were happy there.” The hurt in his voice is evident, but then he speaks again. “I don’t think you should go out. I’m sorry, I know saying this won’t make things easier, but you don’t need to drink any more tonight.”
As a cab pulls over, I whirl on Finn. I want to lock him out the way he did to me, except that I have no control over anything in our business. That’s not true for our relationship, though. I want to hurt him. “I’ll go home when I feel like it. I’ll drink what I want, talk to who I want, post what I want.” My hands are in two tight fists. “I need you to change the password back.”
His tie is crooked, his honey-colored hair disheveled, but he looks nothing less than gorgeous and perfect. “No.”
“It’s my business too.”
“You can’t make such a huge decision while you’re in this state.”
“Change it back. Tonight.” I open the door to the cab’s backseat. “We’re this close to our goal—”
“I don’t give a shit about that,” he cries, taking my elbow to pull me from the car. “Who gives a fuck how many followers we have?”
“I do,” I say through a film of tears. “You made me care. You pushed me to do this, and now you’re trying to make me feel stupid for wanting it.”
“I never pushed you, Hals, and I’m not trying to make you feel stupid. I’m saying that’s not important right now—”
“To you. Let me go.”
“To us. And no.”
“You know what’s important to me?” I shove my palms into his chest, and he releases me but doesn’t budge. “You think you know better?” I ask.
“No.”
I try to take a deep breath, but I can’t catch one. “Why don’t you just put me back on the fucking drugs? What made me think you’d accept me like this?” I push him again, and he grabs my wrists. “Is this what
you signed up for? A crazy person? Is it?”
He spins me around to hug me from behind. “This isn’t you,” he says, his hands cold and firm as they keep me in place. “You’re somewhere else right now. Come back to me, Hals.”
My heart pounds a mile a minute. I should’ve done this months ago, before I fell so hard. I knew deep down—nobody wants someone like me. I’m troubled. I make bad decisions. “This is me. Let go.”
“No.”
“You can’t handle me. Nobody can, and maybe I’m better off without any of you. Let go of me.”
“No. I’m not letting you go. You can fight me all you want, but I love you.”
“I’m going to Rich.” It just comes out.
After a few tense moments, he releases me all at once, like I’ve burnt him. “What?”
I stay where I am, back to him as I try to breathe. “I have to process all this—away from you. I’m going to see Rich, my friend, because that’s what I need right now.”
“If you go there, we’re done.”
I get in the backseat of the cab and shut the door, but the passenger’s side window is open.
“I can forgive you anything,” Finn says, “the scene you just made, overdrinking when I warned you not to, telling the people who hired me to do a job something so personal about us. But not this.”
