I watched the conversation bounce back and forth like a ping-pong match, everyone leaning in for the latest volley.
Gina’s eyes lit up. “So was Jocelyn,” she repeated.
“I still think she was perfect for you,” said someone—probably Melanie.
“No, no,” Gina said quickly, waving a hand tipped in glossy cream-colored nails, her stack of bracelets sliding with the movement.“We’re not talking about me and my ridiculous romantic misadventures.”
I couldn’t help it; I snorted into my cup.
Like clockwork, Gina’s gaze snapped to mine. Her dark eyes had that piercing intensity she used on strangers and stubborn bartenders, but now it was focused squarely on me. I met her look with a warning arch of my brow.
Don’t do it.
Too late.
She threw an arm around my shoulders, pulling me into an exaggerated sway that made the room dip more than the wine had already managed. “We should really be talking about my poor, sad, romantic little artist.”
“Wait a—Gina, stop.” I squirmed out from under her, pushing her away with a half-hearted shove. “I’m not lonely.”
“Are you with anyone right now, Brielle?” Melanie asked, practically purring across the table.
“She hasn’t been on a date in years!”
“That’s such an exaggeration,” I said. “I went on a date last semester. During my writing residency, remember?”
The looks around the table said no one remembered. Or they didn’t believe me.
Which was a fluke, honestly. Getting into the residency, I mean. Another expensive gamble, dressed up as an opportunity. Another chance to drain money I didn’t have, in exchange for bunk beds and soggy cafeteria salads and the privilege of writing stories that weren’t going anywhere.
I’d realized that halfway through the trip after a rejection from a well-known literary magazine who was one of many proclaiming my writing just wasn’t what they were looking for. The residency unfortunately wasn’t going to be some magical leap forward into my writing career. That no one was going to “discover” me. That it might just be another line on a résumé no one would read.
So, yeah, I had gotten a little distracted.
His name was Jimmy. Thirty-eight. Salt-and-pepper hair that he always wore pulled back into a low ponytail with a soft elastic he kept on his wrist. Hair long enough to tug, once, and he had laughed—low, with that amused, knowing sound deep in his throat, like he wasn’t surprised, like he’d expected me to do it.
He was writing a nonfiction case study on rural health infrastructure in Appalachia—very serious. He made sure I knew it too, though he’d leave out pages for me to read by the coffee maker in the shared lounge. The pages were heavy. Earnest. Full of numbers and suffering and statistics with no clear solution.His voice in them was calm and compassionate, the kind that made you think he was probably better in writing than in real life.
We weren’t really supposed to get involved with each other—technically. But it was one of those unspoken things. The kind that happened when people are trapped in too-close quarters with too many feelings and not enough distractions. It felt inevitable.
It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even lust. Not really.
It was more like gravity. Like leaning too far in and not catching yourself in time.
He told me once, lying on his back in bed, that I reminded him of someone. He didn’t say who. He didn’t have to. I thought we both knew I wasn’t going to be the person in his story. Just a person. A paragraph maybe. A single striking detail.
Still, there was something about the way he looked at me after I read one of my pieces aloud during the workshop. Like he’d been holding his breath and didn’t realize until the end that he started breathing again.
That part I kept.
The rest? I didn’t know. We’d slept together a few times. We shared a bottle of bourbon on the porch during a rainstorm. Once, he kissed me in the hallway like it was an apology. Another time, he left early from a critique session without saying goodbye. I thought we both knew it was going nowhere, but still, it felt necessary at the time.
Necessary in the way that mistakes sometimes were, especially when you were pretending you still believed you were going to be a writer, not just a glorified secretary who used to have potential.
Now, it was just a fuzzy blur in my memory. Not unpleasant, just vague. Like when you tried to recall the exact smell of a placeyou’d only visited once. You remembered the feeling more than the details.
And maybe that was enough. Maybe that was all it was ever supposed to be.
I didn’t write about Jimmy afterward.
