“Do you want to know the sad part?” Seth asks, and I nod. “She told us last night that she thought you were into him, because you guys were flirting so much, and she was trying to get Cole to see the light about the New York guy and pick you instead. She thought if he took you dancing, maybe he would figure it out.”
“So she wanted Cole to dump me for being a fuckboy —” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “— So that Cole could go out with me?”
Seth laughs. “Pretty much, yeah.”
“What a fucking mess.” We’re on the banks of Prospect Park Lake, and I settle down in the grass. Seth sits down beside me. “For the record, I don’t think I’m a fuckboy. Maybe you can tell Bree I said so.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I lie down in the grass, folding my arms behind my head. “I’m — kind of a dumbass. I mean, not about the stuff I actually do — you know, work shit — but when it comes to people. I know I miss stuff. It’s like — I walk through the world and everybody else has the decoder ring to life but mine was lost in the mail. But Cole — he never really minded, you know? He just takes it in stride and he’s so fucking good to me. And like, beautiful. I don’t know what the fuck he sees in me.”
Seth lies down beside me. “It sounds like there’s abutin there.”
I sigh. “I just feel like — I dunno, he’s not telling meeverything. Like he’s the one who told me that if we got together, it had to be just sex and nothing else. But then Bree says he’s calling her on the phone and crying because I’m the one who’s hurting him. But all I ever did was respect the boundaries thathefucking set. If he wanted something different, why didn’t he tell me?”
“Have you talked to him about it?” Seth asks.
“I fuckingcan’t—” I burst out. “He just says he’s fine, like he doesn’t think I can handle anything. And he won’t talk about —” Sky white over my head, the August haze pressing me to the earth. Blades of grass poking my skin, tickling my bare calves. The thick scent of dirt. I breathe in and out. “I know I fucked up, back then. If I had that night over — but he won’t talk about it, he won’t tell me why heleft— why he never called —”
“He told us about your prom last night,” Seth says carefully. “Did he ever tell you what happened after he left?”
Dad’s voice, frantic with worry. A sleepless night, the glowing digits on my alarm clock a mockery. Cole’s mother, cold as ice, as if her son’s face had been carved out of stone.
I’ve never talked to anyone about any of this.
“I know there was an accident.” The words come from some deep vault within me. “Hannah’s mom drove me home from prom, but when I got there, Dad was out. He got home a little while later, and he was — like he was when we found out about Mom. He said Cole had crashed Sharon’s car, that she needed Dad todrive her to the scene. He wouldn’t let me leave the house until the next day. But when I finally did — Cole’s mom met me at the door. She called me ‘the other boy.’ And she said they were taking him away. And that was the last I heard from him until I saw him in April.”
Seth takes a deep breath, and then lets it out slowly. “There’s more to the story, I think. Alotmore that you deserve to know. But it’s not my story to tell.”
I glance over at him, and he’s lost in thought. “It’s Cole’s?”
Seth turns his head toward me, and his brown eyes are full of urgency. “Look, I don’t know the dude anywhere near as well as you or Bree do, but I believe him when he says he loves you. He’s losing his shit over you. And I hope you’ll give him another chance.”
I picture the whole tangled mess, and I cover my face with my hands. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Just call him,” Seth urges. “I know he wants to work this out as much as you do. But it’s not going to happen until you actually talk to him.”
“I’ll think about it,” I sigh.
***
I don’t call him.
I miss him like crazy. I can’t stop thinking about his crooked smile, about the light in his eyes when he looks at me. The way he snuffles in his sleep, seeking me outon my side of the bed and throwing an arm across my waist when he finds me. The scent at the nape of his neck, the notch of his collarbone, the little hollows just inside his hips, and how he grips the sheets when I nuzzle them. The way he teases me, the way he zeroes in on me even in a crowded room and always seems to know what I’m feeling, even when I don’t know myself. I open our text thread and I read the last messages, a week’s worth of flirtations exchanged under Bree and Seth’s noses, and I long for that ease, for that playfulness. I want it backdesperately.
But when my thumb hovers over the call button, my stomach turns to ice.
I picture his tearstained face on Bree’s front lawn. I picture him walking away from me, when we were young. I think of every word I haven’t said, every word that lodges itself in my gullet, unwilling to push through to the light of day. And I know I can’t present him with the raw hamburger that is my heart.
Besides, it’s September, which means school is back in session. I’m grinding again, shuttling back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan, teaching five days a week at three different schools and trying to keep my head above water, to escape the undertow of despair. I tell myself this isn’t anything I haven’t done before, that muscle memory will carry me through. But somehow, just a few months stepping out of my rut has reshaped the earth in front of me, and I can’t find the groovesagain. There isn’t a part of me that Cole hasn’t touched, and I see his imprint everywhere.
I force myself to get up in the morning, to shower and put on clean clothes and eat at least twice a day, to show up for work and teach my classes. I don’t get off the subway at 23rd Street for a late afternoon quickie, and I don’t sit in quiet restaurants with interesting menus. I don’t eat out at all. Instead, I go home and I hunch over my desk and I work until my eyes are blurry and my head is full of cotton. Then I fall into bed, and if I’m lucky I manage six hours of broken sleep, dreams haunted by unseen and unnamed dread.
Before everything, before Cole and I fucked it up so badly, Bree and Seth had floated the idea of a joint bachelor and bachelorette party. But with things as they are, it’s not a good idea, and so one weekend I take the bus up to Boston and I meet up with Seth and his groomsmen and we go to an escape room and then a brewery tour. We end up back at Seth and Bree’s apartment, gaming until three in the morning, and it’s nice, I guess. But Bree takes her party to a luxury resort in St. Barts, and I stalk Cole’s Instagram, scrolling through pictures of white sand beaches and bright turquoise water, of tropical greenery and outrageously colorful cocktails. It’s where he belongs, in an exotic place with beautiful people, and he looks right at home in the pictures, with people who understand him. And it tears something ugly inside me to think about howwide the gulf between us really is, how I could never give him any of this, how I would never fit in.
Three weeks into September, I’m sitting at the desk in my apartment, the dregs of a bowl of Kraft mac and cheese beside me. It’s late, and I’m finally finished grading the latest stack of response papers. But it’s also the start of the academic hiring season, and even though this is my third year on the market and I know my chances of getting a tenure-track job are slim at best, I still have to try. So I open a tab in my browser and navigate to one of my usual job hunting sites.
And there’s a new listing.
