I laugh, except it comes out broken and wet. “I wish.”
“And you told him that’s not what happened?”
“Yes.” My hands fly up helplessly. “I tried. I-I tried to explain that I signed the lease before—before all of this got…” My throat closes.Bigger. Real. Important.“I tried to explain, and he kept cutting me off, and then Aaron came over and made it worse, and Grayson nearly hit him, and I had to pull him away, and then he just?—”
My phone buzzes beside me on the couch.
I freeze.
Zoe glances at it. “Is that him?”
I don’t know why my stomach drops like maybe,maybethis will be the message where he says he’s sorry, where he says he overreacted, where he says come home and we’ll talk.
My hands are shaking so badly that I almost drop the phone when I pick it up.
Grayson:
It’s over. I’m done.
That’s all it says. There is no explanation, no softness, no room left for me to try to explain.
Something tears wide open inside me. The tears that never really stopped hit harder. This is worse. It’s instant and violent and I fold in half around the phone with this awful sound ripping out of me, and suddenly I can’t breathe again. Snot, tears, hiccuping gasps, mascara, all of it. Every ugly thing a body can do when it’s hurting too much.
“Oh, Carly.” Zoe is on the couch beside me in a second, hauling me against her. “Oh, fuck him. Fuck him for that.”
“He’s s-shutting me out,” I sob into her shoulder. “He won’t even let me explain.”
“I know.”
“I don’t—don't even want that a-apartment.” The words come out mangled. “I don’t care about the apartment, Zoe, I don’t care, I just—I want to f-fix it. I want to go back and fix it and I c-can’t. I just want him.”
She rubs a hand up and down my back while I shake apart all over her couch. “Okay. Okay. Then the apartment is just an apartment. We’ll deal with the apartment later.”
“I-I want to break the lease.”
“Then we’ll look at that.”
“I-I don’t care if I lose money.”
“We’ll look at it,” she repeats firmly, because I’m spiraling and she knows it.
I pull back just enough to look at her. “W-what about my job?”
“Worst case? You don’t go back there.”
A fresh wave of panic crashes over me. “N-no, no, that’s my job.”
“I know.”
“I worked s-so hard for that promotion,” I choke, gasping between the words.
“I know.”
“And Penelope—” My voice shreds on her name. “I can’t just—just disappear on her. I can’t do that to her. She’ll think she did something wrong. She blames herself. Gray—Gray said?—”
“I know.”
Penelope is probably going to ask where I am, and Grayson is probably going to tell her something clipped and final, and she is going to carry it around in her little chest like it’s her fault somehow, and I hate him for this, for shutting this down, for closing me out like it was easy.
