“I’m just… not good at parking—”
“Same difference.”
The ringing in my ears has turned into buzzing, and the longer Max is sitting at my kitchen table, surrounded by my unpacked life, the louder it gets. “Maybe you’re right. But can’t we just go back to being friends? I get not wanting to date me. I wouldn’t want to,either. But this, the business… Max, we make great films together. Please. Don’t throw that away.”
Me. Don’t throwmeaway.
Max’s frown widens as we grow quiet again, and it’s such a silly little thing, how much I wish my best friend was smiling at me instead. But I don’t know who else I can talk to about this except for Max. My birth mom had never been able to handle having a kid, let alone a neurodivergent one, and my birth dad had left the picture so quickly, there wasn’t a trace of him in our house. No photos. Gone. And Max is the last person who met me as that nervous, traumatized foster kid, with my new college textbooks and glittery dreams. He saw parts of me that nobody else ever will, those final wispy moments of my childhood before I became a real person. Making other friends—letting anyone else in—would mean having to reopen the wound and share that pain again.
And… I’d thought I’d gotten better. I’d thought that maybe, when I’d grown up and become a successful person, and Max had taken me under his wing and made me as palatable as possible, I’d somehow become less disposable. Because the terrible truth is that losing my birth parents had been like watching wind rip dandelion fluff from the stem—natural. A little expected.
Losing my best friend is unfathomable.
“Jesus, this is exactly why we can’t work together anymore. You never let anything go.” Max rakes his hair back and sighs sharply. “I don’t want to make sad docs about creepy old politicians anymore.”
“But we won awards.”
“Winning isn’t all that matters.”
“But—”
“I know you don’t want to be like your mom, dude, but seriously. Let it go.”
Tears. I’m officially crying. “That’s a low fucking blow,” I say, grabbing a napkin and twisting so he can’t see my red face.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. Tears always hit him right in the feelings, though he’s trying to stay in his anger. “Think of it this way. This can be positive for the both of us. We’ve become completely different people as we’ve gotten older. I’m going to make the sickest movie about Formula 1 ever, and you can do whatever weird artsy shit you want to.”
Everyone has certain words they never want to hear. For Max, it’s that he’s ugly. He isn’t, of course. He’s ridiculously striking, a Norman Rockwell painting animated into life. But his knees and arms grew before the rest of him, and getting called gangly and awkward for years warped him into a man who desperately craves positive attention. Even now, in the thick of the worst I’ve ever felt, I understand why he’d cheated. He couldn’t not. With a sporty, fun woman who admires his work, it was game over.
My fatal flaw—the words that secretly kill me?Mom, different, weird.And he’s used them all.
I swallow back acid so I can speak. “Can you just go now? Please?”
Max is on his feet instantly, coffee abandoned. “Okay.”
I almost wish he’d ask if we can talk in a few days, try to schedule closure that I could sneer and reject, but… he doesn’t. Nor does he ask what I’m going to do now that I have nothing. Max goes to the front door of my brand-new apartment and leaves with a creak, then a click. I kind of wish the door would fall off its hinges, too. Explode. My best friend of six years breaking up with me, firing me, then leaving me in a new town—no, an entirely new state—merits a more dramatic exit.
But this is real life, not a movie, and real life is quiet when it destroys your dreams.
So I lean against the door. Feel the wood against my back. And breathe, in for five, out for five.
Then I look at my phone.
It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. I was supposed to be at the Ignition practice facility at nine so I could start filming Arthur. My argumentative, self-centered, womanizing documentary subject, who’d seemed hell-bent on making my life at Ignition unfathomably difficult. Normally, I’d call a subject to let them know I can’t make our scheduled time, but the idea of speaking to another man who wants to hurt me is pretty unappealing right now.
What is appealing, though, is getting out of this apartment. And this town. And Texas.
Chapter Three
There isn’t a coffee shop within walking distance, only a dimly lit dive bar somehow actually named The Affair. If I’d been wondering whether or not the universe was getting a kick out of my life today, that cosmic joke has been confirmed.
“Another coffee?” the bartender asks. She can’t be old enough to serve me anything else. I’m twenty-four. She’s a literal infant.
“Hit me,” I say, then frown. “Weird phrase.”
“At least you didn’t call me sweetheart,” she says with a small smile. “You’re the nicest person I’ll get all day.”
“What a shame.”
