Ezra didn’t take the bait.
“Did something happen?” he asked. Then: “Did your mom call?”
I winced. “Yes,” I said.
“Are you okay?” His voice was gentle, its natural rasp turning his question into a whisper.
“Fine,” I said. “Can’t say the same for your girl, though.”
Ezra looked over his shoulder at Ashley, who was staring at him longingly from the bar.
“She’s not my girl,” he corrected. “We broke up. At my birthday party, actually.”
I could tell he expected to see a reaction from me, and internally, I was having one. The problem was that I couldn’t quite figure out what itwas. Just a few hours ago, I’d told Mal that love was a conscious choice. But there had been nothing intentional about my free fall for Ezra. It had taken years for me to label the stirring in my chest for what it was, and I’d come to it kicking and screaming, cycling through denial and anger because no way was I stupid enough to develop real, actual, nonfraternal feelings for Ezra Adelman.
And yet, in these few short months, those feelings had already changed into something unrecognizable.
“I hope you didn’t dump her on my account,” I said, trying to sort through the mess of my emotions. “Obviously I would’vebeen uncomfortable if you’d stayed together at first, but if you really felt like she was the one, I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”
Ezra gave me an incredulous look, and what remained of his composure shattered on the spot.
“You wouldn’t want to be in the— Jo, you’ve been avoiding me forthreemonths. You didn’t pick up my calls or answer my texts. You unfollowed me on social media. You asked my mom to put you at a different table at the benefit—”
“I didn’t ask,” I interjected. “Renata thought that it might have been uncomfortable for us to be sitting together and offered to make a switch—”
“You cut me out,” Ezra finished. “Out of nowhere, like I meant nothing to you.”
I’d never done well with seeing Ezra in distress. It was like I’d seen him burn through his lifetime’s worth of suffering in a few short weeks, and I needed to shield him from more. Even now, I had to hold myself back from reaching across the table and placing a comforting hand on that shaking fist.
“That’s not true,” I said.That was the problem, I almost added.You meant too much.When Mal held my hands and told me he was determined to earn my trust, I’d experienced what it meant to be desperately wanted, to have a man anchor me in his gaze and tell me that he was going to do whatever he needed to prove to me that he loved me. When I was busy being Ezra’s loyal hand, the best I could hope for was a kiss on the cheek before he went running back to his model of the week.
“You sure?” Ezra said. “Because you seem perfectly content to keep living a life without me in it. Seems like I’m the only one here having a hard time.”
“I figured you’d find someone else to keep you occupied,” I said truthfully.
“You’re not replaceable to me, Jo,” Ezra said.
I didn’t say anything to that, which in itself said too much. We sat in silence for a long time, long enough for a waitress to swing by hopefully to ask Ezra what he’d like to order. Ezra shook his head without even turning to look at her, then wiped his hands down his face.
“Look. I didn’t mean to ambush you. I swear I was planning to leave you alone, grab Ashley and run, but then I saw you sitting here and I...” He sighed, dropped his head into his hands. “I’m sorry. I screwed up that night. I knew I screwed up the moment I walked out of that library. And I just want a chance to try to make it right. So can we talk about what happened? Please.”
What happened, I almost said,can’t be explained in one sentence.It had been a thousand tiny heartbreaks over ten years: honoring his then girlfriend Becca Holiday when he won the People’s Choice Award for Best Male TV Actor when I was the one who’d run his lines with him in the middle of my oncology rotation, sternly correcting every interviewer who insinuated that I was his girlfriend, taking women he’d known for two weeks to events that he promised to sneak me into and expecting to be forgiven with a simple “I’m sorry, she just assumed we would be going together and I couldn’t disappoint her.”
I’d suppressed these memories, but at their resurgence, I felt my throat tighten.
“You’re still pretending you don’t know,” I said. “Even now.”
“Know what?” Ezra said.
I scratched a line down the table, feeling the grit of the wood grain against my nail.
“That I was in love with you,” I said.
You’ve honed your craft,I thought. If I hadn’t been searching his face for a reaction, I might have missed his wince. But then something in his expression changed, a twist at the corner of his mouth, a slow, pained swallow.
I knew Ezra’s face. I’d studied it under different sources of light, seen him delirious with joy and sad and angry and high out of his mind, and I could most certainly make out disappointment.
“Was?” he said softly.
