“How is that possible?” I ask, heaving my weekender bag over my shoulder. It’s looking a bit worse for wear. “Two of his toes were going the wrong way.”
“Dunno.” He shrugs. “He told me he’s a retired ballet dancer, so maybe that’s just his feet.”
“Ted Wetter is afascinatingcreature.”
I head for my front door. Ethan goes to follow, then falters. In this game of reality chicken, it’s the ultimate flinch. Any questions I had as to whether he thought this could go on fall away.
I let my bags drop to the ground. The computer hits the asphalt with a thunk that makes me wince. Ethan doesn’t look at me. He just stares at the bags like I might yell,Psych!and throw them back in the van and drive into the sunset with him, vomit clothes be damned.
Dread twists my stomach the way it does in the windowless “bad news” conference room at my office reserved for personnelmatters. Maybe that’s why I feel compelled to take control of this meeting before it gets away from me.
“I can’t go to the music festival with you,” I tell him. Vacation is over and it’s time to face reality.
“Okay.” He inhales through his nostrils. “Do you have to work tomorrow?”
“I have to work every day. Most people do.”
“Most people don’t workeveryday,” he mutters, closing his eyes. When he opens them, he lifts his head to face me. “We’ll stay here then. I don’t have that gig until Friday, but then I’m open for two weeks, so I can come back after.” He’s determined to keep this conversation breezy.
“Then what?” I ask, exhausted from pretending this could be something. I don’t want to play anymore. I want to cry alone in my room. “We keep doing this friends-with-benefits thing forever?” It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. He won’t stay. Who would? “Look. I know what this was, and I’m not about to force you into something you don’t want, okay?”
He swallows his sigh, almost concealing it. “What is it you think I want?” he asks.
“Ethan, I’m tired. I need a shower. Can we just…?”
“No. I’m curious. Who do you think you are to me?”
“I’m Chuck,” I say simply.
He grabs my hand and clutches it, as though I’m so close to something. If only I weren’t terrified of what thatsomethingwas. “And who isthatto me?”
I consider saying something flip or sarcastic. Something that would de-escalate whatever is happening right now on this stupid driveway that still has a hole from the truck that carted my ex’s belongings away. But after my fight withLaurel, I’m emotionally spent. Empty. Scooped out of all feelings. What’s left is that lonely, contagious ache.
“I don’t know, Ethan,” I spew bitterly, like an unstoppable plague of human misery. “The kind of friend you can bail on and forget about for an entire year, and then send a GIF of Nicolas Cage to like everything’s normal.” I swallow hard, pushing down the lump of grief suddenly building in my throat. The unprocessed loss of one of the most important relationships of my life. On top of another loss. And then another.
His hand grips mine for dear life but I don’t stop.
“I’m the friend you can hook up with in the woods after you bailed on her wedding with a made-up excuse, because you know she’ll always let you off the hook.”
He drops my hand like I’ve burned him. “Seriously, Charley? That fucking wedding. I told you—”
“If you mention salmonella one more time, I swear to god, Ethan. You’re mybest friend. I know I’m pretty good about keeping my expectations of men to the floor, but I made you my best man at my wedding and you flaked because you wouldn’t have a date? A woman you were casually—”
“She wasn’t…” He shoves his hand through his hair and grips his neck. “Margot and I weren’t even seeing each other anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” For two and a half years, I’ve been reading and rereading that text, and it wasn’t even true?
“I ended things with her the day of your bachelorette party.” The look in his eyes strips me bare. “I couldn’t go to your wedding because it wasyou. It was your wedding, to a guy who wasn’t me.”
My heart clambers up my throat, but I can’t respond. I can’tform words. I’ve been begging for a real answer, and now that he’s giving it to me, I can’t tell if I want to cover his mouth with my lips or my hand. His words recontextualize everything that happened after, knocking over each moment that follows like a row of dominos. Time stretches and slows. Everything’s changing and crumbling all at once.
“And I was so fucking low, but I was going to swallow it,” he continues, his voice breaking a little in a way that’s breaking me. “Because youwantedto marry him. He was the kind of guy you wanted, who knew his credit score and had a house with one of those cupboards that’s actually an ironing board that folds down. ‘Could never be me,’ right? That’s our whole thing. That you couldneversee yourself with a guy like me.”
That’s not whatthatmeans.That’s never been what that means. Not to me.I’mthe undatable one.I’mthe one who doesn’t fit. But I can’t force the words out.
“Then I was at your bachelorette party,” he continues. “And youlookedat me, and for a second, it was like I could see it all in your face. I saw…” He steps in close so my back is against the van. Just him and me and this haunted place. His gaze is warm and unflinching. It holds me like a cupped hand against my cheek. At that moment, I know everything, and I don’t need him to say it. Heshouldn’tsay it. I might not be able to walk away if he does.
“Charley, I think about you when I wake up. When I go to sleep, I dream about you. I try to outrun it, but wherever I go, it’s already there…waiting for me. I can’t escape the way I feel about you, and I don’t want to, because even when I’m completely alone in the dark, you’re there, and I can’t ever let that go. You’re…the moon to me, Charley…which I know sounds like some shitty lyric from a song I wrote about you,but that doesn’t make it less true. I love you. I’minlove with you,” he says, repeating the sentiment like it’s nothing. Or like it’s something I’ve always known—a principle of the universe he’s simply restating. But the declaration steals the air from my lungs. We stand there in the quiet, staring at each other as time expands and contracts like a beating heart.
