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No insulting theories, no lessons on perspective, and no teasing touches or stolen kisses to speak of.
Basically, we were all kinds of off.
Reed and I didn’t do small talk. When we conversed, it was about more than the fucking temperature and fog index. It was deep and all-encompassing, and the emotion behind it was truthful even when the words were lies.
This was an almost frightening version of the opposite. Fake smiles and guarded emotion, the two of us danced around each other like strangers. The truth was, there’d been more emotional closeness when I’d hated the son of a bitch.
I wasn’t sure if it was him or me causing the weirdness—or maybe it was both.
I couldn’t deny the wheels of my brain had been spinning overtime since my revelation of love had occurred on his bed. There had been several times throughout dinner that I’d had the urge to yell out a cheesy declaration, but thankfully, stopped myself from doing it with a mouthful of garlic bread. Most people didn’t want to be sprayed in the face with soggy breadcrumbs while hearing I love you for the first time.
But he’d been acting a little strange since I had shown up at his apartment too, and I wondered if it had something to do with his old college buddy.
I let my gaze wander toward him and took in his furrowed brow and the firm line of his normally relaxed lips. His eyes stayed fixated toward the TV as he clicked mindlessly through the channels. I honestly wasn’t sure if he really even noticed my presence or the fact that I was staring at him. He was completely in his own world.
Yeah. Something’s gotta give here…
Things were not right.
My gut instinct told me it had nothing to do with me or my feelings and had everything to do with Reed.
“So…” I ventured, unsure of how to bring up the elephant in the room or if I was even welcome to notice it. Still, Reed’s mood was half completely him, half lost in thought. I wasn’t sure how to keep up, and it was throwing me off my normal game.
I was mentioning it whether I was supposed to or not.
“So?” he asked, clicking the toggle on the remote far too quickly for my liking.
“So,” I started again, putting my hand over his to stop his TV terror. “Brandon?”
Reed smirked at my inquisition, but his face quickly faded at the subject.
“He’s getting a divorce.”
“Are you serious?” I questioned for clarification even though I knew this wasn’t the kind of thing Reed would ever lie about. There was a playful time and place for his lies, and the look on his face alone proved there wasn’t anything amusing about this.
“Sadly, I am serious.”
Sorrow settled around my eyes and weighted the area above my heart. “Holy hell. He had a toddler.”
“Yeah.”
Jesus. All at once, the puzzle pieces started to fall into place.
His friend had looked sad, and not just a little sad, but that soul-aching kind of sadness that no matter how hard you tried to put on a good face for the rest of the world, it still arrested every beat of your heart below the surface. It was the kind of sadness you couldn’t completely hide because it was always there, seeping from your eyes, lacing your words, and drowning your smiles.
Poor Brandon. It was one thing to have to deal with the end of a relationship—a marriage—but it was a whole other level of devastation when a small child was involved.
That information had turned me speechless, and silence just kind of settled over us after that. I found myself lost in the gravity of the moment, and it wasn’t until Reed’s amused eyes caught my attention and I followed his gaze to my exposed abdomen that I realized I had unknowingly lifted up my shirt and was now mindlessly patting my stomach.
I blamed the Italian food. It was safe to say I was about three months pregnant with a food baby named Pasta.
Reed grinned and I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t smile at the food baby.”
“It’s cute.”
“It is not cute,” I refuted on a sigh.
He winked. “It’s fucking adorable.”
“Pasta is not adorable. He’s huge.”
“Aw,” he cooed and rubbed my belly. “Hello, little Pasta.”
I slapped his hands away in annoyance, but I couldn’t fight the smile making a bid to consume my face.
“What do you and little Pasta feel like watching?”
I scratched the side of my face with my middle finger, but he just chuckled.
He continued flipping through the channels until he stopped on an episode of the Golden Girls. “How about the Golden Girls? Can’t go wrong with Betty White.”
“Betty’s great, but Sophia is my favorite,” I said and then remembered my second reason for stopping by Reed’s apartment with the same surprise intensity as an asteroid striking the earth. “Shit! I almost forgot!” I hopped off the couch and grabbed my laptop bag from the entry.
His eyes followed me with begrudging curious enjoyment, but he didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like odd behavior was out of the ordinary for me.
“Wanna see my column for this week?” I asked as I shuffled back over and sat down beside him.
“I don’t need to,” he responded, and my eyebrows rose on their own accord.
That was definitely not the reaction I had expected.
“Huh?” I searched his neutral expression for a clue. “I figured you’d want to see my column for this week so you could get a head start on yours…”
He patted my knee. “Like I said, I don’t need to.”
My spidey sense kicked into high alert. Something wasn’t right about his lackluster tone. “What’s going on?”
“I got fired,” he answered without pause or preamble, and with the apathetic way the words fell from his lips, he might as well have just told me he got new car insurance.
But even his indifference, as cool and seemingly calculated as it felt, couldn’t mellow my shock. My spine stiffened with the effort to stay calm enough to seek out an explanation. “What? What happened?”
He shrugged. “They didn’t appreciate that I’d started to agree with your columns.”
“Oh, my God.” I covered my mouth with my hand. “Are you serious?”
An array of emotions rained down on me all at once, but guilt was the most prominent by far. It started in my belly, filling it up until it had no choice but to filter up my body and reached my face—scrunching my brow and pinching at my cheeks.
I couldn’t stomach the fact that I’d played a part in him losing his job. Sure, several months ago, I would’ve been cheering over this news from the sidelines, but things were different now. I didn’t hate Reed—I didn’t even dislike him. I fucking loved him, and when you loved someone, you always wanted the best for them.
And this, well, it didn’t feel like the best. It felt like the absolute worst. He and I were matched, and our columns together had purpose. I hadn’t been able to see the merit in any of it in the beginning, but I was suffocating under the weight of it now. Not having his counter to my point felt like losing a part of myself and a part of me and Reed—a part of us. We’d turned into something together, and now it felt like the world had tipped off its axis and was spinning erratically without direction or purpose.
“Relax, LoLo. It’s not a big deal,” he reassured, and even that felt completely off. Maybe I was overreacting—it wasn’t like that would be new for me—but this didn’t feel like that. It felt like I’d been sleeping for months, and I’d finally reached my awakening.
Why was he reassuring me? I wasn’t the one who lost my job.
“It feels like a big deal,” I argued. “I mean, what are you going to do?”
He tilted his head to the side in confusion and reached to the table beside the coffee table to grab his pack of cigarettes. “What do you mean, what am I going to do?”
“I mean, what are you going to do now for work? How are you going to pay your bills if you’re no longer employed at the Journal?” What is this going to mean for us? The unspoken question was perhaps the most important, but years of stunting my emotional growth refused to die an easy death.
“I’ll figure it out. I always do.” He shrugged again, slapping the pack against his hand and slowly fingering a lone smoke out, and just like that, the last eggshell beneath my foot snapped. I was angry—perhaps irrationally so—over that recurrent shrug and his overall nonchalance to the situation.
Why wasn’t he freaking out about this?
He lost his fucking job. If the roles were reversed, I knew with certainty I wouldn’t be chilling on the couch and shrugging like a fool. I’d be a fucking basket case and would already be scouring job ads and calling in favors like a mafia boss trying to evade the FBI.
But not Reed. The loss of employment seemed to make him even more relaxed.
This so isn’t about his job, my mind taunted, but I told it to shut up. I had an argument to wage.
“So…you don’t have any plans?” I questioned and prayed to every god out there he would dispute it—that he would give my anxious soul something to tether itself to in order to weather the storm. “There’s not any other jobs you’re already considering?”
“I’m not a traditional, nine-to-five kind of guy,” he stated, flicking the wheel of his lighter and putting flame to paper. His face never changed from the blasé expression he had put on since this discussion began. “I’ll eventually figure something else out. I always do.”
