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I always do. God, how could he be so laissez-faire about this? Will he feel the same cavalier changing of the guard attitude when he’s done with me?
“Relax, Lola. I’m not worried about it.” He patted my thigh. “Which means you shouldn’t be either.”
Mental scolding engaged, I tried to focus on the topic at hand. If he wasn’t worried about his newfound unemployed status, I guess I shouldn’t be either. I unclenched my fists from my laptop bag and set it underneath the coffee table.
“Are we still a go for this weekend?” I tried to change the topic to something else, even though everything still felt all kinds of off. Internally, I was still freaking the fuck out, but I was trying not to be. That had to be good for something. Why else would they have the phrase fake it till you make it.
“What’s this weekend?”
“The trip to Santa Cruz with my family.”
His brow furrowed in confusion as he pulled the cigarette from his lips and blew smoke straight up into the air. “You never told me about this trip.”
“I didn’t?” I asked and tried to remember if I really hadn’t mentioned it at all. I could’ve sworn we had talked about it, but hell, Annie had been doing her usual routine of texting and calling me about last-minute details—especially ones that revolved around Reed coming along—that I wouldn’t be too surprised if I’d forgotten to actually mention it to him. My sister had a knack for making you feel like you’d had fifteen conversations with ten different people, when in reality, you’d only spoken to her.
“Nope. You definitely didn’t tell me about a trip with your family.”
“Well…I guess I’m telling you about it now,” I said with a smile, but he didn’t return it. His blue eyes searched mine for an explanation.
“I mean, it’s only Sunday night,” I hedged gently, “so that gives you like a whole five days to make arrangements. It’s just a short weekend trip to Santa Cruz. We’re heading out Friday morning and coming back on Sunday night. And since my family is really excited over the idea that I’m finally bringing someone along, I really, really hope you’ll forgive me for being a total spaz and come.”
His face remained neutral—that damnable jut of his chin and fire in his eyes that said his emotions lived under a lock and code—and I decided a little begging wouldn’t hurt.
I clasped my hands together and flashed my biggest puppy-dog eyes, hoping he’d dial in the combination and open up the window he usually let me look inside. “Pretty please, Reed? Please spend the weekend with me and my crazy family. Even Brian managed to get the green light from the president,” I teased.
But it had no power in lightening the mood. If I were a stand-up comedian, the audience would’ve been one bad joke away from booing me off the stage.
“I’m sorry, LoLo, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make it this time.” He climbed from the couch, stubbing out his only half-smoked cigarette in his ashtray, and then walked back to the coffee table to take out another.
My face fell and my hands followed suit, dropping into my lap. “You already have plans this weekend?”
“No,” he responded, but he offered no explanation. In fact, he was busier trying to arrange his next smoke than trying to pay attention to me.
What the hell? Why was he acting so weird about this?
“I’m confused, Reed,” I admitted, and my eyes narrowed in his direction as they searched his face for a clue. “What are you trying to tell me here?”
“I don’t do what people expect.” The cigarette stopped halfway to his lips before falling back to his side. I watched it, focused on it, like I was outside of my body.
His responses felt evasive and off-kilter from the honesty I’d grown to expect from him. It didn’t feel like Reed at all. At least, not the Reed I had come to know and love.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that just because your family expects me to go, doesn’t mean I’m going.” He shrugged. That stupid fucking shrug. “I’m sorry, Lola, but I can’t.”
“But you said you don’t have plans this weekend.”
“I know.” His gloomy eyes met mine, but they were devoid of any explanation that I could grasp.
“So why wouldn’t you want to go?”
“Because I don’t.”
Those three little words stabbed me straight in the chest. I knew I’d dropped this trip on him last minute, but it was like he didn’t even care to try to make it work.
Oh, that’s right, he didn’t want to make it work.
Because I don’t.
I hated those three little words.
They weren’t warm. They were ten degrees below freezing.
This was the opposite of the Reed who had so confidently inserted himself into my life. The guy who had been persistent and determined and did everything in his power to win me over. The same guy who had made me fall in love with him.
This guy wasn’t him. This guy gave zero fucks about me or my feelings.
This might’ve seemed like a small, minor snag in our relationship, but it felt like a chasm to me. It was a mindfuck of epic proportions and had me questioning if Reed and I really wanted the same things in a relationship.
Hell, did Reed even want an actual relationship?
Right now, it didn’t feel like he wanted one with me.
Passionate words reveal a passionate soul, he’d said. And right now, his soul couldn’t even look me in the eye, let alone connect with a passion.
“This rationale is a bit fucked up,” I said in irritation and stood up from the couch. “What’s going on here? Do you not want to spend time with me?”
“I never said that,” he said, but his face, still indifferent, belied his words. I wanted to strangle him.
“Then, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying I don’t do what people expect.”
Raw sadness surged into the plump of my lip, and I bit down with my teeth to temper the flow. This conversation was going nowhere. Reed was so fucking concerned with doing the opposite of what everyone expected of him that he didn’t realize he was hurting the one person who probably cared the most about him in the process—or even worse, he did realize.
He was hurting me, and I wasn’t going to stand around and take any more of it.
The need for self-preservation reached an all-time high, and I had to get the fuck out of his apartment before the abyss of his nothingness metaphorically clobbered me.
“You already made that loud and clear, Reed,” I retorted and swung my laptop bag over my shoulder. “You don’t give a fuck about the fact that you lost your job. You don’t give a fuck about spending time with me and my family. You don’t give a fuck about doing anything that revolves around expectations.”
I waited for panic to pucker at the edges of his eyes, but nothing but a weird fidget with that goddamn cigarette ever came. I reached out and knocked it out of his hand like some kind of child.
His face following the action was one of the first signs that he was still alive. Of course, now that emotion lived there, now that there was a flicker of the guy I was in love with, I was too cowardly to look him in the eye.
“Fine, Reed,” I muttered after collecting myself and heading for the door. “Don’t worry, I don’t expect anything from you. And I hope you have a really fucking wonderful weekend doing the opposite of what anyone might expect from you.”
Maybe I was overreacting, but I couldn’t find it in me to care.
Reed’s feedback was so underwhelming, I’d had more than enough emotional space to fill—in fact, he’d left a void big enough for the both of us.
I’d spent a lifetime avoiding problems altogether, and within the last week, I’d confronted enough to make up for all of that lost time.
Apparently, I wasn’t very good at confronting them head on.
Yet another flaw to add to the list. And, as much as I liked to pretend everything in my life was just as it should be, there were many.
Truth was, I was a vagabond thirty-one-year-old with no job, no close friends, and a girlfriend—if I could even still call her that—who wanted nothing to do with him anymore because he was a goddamn idiot with shit priorities and a messed-up sense of purpose.
Sure, I had enough money socked away in the bank to maintain a vagabond status for a good three years, but I wasn’t the type of guy who just sat around and let my hourglass of time slowly trickle without cause or direction. I was a doer. An experiencer of life. And I opened my arms to everything new and unconventional, and I savored the fuck out of it.
But this wasn’t experiencing or living. This was something else, and the way I’d handled things with Lola had left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. There wasn’t anything savory about the way she had left my apartment looking equal parts sad and pissed off. I was certain three-day-old French fries from McDonald’s held more appeal.
What made it all worse was that I hadn’t heard a peep from her since it all went down. Not a single text or call or unexpected visit. And days without Lola’s sunshine of quirky and adorable didn’t feel like days at all. Sadder than hell, they were infinite monotony in a thousand blasé shades of gray. They were fucking purgatory.
