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“It means I don’t want you to assume it means something big, all right?” She sighed, put the cigarette out, and began pacing in front of me. I was torn between being annoyed and royally pissed off that she would spoil my good mood this way. Then, I felt an enormous amount of love for her for how much she cared about me. In the end, I decided not to lose my cool and to focus on the love part, which made it a little bit easier to hear the next part she had to say.
“Look, I know how important all of that romance shit is to you, but it’s not real. We’ve been through that a thousand times, and it never really mattered all that much that you didn’t believe me. Except now it does. You want him to be some changed guy, now that the two of you had sex, but that doesn’t mean he will be. He’s still the guy who left you, and that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have done it. I’m glad you did it, and I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“It’s the emotions that’ve got me worried, girl. You can’t let yourself get all attached to him now, just because sex got involved. Men don’t change, Fay. Even if you really, really want them to. They just don’t. All of that exception to the rule crap? That’s exactly what it is. It’s crap, and the sooner you learn that, the better.”
I had no idea what I was supposed to say to that, and luckily, I didn’t have to decide. Despite the fact that our diner spent ninety-five percent of the time empty, that was the moment somebody chose to walk through the door, breaking both the spell and the tension of our conversation.
“Yikes,” a voice I didn’t recognize called out. “Not gonna lie. Sensing some serious tension in here. Are you guys open?”
“Sure, we are,” Courtney answered in her falsely happy voice, the one she reserved for the customers. “Why don’t you sit right here at the counter? No reason not to, right?”
And so the guy did exactly that, taking one more second to survey his surroundings and make sure everything was basically all right. Courtney was the one who served him, and I took out my book and began to read. The thing was, I kept feeling his eyes on me. She would be talking to him, but even while I kept my eyes on my page, I could feel his eyes on me, and after he’d settled up, he came and stood in front of me and cleared his throat.
“Hey, I’m really sorry to interrupt.”
“That’s totally fine! It’s not like reading on the job is exactly allowed, right?”
“Right,” he laughed nervously, looking around to see if Courtney was paying attention. Because I knew her so well, I knew that she definitely was, but he didn’t know that, which meant that he made the decision to continue on with what he had to say.
“Listen, I work for a nature magazine.”
“Do you? That’s awesome! What an amazing job!”
“Yeah,” he went on, looking more and more nervous with each word. “I do. And the thing is, I’m going to be around here for a good six months. And I was wondering if you might let me take you out some time.”
I was a little bit astonished. He was a cute guy, with really dark hair and dark eyes. Something about him made me think he would be sweet. He was the kind of guy a girl said yes to, and also, the first guy aside from Neil to ever ask me out in the diner. There was a time when I might have said yes, too. A time in the not too distant past, but now, it was only Neil I could think about. I could still smell him, could still taste him on my tongue, which meant that there was no way I could go out with this guy.
“You have a boyfriend, don’t you?”
“Kind of,” I answered sheepishly, sorry to make him feel bad but grateful to have him be the one to say it first. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be! I’m not surprised. I have to tell you something, though.”
“Of course! Anything,” I answered in a probably overly bright voice, trying to make up for the blow I had just delivered while simultaneously having no idea what he might want to tell me next.
“I’m not giving up. I’m sure your boyfriend is great, but I’m not giving up. If there’s a chance of you being single while I’m here, I’m going to make sure I don’t miss it.”
And just like that, he was gone. He turned and left so quickly, I didn’t even have a chance to answer, and when I turned to look at Courtney, I expected her to be laughing, just as I was starting to. Instead, she was looking at me with a grave, thoughtful face, something very unusual for the Courtney I knew and loved.
“What is it?” I asked, afraid I already knew the answer but asking anyway. “What’s the matter?”
“I just don’t want to see you hurt, and at this rate, you’re going to be. He’s not your boyfriend, Fay, and he never will be. He’s not going to stay. Men don’t change. I keep telling you that. I’m just wondering if you’ll start to listen before it’s too late.”
Chapter 16: Neil
The email I got from Professor Dan threw me back into the real world, the world I had been putting on h
old since coming back to Ashville. It was simple enough in content, only wanting to know when I was thinking about taking the bar exam, but the shit it brought up wasn’t anything close to simple, at least not for me.
The subtle reminder at the end didn’t help, either. The good Professor ended his short, intrusive email by reminding me that putting things off for too long usually meant they didn’t happen at all. I knew what he meant, just as every man and woman I went to school with did. There was a window, and once you got past that window, you lost your momentum. The time after finishing law school was the time in which I had the most momentum a man could have, and instead of using it to take the bar and move my life forward, I was sitting on my ass in Ashville, Alaska, wasting time.
Waking up with Fay next to me in bed had made me vaguely uncomfortable that this might be the case, but seeing the Professor’s words right there on my laptop’s screen, blinking at me in black and white, made it clear. Just because things had slowed down to a crawl for me while I was in Ashville didn’t mean the rest of the world had slowed down, too. Because it most definitely hadn’t. The world was moving on, and it was doing it without me.
“Hey, Neil? Everything okay?”
The sound of Fay’s voice pulled me out of my own head. There had been a weird sound somewhere on the perimeter of my thoughts while I read and reread my email in horror and now I realized what it was. It was the sound of Fay knocking at my door.
