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She exhales a breath, seems to deflate a little. Shakes her head once.
“Then, he proposed to Veronica. And everyone at the office started treating me like I was some fragile, heartbroken invalid. I becameknownfor that. Pitied for that. Instead of being evaluated for my work, it was all about ‘poor little Annie.’ Eventually, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I quit.” She smiles wryly, running her finger around the edge of her plate. “And he got the promotion I was working towards.”
My eyebrows are completely raised. I had no idea… how could someone treat a person—treatAnnie—like that? Slimy Guy is an even worse person than I thought he was. “Annie, that… sucks.”
She grins humorlessly. “It does. Thanks.”
We hold eye contact for a moment. Part of me wants to reach out to her. Touch her. Hold her hand. Be there. It almost feels like torture that I can’t.
She looks away, rubs her upper arms almost self-consciously. “In the end, it was good for me. I spent a couple months in a wallowing funk, wondering how I could’ve lost the life I built for myself in Boston in one fell swoop. But it was the right thing to do. The mistake wasn’t breaking up with him, it was dating him in the first place. And mistakes come with a cost. I paid that cost by losing my career at Financify, but I gained so much in that I could be myself again, have my own identity. Achieve my own goals. At times, mine and Justin’s lives were so intertwined that I didn’t know where his ended and mine began.”
“I understand that,” I say, because surprisingly, I do. Sometimes I don’t know where Performance Mode Robot Liam and Human Hotblooded Man Liam intersect. Or if they should intersect more, but I refuse to let them. Bury one deep beneath the other.
Her hand is on the table now, and I have to actively stop myself from reaching across to take it.
“That’s admirable, Annie,” I say instead, speaking from the heart. “Brave. That was a terrible decision to have to make. It takes guts to walk away from something you’ve worked so hard for.”
She pauses, considering. “I never looked at it like that before.”
I think about my life. About everything that could’ve been, and everything that is instead. All because of a choice I made. My eyes meet hers, and understanding passes between us.
Because looking at it this way was the only thing that kept me going when everything fell apart.
23
ANNIE
“Vulnerability is not about winning or losing, it's about having the courage to show up even when you can't control the outcome.”
I take a huge bite of chocolate chip Eggo and chew monotonously, repeating every word of my favorite Brené Brown quote over and over in my head as I attempt to psych myself up for the dreaded softball tournament.
I may be terrible at sports, but I will go out there with confidence today. Show up and be brave.
And I will not think about Liam Donovan once while doing so. Not about how hot he’s sure to look in sports attire (a Liam look I have yet to witness). Or about how startlingly hot hedidlook the other night in his dinner jacket and khakis when he took me to Petit Soleil on our definitely-not-a-date business outing…
“Penny for your thoughts, honeybunch?” Mom waltzes into the kitchen wearing a bizarre fluffy vest that makes her look like she butchered an alpaca.
I swallow my mouthful of waffle thickly, like I wasn’t just absorbed in memories of the way my boss looked at me during our entire not-a-date.
Like he wanted me, I swear that’s what his eyes said.
But his actions said differently. We flirted, we laughed, and then, he shared that he’d lost his mom, and I, in turn, unexpectedly spilled my guts to him about Justin. In so many ways I felt closer to him. Except physically. He was the perfect gentleman in every single way, but I mean, was a stray finger brush too much to ask for? A hand on the small of my back on our way to the table?
Apparently, it was. Liam kept his hands very much to himself in the most professional of manners. And yes, I was a little disappointed. I couldn’t help but recall the way every nerve in my body flared when his fingertips brushed my shoulder the night we worked late and he lent me his jacket. Since then, my body has been craving another touch. And the longer it goes without, the more it wants its next hit.
I’m amazed I was even able to make coherent conversation given how distracted I was by the desire to be closer to him. Clearly, any and all mental restraint went out the window even as I vocalized my very real reasons for needing to stay away from him—namely, the last time I didn’t stay away from someone I worked with, my career went up in flames.
But no, none of that mattered. I was too tuned into the occasional smirk that crept across his lips, the little scar on his cheek and the story behind it, the way his eyes burned as he kept his careful distance physically, even as we moved closer together emotionally. We lingered over coffee and cheesecake for hours, talking late into the evening.
The next day at the office though, it was like nothing had happened. He was all business-as-usual. I, on the other hand, spilled my orange juice all over the floor when he walked in.
Now, I’m wondering how on earth I’m going to be today, when I have to spend the whole day with him—and at a sporting event no less. How am I not going to say or do something mind-numbingly stupid to embarrass myself?
What if I imagined he was flirting the other night? It was a work dinner after all… even if Luke bailed and there was the sort of tension (on my end, at least) that you could cut with a knife.
But it’s highly possible I read into it—history has shown that I have an overactive imagination. Seriously. One time, I convinced myself that a wasp was following me and plotting my death.
I can hardly tell my mom any of this, though.
