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“She helped me, you know.”
I break from my trance to see Ellie, smiling at me. “What?”
“Tenley. She’s the one who helped me get the apartment. I saw her a week ago, at Ted’s. She asked about you.”
I don’t know why, but that lifts my spirits. “She did?”
She leans in. “She loves you.”
“What?”
“She told me that.”
I don’t believe it. After all this time, I thought she might call or text. I’ve looked at my phone a thousand times, hoping. “No, she didn’t.”
“Yes, she did,” Ellie says more forcefully. “Do you love her?”
That’s easy. “Yeah, but…” I know the song says that love is all you need, but… she can’t love me. “She wouldn’t go to Chicago with me.”
Ellie fixes me with a look. “Dude. She has a life here. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you.” Ellie rolls her eyes. “I told her she should find someone else. Someone boring, normal… not as thick in the head.”
I shake my head, as if that will help it sink in. “But…”
“I’d tell you to go talk to her, but I know you. You’re like her. Stubborn.” She laughs. “Both of you are going to keep on being stubborn, alone and apart, when you know you’d be better, in love and together.”
I look at her. “What should I do?”
It’s the first time I’m asking her for advice, and I can tell by the way she smiles that she likes the turnaround. “What I know you won’t.”
I stare.
She gives me a look like it’s obvious. “Go over there and talk to her.”
Ellie might think she knows me better than anyone, but one of the things I’ve always lived for is the chance to prove her wrong. “We’ll see about that.”
I march for the door, looking for my keys in my pockets, when I realize I’m still in my pajamas. Yeah, I’ll need to take care of that, first.
“You’d better get changed,” Jace calls as I jog up the stairs to catch a shower. “You can’t go anywhere looking like a slob!”
“Thanks, Bud,” I call down to him.
I think my sister’s right, for the first time in her life. Tenley and I are better together.
41
I’m an idiot.
I fully realize that, as I look around my place while getting ready for my apartment-hunting mission.
All those boxes I’ve finally just unpacked and tossed away, after three years?
I’m going to be needing them again.
Truthfully, I don’t mind leaving this place. I’ve never formed an attachment to it. It’s nice, one of the swankiest in town, but it never became home. And now that I’ve scoured the online classifieds and found bigger places with much cheaper rent, I’m confident I’ll find someplace better.
That’s what I’m getting ready to do today. I have a couple of job interviews in downtown Portland later this week, nothing really great… but I have found a few studio apartments down by the Maine Mall that will suit my needs.
I finish brushing my hair and applying lip gloss, then straighten my dress, give myself a once-over, and head for the door. It’s raining out, so I grab my umbrella. I’m backing out the door, about to pull it shut behind me while pushing the button on the umbrella to open it so I don’t get wet, when I stumbled into a wall.
Not a wall, I realize, too late. Brooks is standing in the doorway, hand raised, knuckles out, as if poised to knock, but by the time I realize it’s him, my trigger finger’s already been activated, and the umbrella shoots open, between us.
“Oh my god!” I say as he stumbles back a couple of steps, taking the umbrella from my hands. “I didn’t see you! Oh—”
“It’s okay,” he says, murmuring other comforting words, too, so I know which Brooks I’m getting. He’s not here to argue, at least.
Well, with Brooks, arguments are par for the course.
“You were going out?” He asks.
Yes. I have an appointment in twenty minutes. I shouldn’t be late. The words are on the tip of my tongue. But now, I can’t get them out.
Instead, I close the umbrella and stare, thinking about everything we’ve been through, back when he was my insufferable partner and I was charmed by an online stranger. Before, I’d known so much about those two people—or at least, I thought I did.
Now I know so much more. I know the way his face looks in the near darkness, what the faint brush of his stubble feels like against my stomach as he kisses down my body.
I know there’s a scar near his ear from shaving and that that impeccable white dress shirt hides the most perfect abs and that his smile lights up his face like the early Maine sun does the sky.
My fingers are numb. So’s my tongue. Actually, I’m having an out of body experience, because although he’s standing right in front of me, I don’t have a thing to say.
