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“Relationships are supposed to have time! To see if they’re going to work or not!” I exploded. “That’s the normal flow of things! But we have all this pressure! It’s gotta be a secret so no one freaks out. And I might not see him until the wedding, and then at the wedding we have to pretend like we’re nothing to each other. And I’m leaving, so soon. We didn’t even have any time…” I made myself stop ranting. Because there was no point.
I got myself into this mess. It wasn’t their fault I was in this situation. My cousins didn’t need to be yelled at because I was falling apart.
I sucked back a deep, calming breath, and when I finally peeled my hands from my face, Danica was standing in front of me.
“Jolie. If you want to stay and see if it could work with him, then do that.”
“I can’t. Even if I wanted to… even if I was brave enough to do that, I can’t. My whole life is down in San Diego now.”
“Your whole life?” Dani challenged.
“You know what I mean, you guys. I miss you. I really do. But I have a job and school and my apartment…”
“All of which you can have up here,” Dani said simply. “Plus, you get us and Alyssa.”
“I know, but… I just can’t.”
“Maybe you can,” Danica said gently. “Have you even let yourself think about that?”
I hadn’t, really. But it all just seemed too… hard.
“Think it through,” she said. “You could still take classes up here if you want to. You could get a job. Even if it takes a while to get settled, make some money, you have places you can stay. You know your mom would let you stay with her, as long as you need to.”
“I can’t live with my mom. I love her, but I can’t.”
“Then you could stay in our condo,” Danica said. Which was incredibly generous and kind.
But I couldn’t.
She meant Ashley’s condo, downtown, which they now just kept empty so they could use it when they came into the city. And it only had one bedroom.
“I’d be in the way,” I told her. “Ashley and Matt need to use it all the time when they’re in and out of the city.”
“You could stay with Dani.”
“I have a very nice couch,” Dani said seriously.
“I appreciate it. I really do, but—”
“It wouldn’t be that hard to get a job,” Danica pressed. “Madeleine would hire you back. As a junior decorator. You could work on one of her teams, keep learning as you go.”
“It’s not like that. I can’t just waltz in and out of her design firm whenever I want and expect her to hire me back.”
“Why not?” she said. “I do it all the time. I have quit that place so many times, and every time I come back from touring she’s offering me a contract to work for some client. She needs good people and she trusts us. We’re family.”
“I don’t know…”
“So, your life is so much better down in San Diego?” Dani pressed. “Is that it?”
“No.”
“You’re being stubborn right now, Jolie,” she informed me. “You’re making excuses. Because we all know you could damn sure get hired in some thrift shop and sleep on my couch until you get on your feet and then get a roommate here, just like you did in San Diego. Everything you’re doing there you could do here. The question is, do you want to?”
“You know what I want?” I kinda snapped. “I just want things to get better. I don’t want to make my life any worse. Because no, it’s not great. And I don’t want to make the wrong move and just make things worse for myself.”
“So, you’re paralyzed.”
Maybe I was. But I breathed, “I don’t know. What do you guys think I should do, really?”
