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“I told you I wanted to talk to you. I messaged you, remember? But then I got sick and we didn’t really get a chance to talk.”
Reed looks really confused, torn between two worlds that are no longer intersecting. The look in his eyes says so much, but yet it tells me so little.
He suddenly grabs his sweater off the floor and yanks it over his head. He stands so suddenly that I almost tumbled clean off the edge of the bed, and then he grabs his boots and heads straight for the door.
“Call Nick,” he tells me without even looking at me. “You’ll be amazing. He’s gonna love you.”
“Reed –” I say, just as he gets to my bedroom door.
“Yeah?”
“Is everything alright?”
He turns slightly, but he doesn’t look at me. Apparently the floor is far more appealing than the girl he was just making out with. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Where are you going?”
“I need to, uh… I need to bail,” he replies. “I’ll call you?”
“You’ll, what?”
“Tomorrow, maybe?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yep. No problem.”
“I thought you’d be happy about this. I don’t get it. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he says, shaking his head. Inaudible mumbling ensues. Reed looks all around the bedroom, then he looks back at me, and then he looks at the floor again, and confusion settles over me like a dark cloud.
It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking with the way he’s just put up such a solid wall around his emotions. He’s so complicated, so hard to gauge. He seems to be weighing something up in his mind.
“Reed –” I whisper.
“I gotta go.”
And then he leaves the apartment without another word, closing the front door firmly behind him. My body cools like an iceberg. My eyes itch, though I refuse to be offended or worse still, cry.
I am stunned, however, by the abruptness of his actions.
I really didn’t expect this reaction from him.
He’s so fucking melodramatic. He didn’t give me any clue as to what was going on inside his head before he stormed out.
He didn’t give me anything. He just left.
And as I flop back down onto my mattress, curling up into a ball to stare out the window, I can’t shake the feeling that he just took a little part of my heart with him when he went.
Reed did actually follow through with his promise, and he called me the following afternoon. But it was only a quick call, an obliging check-in, and it held none of our usual flirty banter.
He didn’t once mention the fact that I decided not to take things further. Nor did he mention what had happened between us the night before. He was all business and a part of me ached to have the old Reed back.
He asked me how I was feeling, and when I told him I felt a hundred percent better, he gave me a quick rundown of the upcoming rehearsal schedule.
Nick had obviously told him that I’d emailed him back the night before and agreed to sign whatever they wanted me to sign. He sent me a copy of the documents and the contract, and he asked me to read through them all thoroughly and get back to him once I’d agreed to all the terms and conditions.
Nick wasn’t as bad as Reed made him out to be. He seemed like a pretty decent guy, in fact. I don’t know what constitutes being a dick in Reed Devlin’s books, but I didn’t find him so much of a dick as I did a savvy businessman who knows his shit.
