Sawyer
“Too late.” I mutter my dad’s words to myself before I realize I’m saying them out loud, and the woman in the aisle next to me shoots me a quick glance, her eyes quickly returning to the cases of beer in front of us.
I don’t know what the hell to choose.
I wanted something to take home to Linda’s tonight because I don’t want to go to the bar, and I don’t want to sit on the couch with nothing to drink. I was looking forward to it until that visit to my dad’s house, in a way. I was going to sit, and sulk, and miss her.
But now I feel jittery, filled with a strange kind of energy I can’t get rid of. I know it’s hopeless. It has to be hopeless. But he seems to think it’s not too late.
He doesn’t know anything about this.
Well, maybe he doesn’t. But maybe he does. Maybe it doesn’t matter what my dad knows. Maybe what matters is that the world without Zelda is a painful place, and I hate living there.
I hate being here without her.
I could move, but that wouldn’t solve the problem. I know, because even when I was in the city, I was always looking for her. Every woman that passed by on the sidewalk with blonde hair shining in the sun made my heart jump up into my throat.
It is too late, in a way. It’s too late because she saw what the consequences of being with me are. Were. And I don’t know how to prove to her that it’s not like that anymore. That it won’t be like that ever again.
I shake my head. She’s not going to see me, anyway. She’s not going to answer my calls, or my texts, and I’m not going to be the kind of man who harasses a woman for the rest of her life because he misses her like he misses his own soul.
“Come here often?”
The voice from the end of the aisle isn’t Zelda’s, but it pricks something in the back of my mind.
The woman striding down the beer aisle in Greenville’s best grocery store is none other than Zelda’s friend, but I can’t remember her name. Caroline? Something like that?
She gives me a little grin, her dark curls spilling over her shoulders.
If Zelda didn’t exist, I’d be all over her, but looking at her now, the only thing I feel is a stabbing regret in my gut.
“It’s Carly,” she says, coming up level with me and searching across the top shelf, where they keep the six-packs.
“Carly. Hey.”
“Hi.”
She finds the beer she wants and pulls it down, then turns toward me. “Going to a party?”
I let out a breath that’s more of a sigh. “No.”
“Neither am I. It’s been a long night, though.” She narrows her eyes at me. “I’ve been trying to convince my best friend to call you.”
My heart hammers against my ribs, and I’m instantly tense. The store could crumble down around us right now and I wouldn’t notice. “What?”
Carly looks toward the ceiling, then back at me. “She’s been a wreck for weeks. I finally got fed up.”
“A wreck how?”
“You know.” She looks over at the shelf full of beer again.
“She spends her evenings sulking on the couch. I think she’s putting off submitting her final project for grad school so she can keep sulking for the rest of eternity.
” She gives a labored sigh. “It was an effort to get her out of her sweatpants tonight and get her out to dinner.”
It breaks my heart to hear that Zelda hasn’t been happy, but it also fills me with a kind of crazy joy. I’m not the only one. I’m not the only one who hasn’t been successful at convincing myself that this is fine. She’s not fine either.
It’s not hopeless.
“What are you grinning about? I’d have thought you’d be…sad.” Carly’s eyes glint in the fluorescent light.
“You’re sure nothing else happened?”
Carly’s grin gets wider. “Yeah, hot stuff. All the wallowing is because of you.”
I cover my mouth with my hand, running my palm over the stubble that’s risen there in the past few days.
“Wow. Did I make your day?”
“Yeah. You did. And—” She adjusts the six-pack on her hip. “I’m sorry I was a dick to you at the bar that time.”
Carly waves a hand in the air. “What were you going to do, fight against your obsession?”
I laugh out loud.
“I’ll leave you with that,” she says, then turns on her heel and goes. “I hope I’ll run into you again sometime, Sawyer.”
“You will.”
“You sound confident.” She tosses the words over her shoulder as she turns the corner.
There’s nothing I can do but laugh.
I turn around three times in the beer aisle, completely unable to decide which way to go.
What was I here for again? Right—beer. I grab the closest six-pack to my hand and tug it off the shelf.
I’ve been standing here long enough that I should buy something so they don’t think I’m the kind of guy who loiters around the alcohol aisles, but I don’t even read the label.
I have so much to do. I have so much to do.
I have to figure out a way to convince Zelda that I’m in this, that I’m in this for her, that we can do this together. That I’ll do anything for her.
At the checkout, Carly is in front of me in line. “You’ve got a fire under your ass.”
“Thanks to you.”
“It’s a good thing, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she’s going to California. You knew that, right?”
My stomach plummets to my shoes. “What?”
“She got a job at Stanford. A trial thing, three months. But tonight she told me she was pushing up her flight so she could get out of her earlier. She leaves in two days. First thing in the morning.”
I take a deep breath and let it out. That’s not as much time as I was hoping for, but it’s enough. It’s enough. I have to get out of here.
I have to get started.
This is my last chance.
If she gets on a plane without me—
She won’t. She can’t.
I abandon the beer at the checkout and head for the exit.
“Good luck!” Carly calls after me.
I raise one hand in the air, waving at her as I go, heading for the biggest day of my life.