Chapter 11 The Anticipation Is the Best Part
The Anticipation Is the Best Part
Saturday, Now
In the van’s kitchen, I slip into a pair of Ethan’s boxer shorts and a faded band tee using my long-retired teen-girl Houdini tricks. Not since gym class have I undressed and redressed myself without revealing so much as an inch of skin.
Ethan pulls out yet another bin from under the bed and leads me through the rest of his daily cleanup routine.
We deconstruct the dinner setup and not once does he bring up our conversation from earlier, but that one sentence loops in my brain like a sticky song lyric.
Rich doesn’t deserve to be the last person who’s touched you .
We wash dishes and collect garbage, and when Ethan pulls a plastic toilet out of a cabinet and into the middle of the floor, I pee on it without complaining once, as though it will earn me some much-needed karmic goodwill.
I feel sick every time I think about the possibility of Laurel getting married without me, so I avoid thinking about it at all costs and pray that Ethan’s right about Laurel’s and Petey’s willingness to delay this elopement.
I feel even more sick when my phone stops connecting to Ethan’s Wi-Fi and my email app dissolves into a black screen.
In hopes of summoning a single bar, I lean my arm out the window and can practically hear my phone laugh at me.
When I eventually give up on technology, we cover the windows, brush our teeth, and prepare to spend the night lying side by side at an angle determined by the roll of a soup can he plops on the counter like a quick and dirty level.
I climb into bed first, squirming under the covers until I find the perfect position.
He pulls a brand-new pillow out of a Target bag from behind his car seat.
As much as I want to berate him for having the kind of single-guy home so hostile to partnered domesticity that there’s only one pillow, I’m too grateful for it to say anything.
When he climbs in, I discover firsthand just how compact van beds are and try to make myself tiny while lying face-up, like a corpse. He clicks off the lights and settles into the space beside me, the mattress groaning under our weight.
It’s been months since I shared a bed with anyone besides Laurel. Fourteen, to be exact.
“This reminds me of college,” he says. “Remember how I used to nap in your dorm in the middle of the afternoon and it felt totally normal?”
But I wasn’t in the bed with you , I think.
“Are you saying this feels normal? Or that it doesn’t?”
“It probably shouldn’t feel so normal, should it?”
But it kind of does. I feel it too. No one knows me in the exact way he knows me. Why is that comforting and terrifying all at once?
I roll onto my side. Minutes pass with nothing but the sound of his breath. I anticipate each puff of air like drips from a leaky faucet.
“Don’t think I missed in the shower how you admitted to watching Aurora Falls .”
His voice is close. My silent chuckle puffs out from my nostrils.
“I watched your episode and got pulled in. It was strangely compelling—like One Tree Hill with an extraterrestrial spin—and your song was even more perfect for it on the rewatch.”
“Who was your ’ship?” he asks.
I give the question more consideration than he probably expects. “Harper and Chase. But I had a soft spot for Reagan and Brooke.”
“No.” His head shakes my pillow. “They were so messy.”
“I loved their mess!”
“The Thanksgiving episode when Brooke thinks she’s carrying an alien baby?”
I snort-laugh. “Was she? I can’t remember now.”
“No, she was just training too hard for a gymnastics meet.”
I pull the blanket tighter. “That show went so off the rails in season three.”
“I love that it did. It was better for it. And Harper and Chase don’t get together until season three,” he reminds me.
“That’s when it got bad. They had this perfect banter-filled sexual tension, and when they finally got together Chase got so boring.”
“His brother was just probed. The guy’s gonna be a little emo.” He nudges my shoulder. I elbow him back but don’t put any fight behind it. Our small touches aren’t so playful in the dark, and I’m not sure what to make of that. “The anticipation was getting boring.”
“The anticipation is the best part,” I tell him.
He sighs. “Benson hated that we became synonymous with that show. I think it’s why he wanted the second album to be all experimental and broke up the band when that direction didn’t work.”
Harvey Benson was the other guitarist, the self-appointed leader of Lemonface, and a man who didn’t believe in paying loans because some Reddit forum had predicted that a Fight Club –esque bank-crippling cyberattack would inevitably “wipe the slate clean.” It’s important to note that Benson had two vehicles repossessed in the time I knew him.
“Benson’s an idiot,” I tell Ethan. “I love ‘Velvet Nebula.’?”
“It’s a little sappy.” His melancholic baritone tugs at my insides like a sad lyric.
“Do you miss it? The band?” I ask him, hearing my voice falter. There’s so much about his life as a musician that he doesn’t share, and a part of me worries that this piece of him, those hidden places behind his charismatic front, don’t belong to me anymore.
He takes a long inhale before he answers.
“Yes and no. I don’t miss having only one-fourth of a say in my creative vision.
All I wanted to do was see the world and write music.
I didn’t care about fame or recognition or even performing, really.
If I could figure out a way to be a musician without being a ‘musician’—some dude with a microphone, performing in front of a college crowd night after night, vamping about the Big Twelve conference—I’d literally jump at it.
“But I miss some parts of the band. I miss sharing things. I miss thinking about other people, if that makes sense? What someone else needs or wants. Every decision I make now is about me. Sometimes my parents, but usually me. I’m bored of my life being all about me.”
His voice sounds different now. Loaded. I feel an echo beneath my ribs.
“I can relate,” I tell him. “I’m bored of me too. Of my life. I thought it would feel different.”
“What?” he asks.
“Rock bottoming.”
He laughs at me, a full belly laugh that shakes the mattress. “Beekman, you have so far to fall before you hit rock bottom. Trust me.”
“Well, I am sleeping in a busted-up van down by the river, so…”
“Don’t talk about Lake Superior like that,” he teases.
He pokes my side, and I nudge my heel into his shin as a warning. “Don’t test me, Powell.”
His hand drags up my back and lands a breath behind my shoulder blade.
We’re not touching, but the air around him is holding me close.
The T-shirt I’m wearing snags under the flex of his fingers.
I’m so aware of how each stretch of his muscles brings us fractionally closer under the guise of “getting comfortable.” We’re just friends sleeping beside each other on this tiny mattress in this efficient, minimalist van home.
That’s all this is—I know this—and yet I feel every twitch.
Every facial expression. And I can anticipate the way he’s working up to something and brace myself for impact.
“Do you ever think about…?” He breathes in deep but then seems to change course when he says, “We’ve never talked about your bachelorette party.”
This catches me off guard—his casual mention of the night we don’t discuss, the tender cadence of his voice, like he’s confessing something while still revealing absolutely nothing. Typical Ethan.
“We don’t ever need to talk about it.” I keep my voice breezy. A leaf dancing in the wind without an ounce of the anger or hurt that once clenched my throat.
I hope he never knows how much it mattered to me.
How much the bullshit he spewed all over me that night affected me.
His unfiltered assessment of my life cut so deep, but the worst part?
He was right. He reduced my wedding to some childish affair born out of my own stubbornness, but he was right.
It always hurts the worst when the naysayers are right.
That night, I was so angry with Ethan. Still, I never thought he’d bail on my wedding over it.
On the morning of my wedding, I couldn’t bring myself to respond to the lame excuse he sent in his place over text—I didn’t want to say anything I’d regret—but as time went by, the anger built around my heart like layers of thick paint.
Why did I need to extend the olive branch? I asked myself. He was the one who attacked my life choices, then disappeared. My very best friend’s only parting gift would be the plastic party penis straw he handed me at my bachelorette party.
The decay of our friendship was slow and painful, like watching a limb rot off my body.
Days turned to weeks—weeks to months—until I’d forgotten who wasn’t talking to whom.
Hurt and anger corroded my insides as my most important person fell away.
Our friendship was this phantom that followed me around with only a phallic straw and discarded chocolate foils as proof that it ever existed in the first place.
But in bed with him now, I don’t want to rehash it all. That’s the key to preserving long-distance friendships. Pushing the slights and hurts so deep into the earth that the other can’t spot them from the other side of the continent.
The silence is growing into something palpable. I have to put us out of our misery. “It was forever ago,” I assure him. “And anyway, you were right. So it doesn’t matter much now.” A pitiful laugh vibrates in my throat.
His breathing is heavy. “But the way I just came out and told you…you know…”
“Trust me. I remember what you said.”
His sigh is part laugh, part tortured exhalation. “Yeah. I imagine you do.”
“I don’t care. Really,” I whisper, with such a quiet confidence I almost believe it myself. “I know what you were trying to do. Even if you had zero tact while doing it.”
“Yeah,” he agrees.