Chapter 21 Wet Ted’s Name Is Ted Wetter #2
I let my bags drop to the ground. The computer hits the asphalt with a thunk that makes me wince. Ethan doesn’t look at me. He just stares at the bags like I might yell, Psych! and throw them back in the van and drive into the sunset with him, vomit clothes be damned.
Dread twists my stomach the way it does in the windowless “bad news” conference room at my office reserved for personnel matters. Maybe that’s why I feel compelled to take control of this meeting before it gets away from me.
“I can’t go to the music festival with you,” I tell him. Vacation is over and it’s time to face reality.
“Okay.” He inhales through his nostrils. “Do you have to work tomorrow?”
“I have to work every day. Most people do.”
“Most people don’t work every day,” he mutters, closing his eyes. When he opens them, he lifts his head to face me. “We’ll stay here then. I don’t have that gig until Friday, but then I’m open for two weeks, so I can come back after.” He’s determined to keep this conversation breezy.
“Then what?” I ask, exhausted from pretending this could be something.
I don’t want to play anymore. I want to cry alone in my room.
“We keep doing this friends-with-benefits thing forever?” It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud.
He won’t stay. Who would? “Look. I know what this was, and I’m not about to force you into something you don’t want, okay? ”
He swallows his sigh, almost concealing it. “What is it you think I want?” he asks.
“Ethan, I’m tired. I need a shower. Can we just…?”
“No. I’m curious. Who do you think you are to me?”
“I’m Chuck,” I say simply.
He grabs my hand and clutches it, as though I’m so close to something. If only I weren’t terrified of what that something was. “And who is that to me?”
I consider saying something flip or sarcastic.
Something that would de-escalate whatever is happening right now on this stupid driveway that still has a hole from the truck that carted my ex’s belongings away.
But after my fight with Laurel, I’m emotionally spent.
Empty. Scooped out of all feelings. What’s left is that lonely, contagious ache.
“I don’t know, Ethan,” I spew bitterly, like an unstoppable plague of human misery.
“The kind of friend you can bail on and forget about for an entire year, and then send a GIF of Nicolas Cage to like everything’s normal.
” I swallow hard, pushing down the lump of grief suddenly building in my throat.
The unprocessed loss of one of the most important relationships of my life.
On top of another loss. And then another.
His hand grips mine for dear life but I don’t stop.
“I’m the friend you can hook up with in the woods after you bailed on her wedding with a made-up excuse, because you know she’ll always let you off the hook.”
He drops my hand like I’ve burned him. “Seriously, Charley? That fucking wedding. I told you—”
“If you mention salmonella one more time, I swear to god, Ethan. You’re my best friend . I know I’m pretty good about keeping my expectations of men to the floor, but I made you my best man at my wedding and you flaked because you wouldn’t have a date? A woman you were casually—”
“She wasn’t…” He shoves his hand through his hair and grips his neck. “Margot and I weren’t even seeing each other anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” For two and a half years, I’ve been reading and rereading that text, and it wasn’t even true?
“I ended things with her the day of your bachelorette party.” The look in his eyes strips me bare. “I couldn’t go to your wedding because it was you . It was your wedding, to a guy who wasn’t me.”
My heart clambers up my throat, but I can’t respond.
I can’t form words. I’ve been begging for a real answer, and now that he’s giving it to me, I can’t tell if I want to cover his mouth with my lips or my hand.
His words recontextualize everything that happened after, knocking over each moment that follows like a row of dominos.
Time stretches and slows. Everything’s changing and crumbling all at once.
“And I was so fucking low, but I was going to swallow it,” he continues, his voice breaking a little in a way that’s breaking me.
“Because you wanted to marry him. He was the kind of guy you wanted, who knew his credit score and had a house with one of those cupboards that’s actually an ironing board that folds down.
‘Could never be me,’ right? That’s our whole thing.
That you could never see yourself with a guy like me. ”
That’s not what that means . That’s never been what that means. Not to me. I’m the undatable one. I’m the one who doesn’t fit. But I can’t force the words out.
“Then I was at your bachelorette party,” he continues.
“And you looked at me, and for a second, it was like I could see it all in your face. I saw…” He steps in close so my back is against the van.
Just him and me and this haunted place. His gaze is warm and unflinching.
It holds me like a cupped hand against my cheek.
At that moment, I know everything, and I don’t need him to say it.
He shouldn’t say it. I might not be able to walk away if he does.
“Charley, I think about you when I wake up. When I go to sleep, I dream about you. I try to outrun it, but wherever I go, it’s already there…
waiting for me. I can’t escape the way I feel about you, and I don’t want to, because even when I’m completely alone in the dark, you’re there, and I can’t ever let that go.
You’re…the moon to me, Charley…which I know sounds like some shitty lyric from a song I wrote about you, but that doesn’t make it less true.
I love you. I’m in love with you,” he says, repeating the sentiment like it’s nothing.
Or like it’s something I’ve always known—a principle of the universe he’s simply restating.
But the declaration steals the air from my lungs.
We stand there in the quiet, staring at each other as time expands and contracts like a beating heart.
Intellectually, I know this is the part in the movie when I tell him I love him too—that I’ve probably always loved him—but my panicked heart is lodged in my ribs. I look down at my feet, gathering myself as fear clenches my throat. “If that were true—”
“It is,” he pleads with me, his voice cracking.
I shake my head and gather up my voice like wreckage from a storm. “If it were, you’ve had years to tell me that.”
He presses his eyes shut. “I did tell you. At your bachelorette party, I told you.”
I don’t recognize my laugh. It’s hard and humorless. “I’m sorry, did you hand a party penis straw to me before or after your big declaration of love?” He steps back, struck. “That is such bullshit, and you know it. You said nothing!”
“I did! But you weren’t ready to hear it, and it nearly destroyed us. Destroyed me.” He shakes his head, sending his hair into his eyes. He looks like a cornered animal. “And I would’ve said it months ago if I’d have thought for a second that you wouldn’t panic if I—”
“Ethan.” It takes every muscle in my throat to keep my voice from collapsing into a soundless wail. “You let me get married to someone else.”
“You don’t think I regret that?” he grits out.
He kicks the rear tire like it’s done something to him. How must we look to my neighbors, two grown adults passionately arguing beside a white van? Someone’s surely reported this as “suspicious” on Nextdoor.
“Every day you were with that guy, you don’t think it was killing me?
I moved in with my parents. I tried to get the band back together—a band that I hated by the end of it.
Thank god Ivan was already drumming for someone else and got me writing songs again or I would’ve gone insane knowing you were waking up next to that smug asshole every goddamn day. ”
“You abandoned me!” I cry out. “I thought I’d done something wrong. I was a wreck my entire honeymoon wondering what I’d done to make you leave me like that.”
“How do you think I was, knowing you were on your honeymoon, Chuck? Why do you think I’m here now?”
“Because it was convenient for you,” I say bitterly, pulling my arms over my belly. “It lined up with your schedule, and this whole weekend was happenstance. If you’d had a show somewhere else or hadn’t been ‘in the area,’ you’d be professing your love to some other woman right now.”
“I wasn’t even ‘in the area,’?” he spits, his voice defiant. “I sent you that text from the parking lot of a Kroger in Atlanta after I bought everything to re-create the dinner we had in Malibu. Remember? You were wearing that red dress, and I all but begged you to move to California?”
I do remember it, but not the way he describes it. We were celebrating my passing the Minnesota bar exam. I’d spent months studying for a test that he casually suggested I throw away over a wine and seafood meal I couldn’t even afford to split. I think I laughed at the offer.
“Then Friday morning,” he continues, “Lo told me your divorce was final, and it was like a starter’s pistol went off in my chest, and I just…
drove. I bailed on an entire weekend of shows.
I couldn’t risk you starting your life over without me in it.
I’ve always wanted this, Chuck. You and me,” he whispers.
“The way it’s supposed to be.” He takes my face in his hands, palms trembling against my cheeks, and god help me, I lean into them.
“Let’s just go somewhere. Leave this all behind. ”
A cold laugh wrenches itself from my throat. “Powell, this is all too familiar.”
He drops his hands and takes a step back from me. “No, Chuck. It’s not like that. I just want to…start something with you, someplace else. Someplace that’s not your ex’s house.”
“It’s not his house. It’s my house. I went to great pains to make it my house .”
“It’s big and cold and empty. It’s not you at all! Why do you even want it?”