Chapter 34
34
Eleanor
Dawn and I walk arm in arm down our hallway, laughing.
“That was a shit show,” I say.
“A disaster,” she responds.
We settle into our third retelling of our night.
Dawn glances back over her shoulder, and she’s such a good actor that I can tell she’s pretending to be Anthony Teller by the way she’s widened her eyes and adopted his strange, wobbly gait.
“Oh shit,” she says, using his exact affectation.
“He ran ,” I say, as Dawn breaks away to do just that, zigzagging across our carpet, pretending to cut through imaginary theatergoers to avoid me. She mimes crashing into a man holding a drink. “Sorry, dude, sorry,” she says as Anthony. “I’ll pay you back, dude.”
This really makes us lose it. Dawn saying the dude line in her bro-ey impression voice. It’s so pitch-perfect I can’t even be mortified that we ran into Anthony Teller after a play and he fled the scene at the sight of me.
“I really thought if I ever saw him again, I’d be a wreck,” I tell her. “But this was so perfectly disastrous that it might be one of my favorite memories instead.”
“Honey, you came out looking like a peach.” Dawn unlocks the door to her apartment. “And I hate to say it to you, but he isn’t even that attractive.”
“I know.”
“Carson’s much better-looking.”
“Oh, it’s not even a contest.”
“Not at all.”
We linger in our doorways, looking at each other.
“Thanks for coming with me,” I say, suddenly teary. “I’m a little buzzed from all the wine, and it’s making me sentimental.”
She walks across the hall and pats me on the head. “You don’t have to explain it, sweetheart. I know.”
“But I do,” I tell her, grabbing her hand. “I need to say this thank-you. If you weren’t with me, I probably would’ve done something sad, like cry. Not because I miss him or I wish I got to be with him. But because, I don’t know, it still hurts that he embarrassed me. But now we can laugh.”
“Sorry, dude, sorry,” Dawn repeats again. It’s just as funny on the fourth performance as it was on the previous three. “I’m glad I was with you too.”
“You’re my friend,” I tell her. There’s a little slur in my voice that even I can hear. “I might be a little drunker than I realized.”
She pats my head again. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Love you,” I blurt out.
“Love you too,” she says with a laugh.
Inside my apartment, I yank my phone out of my purse.
Eleanor: What if we saw each other?
Maybe it’s the wine talking. That’s what I tell myself. That it’s the drink, not me, being this bold.
Carson: What do you mean?
Texting is the wrong format for this conversation. I’m putting too much emphasis on their inflection. In my mind, they’re stern. Defensive even.
Eleanor: In person. What if we met up again?
Their text bubbles appear and disappear over five times before I bite the bullet and call them.
“I’m not drunk, I promise,” I start, almost laughing as I say it.
“That’s not a rousing endorsement,” Carson responds.
“I just miss you,” I say. “I can’t keep going without seeing you in person.”
The line goes quiet. Too quiet. Hear-into-my-own-skull quiet.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” they say.
“It’s not nothing.”
“Eleanor, you just…left.”
We pick up this dangling conversation from July like we haven’t been talking every day for almost a month, dodging this exact topic.
“I know,” I say with a practiced breeziness. “I was crowding up your family time.”
“No one told you that you were doing that,” they respond. “You decided that without speaking to me. And then I didn’t hear from you for months. And then one day, you start texting me again. And I know I haven’t done the best job of showing how much you hurt me. Because I like talking to you so much. But you did. A lot.”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you. Not that it changes things. I just want you to know that wasn’t on purpose. I thought it would be better if I left without making a big deal of it.”
“It wasn’t better.”
Our conversation in their middle school parking lot comes to mind. How they’d told me about their high school years. How they didn’t want someone to fix what they’d done, they just wanted to be asked what was making them act out in the first place.
I slump against my door until I’m seated on the ground, kicking off my shoes and leaning back. Even though no one can hear me except my cats, I still drop my voice into a whisper. “I just, I liked you too much,” I say. “It really scared me, and I didn’t know what to do about it, because we don’t live close enough for us to make any sense together.”
“What would be different if we saw each other this time?” they whisper back.
“I would be nicer,” I say. “I’d let you set the thermostat to any temperature. I’d eat every meal you made me. Maybe I’d even consider giving up walking.”
“I’ve never needed you to be nice. I like the way you are.”
“And I’ve never needed you to pretend to be mischievous to make you make sense in the world.”
There’s challenge in both of our voices. And something prideful too. Not for ourselves, but for each other. A contest of who sees the most about the other.
“You can be complicated and deep around me,” I say. “You can steal my sugar packets to draw my face and tell me the stars remind you of the places you go when you sleep. I like all the ways you don’t make sense to me, because I know that if I try hard enough, if I soak up every second of being around you, someday they will. And that by knowing you, I will know myself better, because somehow, you already feel like an extension of who I am. Or who I’m meant to be, maybe. You feel like the rest of me.”
When I finish, I expect stunned silence. Instead, Carson whispers, in a voice so soft it almost breaks me, “Do you really mean that?”
“Of course I do. Why would I lie?”
“I don’t think you would. I just didn’t know you felt that way.”
“Well, I do,” I say, still angry, more at myself than them. For holding all of this in. “I think about you every night. I lose sleep over you, replaying what we discussed, wishing there was more. Inventing more. Needing your hands on me. Needing all of it.”
“If we saw each other again, I wouldn’t try so hard to make you think I was cool,” they tell me. “I’d admit that the banana cream pie at Rita’s is actually really good. Not as good as the apple crumble, but it’s a contender.”
“I’d accept your invitation to stay over at your place,” I say, interjecting.
“You could even look through all my drawers if you wanted to. I wouldn’t even hide my old journals.” I can almost hear their smirk.
“Yes, you would,” I say, smirking right back.
“Okay, I would try. But I think you’d find them anyway. And I’d probably let you read them too. If you found them interesting.”
“I would,” I assure them. “Everything about you is interesting to me.”
We both fall quiet. Our breathing seems to synchronize. What I think are Carson’s breaths become my own, calm and deep.
“It sounds perfect,” I say, drifting off, the wine making my eyelids heavy.
“It does,” Carson echoes.
“Maybe someday…”
“Maybe…”
That’s how I fall asleep. With Carson’s breath in my ear, and the promise of seeing them sometime in the future hanging on my lips.