Chapter 7 Thirty Days #2
Hailey is wearing a green top that I've never seen before and she looks good in it.
She hugs me when we arrive and asks how work was and I tell her it was fine and she tells me about a sale at a store downtown and how she almost bought three pairs of shoes but talked herself down to one.
She is so normal. So friendly. So effortlessly convincing in her performance of being my friend that I sometimes wonder if she even remembers what she's doing with Blake when she's standing here talking to me about shoes.
Blake orders a round for the table because that's the kind of gesture Blake makes in public. Generous. Easy. The guy who always picks up the first round. He doesn't mention that the money for the round probably would have gone into the house fund if he still cared about it.
I'm standing near the pool table watching Ronnie and Chase argue about whether a shot was legal.
They've been going back and forth for three solid minutes and neither of them is willing to concede.
Chase is pointing at the table. Ronnie is pointing at Chase.
It's the kind of argument they have every single time they play and it never gets resolved.
Nathan walks up beside me. He's holding two beers and he extends one toward me.
"You looked like yours was getting low," he says.
"Thanks." I take the beer.
We stand there for a moment watching the argument unfold. Nathan has the patience for other people's nonsense that I've always found quietly impressive. He can stand in the middle of chaos and look completely unaffected.
"They're going to argue about this shot for longer than they actually played the game," he says.
"Chase once debated a card game rule for forty-five minutes at Sierra's apartment. This is warm-up."
Nathan's mouth twitches into a small smile. He doesn't do big expressions. Everything about him communicates in small adjustments that you have to be paying attention to catch. Most people don't pay that kind of attention. I'm paying it tonight for reasons I'm not ready to examine.
"Can I ask you something?" he says. His voice is quieter now. Not conspiratorial. Just private.
"Sure."
"Are you okay?"
The question lands softly. He doesn't say it with weight or drama or the kind of loaded concern that makes people defensive. He asks it the way you'd ask someone if they're cold or if they need anything from the kitchen. Simple. Direct. Easy to answer honestly or easy to deflect.
"I'm fine," I say. Automatic. Practiced. The same answer I've given everyone for weeks.
Nathan nods. He takes a drink of his beer. He watches Ronnie finally attempt the disputed shot, which misses by a wide margin, and Chase throws both arms up in vindication. Nathan doesn't laugh but his eyes do something close to it.
Then he says, "Okay. But if that answer ever changes, Ronnie has my number. You can get it from him."
"Nathan, I'm really fine."
"I believe you. I'm just putting that out there. In case."
Then he walks away. He goes back to the table where Sierra and Alana are sitting and he sits down and picks up the conversation without looking back at me.
I stand by the pool table and I hold my beer and I think about what just happened.
He didn't flirt. He didn't pry. He didn't demand an explanation or offer unsolicited advice or make the conversation about himself. He asked if I was okay. He accepted my answer even though we both probably knew it wasn't the truth. And he made sure I had a way to reach him if I needed to.
That's it. That's all he did.
I think about how different that is from Blake.
Blake doesn't ask if I'm okay. He assumes I'm okay because that assumption is easier.
If I told Blake I wasn't okay he'd want to know what he could do to fix it right now, not because the problem matters to him but because an unhappy Lara is an inconvenient Lara.
Blake's version of caring is making the discomfort go away.
Nathan's version is acknowledging it and standing nearby.
I think about that interaction for the rest of the evening.
I'm still thinking about it when Blake puts his arm around me at the table.
I'm still thinking about it when Hailey laughs at something across the room and I feel the familiar anger rise in my throat.
I'm still thinking about it on the drive home when Blake is talking about something I'm not listening to.
I shouldn't be thinking about Nathan Johnson this much. I have bigger problems. I am in the middle of secretly dismantling my engagement and preparing to expose my fiancé's affair and I should not be dedicating brain space to a thirty-second conversation at a bar.
But I can't help it. Something about the way he asked, the simplicity and the decency of it, lodged itself somewhere I wasn't guarding.
I push it aside. I have to. There's too much at stake right now to get distracted.
The next morning I go to the salon and I work a full day and Cheryl tells me I look better than I have in weeks and I tell her I got a good night's sleep, which is a lie but a small one compared to the lies I've been living inside.
The final straw comes two days later.
It's a Saturday morning. I'm making coffee. Blake is at the kitchen table scrolling through his phone, which is his default position for every Saturday morning of his life. He tells me he's going to help a buddy from work move a couch.
"Which buddy?" I ask.
"Dave. He's new. You haven't met him."
"Where does he live?"
"Over by the old mill. It's a second-floor apartment and the couch won't fit in the elevator so we've got to carry it down the stairs."
"That sounds miserable."
"It'll be fine. Shouldn't take long."
He leaves around ten. I spend the day at the apartment doing laundry and cleaning, which feels absurd given that I'm planning to leave this place within a week.
Blake comes home at four-thirty. He drops his keys on the counter and opens the fridge and pulls out a beer and leans against the kitchen island with the casual ease of a man who has nothing to hide.
He tells me about hauling the couch down two flights of stairs.
He acts out the part where they couldn't get it around the landing and had to tilt it at an angle that he describes using both arms and a sound effect.
He's entertaining. He's funny. He always has been.
This is the Blake that everyone in Pinehurst likes.
The guy at the party who makes you laugh.
The guy who tells stories with his whole body.
"Dave kept saying we should just leave it in the stairwell," Blake says, grinning. "I told him his landlord would probably have an opinion about that."
"Sounds like a long day," I say.
"It wasn't bad. Couple hours tops."
Then I ask casually what he did after the move.
"Came straight home," he says. "I was wiped. Those stairs killed me."
I look at him. I look at him the way I've trained myself to look at him over the past month. Not with emotion. With attention.
His hair is freshly washed. Not sweaty, not dusty, not the way hair looks after carrying furniture down two flights of stairs.
Washed and dried and styled the way he styles it when he's going somewhere.
His clothes are different from the ones he wore this morning.
Clean jeans. A shirt I recognize as one he keeps in the back of the closet for going out. Not a moving-furniture shirt.
And there's a scent on him. Faint. Floral. Not his deodorant. Not his body wash. Not anything that exists in our apartment.
Perfume.
He was with Hailey today. He helped his coworker move a couch and then he drove to wherever Hailey was and he spent time with her and then he showered, probably at her place, and changed into clean clothes and drove home to me and told me he came straight home because he was tired.
He's drinking his beer and looking at his phone and he has no idea that I'm standing three feet away watching the last thread snap.
Not rage. Not despair. Just a clean, final certainty.
I'm done.
That night I call Raina from the bathroom with the door locked and the faucet running for cover.
"I need to move the rest of my stuff," I say. "This week."
"I'll take Tuesday off work. We'll do it while he's at the jobsite. I already talked to my office and they can cover my patients."
"You already talked to your office?"
"I told them I had a family thing. Which is true. You're family. This is a thing."
"Okay."
"Are you ready?"
I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. The woman looking back at me is tired. She's lost weight from weeks of stress. Her skin looks dull and her eyes have shadows underneath them that concealer can't fix. She looks older than twenty-four.
But she also looks determined. She looks like someone who has spent a month carefully and methodically preparing to reclaim her life.
"Yeah," I say. "I'm ready."