Chapter 14
CHAPTER 14
Emails and texts should be illegal before eight in the morning.
Haleigh groaned as she rolled over to watch her phone buzz across her nightstand. It was seven forty-five. She had fifteen blissful minutes of sleep left. Who would dare disturb that?
She needed to figure out how to petition the UN to make this a global law. No business before eight.
It couldn’t be Jack. He had to go into work both days this weekend, despite dropping her off at almost two in the morning, and Joey only called when she needed something. No one else Haleigh knew would be conscious enough before ten to be sending messages.
Another notification chimed.
“What?” she muttered with irritation as she swiped the screen open.
There were a bunch of ads from stores she was sure she’d already unsubscribed from, an email from one of her writers asking if they could push back the timeline for edits by another week, and a dog-walking client lamenting that they had to move and needed to cancel their services.
Throwing her phone on the bed, Haleigh buried her face in her pillow and released a muffled scream.
It was amazing how, between breaths, your life could suddenly be in freefall. First her date-pocalypse was somehow worse than she’d expected, then last night happened, searing the sensation of Jack’s hands on her skin, his leg caught between hers, into Haleigh’s mind forever, and now the money she needed more than ever seemed to be doing its damnedest to slip right out of her hands.
I’ve had enough, universe, she conceded as she dragged herself out of bed. You win. Huzzah.
There was a soft knock at her door. She mumbled a grumpy “yeah” while digging around behind her pillows for a hair tie.
The door opened a crack, and Stanton peeked through. He looked as tired as she felt. His curls were mussed from sleep, and his glasses sat askew on his nose as if he’d just shoved them on. He was wearing his Eras tour T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants with chili peppers on them, each yelling, “I’m too hot to handle.”
“Heyyyyy,” he cooed, a manic smile on his face. “I thought I heard you grumbling in here.”
Oh god. He was using his we need to talk voice. Even if she had a suspicion that she knew exactly what he wanted to chat about, she was not in the mood for it right now.
His smile got bigger and more unhinged. “Ryan and I are making waffles. Your favorite.”
“So you can soften the blow of kicking me out?” There was no time for subtlety when the universe was playing soccer with your life.
“Whooooaaaa, what?” Ryan appeared behind Stanton, wielding a pair of tongs. He was a head shorter than Haleigh’s roommate, with a slight build, dark brown skin, tight braids that he wore tied back at the nape of his neck, and an infectious smile behind a neatly trimmed beard. His smile dropped as his umber-colored eyes searched Haleigh’s face. “Who told you we were kicking you out?!”
Haleigh arched an eyebrow at the two men. “You’re moving in together, right?”
“Well, yeah,” Ryan admitted. “But that doesn’t mean you have to go.” At the sound of the waffle iron beeping, he rushed back to the kitchen.
Haleigh shifted her attention to Stanton. “You own this place, and you and Ryan deserve some privacy to enjoy your domestic bliss.” She pushed a smile onto her face. They were a great couple, and she was happy for them. Truly. She just wished their good news didn’t have to be bad news for her at the same time.
Stanton flopped down into Haleigh’s desk chair. “We can be blissfully domestic with you here.”
“But then where will you put your sex dungeon?” she quipped. “And your Golden Girls –themed furniture?”
“Not themed, ” Ryan yelled out from the kitchen. “Just named. My living room is not styled like I’m a seventy-year-old retiree from Boca Raton.”
Haleigh snorted. She’d seen enough of his stuff come in and out of here over the last year to know that was his exact aesthetic. And a good sign that Stanton was really in love, because otherwise he would have made over that man ages ago.
“I don’t want to be a third wheel. And you’ve let me mooch off of you for almost two years”—she held up a hand when Stanton tried to argue—“and it’s time for me to get my shit together.”
“Your shit is doing great,” Stanton insisted, sending them both into a fit of laughter.
Once Haleigh caught her breath, she shook her head. “I have to stop being so afraid of the future and start figuring it out.” She couldn’t keep crashing through life hoping things would magically be okay. “If my bank meeting last night taught me anything—”
Stanton clutched her arm. “You went to a bank in that masterpiece of a dress? I thought you had a date.”
“I might as well have been at a bank. All the guy wanted to do was talk about my lack of business plans and financial sustainability.”
Stanton cringed. “Between this guy and the bird, you’re really campaigning for that worst-date-ever superlative.”
And to think she still had seven to go. The universe better show her some mercy soon.
“But listening to this guy drone on forced me to accept that I need a plan. Or a career. Something I can stand on with my own two feet.” She was not the same Haleigh who’d been destroyed by that copyediting job three years ago. She had medication and coping mechanisms and a therapist she could call. “I won’t do that if I keep living here with your fake version of rent.” She grinned at Stanton.
His mouth drew into a serious line. “Fine, but I’m not going to leave you high and dry. You’re staying until you’re ready.”
Haleigh stood and crossed the room. Grabbing his cheeks in her hands, she brought her lips to his forehead. “He’s a good egg, Stanton. I’m happy for you.”
Stanton and Ryan were proof that dating could work. That not every person Haleigh went out with would be a Bradley Cooper (not that one), no matter how bad last night had been.
“Pssshhhh.” Stanton rose to his full height, making Haleigh crane her neck to look at him. “He’s one of those golden eggs that giant lays in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’”
It was definitely a goose, but Haleigh didn’t bother to correct him.
Stanton hooked his arm in hers. “Now, let’s go eat your pity waffles.”
Two waffles with strawberries and cream and three episodes of some reality show about a crew on a luxury yacht later, Haleigh was sitting at her desk, fussing with her key necklace as she stared at the open calendar on her monitor.
Two months. That seemed like a reasonable timeframe to find a stable job. She marked the date with neon highlighting and extra exclamation points.
Then four months to move out. She couldn’t lean on Stanton any longer than that.
As she flipped through the days to add her second deadline, Haleigh’s eyes stuck on April 16.
Joey’s celebration weekend.
Two weeks had already passed since Haleigh had received her invitation, and she didn’t feel any closer to a dating sabbatical or a plus-one or anything that would make attending her sister’s party less painful.
It would be three days of celebrating the Berkshire golden child. Summa cum laude; Harvard Law; perfect, beautiful fiancée; nice town house in Cambridge. Joey would probably have two kids and a golden retriever before she turned thirty.
Haleigh’s sister was doing it all. And not once had she so much as stumbled. Joey would never have let a corporate job drive her into a depression so deep she couldn’t get out of bed. She’d never be wandering down an unclear path to an even more opaque future.
Literally everything Haleigh had done in her life was the opposite of her sister’s choices. And someone at that party would remind Haleigh of that every second of those seventy-two hours she was there.
Something had to change before April 16. Otherwise, Haleigh wasn’t sure she’d make it through that weekend in one piece.
She couldn’t do anything about the plus-one situation yet, but Haleigh could start looking for a job. For real. Not just bookmarking search sites or taking career quizzes. Actual, honest-to-goodness applying for positions.
She toggled open a browser and clicked on a few of her saved pages. She had an English degree with dual concentrations in literature and professional writing. Which meant she had the skills to fill a position at any company that needed things written down and edited to sound good.
Her stomach cramped as she scrolled through her first search. There were plenty of jobs she was qualified for, but Haleigh didn’t want to spend the rest of her life writing technical manuals for engineering companies or copyediting textbooks like a lot of her classmates had gone on to do. Just selecting one of those postings summoned the kind of thoughts she’d worked hard to keep out of her head since her last full-time job. The ones that caused the insides of her wrists to tingle, and her eyes to burn, and made her so lost and sad that it was hard to leave her room.
She ran her fingers over her necklace. “Start small,” she told herself. Her therapist often pointed out that Haleigh liked to climb to the top of a building without using the stairs. “One step at a time.”
She blew out a breath. “I will apply for three jobs,” she announced to no one. She could handle that. There had to be three options that were at least mildly appealing.
Though she was practically strangling herself from her grip on her skeleton key, Haleigh forced herself to read over every position that loaded up on the page.
At the fourth one, she stopped skimming the text and began reading in earnest. An acquisitions editor for mysteries and thrillers.
That could be something. Haleigh loved both genres. And the company was only a twenty-minute train ride away.
Her goal when she’d headed off to college had been to become an editor at a big publishing house. She loved reading, and she enjoyed making writing tighter, stronger, more engaging. Often, she’d find herself rewording lines from books in her head or imagining how she might have approached a plot point differently. Getting an English degree only made sense. Then she’d planned to apply for Columbia’s certificate in publishing or get a master’s from Emerson or some other school that had an advanced publishing degree.
After undergrad, though, Haleigh wasn’t ready to take on more student loans, so she’d adjusted that original path. She decided to get some experience locally, save some money, and reassess in a few years. She’d taken that copyediting job because it was publishing experience—even if it was in education instead of fiction. And she’d hung on for as long as she could because she’d wanted to be like Joey. She wanted to achieve all her goals. She wanted people to be proud of her.
But when her mental health took a toll, Haleigh had fallen into survival mode and never quite gotten out of it.
As she stared at the job opening, she wondered if this was her chance to reclaim that future. An opportunity to make real change toward more financial stability. A course correction back toward what she’d wanted, before she became too afraid to want anything.
Her heart hammered against her chest as she hit the apply now button.