Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Lennon
The milkshake is obscenely good.
Strawberry, extra thick, with whipped cream already sliding sideways off the top. I catch it with my straw before it can escape and take a long, triumphant pull while Tessa watches me.
“You look feral,” she tells me.
“I feel feral,” I agree. “This is the best milkshake I’ve ever had.”
“You say that every time.”
“And I mean it every time.”
“Sure.” She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling.
We’re sitting on a bench in the middle of the mall, shoes off because we’ve been walking for hours and earned it.
The fountain behind us makes that soft, endless trickling sound.
Somewhere above us, the skylights let in pale afternoon light, and everything feels easy in the way it only ever does with her.
Like nothing bad ever happened or ever will.
“Okay,” Tessa says, crossing her legs and turning toward me. “Start talking.”
“I already did.”
“You summarized.” She flicks her hand dismissively. “I want the director’s cut. With feelings. About all three of your men.”
I groan and lean back against the bench. “They are not my anything. I simply met three new people.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m not into all of them.”
“Okay,” she says calmly. “So which one are you denying the hardest?”
“That’s not fair.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I drop my hands into my lap. “You make it sound like I’m desperate.”
She studies me, then snorts. “You’ve been emotionally starved for months. Of course, you’re suddenly craving everything that makes you feel alive.”
The way she says it makes it sound less like an insult and more like a diagnosis.
“I’m not craving.”
“You are absolutely craving…” she leans closer, “… sex.”
I glare at her. “I’m not sleeping with anyone.”
“Which is just tragic.” She points her straw at me. “You should absolutely fuck Paul.”
“Tessa!” I look around instinctively.
“What? I’m team Paul. He smelled your neck. I respect that in a man.”
“He didn’t smell my neck.”
“You said he buried his face in your neck.”
“It was more of a…” I gesture vaguely. “An adjacent situation.”
“Lenny…”
“Fine. He smelled my neck.” I take another pull of my milkshake. “But he also said he’s been celibate for five years. Which, he told me, like thirty minutes after I met him,” I add.
The noise she makes is inhuman. Several nearby shoppers turn to look.
“Sorry,” I say to them. “She’s fine.”
“I am not fine,” Tessa informs me, pressing both hands flat to the bench as if she needs to ground herself. “Lenny. He told you he’s been celibate for five years?”
“And that he has two months left.”
“Two…” She stops, then presses her lips together. “Holy shit, you know what that means, right?”
“That he has very good self-control?”
She makes a sound that is a half-laugh, half-delighted shriek, and covers her mouth with her hand. “That means he’s going to go feral when he finally gets you. Which is great because you need to be folded like laundry by a man with a little bit of gray in his beard.”
“Tessa!”
“What?” She chuckles. “It’s the truth.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“Oh, I do.” The smugness in her expression softens. “I know exactly what kind of man he is. He’s a good one, Lenny.”
I open my mouth to ask her what she means by that and how she could possibly know, but then I think about ice water in a tumbler he washed and refilled.
About white sheets tucked at the corners, and Mr. Muffin placed with obvious care.
About the way my name sounds different in his mouth than it does in anyone else’s.
About his hand at the small of my back in the kitchen doorway, and his lips at the corner of my mouth, and the fact that he spent three hours picking out furniture for someone he hit with his car and calls it nothing.
“You like him, don’t you?” Tessa asks, softer now.
I look down at my milkshake. “Yeah,” I admit quietly, and I know I would only ever admit it to her. “I do.”
She bites her straw, muttering something that sounds almost like “that’s not going to make this easier,” but before I can ask what she means, she says, “Now. Tell me about the tall one with the freckles and the paint on his hands.”
“Nevan,” I say, just as he walks past us in the mall in his unhurried way, hands tucked in his hoodie pocket.
“Oh,” Tessa says beside me, her eyes following him. “He’s handsome.”
“He’s twenty-seven.”
She gives me a look. “And?”
“And that makes him eight years younger than us.”
“Paul is five years older than us.”
“That’s not the same.”
“That comment made you a hypocrite. You know, John Lennon was younger than Yoko Ono.”
“That’s your argument?”
“If it worked for the original Lennon, it can’t be wrong for you.” She shrugs, and I snort, making her smile. “You like Nevan too.”
“We’re friends.”
“You like him,” she says again, with the patience of someone who has watched me lie to myself professionally.
“He’s into someone else. There’s that girl at the inn, Sydney, he’s been pining over for a year.”
“And?” Tessa’s expression doesn’t move.
“And I’m not going to be the person who complicates that.”
“So you do like him.” She grins.
“I really don’t. I’m just… we’re friends.”
“Uh-huh.” She looks at me with that look. The one that means, you hear yourself, right?
I look at my milkshake.
She doesn’t push further, just hums to herself, which is somehow worse. “And the other one?”
I hesitate. “Ridge?”
“Yeah… Ridge.”
The name sits different than the others in this space. With Paul, it went warm, and with Nevan, it went pink. With Ridge, it got very still.
“He’s complicated,” I say.
“Your favorite.”
“Tessa…”
“I’m not wrong. You like your men complicated.” She watches me with those green eyes that have always had too much patience for my deflections. “What about him is complicated?”
I huff a laugh. “Literally everything.”
“Do you trust him?”
Do I?
Tessa’s eyes flick to the corridor behind me, in the direction of a flickering light. I can already feel it even though I haven’t turned to look.
I frown and look down the corridor in both directions.
Empty. Every shop, every bench, every escalator.
The music from the store speakers has cut out.
The other shoppers, the couple with the stroller, the teenagers outside the phone case kiosk, the woman with the enormous pretzel—all of it, just gone.
Only us, and the pale skylight, and the soft sound of the fountain that somehow keeps going.
“Huh,” I say.
“Huh?” Tessa asks.
“Everyone’s gone.”
She glances around. “So they are.”
I look back at my milkshake, but then notice my hand wrapped around the cup.
Breadstick fingers. Every single one, pale and slightly doughy, tapering to soft, rounded ends where my knuckles should be.
“This is a dream.” I set the cup down very slowly…
… and the mall brightens around me all at once, colors deepening, the skylight suddenly blazing, the fountain rushing back loud and clear as if someone turned the volume up all the way.
I look at Tessa.
She’s exactly as I remember her, and nothing like the still, pale version sitting in that chair by the window. Shoulder-length dark hair, a little wavy at the ends, green eyes bright, and freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks. She’s beautiful like she always was, annoyingly pretty.
“Hey, girl,” she greets in a soft tone, like we haven’t seen each other in years.
We haven’t.
Not like this.
“Tessa.” My voice breaks on the second syllable.
I’m across the bench before I’ve decided to move, and then my arms are around her, and she’s real, solid, warm, smells like cocoa butter, and I pull her in so hard I hear her exhale in surprise before she pulls me back just as fiercely, her arms locking around me, her face pressing into my hair.
“I missed you,” I gasp into her shoulder. “Every single day, I missed you—”
“I know.” Her arms tighten. “I know, Lenny.”
“You’re here,” I say, because I need to hear it out loud.
“I never left,” she murmurs. “I’ve always been right here.”
I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. Better. I decide that right now because I cannot afford to make any other decision.
Tessa pulls back before I do. She’s still smiling, but underneath it is urgency.
“How long can you hold this?” she asks. “Lucidity?”
“I don’t know.” I glance around. The mall is still bright, the fountain still loud, the empty corridors stretching away in both directions. “It feels stable.”
“It won’t last forever.” She takes both my hands in hers, and her grip is firm. “So I need you to listen to me, okay? Really listen.”
“I have so many questions—”
“I know, and I’ll answer them, but not now.” Her eyes find mine. “There’s something I need to tell you first.”
I go still.
“I can’t stay where I am,” she says.
There’s something frantic under her voice now, something I’ve never heard from her before.
“This in-between is making me lose my mind. I’m not fully here, and I’m not fully there, and I’ve been stuck in it for years because…” she pauses, squeezes my hands once, “… because of you.”
“Me?”
“You’re my tether, Lenny.” She says it as if it’s obvious. “I can’t let go completely because some part of me won’t leave you behind. It never could.”
The words take a second to reach me. And then they do, all at once.
“I’m the reason you’re stuck?” Dread claws up my spine. “All this time, I’m the reason—”
“No.” Her hands squeeze mine hard. “Listen to me. It’s not your fault.
It’s not something you did, it’s just what we are to each other.
” She waits until I look at her. “I love you too much to let go, and that love is the thing keeping me from somewhere I need to be. That’s not your fault, it’s just the truth. ”
I stare at her. At the green eyes that have always seen straight through me. Twelve years. She’s been in that state for twelve years, and I’ve been on the other side of a country with no idea, and the whole time…
“Tessa,” I say, and my voice comes out wrecked. “I’m so sorry.”