Chapter Twenty-Six
“Call anytime.” She taps her phone where it’s strapped to her arm, cued up with her high-adrenaline playlist. “Otherwise, I’ll run for two hours and aim to be back around six.”
I shake my head at her, incredulous. Two hours. If she was anyone else, I’d suspect her of spending half that time parked at a coffee shop, sipping a latte. But she isn’t anyone else.
“Thank you again for being here,” I say. “And also, I guess, for not being here?”
She laughs, and I almost laugh, though I’m too keyed up to do more than muddle a smile.
“You’ll be okay?” she asks.
“Maybe not tonight, but eventually.”
“It’s good to have goals.” She envelops me in a warm hug and I squeeze her tight.
As we step back from each other, Khalil’s door opens and he wheels his bike out, halting as he sees us. Hannah spins toward him and she goes still, too.
“Hi,” he says, still frozen.
“Hi,” she says, equally rapt.
“Are you—”
“Yeah. And you’re—”
“Yep.” He does a quick scan of her appearance. “Are you about to—”
“Yeah.” She gestures at his bike. “You?”
“Uh-huh. Any chance you want—”
“Please. Yes. If my pace is okay.”
“Mine’s... whatever.”
“As in fast?”
“As in happy to pace you.”
“But that’s—”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay. Cool.”
“Yeah. Cool.” He hikes his cycle onto his shoulder and opens the door to the stairwell as though he’s in such a rush to get going, he can’t be bothered to wait for the elevator.
Once he’s out of view, Hannah sneaks me a wide-eyed look of surprise and delight.
Then she follows Khalil into the stairwell and I watch the door close, too stunned to move.
Despite my prior concerns about meddling, no meddling appears to be necessary.
In fact, I don’t think full sentences were involved.
Can two people really fall for each other that fast?
I shake off the question as swiftly as I ask it.
This is not a moment for analysis.
This is a moment for joy.
I’m about to close my door and stress-pet Aggie while watching the clock when the elevator dings and Everett steps out, looking cozy and familiar in his peacoat, corduroys, red Converse, and striped scarf, with his ancient satchel strapped over his chest, but also not familiar with his posture slumped, his face unshaven, and dark circles under his eyes.
He sees me right away and as our eyes meet, I’m slammed with several feelings at once: intense longing to run to him, anger that he made this impossible, and a random concern that he might think I’ve been standing here waiting for him for god knows how long.
I swiftly decide it doesn’t matter what he thinks.
In a way, I’ve been waiting for him for the last two days. Even while I’ve also been avoiding him.
“Should I, um, do you want, would you rather...” he stammers, and I’m about to save him the effort of asking by inviting him in when Aggie sidles past me and trots over to greet him, completely disregarding the heart-to-heart we had a few minutes ago, when I told her things with Everett might be changing and she shouldn’t assume we were still on familiar terms.
Everett bends to pet her head, though he eyes me uncertainly as he does it, like he’s not sure petting her is allowed anymore, which is like a knife to the heart. It’s one thing to know I might have to live without his affection. It’s another to thrust that reality on Aggie.
“Come in,” I say, no longer willing to drag this out, not when he looks tortured and Aggie’s breaking my heart, nuzzling into his touch and wagging her tail with oblivious joy.
I step back and Everett enters my apartment with Aggie following at his heels. He stands just inside the threshold, clinging to his bag strap with more uncertainty, no longer the boyfriend who’s spent countless hours here, but a stranger in a strange land. Until he notices the kitchen.
“You’re baking?” he asks with understandable surprise.
“ We’re baking,” I amend. “It seemed to help the last time we had a difficult conversation, so I thought maybe, instead of sitting awkwardly on the futon, we could try this again.”
His brows flicker. His lips twitch. His grip tightens on his strap. I don’t know what any of it means, other than I’m not the only one struggling here, but that’s probably all I need to know beyond the obvious, which he can tell me as we crack some eggs.
He leaves his coat and bag by the door and joins me at the counter while Aggie flops onto her bed and watches us with quiet curiosity.
I didn’t look up a recipe, figuring we could keep it simple and make the cookies on the back of the chocolate chip package, which is what Hannah I rustled up ingredients and tools for this afternoon, all of them laid out on the counter.
Everett grasps the idea right away, setting a bowl in front of each of us and asking, “Wet or dry?”
“Dry,” I say. “That chilled butter’s all yours.”
We set to it, me measuring flour and him unwrapping sticks of butter, standing hip to hip but making an effort to keep space between us, which I hate but also need right now.
“First of all,” he says as he locates the wooden spoon, “I want to say I’m sorry. I made a choice that hurt you and I knew it was messed up when I did it. While I’m glad I get a chance to explain, my explanation doesn’t excuse what I did. So. Yeah. I’m really sorry, Cameron.”
I nod, and swallow, and let the flour idle until the threat of tears subsides.
“Second.” Everett frowns as the wooden spoon fails to dent the butter, but he tries again, and the white-knuckled, neck-tendons-straining effort he puts into it confirms I chose the right task.
“I didn’t plan to mention your account in this interview process.
I need you to know that. I encouraged you to pursue the sponsorships because I hated seeing you spend so much time at jobs you didn’t enjoy, or struggle to afford a few basic things for Aggie.
And also, I guess, I encouraged you because they were something I could help with. ”
I carry on with the dry ingredients while hanging on every word.
He brute-forces the butter into the beginnings of submission.
“You’re really hard to do nice things for,” he continues.
“You don’t want me to buy you dinner, even when all you have in your kitchen is a literal crust of bread and whatever you can scrape from a nearly empty jar of peanut butter.
I had to sneak a Christmas gift in through a loophole in the strict No Presents agreement you forced me to make.
You’re so self-sufficient you had to hit an extreme financial crisis to let me help with your laundry.
But building your account to increase your sponsorship revenue? That was something I could do.”
I stir the dry ingredients together but I’m too distracted to trust my measurements or put much effort into it.
So far he sounds so reasonable, so like the Everett I’ve always known: kind, gentle, generous, thoughtful, helpful.
His criticism barely even feels like criticism.
It seems fair and crystallizes a lot of other thoughts I’ve been wrestling with lately about loneliness and what it means to need other people, having always assumed my self-sufficiency was a necessity, or even an asset, without realizing it might not leave room for someone who’s trying to show they care.
Releasing myself from that assumption would be so freeing, and I want to consider it further.
But I feel like I’m waiting for the axe to fall. And I need him to get on with it.
“The choice you said you made?” I prompt. “The one you knew was ‘messed up’?”
“Right. Okay.” He scowls at the lumpy butter and goes at it again with full force.
“We were headed into the final round of interviews last week when a few of my colleagues overheard our CEO saying the final choice would likely come down to Brandon and me, and if I didn’t get the job, it would be because my portfolio didn’t demonstrate enough scope, strong on sleek and sophisticated with a lot of prestige accounts, but lacking anything purely whimsical and fun. ”
I stop stirring, suddenly sensing where this is going, desperate to find out if I’m right.
Everett carries on with the butter, so absorbed by his task he doesn’t notice my stillness.
“Word spread,” he says. “Brandon’s...
well, Brandon, but he’s good at what he does.
He also interviews well, which is where I struggle most. I get anxious and fumble my words.
Everyone I work with knows this. They also knew Brandon would nail it.
” He pauses just long enough for me to swallow a swell of nausea on his behalf.
“They all follow you on TikTok and knew I’d helped with branding and video production.
Someone suggested I add your account to my portfolio before the final interview.
I argued against the idea. It felt like an abuse of the rare opportunity you gave me to do something nice for you.
But Brandon kept walking around like he’d already picked out wall art for his new office, my colleagues were freaking out that he was about to become their boss, pressure built, and in the middle of an interview I was stammering and sweating my way through, someone asked if I had anything more vibrant and joyful.
So I panicked and pulled up your account.
” He stops there, sets down the bowl of softened butter, grips the edge of the counter with both hands, bends forward, and exhales as though he’s been holding his breath for a century.
Or at least for the last forty-eight hours.
I reach toward him on instinct, ready to comfort him by rubbing his back, but I retract my hand before touching him. We’re not there yet, though I no longer sense we can’t get there.
“So you weren’t using the account for your portfolio all along?” I ask.