Chapter 5
five
It had been years. Years.
Yet the moment Josh held the door to the bar open for me like some kind of rom-com gentleman, the weight of that laundry room crushed me all over again.
I stepped inside anyway, chin up, shoulders squared.
Pretending I hadn’t just spent the last fifteen minutes in a spiral as we made our way to our next location about the last time we had technically been alone together.
That had ended with me wanting to disappear into a lint trap and him reminding me that I was just his “little sister’s kid best friend. ”
Nothing was ever going to happen.
The bar was cozy and dimly lit with old-fashioned bulbs strung along the ceiling and a wall of scratched vinyl records behind the bar between televisions blaring the live sports games. The background music was a low, steady hum.
“So,” he said, tugging off his jacket again, “how am I doing so far as a fake date?”
I gave him a look. “You get points for showing up. That’s already a better track record than most guys these days.”
He grinned. “So, I’m winning?”
“It’s not a competition.”
“Feels like one.”
He leaned back on his stool, stretching slightly. His shirt pulled just tight enough to remind me that he had, at some point, become someone with shoulders. Broad ones. Not that I was noticing. Or caring.
“Well then, you’re winning. Your competition so far has been your sister.”
“I’ll take it.”
I reached for my water glass before noting my fingers again.
Chuckling at my predicament, Josh handed me a napkin. He looked perfectly at ease, like this wasn’t weird. Like none of it was weird.
“Thanks.” I took the napkin from him, trying in a somewhat-decent effort to wipe the sauce from my fingertips, but really, I think I was just making it worse. “Honestly, I don’t think I can count this as a practice date anymore.”
Josh smiled at me around another bite of his own dozen wings that he was almost finished with already. “Why not? I’m sure having a good time.”
“I would never order wings on a first date.”
He looked me over. “Yeah, maybe it’s not the best look.”
“Hey,” I chastised, suddenly feeling a bit self-conscious.
He shook his head as another cheer went up around the bar, and we turned our heads back toward the television screen hanging up behind the rows of liquor bottles and sloping garland someone had attached to either side with hand-tied red velvet bows.
“This is a fun place,” I said.
“Not too shabby. Another teacher at school brought me here after I survived my first week a while back. Food is good for bar food and the drinks don’t make you hate life.”
“A positive,” I agreed.
“I thought so too.”
As the game on the TV cut to a commercial break, a soft buzz of conversation rose around the bar. It was background noise really—because Josh turned his full attention to me. No distractions. No half watching the screen.
His eyes did a slow sweep over me, like he was trying to figure out something. Like I was unfamiliar and familiar, all at once.
“I never got to ask you,” he said finally.
“Ask me what?”
“What you’ve been up to the past few years.” His tone was casual, but there was something behind it. Something heavier. “It’s been a while. How have you been, Brielle?”
He said my name softly, like it belonged to him. Just like he used to. And just like then, it knocked the air from my lungs.
I gave him a wary smile. “Besides the obvious?”
He tilted his head, amused. “Avoiding me.”
I let out a small scoff. “I haven’t been avoiding you.”
Josh raised his eyebrows.
“If I was avoiding you, then you were definitely avoiding me,” I shot back.
He paused. Then nodded once. “Fair.”
I could’ve pushed. I could’ve asked why.
Instead, I sighed. “I haven’t been doing all that much.”
His expression told me he didn’t buy that. Not for a second.
“Well, besides the obvious,” I conceded.
“I think I’ve decided I want to hear about the obvious,” he said. “Changed my mind.”
I rolled my eyes but gave in. “All right. I finished my bachelor’s in English—which probably wasn’t the best financial decision, but, hey, I did it.”
He nodded like he’d heard that part before.
“Then I got into a writing program for my master’s. Possibly an even worse decision. I guess I’ve always been that girl who bets everything on one thing and hopes it works out.”
“Why do you say that?”
My finger grazed the rim of my glass. “Because writing was always my thing. I thought doing it in an academic setting would make me better at it—or make it real, I guess. Sometimes, I wonder if it just made me more afraid.”
He didn’t interrupt. Just listened.
“I had a few pieces published. Little things. Random think pieces and a short essay that did okay. I interned at a small magazine upstate, got my degree, and somehow managed to graduate right alongside Gina, even though we were miles apart. And now …”
“Now?” he asked gently.
“Now I’m on the never-ending job hunt.”
Josh gave a low, thoughtful nod. “You never came back home for Christmas.”
“Busy, I guess.” I kept my voice even, though my chest tightened.
It was true. I had been busy—picking up other people’s shifts, taking campus jobs no one wanted.
But it wasn’t the full truth. The real reason I hadn’t come home?
I hadn’t wanted to walk into the Hutton house again, knowing what had happened the last time I did.
He let the silence hang for a beat. “And now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you still busy?” he asked. “Or are you going to come back home?”
I blinked, thrown by the way he had said home. Like it was still mine. Like he thought I might still belong there. “I have a new home here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I guess it depends. If someone hires me soon …”
“No one’s going to start anyone before the new year,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “Even if you do get hired, they’ll probably start you in January. No one smart kicks off a new employee during the holidays.”
I nodded slowly, chewing on that thought. For a few hours, I’d actually managed to forget the weight of my current limbo. Now it was back, settling heavy in my stomach.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I have no idea what I’m doing. I mean, is it stupid that I thought after following all the rules, like school and degrees, that gaining experience would be easier? That life would just magically click together once I passed Go and went to work?”
Josh leaned forward, elbows on the table. “No. Definitely not.”
I looked at him. “You sure?”
“No one knows what they’re doing,” he said, serious now. “Everyone’s just pretending they’ve figured it out. The trick is to try to enjoy the pretending.”
I stared at him a moment, unsure what to say. I wasn’t used to this version of Josh. Thoughtful. Gentle. Still a little infuriating, but now in a way that made my pulse skip.
“Enjoy the pretending.”
Easy for him to say. But for some reason, hearing it from him made it feel less like a failure and more like just another stage.
And maybe this—us, here, in this weird fake-date limbo—was just pretending too.
But it didn’t feel that way anymore. Or maybe it never would to be. My brain was still probably stuck so many years ago.
“Are you a fortune cookie now?” I countered.
He shrugged with a small laugh.
“And enjoy what pretending? Being a step from an empty bank account and having to explain to your sister that I can’t afford a five-dollar pizza night?
Not knowing where I am going to end up or if I’m going to be writing articles about anti-aging creams and step-by-steps on how to live a dairy-free, gluten-free lifestyle for the rest of my life?
Did you know there are different chocolate sandwich cookies for every kind of dietary restriction these days? ”
“Enjoy everything, I guess. Even the not knowing.”
I mean, sure, that was easy to say. Too easy.
And I was happy I was here. I’d made it to this point in my life, and I was living in a nice apartment with Gina, who I’d still somehow managed to keep as one of my best friends.
She was my family, and now we were still together, and it was all I could’ve ever really asked for.
I was thankful for it.
Grateful.
But was I really enjoying myself as I suffered through employment applications and not doing what a much younger me would’ve been proud of herself for?
“I mean, you like to write. That’s amazing,” said Josh. “That’s enjoying. I’ve always admired you for that, honestly.”
“You have?”
“It’s kind of what made me do whatever I wanted to finally two years ago. Among everything else going on.”
He admired me?
“You always had a notebook too. Constantly writing in it.”
I peered back at him again. “A notebook?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t you always check to make sure your bag would be able to hold it?”
I had done that. Or I used to. Now I had my phone I just kept notes on, though I remembered my notebooks. I loved my notebooks even if I thought I might’ve torn a few of them up during college when I couldn’t look at what was inside of them anymore.
I didn’t realize that I’d stopped completely until now. I just stopped writing in them. Stopped writing the same stuff anyway, which was probably the entire reason. Because I’d grown as a writer and also because I didn’t want to relive the moments I had gotten through. It felt freeing at the time.
Now, I wonder what I would’ve thought if I looked back at those entries of fairy tales, mixed in with my life I documented each day.
“You always used to have one on you at all times,” he said with a chuckle. “I swore, wherever you were, I always knew that I could count on someone having a pen too.”
“I forgot I did that.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “More or less.”