Chapter Twenty
Jo
It had taken three days for Ezra to be weaned off the ventilator.
Before my first day at Elion University’s campus, I had sworn to myself that I would never let a boy derail my studies. But
for those three days, I didn’t go to class, didn’t study for my looming midterms, just sat at Ezra’s bedside, the numb, silent
girl who haunted his hospital room like a ghost while international supermodel/entrepreneur Renata Kovalenko wept beside me.
For three days, I had watched the stilting, artificial rise and fall of his chest, thinking about how, when I first found
him, it had been so eerily still. Breathing wasn’t something I’d noticed before this. But now I watched for it in everyone,
taking note of the subtle expansion of ribs beneath the scrubs of the respiratory therapist who suctioned out Ezra’s secretions,
the slight rise of shoulders of the nurse looking over her IV pumps.
The doctors tried to be optimistic. He’s young , they’d said. He’ll pull through. But they also said that he’d been “down” for a long time. That his brain might not have gotten enough oxygen, and that even though he seemed to follow simple commands like “wiggle your toes,” “squeeze my hand,” they couldn’t be sure what he would do with more complex ones. If he would be able to talk, walk, act again. So when, on the fourth day, the team stopped by his room to announce that they were going to pull his breathing tube,
I grasped Renata’s hand and led her out into the hallway.
“He’s still in there,” I assured her.
Renata nodded, tears trailing down her face. She cut an imposing figure against the hospital’s wheat-colored walls, her jutting
hip bones, angular cheeks, and arched nose a study in geometry, and it struck me that, despite her incredible looks and absurdly
wealthy husband, her employees and her millions, she was alone. That the only person here to share in her horror was me, a
surly, poorly dressed teenager her son knew from class, who was alone too.
When we walked back into the room, Ezra was watching for us. He gave his mother a chagrined wave, like he was greeting her
after a weekend road trip, and she launched herself, sobbing, into his arms.
I watched them, knowing that my part in this had ended. I had three days of lectures to catch up on, an email to send to my
Chemistry TA begging to make up my missed lab. A life that I was still yet to build. Quietly, I crept for the door.
“Jo, wait,” a voice croaked behind me. Ezra, peeking out from over his mother’s shoulder, his skin pale, the circles under
his eyes dark, his gaze clear and direct. “Stay. Please.”
Then, he extended his hand, and without missing a beat, Renata did too.
I understood, in that moment, that they were offering me something that I’d never had. I understood, too, that I might never be able to give it back.
“I won’t,” I promised.
It had been weeks since I’d last seen Ezra, and in that time, he’d let his facial hair grow. I’d never seen him with more
than a five-o’clock shadow, but today he was rocking more week-old scruff, and it had a strange effect on his appearance,
making him less billionaire playboy and more front man of an indie rock band. It didn’t suit him, but that didn’t stop him
from being more beautiful than I remembered.
“Long time no see,” he said.
I could feel eyes settling on our table, snapping to Ezra like magnets to metal. Probably trying to place him, wondering where
they’d seen him before, or perhaps just checking him out. People like Renata and Ezra could hardly escape notice, but today,
Ezra didn’t seem to care. His focus was homed on me.
“Yeah,” I said weakly.
It hadn’t been that long since Ezra and I had last sat in a restaurant like this, stuffing our faces with the carbs he’d deprived
himself of while shooting shirtless scenes for One True Kiss , before heading to our next stop: a concert we’d seen advertised on a streetlamp, a secret magic show in the basement of a bar, an overpriced speakeasy where I would try the cocktails and he would make fun of my expressions while sipping a club soda. Afterward, we would hobble back home to his Gold Coast apartment and, after forcing me to chug his mom’s weird electrolyte water, collapse on either side of his California king. I’d wake up before him, like I always did, and draw a mustache on his face with washable marker, and he would enact his own revenge by wearing it the next morning to brunch, twirling the corner like a cartoon villain while reading through the menu.
And yet now, he felt like a stranger.
“Did you change your number?” Ezra said. “I tried to call you, but it said the line was disconnected.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe I just blocked you.”
Ezra didn’t take the bait.
“Did something happen?” he asked. Then: “Did your mom call?”
I winced. “Yes,” I said.
“Are you okay?” His voice was gentle, its natural rasp turning his question into a whisper.
“Fine,” I said. “Can’t say the same for your girl, though.”
Ezra looked over his shoulder at Ashley, who was staring at him longingly from the bar.
“She’s not my girl,” he corrected. “We broke up. At my birthday party, actually.”
I could tell he expected to see a reaction from me, and internally, I was having one. The problem was that I couldn’t quite
figure out what it was . Just a few hours ago, I’d told Mal that love was a conscious choice. But there had been nothing intentional about my free
fall for Ezra. It had taken years for me to label the stirring in my chest for what it was, and I’d come to it kicking and
screaming, cycling through denial and anger because no way was I stupid enough to develop real, actual, nonfraternal feelings
for Ezra Adelman.
And yet, in these few short months, those feelings had already changed into something unrecognizable.
“I hope you didn’t dump her on my account,” I said, trying to sort through the mess of my emotions. “Obviously I would’ve been uncomfortable if you’d stayed together at first, but if you really felt like she was the one, I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”
Ezra gave me an incredulous look, and what remained of his composure shattered on the spot.
“You wouldn’t want to be in the— Jo, you’ve been avoiding me for three months . You didn’t pick up my calls or answer my texts. You unfollowed me on social media. You asked my mom to put you at a different
table at the benefit—”
“I didn’t ask,” I interjected. “Renata thought that it might have been uncomfortable for us to be sitting together and offered
to make a switch—”
“You cut me out,” Ezra finished. “Out of nowhere, like I meant nothing to you.”
I’d never done well with seeing Ezra in distress. It was like I’d seen him burn through his lifetime’s worth of suffering
in a few short weeks, and I needed to shield him from more. Even now, I had to hold myself back from reaching across the table
and placing a comforting hand on that shaking fist.
“That’s not true,” I said. That was the problem , I almost added. You meant too much. When Mal held my hands and told me he was determined to earn my trust, I’d experienced what it meant to be desperately wanted,
to have a man anchor me in his gaze and tell me that he was going to do whatever he needed to prove to me that he loved me.
When I was busy being Ezra’s loyal hand, the best I could hope for was a kiss on the cheek before he went running back to
his model of the week.
“You sure?” Ezra said. “Because you seem perfectly content to keep living a life without me in it. Seems like I’m the only
one here having a hard time.”
“I figured you’d find someone else to keep you occupied,” I said truthfully.
“You’re not replaceable to me, Jo,” Ezra said.
I didn’t say anything to that, which in itself said too much. We sat in silence for a long time, long enough for a waitress
to swing by hopefully to ask Ezra what he’d like to order. Ezra shook his head without even turning to look at her, then wiped
his hands down his face.
“Look. I didn’t mean to ambush you. I swear I was planning to leave you alone, grab Ashley and run, but then I saw you sitting
here and I...” He sighed, dropped his head into his hands. “I’m sorry. I screwed up that night. I knew I screwed up the
moment I walked out of that library. And I just want a chance to try to make it right. So can we talk about what happened?
Please.”
What happened , I almost said, can’t be explained in one sentence. It had been a thousand tiny heartbreaks over ten years: honoring his then girlfriend Becca Holiday when he won the People’s
Choice Award for Best Male TV Actor when I was the one who’d run his lines with him in the middle of my oncology rotation,
sternly correcting every interviewer who insinuated that I was his girlfriend, taking women he’d known for two weeks to events
that he promised to sneak me into and expecting to be forgiven with a simple “I’m sorry, she just assumed we would be going
together and I couldn’t disappoint her.”
I’d suppressed these memories, but at their resurgence, I felt my throat tighten.
“You’re still pretending you don’t know,” I said. “Even now.”
“Know what?” Ezra said.
I scratched a line down the table, feeling the grit of the wood grain against my nail.
“That I was in love with you,” I said.
You’ve honed your craft , I thought. If I hadn’t been searching his face for a reaction, I might have missed his wince. But then something in his expression
changed, a twist at the corner of his mouth, a slow, pained swallow.
I knew Ezra’s face. I’d studied it under different sources of light, seen him delirious with joy and sad and angry and high
out of his mind, and I could most certainly make out disappointment.
“Was?” he said softly.
I recoiled, astonished. His reaction, his displeasure—they were incongruent with the man who had run out of a room at the
first hint that I was going to confess. Across from me, Ezra hadn’t looked away from me, his lips tucked into a line, waiting
for me to speak.
I opened my mouth to say something— What do you mean by that? Did you know all along? Are you so greedy that you want things to go back to the way they were,
with me pining away in your number two slot? —when suddenly I was engulfed in a coconut-lime scent.
“I hate to interrupt,” Dahlia said, “but the bartender wants Ashley out of here. We should probably get the check...”
Ezra’s features convulsed, then settled into the polite, neutral expression he always used with my roommate.
“Right,” he said. He turned in his seat, smiled good-naturedly at a passing waiter, who zipped to his side immediately, busy
restaurant be damned, and hit us with a “How can I help you?” Ezra handed him his black card. Then to me: “When am I seeing
you again?”
I swallowed down air, still reeling. “At the benefit?” I said. “Probably?”
“You don’t have time for me before that?” Ezra asked, his expression unreadable. When I shook my head ( I need a little more time than a week to sort through this mindfuck. ), he grunted his displeasure.
Luckily I was saved again, this time by the waiter, who zipped back to Ezra’s side like he was attached to a string. Ezra
scrawled his tip onto the receipt, barely breaking his eye contact with me, and the waiter, who’d been waiting over his shoulder,
looked like he was about to faint.
“Fine,” Ezra said to me, handing back the check presenter. “We’ll talk then. Don’t let my mom monopolize you.”
“Thanks for paying,” I said.
“Of course,” Ezra said. His gaze was heavy on me as I stood. It was this singular focus that had made him so popular on the
screen, how he managed to make the female lead look like she was the only woman in the world worthy of his notice. It was
strange, to feel that intensity directed at me. “I’m going to assume that means we can sit at the same table?”
I laughed in spite of myself, too stunned to react otherwise.
“Sure,” I allowed.