Four #2
“You’ll be okay. You’ll get your job back and find a new apartment. Everything will work out.”
“Maybe.” I shrug. “What about you and the cheater? How did you end up on two different pages?”
Bri huffs out a laugh and takes the final bite of her ice cream cone. “I don’t know if we were ever on two different pages, he was just between two different sets of thighs.”
I fail to stop the laugh she pulls out of me. “Sorry.”
“It’s cool. You can’t judge me, teacher’s pet.”
I gasp at her cutting joke but end up laughing again. “She was a professor, not a teacher.”
“Right, right. No disrespect to my girl.” Her giggle adds to my enjoyment. “Wait. What time are you supposed to go back to the airport?”
“Around five-ish?” I glance at my phone, ignoring the lack of notifications beneath the glaring 6:40 p.m. “Fuck!” I yell, earning glares from the parents nearby. “My flight is supposed to leave in an hour. I lost track of time.”
“We can run to the hotel, but do you think you can make it?”
“Not if it’s anything like last time. I’ll be last in the standby line checking in this late, anyway.” I drop my head back, mouthing the slew of curse words I want to scream.
“Stay in my room.”
I look down, seeing sincerity on Bri’s face. “Really?”
“The pullout couch is all yours. I haven’t booked my flight yet. We can look together tomorrow.”
“You’re serious?”
“No, I’m joking. Die in the street.” She cracks a smile. “Yes. Come on.”
~
Back at the hotel, it’s late, but I can’t sleep yet. I lie in the surprisingly comfortable pullout bed, bouncing laser beams back at guardians on my Switch while trying to zone out from my thoughts. It isn’t working.
I check my phone again for the millionth time, hoping I’ll see Natalie’s name on my screen, proving Bri wrong, but it’s blank yet again.
With Mom on her shift in Vietnam with my grandmother, and my sister on deck to give me shit the moment I tell her what happened, it’s only me, my phone, and Natalie’s number staring back at me from beneath my hovering thumb.
Getting my suitcase back felt like the period at the end of a sentence. Now, I’m not sure what’s next. This part of my story—the embarrassing moment when the heroine drags her antagonist through the mud before killing him off—has come to an end.
But one text wouldn’t kill me, right? A little peek at the end of the story to see if the antagonist survives and convinces the heroine to love him again.
Through my thoughts, I hear what sounds like Bri talking in the next room. I set my phone down and listen closer, hearing the muffled sounds of crying. My chest instantly clenches.
I leave the warmth of my blankets and go to her door. It’s clearer now, the distinct sound of sobbing into a pillow.
Shit. She spent the whole day getting me out of my sorrows only to fall back into her own. She was so level-headed and inspiring while leading me through it, I hadn’t considered she was still struggling. That was shitty of me.
Tapping lightly on the door, I say, “Bri?”
Her crying stops. “Yes?”
“Are you okay?”
Her sad laugh breaks my heart. “Not really.”
Not knowing what to do, I default to being my grandmother. “Can I get you something? Tea? A snack?”
“You can come in.”
I do so timidly, feeling like I am encroaching on her privacy, both spatially and emotionally. When I find her curled up under her covers hugging her tear-stained pillow, she looks . . . broken. It’s a shock to see.
“I heard you crying. Do you want to talk?”
She sits up against the headboard and shrugs noncommittally, then pats the bed beside her. I accept her invitation.
“It’s David. I saw a picture of him with the other woman. I didn’t think I would see him because he hasn’t posted on his profile in years, but she tagged him. When I opened the app, it was just there, in my face, like the biggest Fuck you.”
“Was it hard to see her?”
“Yeah. But it was harder to see that she’s pregnant.”
My next heartbeat spreads like ice water through my chest. “Tell me you’re lying.”
She reaches under the pillow and retrieves her phone, unlocking it and handing it to me. The anthropomorphized pile of garbage stands beside a woman who’s smiling ear to ear, holding a sonogram up to the camera.
“Jesus,” I breathe out.
“He knows I don’t want to have kids—told me from day one he didn’t either, and now . . . Fuck.” Bri starts crying again, and my chest wrenches.
There’s nothing I can say, no dark joke I can make to lighten a situation like this. He didn’t just cheat on her, he started a whole family behind her back. “I’m so sorry.”
She denies my sympathy with a shake of her head. “It’s just now hitting me how much he lied. For three fucking years, I loved him, and now I don’t even know who he is. He’s making me question my worth, and I hate that I gave him that power over me.”
She clings to me, fingertips gripping my bicep and palm while she cries onto my shoulder.
My eyes burn with empathetic tears. It is physically painful to see someone as strong as her fall apart over someone so far beneath her.
I wish I had done something to ease her hurt before now rather than letting her shift so much of her focus to me.
“I almost called Natalie,” I tell on myself.
“Why?”
“Same shit. Even though I know she doesn’t want me, I still love her, and I miss her.” In the short time I’ve shared with Bri, I’ve learned to recognize my bad habits.
“We need to block them,” she says suddenly. There’s a dissociated look in her eyes. She is lost in the emotional abscess left by the people who pushed us away.
“You think so?”
“Yes,” she says. “We’re going to take two steps forward, then see one of their posts or accidentally text them and feel like shit all over again.”
She’s right. Like always. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
We take out our phones, scooting closer together so we can see both of our screens. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
Side by side, we both tap Block. The conversations go away. We do the same with app after app, deleting text messages and comments, until all that’s left is calls and texts.
“We should block their numbers too, right?” she asks. Hesitation sets in for both of us.
My stream of texts to Natalie is pathetic. Back-to-back messages receiving only a one-sentence response, yet I still didn’t see the lack of reciprocation, the one-sidedness of affection.
Part of me fears not being able to hear from Natalie at all, as if there would be an emergency or life change that would require me to be the person there for her, but she started a new life on her own.
She pushed me away. She left me. This is the period at the end of a sentence she wrote for us both.
“Let’s do it,” I say.
We do it together. Relief washes away part of my grief. My next breath comes easier. Bri sinks down into her pillow with a heavy sigh.
“Feeling any better?” I ask.
An attempt at a smile twitches on her tear-plumped lips. “I’ll be fine in the morning.”
“You sure?”
She nods emphatically, wiping the last tear from her eye. “I’m sure.”
Betraying what she said, she doesn’t let go of my hand. Her body speaks the words she won’t. “Do you . . . want me to stay?”
“Yes,” she admits softly. “So you can kick me if I start crying again.”
That makes me smile. “Sure.”
I climb under the sheets, as casual a distance from her as one can achieve while sharing a bed, knowing if this is anything like the last time, the space between us won’t remain casual at all.
I also know she won’t mind if it doesn’t.
If I tried, I could count the number of times Natalie let me sleep next to her without complaint.
Funny how I’m more comfortable in bed with a stranger I’ve known for two days than I was with my girlfriend of two years.
Slowly, she falls limp, her breaths slow and heavy with sleep.
I watch her, trying to follow suit, but I can’t get today out of my head.
Bri is . . . special. As I’ve recently been informed, I’m not the best at reading subtext, but it doesn’t take social literacy to see how willing she is to throw herself into the fire to help me when she would never expect the same back.
I feel like I owe her for all the help she’s given me.
Even if I don’t—even though she will insist that I don’t—I want to pay her back.
I’ll figure something out.