Chapter 50 New Year’s Resolution
It vibrating in my back pocket was the only way I could tell it was even ringing thanks to the Spice Girls on blast overwhelming Gabe’s small apartment.
Leaning into Gabe, I yelled, “I’ll be right back!”
“But the ball is dropping in ten minutes!”
“I’ll be back by then!”
“This better not be you trying to get out of kissing me at midnight!”
Chuckling, I threw him a wink. “Wouldn’t dream of it!”
I weaved through the handful of people Gabe invited over for New Year’s Eve, passing smiles to the ones I knew as I made my way out into the hallway.
The hallway hummed with muffled music but was otherwise deserted.
Quickly, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and hit the answer button before checking who was calling.
“Hello?”
A sharp and deeply irritated sigh greeted me on the other end. “You know tonight is supposed to be my wedding night?”
My chest expanded with shock.
Monica?
A few seconds passed over the line in silence, my eyes darting back and forth across the dirt-caked, carpeted hallway, waiting to see if her voice was a dream. She and I hadn’t spoken in over a month. Not since I left her house with the hacked up pieces of my heart trailing behind.
“Helloooo?”
“I’m here,” I blurted out, realizing I hadn’t spoken.
“Did you hear me? About the fact that today was going to be my wedding day, and instead I’m at a shitty office party?”
My eyes shut closed, and I leaned my back against the door.
Of course I knew what today was supposed to be.
It was the first thought in my head when I woke up this morning in a new apartment, in a new city, in a new life.
I was here instead of standing by my sister’s side as she said ‘I do’ to the man of my dreams.
“I did,” I answered softly. “I just don’t want to say the wrong thing.”
“You see, that might be what shocks me more about this whole thing. You’re always so careful and so polite, and then you go and do something so fucking far out of left field for you.”
Gloom sunk my chest in with a sigh as I picked up on the slur lathering her words. She was drunk. A lack of inhibition was the only reason she’d picked up the phone and called me tonight.
“I know.”
“For you to do what you did knowing how it feels…” Guilt twisted my stomach inside out as I listened to her voice shake on the other end.
Monica might have been drunk enough for this conversation, but I certainly wasn’t.
She was diving headfirst into a conversation I’d imagined between us hundreds of times when I couldn’t sleep at night.
So many times I thought of what I would say, how I would go about it, and now, all the well-thought out, insightful comments I had planned were drawing a total blank.
When I needed it most, my brain failed me, because why not?
“You deserved a lot better than that,” I spoke quietly, slumping my head into my free hand and hoping I wasn’t saying the wrong thing. Any small misstep in this conversation on my part and Monica could throw out whatever drunken whim she had tonight to want to talk to me.
Monica sighed. “I didn’t call to yell at you.”
“Then why did you call?”
A pause hung over the phone.
“Christmas.”
My head perked up. “Christmas?”
“Yeah, Mom, Dad, and I watched Home Alone without you to keep with tradition. Felt weird as shit.”
“Oh…”
The tiniest, thinnest sliver of optimism punctured my lungs, and I struggled between exhaling and holding down my lips. I couldn’t seem to do one without the other and smiling right now felt too assuming.
It was so strange not being at home for Christmas this year, but I didn’t see how I could go home with everything.
Mom agreed too. Though neither of my parents had gone out of their way to say anything to me about what happened with Ethan, I knew they knew and just preferred not to comment.
This was between me and Monica and our mess to work out.
“I tried putting back together your letter by the way, but I gave up. I got like, three paper cuts.”
This time, I smiled picturing her cursing at small bits of paper as she tried to tape them together.
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, they’re a bitch.”
And then the conversation stalled out. I held my phone tighter as my grip grew slick with nervous sweat.
Was I supposed to say something next? I could say I’m sorry again, but that didn’t quite work out the first hundred times.
Maybe small talk? That seemed a bit dull and forced, but I would talk about paper cuts or the weather all day long if that’s what it took to jump start a relationship with her again.
In the middle of my panicked thought process, Monica cut through.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Oh…
Shit.
“None of this would be happening right now if you had just come to me and told me that you liked him. It would have been weird, but I would have been a hell of a lot more understanding, Alice.”
I swallowed hard, the feeling of something being lodged inside my throat sprouting suddenly.
This was what Monica wanted. This was why she called. She wanted answers to questions only I knew. She wanted to hear it from my own lips why I did what I did. No holds barred. All curtains dropped. Every uncomfortable thought and unfaithful emotion I had laid out on the table between us.
“Because I didn’t want to like him,” I started slowly. “I thought it was just some dumb crush at first and… when I realized it was more, I—” I stopped to breathe, squeezing my eyes shut against the turbulent memories. “That’s when I moved out.”
“I sort of figured that after the fact.”
Pulling the phone away from my mouth, I let out a pained sigh at the droll, unimpressed tone of her voice.
“I never thought anything was going to happen. I tried not to let it happen…” A breath trembling with absolute shame gashed through my sentence. “And then it did. So I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to hate me… and then here we are anyway.”
Against my ear was white noise and nothing more. No hint that Monica was still even listening, but I continued talking like she was.
“I should have told you. I shouldn’t have let it happen in the first place, but once I did, I should have told you instead of lying to myself that it would never happen again. Each time it happened, it was just easier to tell myself that was the last time than to admit what was going on.”
“That you were having a full-blown affair with my fiancé?”
Affair .
My whole body exploded with pin pricks as she threw that word in my face. It was such a nasty word. No one ever heard that word and thought of two people who genuinely loved each other. The word always sounded dirty and sleazy, and you assumed the people attached to it were too.
Ethan and I were neither. We were just cursed to be in love with the wrong person.
“Yes,” I answered.
On Monica’s end, I picked up on riotous voices partying and laughing, but she didn’t seem interested in joining them. Gabe would start looking for me soon, but there was no way I was leaving this conversation before Monica did.
“I wanna be mad at you forever, Alice. I really do. And I will be for a long time. Like a long, long, fucking time.” She paused, and I imagined her taking a long sip of whatever she was drinking tonight.
“But I do not hate you.”
The heart I thought I had lost gave a sudden and violent start in my chest.
“Really?”
“Yeah. We’re in a bad place right now, but we’re going to get past it, okay?”
My eyelashes grew wet as I closed my eyes, and they absorbed the happy tears that had risen.
For the first time in over a month, I was able to breathe all the way down to my gut.
A full, deep, relieving breath that flooded clean air all throughout my body, and I took it in greedily.
There wasn’t anything stopping the oxygen from reaching down to my belly button and back up again anymore, and boy, it felt good .
“Okay,” I whispered back.
“In other news, Ethan showed up on my doorstep a few weeks ago asking where you were.”
Just like that, all the freeing air I’d sucked into my lungs dried back up again and I choked on it. I coughed and tried to catch my breath, the oxygen burning my throat. Embarrassment slumped my head down to rest on my hand once my coughing subsided.
“I’m so sorry. He shouldn’t have done that.”
“Eh, don’t worry. I sent him on his way with a few colorful words.”
I didn’t even want to think about how that interaction went. A furious Monica and a desperate Ethan, both clashing over stupid Ol’ me.
“But then he just sat outside on the curb for another hour moping, so I went outside to tell him to fuck off, but then—” She groaned into the phone. “I’ve always been a sucker for men who cry.”
Like someone had kicked me in the chest, I dropped back against the wall.
“He was crying?”
“He clearly had been before I came out. His eyes were red and puffy. I hate seeing men cry.”
“Me too,” I spoke, my voice dropping like one of his tears.
“It was probably for the best though. I ended up taking pity on him and sat next to him on the curb and we just started talking. Like, really talk. About everything.”
“Like what?”
“Like our relationship and why it didn’t work out and how he felt about the relationship and how I felt about the relationship—which were surprisingly similar once we broke it down.
We both admitted that if it weren’t for the pregnancy scare, we probably would have been broken up before you even got here. ”
Well that would have made things about a billion times easier.
I wouldn’t have met Ethan as my sister’s fiancé but just as some handsome stranger.
Monica would have probably suggested I look for work at the bar, and that’s most likely where we would have met.
We would have laughed, flirted, and fell in love as our hearts demanded.