Chapter 26
Eventually—it could’ve been 30 minutes, it could’ve been three hours, Will loses track—he gets up from the chair and drags himself over to the bed. Rachel left in such a hurry that she didn’t grab her bag, and he doesn’t have the heart to move it, like not touching her things will somehow make up for inserting himself into her professional life in such an egregious manner. Then again, it could also be that he just wants to be close to any part of her right now.
The TV is still on and still muted. He contemplates turning it off, but grabbing the remote off the nightstand feels like too much effort, so he it leaves it alone. Several more minutes go by, and the air conditioner kicks back on. It’s the only noise in the room when a text rings out from the pillow next to his head where he set his phone. Even semicatatonic, he made sure his ringer was turned up loud so he wouldn’t miss her, and his head snaps up at the trumpet text-notification sound that he long ago assigned to her, and her alone.
I took the car and checked in at another hotel. Please don’t call or text.
The surge of hope he felt hearing those trumpets evaporates before it’s even fully formed.
She’s gone.
He stares at the phone, unsure whether to acknowledge he’s received her message. She told him to leave her alone, and he is sure she meant it. And at least he knows she hasn’t left the Nashville area. But it’s so out of character for them as a couple to just cut off communication like this that he can’t imagine anything harder than not responding.
He thinks about asking Ali or his mom for advice. Ali has a vague sense of what’s been going on, but it’s too much to explain over text, and it’s Friday night, so he’s probably out. Not to mention he tried to keep Will from making this exact mistake, and Will just ignored him. Like an idiot.
With his mom, he doesn’t even know where to start.
So he responds to Rachel with the shortest, most honest thing he can think of.
Ok. Again, I’m so, SO sorry. I love you.
When it’s been 10 minutes and she hasn’t so much as liked his text, let alone replied to it, he discovers he was wrong again: that—knowing she’s ignoring him—that’s harder.
Will forces himself off the bed in the direction of the bathroom and the shower, leaving his phone behind like it’s betrayed him by pointing out the obvious fact of Rachel’s anger at his lies.
Lies. That doesn’t even cut it. This was antihero stuff, except without the hero and without the charm of a beautiful leading man.
Will turns on the shower. Ever since he was a kid, he’s found the rush of running water extremely comforting, and as he strips off his clothes, he half wishes he could just spend the night in there. Once the water is hot, he steps in and lets it wash over him, doing his best to keep the bandage on the tattoo from getting drenched. He knows it’s been long enough that he could remove it, but seeing that date right now would flood him with painful nostalgia for three days ago, when he thought those numbers could somehow keep them together, somehow keep Rachel from being furious when he told her about his ill-conceived plan. It almost makes believing Lawrence could have been a ghost look plausible in comparison.
Turning his back to the spray, Will closes his eyes and finds himself flashing back to what, until tonight, had been the worst fight they had ever had.
It happened after Isa’s wedding. No one was ready to go home when the reception ended, so a large contingent of them walked to a bar down the street. Will and Rachel had been living together in Chicago for almost a year, and they’d each been asked multiple times throughout the evening when they were going to be the ones getting married. Of course that wasn’t ever how the question was posed, with people far more interested in knowing when they planned to “tie the knot” or “get hitched” or sundry other clichés. The most aggressive of them dispensed with the premise of a question altogether and simply declared “You’re next.”
It wasn’t obnoxious at all.
By that point, Will had already had the idea of proposing at the art institute near the Seurat painting, but just as when he’d moved there, the timing wasn’t right yet. And he was fine with that. Young and enjoying living in the city together, they were wholly committed to each other, so there was no rush. It also didn’t hurt that it gave him longer to save for a ring.
So the first time one of Rachel’s uncles asked when Will was “going to make her an honest woman,” and she brushed it off with a “Don’t give him any ideas, Uncle Gio,” digging her nails into Will’s palm as she did so to keep herself from punching her dad’s brother in the face, the two of them laughed.
“My family,” she muttered into her Manhattan when her uncle moved on, and Will kissed her on the forehead.
They had similar exchanges all over and around that ballroom. On the dance floor. In line to get drinks. Out on the terrace when they indulged in cigars with the rest of the wedding party. And without setting out to, Rachel kept responding the same way.
“Don’t give him any ideas.”
The two of them had both laughed about it once, and it was an easy way to change the subject, which explained why Rachel fell into defaulting to it over and over again. But with each passing interaction, coupled with each of her Manhattans and his gin and tonics, what had started out as a harmless quip wore thinner and thinner on him.
Will thought he’d be in the clear once they got to the bar, figuring—granted, drunkenly—things would start to feel more like a party and less like a wedding reception. They hadn’t been there 15 minutes when Rachel’s mom’s younger sister, the self-appointed cool aunt, sidled up to them at a high-top table and asked when they were “going to make it official already.”
For what a sober person would have recognized as the seventh time but that he would’ve sworn was at least the 20th, Will felt like the butt of a joke. Worse, it was a joke that picked at one of his biggest insecurities: that he wasn’t good enough for Rachel.
And Rachel was the one making it.
“Don’t go giving this guy any ideas, Auntie,” she said with a dash of a slur and her arm around him.
“You need to write some new material,” Will fired back, his tone wobbly, too, but still harsh. He shrugged her arm off. “Because that shit’s getting old.”
Rachel looked at him, confused.
“Look at that,” her aunt chimed in, either oblivious or choosing to be. “You already bicker like a married couple. You’re perfect for each other!”
“I don’t know,” Will said, not looking at the aunt but also refusing to meet Rachel’s stare. “She’s told pretty much everyone at this wedding she doesn’t want to marry me, so maybe not.”
The aunt waited to see if one of them would play that off and defuse the tension.
“Okay, looks like I struck a nerve,” she said when they didn’t, and then beat a strategic retreat over to a group of Rachel’s cousins.
“What the hell was that?” Rachel asked as soon as they were alone.
“That was me being over you acting like the idea of us getting married is the craziest thing you’ve ever heard in your entire life and making me look like a fool in front of your entire family in the process.”
“That’s not at all what I was doing. And you’ve been laughing about it just as much as me.”
Still huddled around that now painfully small high-top, Will finally turned to face her. “Have I? Maybe if you’d taken a break from being so darn hilarious, you would’ve noticed I haven’t laughed like the last dozen times.”
Rachel lifted her glass and gave him a skeptical-bordering-on-condescending look over the rim. “I think you need to check your math there, Willem.”
His full name was William, but since college, she’d sometimes call him this when she’d been drinking.
“They all already act like I’m some sort of wounded animal who followed you home from Michigan,” he said.
“Wounded animal?”
“Yeah. Some little, bitty baby ... something or other you took in out of the goodness of your heart.” The alcohol had sabotaged his ability to complete the metaphor, so he attempted to make his point by pretending to rock whatever the little, bitty baby thing was in his arms.
“Okay, you’re cut off,” she said. Which was absolutely the right call. But the way she just decreed it, completely overlooking that she was also drunk, only made him madder.
“Oh, good idea,” he said, whispering in mock conspiracy. “Don’t let them see me pissed at you. The whole narrative of my patheticness might break down.”
There with the water beating down on him in the shower in Nashville, nine years later and his marriage currently a mess, Will understands, maybe for the first time, just how much he’d been projecting what was going on inside of him onto Rachel’s family.
Also, patheticness? He’s pretty sure that’s not a word.
He thinks back to what Rachel said next.
“Uh, I don’t know where you got that. They don’t think you’re pathetic.” They’d switched to beer, and he can still see her taking that long drink before adding: “I mean, I don’t know how much they like you. But I don’t know much I like you right here at this particular moment in time, either, so ...”
When they apologized to each other the next day, she would say that was the line she regretted most. His followed in response to it.
“Well, that’s good, because it’s not like I’m in some sort of big ol’ rush to propose to you, anyway.”
They stood there stewing, finishing their beers. They hadn’t been loud, but their combined body language—her ripping up a coaster into ever smaller pieces, him staring a hole into the dartboard on the opposite wall—warded off any passersby who might have been inclined to stop and chat. A few minutes passed with them each waiting to see if the other would give or, short of that, say something that would set off the next round of barbs. Eventually, Will pulled out his phone.
“What, are you just going to ignore me now?” Rachel asked, seeing an opening to go at him again. “Got some email you need to catch up on at midnight on a Saturday?” She shifted into a parody of his voice, which sounded like a besotted Smokey Bear. “‘I’m Willem, and my job is so important!’”
“That’s super mature, Fartosaurus,” he said, deploying Isa’s childhood nickname for her, which Rachel had told him about after she’d farted once when she and Will were having sex. Had she not been caught so off guard, the last of her beer might have ended up in his face. That said, she was close to laughing at how ridiculous this had gotten, and if she had, maybe he would’ve, too, and then they’d have gotten back to their night. But that didn’t happen.
“For your information, I’m calling a cab,” Will said.
“Seriously?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, what, that’s it? Your feelings get a little hurt, and now you’re going back to the hotel? That’s mature.”
“No. I’m going back to the apartment.”
He could tell this surprised her. “Well, for your information,” she said, “I’m not leaving my sister’s wedding to join you in your little, bitty pity party.”
“Awesome. Because I wasn’t asking you to.”
Rachel looked stung, but she covered it quickly and went over to join her aunts and cousins.
He went home, to their home, by himself that night. She stayed in the hotel room she had booked for the two of them. He had trouble sleeping and was wide awake when she tried calling at 3:30 a.m., but he didn’t answer. She followed that with a text that simply read U up? If it’d been an apology, he might have written back, but considering her phrasing was better suited to a booty call, he didn’t. It was and still is the one and only time he has ever purposefully ignored a call or text from her out of anger.
They didn’t talk until Rachel returned to the apartment early the next afternoon. She said she was sorry for what she’d said about not liking him while they were fighting and making him feel like she didn’t want to get married. Because of course she did—just not yet. He apologized for not speaking up sooner about the joke and then overreacting when he did, and that obviously he had already thought about how and when he’d want to propose—also, not yet. Then came a makeup hug, followed by a makeup make out, which would’ve become makeup sex if they hadn’t simultaneously felt nauseous as a result of how hungover they were. So instead, they curled up together under a blanket on the couch and watched Date Me Now! for the rest of the day. They were back to being them, no worse for wear.
It’s a hopeful thought as Will, now in the midst of a fight that has dethroned what happened at Isa’s wedding as their worst, turns off the water and grabs a fluffy white hotel towel to dry himself off. As he starts drying his hair, he even finds himself thinking that if history is any indicator, everything could be fine by this time tomorrow, in time for Swift Saturday. He looks at his wrist and picks at the bandage, contemplating a permanent unveiling of the tattoo that is a reminder of just how sure Rachel had been about him.
But then he spots her toiletry bag on the bathroom counter.
He remembers how she left, with no thought for what she was going to wear or how she was going to, say, take out her contacts, like she had to be anywhere but near him, and his optimism disappears as fast as it arrived.
This fight isn’t like last time. As angry as he was then, he never felt like anything was truly in jeopardy. For one, they were both drunk, which had inserted a certain emotional distance into the argument even as it was happening, like they both knew in real time that they were each embellishing reality. Two, they’d been out of school more than three years, but it still had many of the contours of the kind of scene you might make in college, right down to the indiscriminate use of a nickname like Fartosaurus. And the fight in the bar popped up almost out of nowhere, its roots only extending as far back as earlier in the night (even if Will’s insecurities themselves were deep seated). Whereas what he’d done in arranging the interview with Creative Vices had become in effect a weeklong con. There was no misunderstanding at the heart of it, no joke inadvertently causing offense. His actions had been purposeful.
Perhaps most critically, Will got hurt before. Rachel was the one doing the harm. It was questionable if a moral high ground existed in the early morning hours at that bar, but if it did, it was his. And despite turning down her phone call, he still would’ve answered a text from her if it had been anything more substantive than U up?
No, Rachel isn’t just angrier with him than he’s ever been with her; she’s angrier than he’s ever seen her, period.
He’d been prepared (or at least thought he was) for her to ask him how he could’ve been so stupid or to yell at him for an hour straight or to demand he call the whole thing off. Maybe all of those at once. Or worse: she might have kicked him out of the hotel room, told him to sleep somewhere else.
But even then, he still would’ve known where to find her when it was time. For the purposes of the trip, this room was their home base, their shared space in a city neither had ever visited. Her leaving him behind here and not telling him where she went?
It feels more ominous.
He leaves the bandage where it is, picks his clothes up off the floor, and heads out to the room to put on a pair of pajama pants and a plain gray T-shirt. Retrieving his phone from the pillow, he instinctively taps the screen to see if she tried him, knowing full well that she didn’t.
You’d think that would lessen the disappointment of seeing nothing there, but it doesn’t.
The lack of any other text on the screen besides the clock makes 8:32 p.m. feel far lonelier than he’s used to. If they were at home, they’d just be settling in for a night of TV together, or maybe she’d be reading while he did a crossword puzzle. He loves that time of day, those few hours when everything that isn’t them seems to matter a little less. But right now, all he has of her is the photo on his lock screen of them at the botanical gardens and the bags she left behind.
Will imagines Rachel waking up in the middle of the night, deciding she can’t be in the same city as him, and driving home alone, calling Isa on the way to ask if she can stay with her. It makes him want to start flipping through all the pictures of them to feel closer, so he slips the phone into his pocket before he can start. He needs to do something productive—literally anything—to keep himself from spiraling even more than he already is.
Dinner. He should have some dinner. The last time he ate was lunch, which was before they left Lexington. Forget the fact that he isn’t hungry. He should be hungry, and given the circumstances, that’s enough to go on.
He goes over to the desk and pulls the faux-leather-bound booklet of a menu off it. His eyes go first to the 22-dollar mac and cheese, noticeably lacking a gourmet flourish like lobster or truffles, and he quickly ascertains that the meals are reasonably priced by room service standards, which is to say exorbitant in any other context.
If he had something approaching an appetite, he’d probably give the burger and frites a shot and wonder the whole time whether it was actually Kobe beef or just a way to make him feel better about drastically overpaying for a meal he could get at McDonald’s. As it is, he sets the menu back down and decides he’ll just go to the vending machines down the hall and really lean in to the bleakness of his situation.
It’s a mistake, and not just because of the scant nutritional value that awaits him.
As soon as he has the thought, his mind is racing back to Mackinac and the unabashed joy on Rachel’s face at the Marquise as she weighed whether their waiter was part of a double-Lane couple or instead had referred to himself as a “vending machine of bullshit.” He could practically hear her laugh.
A few days ago, he couldn’t have imagined a scenario where this memory would make him start to cry. But this night is proving to be full of firsts.
“What’s wrong with that man, Mommy?” a little boy asks as Will stumbles toward them in the hallway, wiping the tears off his face.
“Shh,” his mom says. “That’s not polite.” She looks right at Will. “Sorry about that. Kids, you know?”
“It’s okay.” Will looks at the boy. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s not okay for daddies to cry. Everybody cries. Mommies. Daddies. The PAW Patrol probably. Everyone.”
The boy nods solemnly, and Will manages a weak smile while the woman pulls her son in closer and shifts uncomfortably. “Are you all right?” she asks as he walks away.
“Peachy,” he says without looking back. “These are happy tears. I effing love peanut MM’s.”
Will gets to the machine and discovers it is sold out of peanut MM’s.
He stares through the glass, debating his options. It’s the kind of conundrum Rachel would love. Do you stay in the MM’s family and go with plain, or do you buy a bag of Reese’s Pieces for the first time in your adult life? Or maybe just blow it all up and go with Skittles?
Feeling her absence, he can’t help himself. He pulls out his phone.
You know you’ve hit rock bottom when the unavailability of peanut MMs forces you to change your dinner plans.
He slips in his money and pushes the button for the Reese’s. As he’s fishing the bag out from behind the machine’s little swinging door, he hears the ring of a text back.
Ali, fast as ever.
It went that bad?
Afraid so. You were right.
Is Rachel with you?
No.
Where is she?
I don’t know. Another hotel somewhere. She took the car and told me not to call.
Will buys a bottle of water from the adjacent drink machine and then retreats slowly down the hall in the direction of his room, waiting for what Ali is going to say next. When there’s still no response after he’s gone back in, sat on the bed, and opened his candy, he checks to see if he forgot to hit send on his last message.
But he did send it. And Ali never takes this long.
Will assumes he doesn’t know what to say, and who can blame him? Ali had tried, repeatedly, to warn him what a bad idea it was to go behind Rachel’s back, but Will had gone through with it anyway. It was a little presumptuous to ask for a sympathetic ear now. Especially on a Friday night when Ali could be out in New York City. Eating Reese’s Pieces alone in his hotel room is painfully fitting.
About to turn the volume up on the long-muted TV, Will stops when his phone rings.
Not a text ring. But a ring ring.
“Hey, man,” a subdued Ali says, not waiting for him to speak. “I’m really sorry.”
They rarely talk over the phone. That his friend chose to call him now makes Will realize all over again just how bad this is.
But he is grateful for the reminder that he doesn’t have to face it by himself.
“Don’t be,” Will says. “I was bound to screw things up sooner or later.”