29. The Wrong Kind of Safe #2
“You look like hell,” she says, stepping past me into the pristine hallway without waiting for an invitation. “And this place smells like a hospital ward. Where’s the cat? I need something to pet that doesn’t look like it’s about to have a nervous breakdown.”
“He’s sulking in the bedroom,” I say, closing the door. The disappointment is a physical weight, a leaden stone dropping into the pit of my stomach. “And I don’t look like hell. I’m organizing. This is what people do when they move.”
Kayla sets the tea down on a stack of unopened boxes and spins around, her eyes scanning the empty, white room with clinical precision. “Organizing what? Your own funeral? Mands, I can literally hear your anxiety from here. It’s making the tea cold.”
“I’m just tired, Kay. It’s a lot of moving. My life has been in shambles for weeks.”
“It’s a lot of bullshit,” she corrects, pointing a finger at me.
“You moved back here because you’re a coward.
You’re terrified that if you stay in that loft, you’ll have to admit that you actually want something and it scares the shit out of you.
You’re running back to the comfort of being miserable and ’safe. ’”
I reach for my tea, my fingers trembling against the paper cup. The heat of it is the only thing I can feel. “It was a fake relationship. We were performing for my parents. The performance is over, the audience has left, and the stage lights are off. What else was I supposed to do?”
Kayla scoffs, a sharp, derisive sound that echoes off the bare walls.
“Right. The performance. Was the part where he looked at you like you were the only thing keeping the earth on its axis also part of the script? Was the part where you haven’t stopped sketching his profile for three weeks, even before your stupid fake arrangement just method acting?
Because if so, you both deserve Oscars and a very lonely life. ”
I don’t answer. I can’t. If I speak, the walls I’ve spent the last six hours building will come crumbling down.
I take a sip of the tea. It’s hibiscus, lavender-infused, from her shop.
It tastes like the comfort of the Teacup, but it doesn’t taste like the cedar-and-bacon scent of Sterling’s kitchen.
“I’m hosting a poetry night at the Teacup tonight,” Kayla says, her voice softening just a fraction, though her eyes remain sharp.
“Come. Get out of this white box before you start talking to the wallpaper. It’s a theme night, ’Authenticity vs.
Approval.’ Very on the nose for you, don’t you think? It’s basically your autobiography.”
“I have work to do,” I mutter, looking back at the laptop where Sterling’s jawline is still etched into the margins of my career, a ghost in the machine.
“The work will be there tomorrow. The man won’t be if you keep sending him texts that sound like they were written by an AI with a grudge.
’Sounds fine’? Really, Mandy? You’re a graphic designer.
You’re supposed to understand the importance of subtext, of whitespace, of what isn’t said.
That text had the subtext of a restraining order and a cold cup of coffee. Just think about it.”
She leaves me with the tea and a look of deep-seated disappointment.
I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to prove her wrong.
I unpack the boxes with a ferocity that leaves my cuticles bleeding.
I hang the prints, the minimalist geometric ones I bought because they ’don’t clutter the visual field.
’ I line up my books alphabetically by author, then by height, then by color, until they look like a display in a store nobody visits.
I recreate the life I had before the fire, inch by agonizing, sterile inch.
By 7:00 p.m., the apartment is a masterpiece of the status quo. It’s exactly what I thought I wanted. It’s safe. It’s quiet. It’s a fortress built of eggshell paint and polished wood.
I find myself sitting on the floor of the living room, leaning against the sofa.
I haven’t even bothered to turn on the television; I just stare at the dark screen, watching my own reflection.
Bowie is curled in my lap, his purring a low, steady thrum that vibrates against my thighs.
The silence of the apartment is absolute, broken only by the distant, muffled sound of traffic three floors down and the hum of the refrigerator.
It’s the silence I used to call peaceful before I knew what it sounded like to have someone else breathing in the next room, or the sound of a shower running at 6:00 a.m. when Sterling had a shift.
I’ve been running my whole life. I ran from the fire, only to run into a lie that was easier to manage than the truth.
And now, I’ve run back to this apartment because it’s the only place where I don’t have to be vulnerable.
Here, I’m just Mandy Peterson, graphic designer, currently behind on three deadlines and living a perfectly organized, perfectly empty life.
But the organization is a lie. I look at the family ring sitting in its navy velvet box on the coffee table, the heirloom my mother pushed on us, the one that triggered the panic attack that started this whole collapse.
It looks like an accusation in the dim light.
I was so afraid of the weight of that ring that I threw away the hand that would hold it.
I think about the night of the storm at the loft, then the raw honesty we shared before the shower.
I think about the way Sterling’s hands felt on the small of my back, not possessive like Derek’s used to be, not showy for an audience, but just...
there. Like he was holding the world together so I didn’t have to for a few hours.
He was the only person who ever saw me when I was messy, when I had a full meltdown in my pajamas on a sidewalk in the rain after I failed my midterm, when I was failing to be the perfect, polished daughter.
And he loved me anyway. He didn’t want the version of me that ’sounds fine.
’ He wanted the version of me that draws in the margins.
I love him. I named it at his kitchen sink with a dish towel in my hand, and I’m naming it now in a room that smells like fresh paint and regret.
Real things can be lost. I was so afraid of losing the friendship that I’ve managed to lose the man, and in the process, I’ve lost the only version of myself I actually liked.
I reach for my phone. The screen is dark.
I want to tell him. I want to say that the arrangements are terrible and that I hate the faucet and that I’m terrified of how much I need him.
I want to tell him that ’Sounds fine’ was the biggest lie I’ve ever told, and I’ve been living a lie for two weeks.
But my thumb freezes over the screen. The “Sounds fine” is still there, mocking me, the last word in a conversation I don’t know how to restart without admitting I’m broken.
Bowie looks up at me, his moon-pie eyes wide and unblinking. He lets out a short, sharp meow and bats at the corner of the laptop, as if he’s trying to close the New York offer himself.