Chapter 19
nineteen
. . .
Two weeks later, Early September
This calendar date loomed over me like a doomsday clock.
For two weeks, dread sat in the pit of my stomach as I tried to be cool about it and force myself to pretend it wasn’t happening at all. Superficially, I was. I’d smile and laugh with my best friends through patio drinks, walks to the train station, and nights on the floor of their living room.
When everything went quiet at night in bed, or in the mornings while I watched the sunlight pour onto my hardwood floor, the overwhelming weight of it all sunk onto my chest. It would become impossible to breathe.
I had painted him to be a caricature of himself. Someone who could never have loved me in the first place, someone who lived underneath a handsome and charming facade for those blissful five days. It was easier to envision him under a fictional filter.
Those two weeks passed without any further communication. Sometimes I’d click on his Instagram profile and scroll through his few posts. This was the home for his photography hobby, and he’d even uploaded a handful of pictures from our trip. His trip.
Nothing was actually “ours.”
The day before our supposed meet up I still hadn’t heard from him, to the point where I assumed that he’d forgotten it and I felt the relief of being an afterthought to him.
The morning of I pretended like it was any other Friday, one where I didn’t have dinner plans with Evan McLeod at the end of it.
My relief was short lived when he sent a text confirming our…date? Was it a date? Was it a business meeting?
I texted the address of the hidden gem Mexican place in my neighborhood. It was the kind of low key spot no one would expect to see a TV star, and it was well within the comfortable confines of familiarity for me. I’d been to this place dozens of times, I’d have the upper hand.
Now, here I was with my hair curled in loose waves and a little casual dress flowing over my curves.
I couldn’t overthink what I was wearing or what I’d look like.
I tugged at the dress in the mirror and considered changing my mind again.
Settling on an outfit that made sense felt impossible.
I hovered between two realms, not trying so hard that it was obvious, not looking so casual it seemed like I’d given up.
In the midst of looking for a missing lipstick, I jumped at the noise of my phone buzzing on top of my vanity.
Maybe: Evan
I’m leaving the hotel now
Ok. I’ll meet you there.
Maybe: Evan:
I can also pick you up.
Save you the train cost.
I can walk.
Maybe: Evan:
Even more of a reason to pick you up.
It wasn’t worth the fight. He clearly wasn’t good at letting things go, if him talking to me again in the first place was any indication.
I poured myself a shot of the only liquor I had in the house—cheap vodka I used to make pasta sauce—then hesitantly sent him my address.
I quickly scanned my living room in case he could see a glimpse of it through my front door, a new layer of myself ready and waiting to be perceived by Evan.
All my Thorndown artifacts were gone, it was clean, and my decor made it seem like I was a normal, interesting adult. He wouldn’t be able to look too closely and see the messy piles of laundry in my bedroom or the empty bag of chips stuffed into the trash can.
I sucked in a shaky breath. Evan McLeod was en route to me. He’d text me. The chauffeur would open the back of the hired car. I’d slide in the back seat beside him. We’d ride to the restaurant in painful, tortuous silence. It would likely be one of the less uncomfortable parts of the night.
My bedroom mirror was sick of seeing me as I checked my reflection for the nth time. I fussed with my hair until my curls flattened. I couldn’t sit still, and I couldn’t go for a run, so I paced, and paced, waiting for the “here” text.
What would I say after “hey”? He’d wrecked my plans to walk over by myself. The fifteen minutes in the late summer air would be the closest thing I’d get to a run tonight, and now his chivalry squashed that.
The door buzzed.
I prayed to the universe that it was a delivery driver at the wrong address. I knew it wasn’t. Evan had a tendency to show up when I wasn’t ready for him. As I grabbed my purse off the crooked hook in my entryway I could see a tall, broad silhouette waving through the frosted glass window.
A sheepishly smiling Evan was revealed once I opened the door. He was in a linen button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top few buttons unbuttoned. His hands were shoved into his pockets, making the veins in his tanned arms pop.
Slut, I thought.
Silence hung between us like lingering summer humidity. We were in a standoff. A competition to see who would be the first to break and greet the other person. This was a terrible start to the evening.
“Hey,” he said. Soft. Gentle. Like a passing breeze. Not at all like a standoff.
All that mental work to get myself into a neutral headspace went out the window. My palms grew sweaty. My knees trembled. Evan Fucking McLeod was standing in front of me. The emotions I’d felt during that week in June came rushing back. Like. Lust. Loss.
“Hey, uh, let me lock up and we can go,” my voice warbled through the greeting. I was remarkably flustered. The same as I’d been when we first met. Any comfort between us had been swiftly undone.
Did he feel it too? Logic told me to doubt that he also had a flint strike of a spark in the back of his mind when he saw me.
I peered around him down the street, seeking out a limo or a black car with tinted windows. “Where’s your car waiting? I'll meet you there.”
“I drove myself,” his brows furrowed a bit. He looked mildly offended, but the emotion cleared from his face quickly. “I thought we could walk over together. It’s a nice night, and I’ve been stuck inside conference rooms all day.”
“It is nice out,” I agree. We’d relegated ourselves to talking about the weather. Off to a great start. I shut my front door and stepped out beside him, my nose nearly pressed into his sternum. “Aren’t you worried about other people approaching you?”
“I figured I’d take my chances,” he shrugged casually.
We descended my front steps side by side. Evan almost extended his arm for me to grasp onto as we walked down, but it snapped back against his torso. Reaching for me came second nature to him.
“You look great,” he said. He could barely look up from staring at his shoes as we walked.
So that’s what the mood of the night was going to be. Perfunctory compliments. Small talk. First date fodder. I could manage that and pretend that he was some random guy off a dating app that I’d reluctantly agree to spend my night with.
“You do too,” I matched his tone and energy. I wouldn’t show my cards and let any of my panic bubble up to the surface.
The amber light of the early evening cast a glow on us.
Our shadows stretched long ahead of our footsteps as we walked down the sidewalk.
The silence was hardly comfortable but it was tolerable enough that neither of us wanted to be the first to ruin it.
Evan kept glancing down at me, studying me as if I had the answers to life’s questions painted on my skin.
“Why are you here?” I blurted out and he shot another not-so-subtle look.
We were both shocked by my break in the quiet. We stopped on the sidewalk and stood face to face with one another. Unsure if it was the shadows or the way he curled his lip slightly, Evan seemed tense.
It wasn’t in a frustrated way, more of a nervous energy he couldn’t dispel sort of way.
I’d expected his fear and anger to merge together into festering lava, burbling beneath his skin, ready to burst. Instead, there was a coolness about him.
The volcano had erupted and all that was left was obsidian.
I squared my footing and pulled my shoulders back.
I was on guard, a blockade built around me ready to reflect anything he might say.
“My agent finally got me on an indie movie,” he exhaled a puff of air from spitting out the answer a little too quickly.
I didn’t react. “It’s a horror about a grad student who believes he is experiencing psychosis but the campus is actually transforming into an evil entity.
The director and screenwriter are both based here, so I’m meeting with them a few times to talk things through. ”
That’s not what I had really asked, I knew that, and Evan knew that. But for now he’d dance around the real question of us meeting up like this. An ambulance wailed in the distance, we had barely made it a block from my apartment.
A fleeting thought passed of whether he had pursued this project because it was heavily based out of Boston.
Of course, I corrected myself, that would be delusional.
There couldn’t be a rational universe where he’d want to see me.
Logic set in, I convinced myself that it was likely by complete chance, he had to have signed on before realizing where the project was based out of.
He was here to tell me to stay away. If he was trying to actively avoid me, just as he had for the last four months, working on a film based in my city was a horrible way to do it.
“Should we continue?” Evan asked, cocking his eyebrow. I was broken out of the hazy confusion that settled over me.
“Sure, sorry, I got distracted.”
We continued walking, letting the discomfort hang like a thick fog above us.
Processing this all was strange, there was the familiarity of my neighborhood, and the familiarity of him, and yet together it felt all so foreign.
His tangibility had ebbed and flowed, he was first an untouchable imaginary figure, then a figment of my imagination that flew into my life for a week, and then a haunting memory that would cause me to wake in a cold sweat at night.
Now, he was something of a blurry image, someone who towed the line between real and not, TV static with images cutting through.