Chapter 20 #2
The last sentence was a wasp sting. I didn’t love being an honorary member of the walk of fame of people who were dumb enough to reject Evan McLeod. My name shouldn’t be listed among sleazy casting directors and agents and A-listers.
“Because you’re too charming and handsome for the role you auditioned for?” I cheekily asked as I tried to diffuse this miniscule bomb of tension that was sparking between us.
“Because I’m sometimes an anxious mess who word vomits during chemistry reads.”
“And how did you handle it?”
“I usually go someplace I can forget who I am and what my job is. An art museum. Coney Island in the middle of winter. If I have the time I’ll spend a whole day driving upstate somewhere.
I need the clear separation in the same way that you need your escape by way of running.
I’m honestly surprised that wasn’t your first inclination. ”
He and I were still technically strangers.
The hours we’d spent together had barely amounted to a full week. Yet a tiny tingle bloomed in my core at him mentioning that quirk of mine. Evan and I didn’t actually know each other, but he knew this about me. He’d filed it away among the other details I’d revealed to him
“That’ll come later,” I said. “I’m trying to run away from my problems a little less.”
“What’s it called?” he asked.
“What’s what called?”
“The book.”
“‘Fire on the Lake’.”
It was a strange cousin to “Ice on the Turret,” more of an inside joke with myself than anything.
Maybe the most eagle-eyed fanfiction readers could tie the threads together.
I’d dropped a few subtle references into the manuscript, things that had been so intrinsic in my fanfiction writing that they were impossible to shake off.
The story as a whole was wildly different from anything I’d ever written before, and I think that’s why I loved it so much.
“Sounds like a New York Times Bestseller to me,” he said earnestly. “I’m really, really glad you texted me. I finally had an excuse to call you.”
I sat silent for a heartbeat. It was bizarre how easy it had been for me to reach out. To pick things up in the way they should’ve been in the alternate universe version of our lives.
“Seriously?” I blurted out. “It’s not weird given the everything between us?”
“It’s definitely weird, but nice? Unfortunately I think we’re tethered together for a multitude of reasons. Plus, talking to you reminds me of camp. And I really miss camp.”
My heart tugged towards him. “Now you know how I feel all the time.”
“This is going to sound crazy, but I’ve been listening to loon calls to fall asleep.”
“They don’t make you feel existential dread?” I thought of the lonely birds calling out to each other at night, close enough to hear one another, too far away to see each other. Always seeking the other out. It felt familiar.
“They do, but in a comforting way? I don’t know how to say that without sounding a little crazy. New York is so loud, I can’t believe I didn’t totally grasp how loud it was.”
“Cambridge is quieter,” I replied. “Never as quiet as camp.”
“I called Sue, I booked another week for myself. And—”
And me.
Just as I began to soften around the edges for Evan again, I snapped back into protection mode, but not from Evan this time. I couldn’t reply to him, not when I was thrust into DEFCON 1 when I saw two people in the distance.
“Fuck, I have to go.” I ended the call with a hasty goodbye, stuffed my phone in my pocket, and watched the couple approaching me. My heart thrummed wildly. A very familiar face, with a very familiar arm, gripping the arm of a woman I didn’t recognize.
“Dani?” Nick’s face had disbelief all over it. His mouth hung open like a trout’s. If he wasn’t careful someone might mistake him for a catch straight from the harbor. “What are you doing here?” He asked it as if us breaking up meant he got custody of the entire Boston Metro area.
“I live a few blocks up?” I replied in disbelief, almost wanting to start the sentence with “we.” It was our shared home for years, how had it vanished from the map? “I was headed home—”
He nodded his head, pieces falling into place. We weren’t six months removed from our relationship and yet he’d managed to forget one of the most basic details about me. He managed to forget the neighborhood we lived in. I’d faded from existence for him.
It stung, barely. Not much more than a mosquito bite. In so many ways my life had gotten significantly better since we’d broken up. There was no stirring sadness or jealousy simmering in my gut.
The woman draped over his shoulder said nothing, her deep brown eyes continuously scanned me up and down.
Identifying the threat. I had the urge to tell her that I will never be a threat to that relationship, she can keep him for all I cared.
She was pretty, definitely too pretty for him but I had a feeling that their connection extended beyond looks alone.
“How are things?” Nick cautiously asked. The way his dark brows knit together told me that he feared the worst from this run-in. To his benefit, I was far too apathetic to tell him off.
How were things?
Well, I had a week-long situationship with my celebrity crush.
It crashed and burned but now we might be friends, also I just got off the phone with him.
Oh, and I’m trying to get an agent for a book I wrote while I was healing from the fallout of said crash and burn with the celebrity crush.
And, by the way, I hardly think about you at all anymore.
“Things are good,” I replied instead, and I mostly meant it.
There was still the ambiguity with Evan, and the likely rejection from the agent, but from a bird’s eye view things were somewhere north of fine.
The months I’d spent eating frozen meals and cereal for dinner had waned, and I fell in love with cooking again now that I wasn’t writing like I was running out of time.
In fact, for the first time in a long time it felt like I had nothing but time.
“You look great,” Nick said quickly, which prompted a sharp glance from the woman beside him. “Shit, sorry, this is Kaitlyn, my fiancée.”
Fiancée? The word rattled around my head, foreign and uncomfortable, yet close enough I could snatch it out of the air. I wanted to grab it and snap it in half over my knee.
Years of being belittled for wanting to be married, his insistence that it was a toxic, antiquated, anti-feminist institution, all for naught. He had interest in getting married, but not to me.
“It hasn’t even been four months,” I said quietly. I wanted my words to bite, but they came out in a pathetic whimper. I wasn’t filled with the same intoxicating vitriol I had been when we first broke up.
He didn’t owe me misery. I knew he was with the other woman, he stayed at her place the night I kicked him out. I’d moved on too, in so many ways. Still, something about the swiftness of Nick committing to forever with someone else cut much deeper.
Nick pulled Kaitlyn in closer, wrapping his arm around her waist. “Well, when you know, you know.” He chuckled stiffly.
“Right, of course,” I replied. Ice spread across my skin, it burrowed deep in my pores. It froze the tears that were hovering in the corners of my eyes. “You didn’t know for six years, but you know four months after officially getting with your side piece. Cool.”
“That’s not—” he started a feeble defense of himself. I realized I didn’t need to waste my time hearing it.
“Good seeing you, congrats and all that,” I briskly walked off, my shaking hands shoved into my pockets.
The last vestiges of summer were still hanging on, but an icy wind snaked between the buildings.
Tears of frustration threatened to break through.
I wouldn’t let them. I’d cried more than enough over Nick and his mediocrity for a lifetime.
A muffled sound rumbled through the fabric of my pants, freezing me in my tracks.
I slid my phone out of my pocket and noticed it was still lit up. Evan’s phone number flashed at the top of the screen with a timer ticking upward.
I hadn’t hung up. And neither had he.
I cautiously brought the phone to my ear, “Evan?”
“Fuck, was that your ex? The one you broke up with before—“
“Yeah,” I cut him off.
“He sounds like a dick.”
“He is one,” I said. I could’ve said more, but Evan and I couldn’t have two emotionally vulnerable conversations tonight. “You stayed on the call? Why?”
A few beats of silence passed. A man running with an overstuffed backpack nearly collided into me as he entered the train station I had exited a few minutes earlier.
“Is it juvenile to say jealousy? Maybe a little curiosity?”
I laughed in reply. “You didn’t have to listen to all that. It’s so fucking embarrassing. I begged him to consider having a conversation about marriage for years and less than six months after we broke up he’s engaged to the woman he cheated on me with. Who the hell does that?”
“It’s not at all embarrassing, you don’t deserve that,” Evan said quietly. “I have time, want to list off everything you hate about him?”