Chapter 5
FIVE
“Show me the blue one again!”
Sara’s voice did the high-pitched half-squeal thing it had always done when she was overly excited. Hanna set the phone on top of her dresser while Sara spread out over her couch in SoMa, a backdrop Hanna was intimately familiar with from their FaceTime dates.
She reached for the zipper at her back, sweating her ass off between the chiffon and taffeta gowns strewn across her bed. Plastic packages and packing slips adorned the floor as she shimmied out of Number Four.
“The light blue or the navy?” she clarified.
“The light—oh! You’re home!” Matty caught Sara’s attention off screen, her eyes lighting up as he tossed his keys on the counter.
Hanna kicked the pink floral A-line dress they’d firmly ruled out into the corner of her room and snatched the light blue silk from the back of an armchair. It was a slick fit that hugged her every curve, with a back on just that side of scandalous.
Sara and Matty chatted back and forth for a moment before a third voice rumbled over the call.
Milo.
Hanna sighed. It was Wednesday. Movie and wing night.
She hadn’t spoken to him after that night at the hotel two weeks earlier, but from what she could tell, thanks to a totally normal amount of social media stalking for a woman in her thirties, he’d started seeing some girl named something cool like Chloe.
Okay, not like Chloe.
Her name was exactly Chloe, and Hanna knew which art school she went to, the name of her labradoodle, and that she worked at the same software company as Milo.
All very normal things to know about someone she had touched once in an elevator.
Sara ran with her phone through their loft and set it down on the counter, the rustling of take-out bags buzzing over the speaker.
“Okay. Light blue is on!” Hanna called, yanking the zipper up the final half inch. The ceiling fell away and Sara’s face popped back into view.
“Oh my god, yep. That’s it. That’s the one!” She darted through the kitchen and shoved her phone into Matty’s hands. “Babe, what do you think? Is it the bridesmaids’ dress? Tell Hanna how great she looks!”
Matty gripped the phone, half a wing sticking out of his mouth.
“Hi, Hanna! You look… very blue!”
Sara rolled her eyes and took the phone back.
“You look hot, dude. I’m almost tempted to put you in the pink one so you don’t show me up.”
Hanna laughed, picking at the neckline. “I don’t know about the back,” she mused, twisting to show Sara the drop. “It’s a lot.”
Sara shook her head, popping a wing in her mouth. “Nope. It’s perfect. Matty’s grandpa is officiating, it’s not like we have to impress the clergy.”
“But like, one wrong move on the dance floor and my tits are out, you know?” Hanna said, shimmying in her bedroom alone to demonstrate her fears.
Sara giggled and an off-screen voice called, “Then that’s for sure the dress.”
“See?” Sara said. “Milo approves. It’s definitely the one.”
Hanna groaned. What happened in the elevator was her own damn fault and nothing else, but she still couldn’t help thinking about it.
Usually late at night.
After a cocktail.
She sighed. “Milo’s approval is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
“Lemme see,” he said, his massive hand covering the screen before his face appeared. He’d let his stubble fill in over the last few weeks, which made him look even more like trouble. His eyebrows arched in confusion. “What are you talking about? You’re completely covered.”
“It’s the back that’s in question,” Sara said. “Turn around, Han.”
Hanna could have killed her.
She reluctantly twisted, flashing the open back as quickly as she could get away with.
“Oh,” Milo mumbled through a bite of food. “Your grandpa have a heart condition, Matty?”
Matty had definitely checked out of the conversation immediately, but responded, “I don’t think so?”
“Then I think it’s the one. It’s settled,” Milo declared. A red heat washed over Hanna’s skin and she hoped that any god that hadn't abandoned her over the last year was merciful enough to mute the color rendering across the screen.
“Amazing,” Sara squealed. She grabbed the phone back and dipped into the bedroom, flopping onto the bed. “Now that the dress is handled, we just need to decide on a hotel for the bachelorette.”
Hanna waved her hand. “I have it all planned. You just have to show up! Taylor and I are on top of things.”
She scooped the pile of rejected dresses off her bed, tossing them onto her favorite depression chair. Sara listed off all of the restaurants she wanted to make sure they hit while in Vegas, and Hanna was totally listening, and not at all thinking about the Greek god in the next room over.
She should have stuck to her guns and never given him a second glance.
It wasn’t that she expected anything after the elevator incident—she wasn’t even sure he was sober enough to remember it—but she thought she might get at least a social media connection out of the damn thing. Her number was right there in the bridal party group chat.
She sighed as the embarrassment crept back in.
“I’m talking about the wedding too much, I’m sorry,” Sara said.
“No! No, no, it’s not you,” Hanna assured her. She sat on the floor, stretching her back as she refocused her wandering mind. “I was just… it’s not important.”
Sara tilted her head and frowned.
Hanna could have sworn she was talking to Cami, thirty years younger. The thought pulled at another thread—would anyone remember her mother’s facial expressions enough to think the same thing about her?
“Your stuff is always important to me, Hanna. I feel like we haven’t talked about you in a while. Check in?”
Hanna inhaled slowly, chasing the burn of her previous thought. When Sara said ‘you,’ she could have meant ‘your mom’ or ‘Logan,’ but she had no idea she should have meant ‘Milo.’ All at once, Hanna realized how dramatic it all was.
Nothing happened.
“I mean. Sure. Logan stuff sucks, as per usual. He’s been calling relentlessly since he was here. I haven’t answered.”
“Of course.”
“Mom stuff sucks more.” Hanna bit her lip.
“I feel a little like I’ll never take a full breath again.
I think I’m just lonely,” she confessed.
“I’m in this house all by myself. I work from home.
I never leave. Phoenix always felt like home because my mom and Logan were here, but now I’m the only one left. ”
Sara nodded, absorbing her words. That, right there, the silence, was why Hanna loved her best friend. She didn’t need to fill it with platitudes or weird speculation. She could let the grief be what it was.
“What if you came out here for Memorial Day weekend? Would that be helpful or hurtful?”
Hanna considered this. She’d visited them a few times over the years, but it had been a while since she’d been out that way. She could use the coastal exposure.
“A long weekend could be nice…”
“Or just, like, sublet your house for the summer and come be my friend!” Sara tried not to look too eager.
Hanna could smell the desperation, but perhaps that was better than the smell of rotting drywall.
“The whole summer!” Hanna gasped.
“What? Like it’s that crazy? We could get so much wedding planning done!”
Hanna twisted the other direction, her lower back popping as her eyes fell on the bronze sunflower bookend resting at the end of her shelf. Logan had given it to her mother for Christmas one year.
She hated that it was hers, but, in that moment, the sight of it felt like a push she needed.
“Okay.”
“What?” Sara asked, her eyes wide. She’d posed the question a dozen times over the years. It was as common as asking about the weather or work.
“Okay,” Hanna mumbled, the relief in her shoulders foreign. “I’ll do it.”
“Ohmyfuckinggod,” Sara yelled.
“Are you good?” Matty burst into the bedroom, appearing over Sara’s shoulders.
“Can I tell him?”
Hanna nodded, the light in her eyes irresistible.
“Hanna is going to stay with us for the summer.”
Matty snatched the phone from his fiancée. “Don’t play with me, Hanna.”
“Only if you guys are sure I won’t be in the way! It will make wedding planning easier, and I could use the shake-up. I have a friend who just lost her roommate. She could probably use a few months to figure her shit out.”
And I’m not at all interested in hanging out in an apartment that occasionally has Adonis’s cooler, tatted-up brother in the living room, she thought.
“How soon can you be here?” Sara asked.
“I’ll look at flights tonight,” Hanna answered.
* * *
“I just have a question,” Olivia said, tapping her pen to her lips in her signature I’m about to fuck up your whole day way that Hanna had grown to fear in their sessions.
“Hit me,” she whispered.
“Why do you keep telling yourself that interacting with this Milo guy was nothing?”
“Because it was nothing.”
Olivia scoffed. “You’ve spent the last six months lamenting the fact that you feel absolutely detached from this world, but the first time someone walks in and makes you feel anything, you’re quick to dismiss it. I find that revealing.”
Hanna chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Okay, but—”
“I just wonder if you’re running from home, or running to someone.”
“I’m not running at all,” Hanna said quickly. “I’m temporarily relocating.”
“Hmm,” Olivia said, scribbling a sentence across her notepad. What Hanna would've paid to read through the pages upon pages of notes Olivia had taken since Hanna's mother had gotten sick. “You’re avoiding my question.”
“Can’t the answer be yes, and?”
“It can,” Olivia said. “But I worry how you’ll cope in a new city without your typical routines.”
Does it matter? Hanna thought. She’d never feel normal again, anyway. What did it matter which zipcode she was sad in?
“You do virtual sessions, right?”
Olivia gave her a half smile. That was the answer she was looking for. “Lucky for you, I’m also licensed in California.”
“I’m going to make you regret that.”