2 #4
I wipe them away, but he brings an arm around me, pulls me in so my forehead is on his chest, and rubs small circles on my back.
Losing my parents has made me a lot more hungry for physical touch.
I used to flinch at hugs, but I think it was because I was afraid to want them too much and feared not getting them.
But when I lost them, I grew this anxiety from the fact that you never know if the hug you give someone will be your last.
But something about this hug, this gift from someone who owes me absolutely no comfort—and, in all honesty, if I had met him the way he met me, I might not have offered the same—envelopes me in this warmth that feels like basking in the sun on your favorite beach, the waves licking at your feet just as soon as the heat and humidity get to be too much.
When I finally stop crying, I pull away and slap my cheeks a couple of times with a laugh. “Wow, that really made me feel better.” His answering smile tugs at my chest. “Your turn.”
When he doesn’t say anything, I say, “This is a safe space. You can vent. Or if you don’t want to, that’s fine too. There’s always another whiskey.”
He reaches for his glass, and I guess that’s that.
Then he chugs it and says, “I was with Anna for ten years, since high school graduation, and in love with her since we were ten years old and she moved into the house next to mine in South Carolina.” I still, trying to mimic how attentive he was to me.
But I am drunk, and my gaze is a little glossy.
“I hated school, but it was everything to her, so I worked hard to get into the same high-ranking university. I majored in business, not because I liked it, but because I needed to make sure I could pull my weight when she became an attorney. I’d down Red Bulls and Monsters mixed with instant coffee crystals to stay up and study when she did so I could spend time with her.
I moved across the country to be closer to her family, neglecting my own, when her mother got sick.
I got a job at her father’s firm, started making good money, and tried to be the perfect person for her. ”
“It sounds like you were,” I can’t help but say.
He rubs a thumb across my hand. “I wanted to be. She pushed me to be things I never thought I was. Everyone around me always thought I was an idiot—my father, my teachers—but Anna never did. She was the one who helped me learn to read when I was struggling and took me to her mother, who found out I was dyslexic. Changed my life. She saved up from her part-time job at a soft-serve shop during high school and bought me a car. Her family took me in like one of their own, and she made me feel like life could be worth living. She was the love of my life.”
“But she’s marrying your best friend,” I say, harsher than I mean to. I’m just trying to figure out how someone who sounds so lovely would do such a thing after having a man so dedicated to her, and being so dedicated to said man, for most of their lives.
He winces, and I wish I’d shut my mouth. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”
No matter how much he props her up, I’m on his side. I don’t know her, and while I absolutely don’t know him either, I kind of do. In a way. First come, first serve for Lucy’s Loyalty.
“I think marrying the best friend of someone you loved classifies you as a not-so-great person.”
He smiles sadly. “People are complicated. Wonderful people do horrible things, and horrible people can have slivers of humanity. She was my love, but I wasn’t hers.
And that’s my own fault. I betrayed her.
Led her on for years and years. She wanted a family, and I pretended to want the same.
” His Adam’s apple bobbles. “I’m the not-so-great person.
I was so scared of losing her, the family she surrounded me with, that I lied.
Every moment I spent with her, every year I wasted her life, was a lie because I never planned on having a family. Never will. And so she left me.”
Well, that’s a shitty situation. Makes the whole best friend thing not as black and white. But he’s right; wonderful people can do horrible things. We all make mistakes, and if we beat ourselves up too roughly, we don’t get up to learn from them.
I hold out my hands in a hug formation. “Come here.”
“I’m okay—”
I wrap my arms around him. His body stiffens for just a second, and then his shoulders slump.
His hands snake around my waist, and I hear him let out a shaky breath.
I want him to feel the same comfort I did when he held me, so I run my hands through his hair, rub circles on his back, and try to offer the warmth of a perfect day on my favorite beach.
A kinship has blossomed between us now that we’ve spilled our lives. I feel oddly close to Anders and, more oddly, somewhat protective too.
He doesn’t pull away, so eventually, I do.
His cheeks have reddened, and he averts his gaze from mine. I find something about it so endearing that I reach over and slap my hand on his shoulder.
“Okay,” I say, cheerfully, “we took the first step. Pity. We got it all out. Now let’s—”
“Party?”
I hop off the stool and link my arm through his, my smile wide. “Until we can’t see, think, or walk straight.”