CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE #3
I see the change in Grant’s face, the moment he finally understands how this all began. Why I was with Jack in the first place, who I thought he was. I don’t like it. He’s about to start judging me—or worse, pitying me. Then he bumps my knee.
“At least he wasn’t a real boyfriend,” he says. “I imagine it’d be a lot harder to move on from the whole murder thing otherwise.”
I do a loud psshhh in his face. “Real boyfriends aren’t much better. All they do is eat your heart for breakfast and crap it out for lunch.”
He doesn’t even point out how that makes no sense. He is so nice. “Speaking from experience?”
It’s a question that would normally elicit a knee-jerk I don’t want to talk about it from me. But with Grant, I do want to talk. Maybe it’s the alcohol. Or maybe it’s just because he’s him.
“Nothing serious,” I say. “I had a dumb boyfriend in high school and I let him make me feel way shittier than I should have.”
I’m prepared to move on, but Grant’s look gives me pause. He’s got those forehead crinkles—the I’m really listening ones.
“What happened there?” he asks.
“He was a master manipulator,” I say. “He tricked me into believing that he was in love with me.”
“How?”
“By telling me that he was in love with me.”
Grant winces. “Yeah. That’ll do it. Especially when you’re a teenager.”
I nod. “I really liked him. And I was so delighted to finally be someone’s girlfriend that I didn’t realize I was slowly becoming more like a potted plant or a decorative pillow.
I used to sit in his basement and watch him play video games for hours on end, feeling like it was an honor that he wanted me to be there, when really I think he just didn’t know how to tell me to go away. ”
“So how did you two finally split up?” Grant asks.
“We didn’t. We’re going on fifteen years of basement bliss.”
“Ha,” he says, not laughing. His eyes are fixed on me, patient.
I loose a breath. “He asked another girl to prom,” I say. “Instead of breaking up with me directly. He figured I’d just get the message that way so he wouldn’t have to actually dump me. Because, and I quote, he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.”
“God,” Grant says. “What a jackass.”
“Want to know the worst part? I still thought we were going together until an hour before. He had said I guess I’ll see you there, and I thought he meant as my date. I had a dress and everything. And then I checked Facebook and saw him posing for pictures with a girl whose dress matched his tie.”
I’m laughing it off, but I can feel that familiar tendril of shame snaking through me.
Telling me there must be something wrong with me if, at thirty years old, my high school heartbreak is still the only romantic wound I’ve ever received.
That it should have been buried by now, by some more adult heartache.
Getting cheated on by an accountant, for example.
It’s not so much that the memory still hurts, but that it stands alone—waiting, like a fracture that has long since healed over but sometimes warns me when a storm is coming.
“I’m sorry,” Grant says, with as much sincerity as if this had all happened yesterday.
“I’m not,” I say. “If he hadn’t done something so egregiously douchey, who knows how long I would have stayed with him?
I think that’s what still bothers me about the whole thing; I don’t want to get stuck again.
It’s like my mom and dad—they’re incredible parents and I love them, but they’re so unhappy together and they won’t make a change.
Sometimes I worry that it’s genetic, the instinct to stay even when you shouldn’t.
That if I’m not careful, I’ll end up just like them—trapped and miserable and totally unable to find the nerve to leave. ”
Grant’s gaze is unwavering. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “If there’s one thing I can always count on you to have, it’s the nerve.”
Always. What a word. I try to ignore the pang it sends through me.
“Anyway, it’s not just me,” I say. “I’ve seen too many people get crushed by love.
My friends. My parents. Everyone on The Bachelor.
People just get hurt in real life.” I angle to face him properly, pushing my hair out of my face.
“You really think everyone here this weekend is happily ever after?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know about everybody. But … yeah, why not? Most of them seem pretty happy.”
“Even the Fiorellos?”
“Oh, no. I give them three months, tops.”
I snort at that, even as a pink glow settles over me with the memory of how Grant defended me in front of them. He said I have stories to tell. He said it would be an honor to be chosen by someone like me.
I wish I could choose him.
But that’s just an inside thought.
“I don’t think it has to last forever to be good,” Grant finally says.
“I mean, sure, that’s the dream. But even if it doesn’t work out that way, the ending doesn’t have to negate the nice parts.
” He looks at me, his head dipped just a little as if telling me a secret.
“Even if you get your heart crapped, I still think it does more good than harm to give it to someone in the first place.”
I wish I could believe him. I’m so full of genuine wishes now. Where is the Gifter when you need them?
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m just not built for it.
I mean, look at me.” He does. I feel it.
“I’m thirty and I have the relationship experience of a sixteen-year-old, give or take some meaningless vacation flings.
I wouldn’t even know where to start. Who would want to go out with someone like that? ”
It’s rhetorical, I swear. That’s how I meant it, anyway, even if somewhere, a tiny part of me is desperate for a real answer.
But Grant says, “Me.”
He says it with conviction, as plainly as any simple fact that might slip from his mouth. “I’d go out with you. In fact, I have gone out with you, and it was wonderful.”
“No, no,” I say, deflating. “Not, like, to dinner. I mean go out go out. Like, boyfriend-girlfriend.”
“Oh, like in the tenth-grade definition of the phrase?”
“Exactly.”
He pauses, idly rubbing the back of his neck. “In that case, I guess I’d have to pass you a note that says Will you go out with me? with a box to check yes or no.”
He’s drunk, I tell myself. But so am I.
“And I’d check yes,” I say. “But then I’d freak out and try to erase it. But it was in pen. So then I’d panic and eat the paper.”
His eyes crinkle at the edges, his mouth quirking up. “You,” he says softly, “are so weird.”
I scoff, my shoulders crumpling. “I’m a coward, is what I am.”
“A coward?” Grant turns to face me, the two of us cross-legged on the floor in front of each other. He looks me in the eye. “Roxie, I watched you drive a serial killer to suicide by fire. And I’m pretty sure you enjoyed it.”
I groan, burying my head in my hands. Grant doesn’t get it. And now he’s made me sound really deranged.
“Hey,” he says, pulling my wrists from my face. He looks at me solemnly. “I have to tell you something.”
Somewhere, trapped in my brain, Sober Roxie is screaming, RUN, RUN, RUN! But Drunk Roxie locks her in a broom closet. “Tell me what?” I whisper.
His fingers are still wrapped firmly around my wrists, and he drops his chin to my knuckles, deep in thought.
He searches my eyes tentatively, as if debating whether he should tell me, but all I can think about is how his mouth is accidentally pressed against my hand and how nice it would be if it were on purpose.
And then, with a heavy sigh, he leans back, closes his eyes, and says, “It was really cool how you Grand Theft Auto–ed my car.”
I jerk back from him with all the thrill of winning ten thousand lotteries.
“YES!” I shriek. “I KNEW it! I fucking knew it!”
The rush of triumph is intoxicating, maybe more so than the liquor, and it compels me to take his face in my hands and plant a silly little kiss on his bunched-up forehead before leaping to my feet for a victory lap.
He slumps in defeat against the bed, his arms resting limply on his folded knees, but glances up to watch me with a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.
I plop back down next to Grant and lift a hand to high-five him. He reciprocates, but we both miss and end up kind of half slapping each other’s forearms. The laughter is dizzying, the kind that throws me off-balance and makes the room not quite spin but pleasantly swivel a bit.
When I catch my breath and everything settles back to stillness, I realize my head is on Grant’s shoulder.
I know it shouldn’t be, but I can’t seem to move.
It’s so peaceful here, feeling him breathe in and breathe out.
Then his head comes to rest gently on mine, and if it were an uphill battle to pull myself away before, now it’s Everest.
Five seconds, I decide. I’ll give myself five seconds to enjoy this. One … two … three … four … five.
… Six.
Seven. Why not.
When I finally lift my head and look at him, his face is so close to mine.
And then it’s even closer.
I realize I’m looking at his mouth, watching his lips part ever so slightly on an inhale. I tear my gaze away, up to his eyes, and maybe that’s worse. There’s something there that I can’t define but somehow know all too well.
We are dancing way too close to the edge of something here.
There they are, finally—those alarm bells I’m used to, cutting through the drunken mist like a foghorn. I scramble to my feet and grab two more tiny bottles from the dresser, tossing him one. “To Pat Benatar!” I exclaim, then restart the music.
By the time sleep beckons, everything is more or less a blurry haze.
But as my thoughts slip away from me, taking wing like birds into the twilight, there are two that linger: Grant’s lips on my hands, and mine on his forehead.
Two sort-of kisses that don’t quite add up to a whole one.
And then all that’s left is a certainty:
We won’t get away with not quites and sort ofs much longer.