Chapter 41. Seth
I have resolved to be cheerful for New Year’s Eve.
Buoyant,even.
I will cast off my annual dread of the last night of the year and lose myself in the melee of my parents’ dearest friends and golf rivals. I love schmoozing with retirees. The mid-60s seems like a fun age.
Plus, my mom, who eschews the trappings of bourgeois elegance when she entertains, is serving all of my favorite norm-core party foods. Chicken fingers. Deviled eggs. Cocktail wieners. I adore cocktail wieners and you just don’t see them at parties anymore.
So I’m cruising through this backyard shindig with a smile on my face. I’m circulating on the pool deck, downing way too many tubular meats. I’m chatting up Sue and Harry Gottlieb about their grandkids. I’m flirting with Pris Hernandez, who I’ve had a crush on since she taught AP Spanish in high school. I’m wearing my Happy New Year’s crown. You can’t be depressed in a sparkly crown, even if it’s a little too small and bites into the sides of your head.
And you know what? My good mood is not entirely an act.
Because I’m holding Molly’s screenplay in my heart.
I’m still sad that this is how she chose to express her love for me. But my hope overpowers my pain. Maybe I’m deluding myself, casting my usual rose-colored tint on the possibility that passion and tenderness can overcome fear. After all, Molly always said that rom-coms bring the fake happy endings that don’t exist in real life.
After all, I haven’t heard a word from her in a month.
But I just can’t bring myself to believe that in an autobiographical script, her character’s grief for the loss of our relationship wasn’t based in real mourning.
And as my shaky heart reverberates with this emotion, I discuss doubles tennis with a pair of retired dentists.
“It used to be impossible to get on the courts, and now you can’t even set up a good round robin,” Dr. Steele complains.
Dr. Yun nods. “Everyone left for pickleball.”
Dr. Steele is about to say something scathing about pickleball, judging from his facial expression, but then he freezes.
He’s staring at something behind me.
He elbows Dr. Yun. “You see her?”
Dr. Yun slowly nods, as if in a trance. “Yowza.”
I glance over my shoulder to see what they’re ogling.
It’s a disco ball.
Or, at least, a woman wearing a dress the approximate size of a disco ball—the shortest, tightest, sparkliest dress I’ve ever seen outside of a Katy Perry video. Her legs are long, set off by towering silver stilettos. Her dark brown hair is down to her ass.
She’s Molly.
My Molly.
Emanating such a glow that if the dentists were not groping her with their eyes, I’d think I was hallucinating.
But she’s real.
She raises her hand at me and waves.
She looks terrified.
My heart turns over.
Whatever happened between us, I don’t ever want to see Molly Marks looking scared.
I wave back and walk toward her.
Time slows down, just like in the movies.
One of her movies.
“Seth,” she mouths.
“Molls,” I mouth back.
And just as I’m close enough to take her hand—
I trip over an umbrella stand and fall directly into the hot tub.
Like, with my entire body. Kablam. Neck-deep in the stew.
I catch myself just in time to avoid smashing my skull onto a Baja shelf. A scrum of sixty-somethings converges around me, screeching in alarm.
Molly’s face looks like a very beautiful, heavily made-up version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
She runs toward me, elbowing her way through the retirees, and kneels at the side of the tub, to which I am clinging for dear life.
“Oh my God, Seth!” she cries. “Are you okay?”
“I’m calling 911,” Dr. Yun shouts over the din.
“No, no, I’m fine,” I rasp at him. My voice is hoarse from emotion and the hot, chlorinated water that went down my windpipe. “Just wet. And embarrassed.”
Molly offers me her hands and I take them and she helps pull me up.
But I’m chest-deep in burbling water, and the incredibly goyish salmon-colored chinos my mother insisted I wear to this party weigh me down, making me clumsy.
I slip again, and this time I take Molly down with me.
Her sparkly body flies forward, knees first, and she topples into the water with a scream and a huge, 104-degree Fahrenheit splash.
We both clamber for the sides of the spa, limbs twisted, trying not to drown each other. My baggy pants are getting caught on her spiky heels. Her sequins are scratching my bare forearms.
“Are you okay?” Molly gasps, once she’s gotten herself somewhat righted.
“Fuck,” I say sharply, though my mother would not approve of me cursing in front of her friends. “I think I just sprained my ankle.”
“At least hot water is good for injuries?” she offers feebly, her hair tangling around her shoulders as it ripples in the jets.
She wipes water out of her eye, and a false eyelash lands on her cheek.
I delicately remove it and hold it up to the light cast by the tiki torch. “Make a wish.”
She starts to cry. “I already did.”
And I hope, I hope, that she means the wish is me.
“What are you doing here, Molls?” I ask softly. “Or, should I call you… Nina?”
She sucks in a breath through clenched teeth. “You read the script.”
I nod. “Are you here for notes on the ending?”
The pink of the hot tub lights shines against her sequins, turning them rose gold. “Well, falling into a hot tub would be a good set piece to punch up the draft,” she says.
“I like your script the way it is.”
She shakes her head. “I’m so sorry, Seth. I wrote it for you, not to sell. I was going to give it to you to say that I’m sorry.”
My shoulders relax at these words. I knew it. I knew she wrote it for us.
I pull her into my arms. It is very painful to move, but this is the best I’ve felt in a month.
Still, she said the script was an apology. Not an attempt to get me back.
Apologies in relationships are often goodbyes. As the king of failed relationships, I should know. So I ask the question that’s been haunting me:
“Molly? How much of the ending is true?”
“The ending?”
“The part where you pine for me. Regret leaving me. Want to come back to me but fear I won’t want to see you.”
“Oh. The dark night of the soul.”
“Jesus, it was that bad?”
“That’s technically what the beat is called when the girl has to either brave up, or lose the love of her life.”
Those words knock the wind out of me.
“The love of her life?”
She looks into my eyes. “Yeah. The love of my life.”
And then I marry her in that instant and we have fourteen kids and establish an eternal celestial kingdom in heaven, no questions asked.
Or I would. This is all I’ve ever wanted to hear.
But she’s not done talking.
“Seth, I am so, so sorry. It’s not an excuse but… I was so scared. I never thought I was wired to fall in love this hard, and I couldn’t stand the idea of losing you. So I sabotaged it. Again. And I hurt you.”
I want to comfort her in this moment, but my throat is too raw. I just shake my head.
“And I don’t expect you to let that go, or take me back, or trust me,” she says. “But I had to come here, because I’d never forgive myself if I don’t tell you that you are my person, and I’m madly in love with you, and I’m going to regret what I did for the rest of my life. And if I had a chance to do it over, I’d choose—”
Her voice breaks off.
“What would you choose, sweetheart?” I whisper.
“I’d choose my soul mate. If he’d have me.”
But she knows I’ll have her, because I’ve already grabbed her and pressed her against my chest as hard as I can without hurting her and am murmuring, “I’ll have you, I’ll have you, I’ll have you.”
Slowly, consciousness of the forty pairs of spying eyes—many of them wearing hot pink “2022!” novelty glasses—dawns on us.
“Hmmm,” I say. “I think they’re getting off on this.”
“We do probably look like we’re doing some kind of strange pseudosexual baptism ritual,” Molly says. “But I guess that’s my fault for falling on top of you into a hot tub.”
“Oh, baby,” I say. “Do you think I’ve gone a single day without hoping against hope that you would appear in a slutty dress and fall on top of me into a hot tub?”
“I’m grateful for your love of pratfalls,” she says.
Jesus, this girl. Always, with the lines. You’d think she writes sappy movies or something.
“What else are you grateful for?” I ask.
She laughs shakily. “I’m grateful for assistants who send the wrong emails. I’m grateful your parents have lived in the same house for thirty years so I know their address. I’m grateful for screenplays that say what I didn’t have the courage to in real life. And I’m grateful for sweet boys who believe in happy endings.”
I kiss her.
“I’m grateful for you, Molly. I’m just grateful for you.”
And that’s how our rom-com ends.
The camera zooms in on the lovers, and the credits roll over a montage of their beautiful life.
But that’s not the end of our story. That’s not even the end of our night.
The camera isn’t rolling for the part when we dry off and go into the guest room and cry in a guttural and asthmatic way that is more medical than cinematic.
The bloopers are playing on-screen, but in real life I’m telling her how scared I am that if we get back together she’ll keep leaving me, and she’s sobbing and saying she knows, that she’s scared of it too. She’s admitting that my job gives her anxiety she’s not sure she’ll ever make peace with. I’m telling her I don’t know how to reassure her. That I can’t chase her down for the rest of our lives.
That we’ll just have to love each other, and trust each other, and nurture this treasure—this absolute witchcraft—that we’re so blessed to have.
That we’ll just have to hope.
But I still believe that some loves are fated.
And I know that Molly Marks is the love of my life.