Chapter 17
chapter
seventeen
Jules
I stare at his text for an embarrassing amount of time.
It’s a completely normal, completely unremarkable text that people send to each other dozens of times a day for dozens of entirely legitimate reasons.
But I’m standing in my kitchen holding my phone like it's a grenade with the pin already pulled, trying to understand why it suddenly feels so much harder to breathe.
He can't tonight.
That’s fine. Completely fine and normal.
He has a big family. They’re probably doing something together. I could text Cora and ask, but I don’t want her to be suspicious.
Also, I don’t need to know the reason because this is fine. I’ve spent the last several nights without having sex with him, I can do it again tonight.
I put the phone face-down on the counter, and then I pour myself a glass of wine I wasn't planning to have.
Then I stand there drinking it and staring at nothing in particular.
But I do conduct a thorough forensic examination of my own reactions until I've identified the exact thing I don't want to find.
Here's the problem.
I'm not disappointed the way a person is disappointed when their Tuesday plans fall through. I'm not mildly inconvenienced. I'm not rearranging my evening around the absence of something that was just supposed to be a recurring arrangement between two adults who know what they're doing.
I'm disappointed the way you're disappointed when the specific person you wanted to talk to isn't available.
When the voice you were expecting to hear in your house tonight, saying whatever dumb thing it says that makes you laugh before you can stop yourself, isn't going to be there.
When the weight of someone in your space that you've been telling yourself you don't need turns out to be something you'd been counting on without realizing you were counting.
I miss him.
Not in the abstract. Not in the way that's about the arrangement or the convenience of it. I miss him. His stupid notes that I find literally everywhere these days. Under my coffee cup at work. In my lunchbox. Taped to my front door. Under my pillow.
And I have kept all of them. Hoarded them like a territorial dragon guarding her treasure.
I could pull out all of those notes right now.
The drawer is literally behind me, no longer a drawer for screwdrivers and batteries and takeout menus.
Because it has been taken over by a collection of sticky notes, scraps of paper, two actual cards and a weird drawing on a restaurant napkin.
And the taco receipt. The one that started it all.
For a while he signed all of them —P. Here lately he’s changed it to XOXO, Yours. And reading those letters never fails to make my heart race.
This is good, that he said no. I’m clearly getting too attached. Booty calls are simple and uncomplicated. Which is exactly how I like things.
I pour another glass of wine and open that drawer. I even take the drawer itself off the tracks and carry that and my wine glass into the living room. I take a nice, long gulp of the wine, noting how smoothly it slides down my throat.
My plan is to read the notes one last time and then dispose of them. Because I am not a lovesick teenager. I am an adult woman in charge of her own feelings. I nod to myself in confirmation.
I go through them slowly, in random order.
Many of them make me laugh, but by the end of the stack, I realize my cheeks are damp.
Through my wine-fogged thinking, I can very clearly see what's been happening to me for the last several weeks.
While I was aggressively holding on to the “booty call” nature of our relationship, he snuck into my heart like a government operative.
I'm in love with Payton Blankenship.
I'm in love with him. Despite the fact that he’s twenty-two, and I’m thirty-two.
And despite the fact that I have done everything I know how to do to prevent this exact outcome.
Yet here I am, eight forty-five on a Thursday, holding a stack of notes that I kept because I couldn't make myself throw them away.
How did I let this happen? And what do I do next?
I do nothing with this information.
I'm going to keep doing nothing with this information for as long as humanly possible. Because doing something means admitting it's real. And there’s still time to save myself. And to save poor Payton from my broken and battered heart.
So I take my glass of wine, leave the notes on the couch and go to bed.
I don't sleep for a very long time.