Chapter 19
I felt hungover when I woke up late the next morning to an apartment filled with Yaz’s soft snores. It was an emotional hangover, as well as an alcohol-induced one, and maybe it was a good thing that I’d always cured both the same way—breakfast banana splits.
Peeling myself off the bed, I brushed my teeth, then stepped over to the kitchen to fix two bowls.
I couldn’t help peeking at my phone before I dug into my freezer for the coffee-flavored ice cream.
No more texts from Dash. Furiously, I blinked the sting out of my eyes.
It wasn’t like I’d expected a grovel or anything.
You know how sometimes you sleep on something that’s bothering you and then the next morning it doesn’t seem quite so bad?
Sleeping on what happened last night had left me feeling like I was seeing a nightclub in the harsh, sobering light of morning. A club in the daylight is painfully depressing. But it’s also honest. You can see all the scuffs and scratches that are usually hidden by the flashing lights.
And in the bright light of this morning? Dash’s and my relationship felt like it had been all flashing red lights warning me to stop before I got too close.
Yaz had slept rolled up into a blanket burrito on one side of the bed even though my window unit was no match for the late August heat. She must have been awake, because as I reached for the coffee-flavored ice cream, she was out of bed and in the kitchen.
Wordlessly, she reached into a cabinet for granola to sprinkle over the whipped cream. I shook my head, and handed her the Froot Loops.
Yaz didn’t utter a single word of protest, which was especially staggering considering the midnight cake.
“That bad, huh?” I asked.
She shrugged, and I paused for a moment to squeeze her skinny shoulders.
Without any fruit to finish off the splits, not even banana, I took my bowl of ice cream and cereal and went to sit on top of the rumpled blankets.
“What do you want to do today?” I asked Yaz, forcing myself to be cheerful for her sake. I mean, she was the one who’d broken up with her fiancée. If she could hold it together, then so could I. “I had this whole plan for today, but if you’d rather just chill here or in the park or something—”
“I think you should go talk to Dash.” Yaz curled up on the small patch of floor under the window, balancing the bowl of ice cream on her knee.
“What?”
“It’s pretty clear that you really like him.
And seeing as you’re working together, you’ll need to at least talk through the logistics of keeping your project going or not.
And honestly… I could use a little alone time to think about next steps.
” Setting the bowl aside, Yaz hopped up and began to rearrange the tray of bracelets and hair ties on my windowsill, wiping off the city grime with a stray sock.
“I… don’t know if I want to go back to Miami.
At least, not yet. I mean, it’s not like I have an apartment to go back to. Or a girlfriend. Or a job.”
The thought that for once in her twenty-six years, Yaz didn’t have her next five to ten years plotted out in a color-coordinated chart complete with timelines and checklists was…
mind-blowing. And slightly terrifying. I mean, it was bad enough for me to freewheel my way through life. For the both of us to be directionless…
Still, maybe that was a good thing. Maybe that was how you found your way.
I had so many questions, but the last thing Yaz needed when she had yet to figure everything out was for me to bug her about what she was going to do next.
“Well, you know half my bed is yours for as long as you need it,” I told her, trying to sound like it didn’t mean the world to me to finally be able to offer her something, as bittersweet as it was that it came at the expense of Yaz’s relationship and job and probably her whole identity.
“And I won’t even make you share with my piles of laundry. ”
She rolled her eyes and threw the dusty sock at me. “Very generous.”
We were both laughing, though. Which was nice, because I certainly wasn’t in a laughing place when I met up with Dash a couple of hours later.
I’m not gonna say I’d been looking forward to seeing him, because I had honestly been kind of dreading it. But it was all going to be fine. Because I was going to handle this with maturity and grace.
Yeah, okay, not even I believed that one.
Going over to Dash’s apartment was probably a bad idea, but even though Manhattan boasted many things, a wealth of places where two people could have a private conversation wasn’t one of them.
I didn’t know what to expect when Dash opened the door.
Part of me thought he’d be unshaven and red-eyed and full of regret.
A smaller part of me wondered if he’d be covered in whipped cream and wielding flowers.
For one fleeting moment, I’d even pictured him in his Duke of Harding costume, armed with an apology that he’d deliver in a crisp British accent.
But no. The Dash that opened the door looked… normal. White T-shirt under an open button-down, dark blue shorts, hair somewhere between neatly combed and artfully messy. It was hard not to be resentful as me and my slept-on-it-weird curls went into the air-conditioned coolness of his living room.
Where I came to a full and awkward stop as I realized that I didn’t actually know how to handle this with maturity and grace.
I automatically crossed my arms, but then I thought it made me look too confrontational, so I dropped them to my sides.
But that was awkward, so I recrossed them.
The last time I’d stood here, under his grandmothers’ portraits, I’d been in knots, too.
But back then it had been lust and hope tying up my insides, not… whatever this was.
I hated this. I hated this so much. It wasn’t just that my stomach was in knots—it felt like I’d turned into one giant knot that someone had pulled too tight.
And I felt tighter and tenser with every second that went by as Dash raked his fingers through his thick locks and didn’t say a word.
I had a vague idea that part of handling this situation with maturity and grace meant not impulsively blurting something out, which would have probably been easy for anyone else, but this was me we were talking about and I was more than due for another flail and—
“I owe you an explanation,” Dash said.
And now I was glad that my arms were crossed, because the stance went well with my raised eyebrow.
Neither of which accurately reflected the knot I had become.
“I know you didn’t want to meet Yaz. You could have at least texted me back and told me you weren’t coming, instead of letting me think you had run away to live with Subway Pizza Rat. ”
He didn’t so much as crack a smile. “I needed to take a beat.”
“And I deserve the basic courtesy of a text when you’re about to leave me and my cousin hang—”
“Right, the cousin you were so eager to introduce me to,” he bit out, with so much force that I actually took a step back.
“Yes! I wanted to introduce you to the person I’m closest to in the world. What the hell are you finding wrong with that?”
“Look, I know how important that was to you.” It was obvious that he was trying hard to keep from losing his hold on his composure.
“And I’m sorry for messing up your big plans.
But did you ever think that maybe I didn’t want to be paraded around in front of your family like some expensive outfit you buy to show everyone how rich and successful you are?
Did you ever think I wanted to be treated, I don’t know, like a person? ”
My mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “You never told me you felt that way.”
“I tried.”
But I’d been too caught up in my own excitement to listen.
Dash didn’t have to say so out loud—I got that and more just from the look in his eyes.
A hot wave of embarrassment rushed over me as I suddenly remembered all that stuff he’d told me about his ex, who’d basically used him for views.
And the older guy who’d only wanted a hot young man on his arm.
And him smiling at me in the thrift shop and telling me that he liked being looked at, but once in a while he just felt like he needed to be seen.
And, you know, me just booking it out of his immediate vicinity like he’d tried to set me on fire.
Yeah, I was a deeply shitty person.
If I’d been a better one, I would have said something to reassure him.
I would have made it better. Because Dash was everything that was good in the world and he didn’t deserve…
well, me. He didn’t deserve me losing my shit all over him yet again.
Or living with the expectation that any little thing could set off my internal smoke alarms and make me bolt.
I think Dash saw the exact moment when I realized it, because he softened.
“I know that I have to get better at speaking out. I like you, Mariel—I like you so much. And I want something real with you. But every time I try to deepen our conversations just a little, I feel the way you start to shut me out. You won’t let me in,” he said gently.
“And that’s okay if all you want is to be buddies who bone, but I don’t.
I want something real. I feel something real.
And I guess I need to know if you do, too.
Or if you could, at some point in the future. ”
The trouble was, I could. I could see it with such clarity that it made everything inside me hurt. I wanted to trust him not just with my heart, but with all the small, scared parts of myself that I continually held back from him and from everyone else in my life. Including myself.
But want wasn’t enough to quell the rising panic in my chest.
I’d trusted Milo, hadn’t I? And I’d trusted Aria when she’d told me to stop running. Trust was something I was constantly investing in. It may not have been a finite resource once, but it was quickly running out.