Chapter 28 – Josie
chapter
twenty-eight
Josie
Kappa Nu parties all sounded the same after a while: bass rattling the windows, somebody’s playlist fighting with somebody else’s playlist, and the specific volume of twenty hockey players who thought they were funnier than they actually were.
I’d been to enough of them by now that I could navigate the main room with my eyes closed, which was useful because Marcus liked me visible at these things, whether or not he planned to actually stand next to me.
I was dancing with Kimmy in the middle of the living room, pretending I was a normal twenty-year-old who did not have two men and zero good options.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Kimmy yelled over the music, grabbing my hands and spinning me. “I can literally see the gears turning. Stop it.”
“I’m not thinking about anything.”
That was a lie. I was freaking out about what I was going to say to Marcus.
“Liar. You’ve had that face all week.” She pulled me closer so she didn’t have to shout. “Is it Marcus?”
“It’s always Marcus.”
“Then stop letting it be Marcus, and dance with me like you mean it.”
But it was Marcus, and it had been Marcus since my birthday. But he’d been real slippery when I tried to talk to him. Hadn’t answered my calls, barely responded to my texts.
He was in full avoidance mode, almost like he knew what I was going to say. I’d come to the party with the intention of cornering him. I knew what I needed to do.
But Marcus didn’t do breakups. Marcus did control, and threats, and a way of rearranging the truth until I was the one who owed him an apology, and I was not the kind of person who sent a breakup text.
Which meant I needed to find the moment, and the moment kept not arriving because Marcus made sure it didn’t.
Lena appeared with three cups of water.
She handed me one, gave Kimmy the other, and the three of us danced in the kind of tight circle that girls make when they’re protecting each other from the room without saying so.
I was almost having fun.
And then I looked across the room, the way I’d been not looking all night, and found Waylon.
He was leaning against the doorframe with a cup he wasn’t drinking from, and there were two girls all over him.
A blonde had her back pressed against his chest and was grinding on him to the beat, and a brunette was tucked into his side with her mouth at his neck, lips moving against his skin while she said something I couldn’t hear.
As I watched, the blonde took his hand and placed it on her chest, as if she were handing him a gift, and he let it sit for a second before moving it to her hip instead.
He was smiling at them in that easy way he had, the way he smiled at everyone, and I knew it didn’t mean anything because I’d studied this man’s face long enough to know the difference between his real smile and his public one.
But knowing didn’t help at all with the feeling that ripped through my chest when I watched someone else’s mouth on his throat and someone else’s body against his.
I wasn’t interested in logic right now. All I could think about was that I wanted to walk across that room and remove both of those girls with my bare hands, which was insane, because he was not mine, and I had no right, and I had a whole boyfriend somewhere in this house who I couldn’t even figure out how to leave.
When I looked up again, his green eyes were already on me. He wasn’t looking at the blonde or the brunette. He was looking at me.
The way he looked at me across that room made my whole body go still, like he’d known exactly where I was from the moment I’d walked in.
I held it for maybe two seconds before I made myself look away because holding it any longer in the frat house was the kind of stupid that got people caught.
He left about twenty minutes later. I watched him say something to Trace, pull on his jacket, and head toward the back door without looking at me again, which meant he was being careful. At least one of us was. What was wrong with me?
Besides wanting what you can’t have? Nothing.
Except maybe I could have it…
I excused myself to find the bathroom, which was a lie, but I’d gotten very good at those.
The upstairs hallway was quieter. The music thinned out past the second-floor landing, and the overhead light was off.
I heard his voice before I placed it, low, muffled through a closed door at the end of the hall, but I knew that voice. Marcus had a specific register he used when he wasn’t performing for a room, this softer thing he dropped into that I used to think was just for me.
I’d heard it before, outside a utility closet weeks ago, in a hallway that smelled like floor cleaner and sweat. That night my brain had tried to put it together and come up empty.
Standing in the upstairs hallway of my boyfriend’s frat house, I finally put it together.
The door moved when I touched the handle, just an inch, which was enough.
Marcus had his back to me. I recognized his shoulders and the line of his spine and the girl’s hands gripping them in a way that told me everything about how long they’d been in that room, while forty people drank and laughed one floor below.
I waited to fall apart. I’d watched enough movies to know how this went. The girl falls apart, or throws something, or screams.
I stood there with my hand on the knob, and none of that happened.
Instead, I just went numb. It started in my chest and spread until it was everywhere. My hands weren’t shaking, and my eyes were dry, and I was not surprised.
The fact that I wasn’t surprised should have wrecked me, because it meant I’d known. Some part of me had known for months, and I’d just refused to look at it.
I’d believed him. I’d worked so hard at believing him that I’d gotten good at it. I’d been ignoring what was right in front of me for a long time.
Then he turned his face, just enough to see me in his periphery.
And I didn’t imagine it. He smiled. He wanted me to see.
I pulled the door closed without a sound and went back downstairs, mind already going numb. Kimmy was mid-sentence, and the music was still too loud, and I put my hands on the counter because I needed something solid.
Lena looked at me, and frowned.
My breath was coming too fast. The napkin I picked up tore in my hands, and I stared at the two halves, unable to feel my fingers.
“Okay,” Kimmy said, and her voice was different — steady and sure, the Kimmy who showed up when it mattered. “We’re leaving.”
“I’m fine.”
“Babe, you’re shaking.”
She was right. I could not fall apart in the Kappa Nu kitchen with Marcus somewhere upstairs.
Lena had my jacket. She put one hand on my back and said, “Waylon’s,” to Kimmy like it was already decided.
Kimmy grabbed my bag and steered me toward the back door, and as we cut through the mudroom, Trace looked at Lena’s face, then mine, and didn’t ask a single question.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll handle it.”
The cold hit me outside, and my breathing went ragged. Kimmy’s arm tightened around me, and Lena said, “Keep walking.”
The cottage was right there behind the main house, small and lit from inside. I could see his shape through the window before we were halfway across the yard. I didn’t need the light to know it was him. I’d have known his shape anywhere.
Kimmy squeezed my hand once, and Lena knocked.