Chapter 18 So Long, and Please Don’t Fall Into the Mop Bucket #2
There. There Hanry is, in his tuxedo, seated on top of a white-cloth-covered catering cart, his phone in hand, the top of his jacket and bow tie undone. He’s waiting for me. And, dear god. He’s as hot as ever. He’s hotter than ever.
I’ve dreamed about this. Making out with him, sure—but specifically, the catering closet. Having spent so many years in catering, it’s like my own personal Mile High Club fantasy.
“That other closet,” Hanry starts, “was kind of cramped—”
Whatever he has to say doesn’t matter. I slip in behind the door, and no sooner has it clicked shut than I tackle Hanry, hard enough to send the catering cart a foot backward.
In the dark, snug room, Hanry kisses me.
His hands run over my neck, my back, my arms. I return the favor enthusiastically.
I tug off his bow tie. I sweep my hands over his chest. I want to feel the place where his hip bone dimples, the line of toned muscle at the base of his abs that leads down to further heat.
I want to feel all of him. I need his pants off.
“Stop,” says Hanry, taking hold of me with passion. I grin against the warmth of his neck.
“Oh, you like that, do you?”
He fishes for me in the darkness. Takes my other wrist in his.
“Sabby. Stop,” he says again. This time I hear the shift in his tone of voice, and it chases away the heat in my belly. Confused, I slide off Hanry’s lap to stand.
“If it’s this room that’s the problem, Sidney promised I’d have a hotel room upstairs so I can crash after the party. You could come too. Would you?”
Hanry has frozen in place. Like I’ve shell-shocked him with my offer, and—oh god. I’ve made the wrong call. It horrifies me, and I feel my shoulders tightening, because yeah, I’m taking the rejection personally, of course I am—but you know what? No. Hanry is attracted to me, I know he is.
“Hanry, say something.”
Rather than looking at me or telling me what’s happening inside his mind, Hanry chooses to focus on the closet wall. Oh no. He’s searching for a light switch. What better way to kill the mood than to flick on the fluorescent ceiling light?
It’s brutally bright.
I can’t stand feeling this exposed a second longer.
“All right, I’ll say it for you,” I joke. “You’re a virgin. You’re saving yourself for marriage. You tried the raw meat, and you’re having a weird gastrointestinal reaction to it.”
Hanry doesn’t chuckle. Instead, he runs his hands over his face and squeezes his eyes shut. Then opens them again. His blue eyes are lit from within, crisp and bright like an icy winter sky. They’re vivid. Alive. Full of desire. For me.
“I’m not reacting to the meat,” he says, his gaze on my lips. And falling lower.
I knew it. That I’m not imagining it: he wants me too. Maybe everything’s okay. I respond, pliant in Hanry’s arms as he pulls me slowly to him, his face nearing mine.
My heart rate accelerates, and I catch my breath.
He parts his lips. I can feel the warmth of his mouth a few inches away. When the hem of his jacket falls across my hand, my eyes drift shut, and I wait. At last, Hanry’s mouth touches mine, covering it, and for a moment the world is soft, warm, and perfect.
“I want this more than you know,” Hanry whispers against me. “But I don’t think continuing would be fair to you.”
My eyes fly open.
Hanry leans back on his hands, moving his face slightly back too, and it’s my turn to be shell-shocked. I swear I see stars around the edges of my sight.
“Hanry,” I say, my heart sinking; my eyes squinting in the starkness of the closet.
“I can’t kiss you like this and keep it light between us, Sabby. And I can’t go upstairs with you.”
“Okay,” I say, more unsure than I’ve ever sounded around him. “We don’t—we don’t have to go anywhere.”
“I know.”
“So what’s this about?”
“I just… don’t make this harder, Sabby. Today already sucked,” he says, putting more space between us. “I had a hard talk with my mom this morning. Before I left.”
Like me, Hanry doesn’t usually bring up his family without provocation. The fact that he’s doing it now, to avoid talking about us? Not my favorite.
“Cool,” I say, in an attempt to be the queen of sympathy.
“I told you I have a brother, right? Seb. He’s about the same age as me.
The way Mom was going on, I don’t know. It made me worry about him.
I think she might try to fuck up his life more than she already has.
That’s what she’s good at—causing situations to spin out of control—so I know I shouldn’t be surprised. ”
Hanry must’ve been hiding these feelings behind his sexy tuxedo mask all night. Maybe it was good I pulled him into this closet before he publicly had the stuffing squeezed out of his feelings-burrito. I’m unsure whether or not I’m helping him, though. He’s still not quite meeting my gaze.
He also remains unspeakably hot. I reach across what feels like a thousand miles to squeeze his thigh, but Hanry moves my hand away. Damn him.
Without looking at me, he speaks so fast, I almost don’t catch the words.
“I can’t keep dating you,” he says.
I go still.
“You what?!” I burst out. “You can’t kiss me like that, then break up with me seconds later!”
“I’m sorry,” Hanry says—a total nonanswer. And total crap.
“What’s your deal? Is this because you’re too serious for me? You don’t want to waste time dating someone you can’t be with forever, and you can’t see yourself in a suburban, single-family home someday?”
Hanry shifts as he resettles on the cart.
“I can’t see myself doing that with you, Sabby. No.”
I want to scream.
Of course he doesn’t. Who was I kidding? Woodsy, artsy Hanry has no interest in the banality of the American dream. I knew that, and yet my lungs feel like they’ve been crushed by a giant, rolling boulder chucked out of a temple of doom.
I feel utterly crushed.
I think I might not survive the hurt of it, not to mention the humiliation.
And, what makes it worse? It’s not Hanry, or his dreams, that are so painful.
It’s me. I’m the problem. I knew he was just a fling, something that would end the moment I figured out how to leave Salem—but I kept spending more time with Hanry than I should’ve.
I let myself think of him before falling asleep at night, wanted his opinion anytime I finished a wedding proposal or envisioned a new décor idea.
I let him see me.
And that’s who he’s rejecting. He’s rejecting the real me and the idea of an “us.”
I know this is the last moment I should be vulnerable, but he has to know how I feel. It’s my last chance to stop this, to show him there might be another way.
“I don’t want to lose you,” I say, the words burning as they escape my throat. Hanry swallows, evidence he is conflicted, in spite of everything. “We could do long distance?”
“You told me this was always going to end at some point,” he says.
“I… did,” I admit.
“What if you don’t go back to New York?” Hanry suggests out of nowhere.
I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean, and since I’m lost for words, of course he thinks he should keep talking.
“I’m not saying you need to quit your job for me.
I’m just saying you don’t have to go back if you don’t want to. ”
“But—but I do want to.” I lick my dry lips. “You know I’ve been faking this wedding planning schtick for weeks so I could leave.”
“I hear you. I’ve heard you. I just, I don’t know. Seeing you out there tonight, you were in your element. There’s no shame in walking away from something that doesn’t serve you anymore,” Hanry says.
Intensely irked, I catch my voice going low.
“I like accounting, Hanry. The neat little rows on my spreadsheets, the color-coordinated headers. The predictable formulas that tell you what will happen in all the little boxes. And I like Manhattan and my roommate, and I like that all of it gives me a life that’s predictable and safe and unchaotic and awesome. ”
“Then you understand why I’m doing this. You’re as afraid of getting hurt as I am.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I should’ve done all of this differently.
If I’d been vulnerable and honest from the beginning, if I’d let Hanry know how much he mattered to me, maybe he would have considered coming with me to New York, or at least trying to make a relationship work in spite of living a couple hundred miles apart.
Maybe then he’d have considered that this didn’t have to end in heartbreak for both of us.
Now it’s too late, and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand the fact that he matters so much to me. We’re a pair of romantic cowards.
For some reason, though? I can’t stand the thought of calling him out.
And he doesn’t demand more from me either.
As the wedding music trickles under the door, we sit there wordlessly, too close to each other, and also too far, a thousand things hovering in the gap between us, neither of us wanting the moment to end.
Until finally, time’s up.
“I’ve got to get back in there,” I say, dry-mouthed. “You know. Before it’s time for dessert, and cake cutting.”
Hanry’s eyebrows draw together in apology. “I get it,” he says. “Goodbye, Sabby.”
My heart thuds. This can’t really be goodbye, can it? For so little reason?
I don’t want this. I couldn’t want anything less. But I force my breathing to normalize and mirror him.
“See ya,” I say.
It doesn’t sound half as smooth as it did in my head.
Cool cool cool cool cool.