Chapter 27
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Audrey
At least the tears have stopped.
I pull into Gianna’s driveway because I don’t know where else to go. My house would be as lonely as the cabin, and Astrid lives with Gray, so I can’t go there. I’m not going to be emotional about a guy at his best friend’s house.
I’d rather not be emotional about him at all, but it’s too late, too fake, and too fucked for that.
Driving back to Nashville was tricky, as it reminded me of the road trip Brooks and I took.
At least this time, I didn’t have butterscotch wrappers strewn throughout the car.
And I told myself that all that cereal he eats like popcorn was terrible for his teeth, and his music was awful.
But then I found myself pulled over on the side of the road listening to his walkout song of choice and having a tiny meltdown.
My brain keeps telling me that I’m going to be fine.
It is the abruptness of it all that bothers me.
I didn’t see it coming, and in my quest to please people, I need to understand what I did to make him turn away from me so quickly.
But I might never understand his reasons, and I need to be okay with that, too.
I just hope I stop associating things with him. It’s the random pow! of a memory that’s blindsiding.
Gianna painted the front door since the last time I was here. Her urinal sculpture, or whatever she created that I don’t question because I don’t want to hurt her feelings, now sits in a flower bed front and center. I bet Drake loves that.
The thought makes me kind of smile.
My knuckles rap against the door. I take a breath, proud of how well I’m holding things together, and fix my shirt. But when I look up, and Gianna flings the door open, and a myriad of emotions streak across her face, I lose it.
Tears. All of them. Everywhere.
She grabs me, pulling me into the house and wrapping her arms around me. “What did that good-looking sonofabitch do to you?” She shushes me, soothing my frazzled nerves. “Drake!”
“Yeah?” he calls from another room.
“My phone is on the easel in my art room. Will you get it and text Astrid EMERGENCY in all caps, please?”
“What kind of an …” He pokes his head around the corner, his sights landing on me. “Emergency. Never mind.” He winces. “Listen, I’m shit with a shovel. But I rolled a lot of things back in college, if you get my drift. So, if you need a body in a rug, just yell.”
I laugh, pulling away from my friend and wiping my eyes with the back of my hands. “Thanks, Drake.”
“Not a problem, Auddie.” He glances at Gianna. “You need anything?”
She shakes her head and wraps an arm around my shoulder, guiding me to the couch.
When Drake moved in with Gianna, they got rid of all of their own furniture and bought pieces that fit their new lives together—except this couch. Gianna refused to part with it, despite its stains, rips, and a little hole that’s on the far right cushion from an unfortunate night with a sparkler.
This sofa has been our ride-or-die for the past six years. And now, it’s getting to feel my tears of heartbreak, too. I was the last woman standing.
I, too, have fallen. Hard.
Gianna brushes my hair out of my face. She spots a clip on the coffee table and uses it to hold my strands back. God, I love her.
“Give me a baseline,” she says. “Because I’m going to be more irrationally pissed than you by default. Are you mad, hurt, or do you hate him? I need to know what level we’re operating at.”
I swipe a couple of tissues off an end table and collapse back into the cushions.
“I don’t know,” I say, relieved to be here with my friend.
I did the right thing driving back today.
This is home. “I don’t know what happened.
Everything was fine last night, and he was going to come over, and we were going to talk about it.
But I had every indication—every one, Gianna—that he was as into it as I was.
He called me. He texted me. And then he arrives a few hours ago at the cabin and is like, this won’t work. I’m so sorry.”
Her face grows sober. “I’ll tell you one other thing that won’t work if I get my hands on him.”
Despite my emotions, I can’t help but laugh.
The front door flies open, and Astrid barges through. She pauses a few steps in the doorway before racing over to me.
“I’ll fucking kill him,” she says, sitting beside me. Her tone has the same grit as Gianna’s just a moment ago. “A couple of the ranch hands owe me some cash from a Texas Hold ’Em tournament last fall. I might be able to trade them a little cash for a little slash.”
“Astrid!” I yelp.
“Tires. I’m talking about his tires.” She makes a face, saying without saying she was absolutely not talking about tires.
I look at Astrid, then at Gianna, and realize how lucky I am to have them. They’d do anything for me—and I’d do anything for them. We have a special bond, the three of us, that no person, place, or thing can break. What would I do without them?
“Do you want to talk about it?” Astrid asks. “If not, we can just sit and listen to Gianna tell us about her latest yeast-based homicide. Or we can start a new show if you’d rather just chill and zone out.”
“Or you can do what I did before I met Drake. Just go fuck someone else.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake—not literally,” Drake says, coming into the room. “Just what I want to walk in and hear.”
“This was a girls’ conversation, thank you,” Gianna says, smacking him on the butt as he walks by. “I’ll make it up to you later.”
He lifts the corner of his mouth. “Damn right you will.”
We settle back and take a breath, the initial panic of seeing me cry over. Astrid rests her head against mine. Gianna moves to the floor and her basket of buttons. She’s been trying to use them to make a painting for months. I don’t get it.
“We had the best few days together,” I say. “It was magical, and I don’t say that lightly. He was generous and attentive. I thought we hit it off. I mean, I just … I have no idea what happened. I’m so confused.”
“This is a him problem, not a you problem,” Astrid says.
“But I went into this, you guys, with an open mind and zero expectations,” I say, shrugging.
“He did say from the onset that he wanted to do things a certain way, so we didn’t wind up …
in this position, I guess. But I wasn’t luring him into a wicked web or anything.
He was as complicit in all of this as me. ”
“So, he just said he changed his mind?” Astrid asks as if she finds it hard to believe, too.
I lift my shoulders and let them fall.
The two of them toss ideas back and forth, but none of them make sense. He didn’t get scared of me or relationships. He didn’t wake up and decide he felt a different way about me. No one else came into his life in twelve hours.
The truth I’ve decided upon is that he just dove into the deep end and found out he couldn’t swim.
I rest my eyes, curling up with a pillow and letting my mind go free.
This is a really crappy end to something I thought had staying power, a relationship I thought might be viable. It was unlikely from the beginning, but the energy between us was just different. Special. Like we trusted and understood each other.
Guess not.
But look at me now. Sure, I might be a wreck with swollen eyes and tear-streaked cheeks, but I’m not broken. I’m hurt. Splintered. But I’m not shattered. The new Audrey Van stood the test of, well, testosterone, and did not break.
This is not like when Seth sent me his belittling text saying I’m “sweet and all.” That was a dick move. I’d been absolutely gutted as if his opinion of me meant the world. In retrospect, what was I thinking? Now, when I think of that text, it’s followed by Brooks’s response about Seth’s rebuttal.
“I guaranfuckingtee that anyone who knows you and has heard of this knows he fumbled you. What a fool.”
But what do I know? Brooks fumbled me, too.
The Audrey who left Nashville during the snowstorm would’ve been devastated by this. I would’ve second-guessed my entire life and been sure I caused his reaction. I would’ve wracked my brain until I settled on a flaw or weakness that I could pin it on.
“I’m going to be okay,” I say, sitting up and rubbing the center of my chest. It stings as if I actually took live fire and shrapnel is stuck in my bones.
“It hurts. I’m sad. But despite that, I’m a different person than I was a couple of weeks ago.
” I search for the right words. “I feel different.”
“Stretched out, prob—oof!” Gianna winces as Astrid bumps her with her foot to shut her up.
“That’s my silver lining,” I whisper to myself. I shift until my feet are beneath me. “I think I’m going to go back to Boston earlier. Maybe tomorrow.”
Gianna makes a face. “Okay. Do you want to stay here tonight? We have tons of room and you’re already here.”
“You’re welcome to stay at the apartment with Gray and me,” Astrid says.
I know they’d let me stay with them, but I also worry that I’ll fall right back into old patterns and feel sorry for myself. Feel as though I did something wrong. I can almost feel my newfound strength draining from just thinking about it.
No, I need to stand on my own and go somewhere that doesn’t have any history with him. Besides, I do love Boston. Maybe I can walk around the city, get a coffee, and reset my brain.
“Where’s my phone?” I ask, searching around the sofa. I find it between the cushion and the frame.
There are no texts or missed calls, and I try not to feel disappointed by that. Instead, I start searching for flights and setting a new arrival date at Ruma. In a way, it feels like an extension of my solo lunches at Piper’s. Now I’m spontaneously solo traveling. That’s growth. I think.
I can’t get a flight out tonight. Figures.
I start to toss my phone beside me when a text message lights up on the screen. My blood turns to ice.
“What’s wrong?” Astrid asks.