Chapter 20 #2
“I know,” she says. “Now enough with the distractions. It’s time for you to hold up your end of the deal. Show us the script.”
“What’s the story about?” Astrid asks, as if Hal hasn’t told her everything, ratted me out.
“It’s nothing really,” I say. “It’s just inspired by a fight I had with someone the other week. Just a play set in a diner,
that’s all.”
“A breakup script,” Astrid says approvingly. “I adore it already.”
“No, no, it wasn’t a breakup,” I correct. “Chris and I have only ever been friends. Not even great friends. We only hang out
when I babysit his dog. It’s that kind of relationship. Non-relationship.” I bumble over my words, cheeks heating.
“Do you think you’ll show it to him?” Tara asks. “As a sort of peace offering?”
“Definitely not,” I say. “I’m not showing it to anyone. Not yet at least. Besides, it’s fiction, I told you.”
Astrid is trying to follow the conversation. It makes me hope that perhaps Hal didn’t tell her everything, didn’t dump my
secrets into the pile of jelly beans and clothes they share.
“Wait, what did I miss here?” Astrid says. “Why aren’t you dating?”
“Good question,” Hal mutters under her breath. Even Tara pinches her mouth, the lines around her lips shaped like two parentheses,
encasing the same afterthought.
“An innumerable number of reasons,” I say, feeling ambushed. “We’d be here all night if I listed them all.”
“I’m not in a rush,” Tara says. It’s true; she’s in a lull between shows and bartending shifts.
“We’re not either,” Hal adds. “Astrid and I have outperformed our weekly goals already, and it’s only Wednesday.”
“Good for you,” I mutter.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Hal says. “I just meant that it would be good to hear why you and Chris aren’t together. The
real reasons.”
I bristle. “What do you mean, the real reasons?”
“Well, as opposed to the fake reasons. You know, like that he has a girlfriend or that he’s not your type.”
“He does have a girlfriend and he isn’t my type,” I say. “I’m not making that up.”
“I didn’t mean fake as in not technically true,” Hal says. “I meant fake as in not emotionally true.”
“Since when are you one to give lectures on emotions?” I press.
Hal blushes, actually blushes, petal-shaped patches of pink dropping onto her cheeks. It’s a sight I’ve never seen before.
She looks at Astrid, then shrugs, like she’s done trying not to try. “Since I met this one, I guess.”
Astrid purrs, not audibly but with the arc of her body, the elongation of limbs. She leans in for a kiss. It’s all very inverse to the mood I’m in. “Get a room,” I grumble, looking for backup from Tara. She doesn’t say anything, just watches, visibly conflicted.
“We already have a room,” Hal says, when she finally reappears from under Astrid’s tongue. “You just don’t like it when we’re
there.”
“You’re right about that,” I say. “She hogs all the hot water with that mermaid hair of hers.” I say it like Astrid isn’t
right there, sitting across the table from me.
Astrid tugs on Hal’s arms, flicks her eyes away. “Maybe I should go, Hally,” she says in a low tone.
“Absolutely not,” Hal flares. “EJ is just using this as a diversion tactic so she doesn’t have to talk about Chris and how
she’s fallen in love for the very first time.”
I flick off the accusation as if it’s just a fly. “I’m not in love with Chris,” I say, kneading nonchalance into my voice
so as not to stoke Hal’s delusion. “And even if I were, it wouldn’t be my first love. I’ve been in love hundreds of times
before.”
“Name one,” Hal says.
“Every time we go to the House of Yes, I fall in love multiple times,” I lob back.
Tara pipes up, as if she’s been waiting her turn. “EJ, you know that’s not really love, right?” she says. “It’s just lust,
infatuation.”
“Of course it’s really love,” I say, feeling ganged up on. “It’s love in its most untainted form, before any resentment or
expectations smear the splendor of the initial connection.”
“So by your logic,” Hal says, “the longer you know someone, the less you love them?”
“For romantic love, absolutely,” I say. “And up until now, you two have always agreed with me. Jenni and Lilly used to too . . .” I trail off, feeling lost among the people who first taught me what it was to be found.
Tara puts a hand on my shoulder, gives a few pats. I battle the urge to shrug her away. “Do you think,” Tara says, “that if
Olivia weren’t in the picture, you’d be dating Chris?”
“No,” I say, without needing to think about it. “Definitely not.”
“Do you think you’d want to be dating him?” she follows up.
Tara, Hal, and Astrid are all looking on, waiting for me to answer. It’s like they’ve already come to their own conclusion
and my own opinion doesn’t really mean much. Just the garnish to their meal, the lonely parsley sprigs.
“Look,” I say, infuriated that I even have to explain myself. But I’m glad of it too, so I can hear myself affirm this. “I’m
a liberated woman. The fulcrum of my life is ensuring that I don’t have a fulcrum holding me in place. That I can fly however
high or low I want, untethered, unlimited. Chris, on the other hand, is a conventional guy who plods along in his corporate
job and wants marriage and kids and all that. It just wouldn’t work.”
“Who said anything about marriage and kids?” Hal says. “We were just talking about dating.”
“It’s a slippery slope sometimes,” I say, shuddering under the crawly candor of it all. “Think about Jenni. So it’s better
not to even open the door.”
The three of them share a look, as if I’m missing something vital.
“EJ,” Tara says, her hand still on my shoulder, her thumb stroking circles on my sunburned skin. “I think the door is already
open.”
“Wide, wide open,” Hal chimes in.
“No, it’s not,” I snap, but I know she’s right. I feel it in the way the words sweep in the debris of relief.
The door with Chris opened the first time I walked inside his apartment, when Arnie jumped up to greet me.
Before that, even. Maybe it was when he opened the door of the Red Rocket for Olivia, that time that I was their Uber driver.
Or maybe when I strode through the door of the art gallery, the very first time we met.
When he pretended to be my fiancé and I chose to play along, just to see where it might go.