Chapter Sixteen
Autumn
My phone buzzes while I'm waiting in line for my coffee.
Jake
here
I read it twice before calling him.
"Did you mean to text me? Here where?"
"London."
I grab my latte and head for the door. "Aren't you supposed to be in Ireland?"
"Monday."
I push through the coffee shop door. "And you're in London."
"I noticed."
"Holloway."
There's enough noise on his end that I have to press the phone closer to my ear.
"I wanted to see you. Figured if I was gonna be that close might as well make it happen."
That shuts me up for a second.
"You rerouted. For me?"
"Yeah."
"That is deeply inconvenient behavior."
"You're welcome."
He sends me the name of a pub to meet him at before we hang up.
A few hours later, I push through the door into warm air that smells like fried fish, beer and wet wool.
Conversation rolls beneath a football match playing too quietly over the bar.
Jake is already at a table near the back, his jacket hanging over the chair beside him.
He spots me and gets to his feet. By the time I reach him, his attention has already moved over my face and settled there a little too long.
Instead of hello, he says, "You look tired."
I stop in front of him. "You rerouted through London so you could insult me over dinner?"
Jake's mouth twitches. Then he steps around the table and pulls me into a hug. "I've missed you, Hayes."
That takes care of whatever I was about to say.
Jake and I have been friends since we were pre-teens, which means most of our love language consists of insults, showing up when something goes wrong and remembering information the other person would prefer forgotten.
His arms stay around me long enough that I stop standing there like I've been tackled and hug him back.
When he lets go, he studies me again. I head him off. "You already used tired. You don't get a follow-up."
Jake thinks better of whatever comes next and pulls out the chair across from his. There's a plate of fish and chips waiting at my place.
I look at it, then at him.
"You ordered for me."
"You always get fish and chips."
The familiarity catches me somewhere I don't expect. Jake has been ordering for me since we were teenagers and had enough money between us to share a pizza. It has nothing to do with Sam, but I'm four thousand miles from Chicago and somebody knew what I would choose before I got here.
I sit down. "Thank you."
Jake takes his seat across from me. "That sounded painful."
"Don't ruin it."
For a while, he doesn't. We eat. Somewhere between his second chip and my first complaint about the amount of vinegar he's putting on everything, we fall back into the version of us that doesn't have to catch up in order.
He tells me about someone at his firm sending privileged documents to the wrong client and the six attorneys who spent the better part of a night trying to contain it. By the time he gets to the partner who discovered what happened, I'm laughing hard enough that I have to put my fork down.
"You're enjoying this too much," he says.
"I'm enjoying it exactly the right amount."
"A man almost lost his job."
"And yet you're telling the story with the enthusiasm of somebody describing a car accident he wasn't in."
Jake considers that. "That's fair."
It feels good to hear him tell me something that has nothing to do with Chicago, Sam or why I left. Just Jake being Jake, halfway through a story and already annoyed because I've interrupted it three times.
When he finally finishes, he steals one of my chips and asks, "Do you actually like it here?"
The question catches me differently than How's London? would have.
I look past him toward the windows. "Yeah. I do."
His eyebrows lift.
"Don't look so surprised."
"I'm not surprised. You sound surprised."
I think about that while I pull apart another piece of fish.
"Maybe I am. I thought it would feel more temporary than it does.
Instead I've started figuring out where things are without checking my phone first. I have a coffee place.
I know which route home I hate. There are parts of the city I recognize now instead of just moving through them. "
Jake watches me while I talk, that familiar little crease appearing between his eyebrows.
"What?"
"Nothing. I haven't seen you in a while. I'm allowed to look at you."
"That sounds threatening."
"You look good, Hayes. Tired, but good."
This time I let him have it.
"Work's good too," I tell him. "The account is doing better than anyone expected. Nix went off-script in an interview and gave a better answer than the one we'd spent hours building for her."
"How'd you take that?"
"I was proud of her." I move my fork through the crumbs on my plate. "She stopped looking at me before she answered. She's a quick study."
"Sounds familiar."
I smile. "She's something else. Nothing like I expected."
Jake finishes his drink and sets the glass down. "You sound happy."
I look at him.
"I am." It takes me a second to realize I didn't qualify it. Jake doesn't either.
He reaches toward my plate, thinks better of it when I pull it closer to myself, and leans back in his chair.
"Can I ask you something about Sam?"
There's enough of a shift in his voice that I know this isn't casual.
"You're going to anyway."
"Probably." He rubs his thumb along the side of his glass. "Before the night you overheard him, did you ever actually tell him you wanted more?"
I don't answer right away.
Jake knows me well enough not to rush me.
"Not exactly."
His eyebrows lift.
"No," I finally say. "I never sat him down and told him I wanted a relationship."
"Why?"
I drag a chip through the ketchup without eating it.
"Because by then it felt like I shouldn't have had to.
We were together constantly. My things had their own space at his place.
He knew how I took my coffee, knew when I was lying about being tired, knew when something at work was bothering me before I'd even told him what happened.
Everybody at Vibes knew about us." I look up at Jake.
"At some point I thought he should be able to see it too. "
"See what?"
"That it wasn't casual anymore."
Jake considers that. "For you."
The correction irritates me because it's fair.
"Yes. For me."
He doesn't pounce on it. He picks up his fork again. For a few seconds I listen to the noise around us and wish he'd chosen literally any other subject.
"I made choices around him too," I say.
Jake glances up. I hadn't planned to tell him this part.
"Anna offered me London before everything happened."
His fork stops. "The first time?"
I nod. "I said no."
"Because of Sam?"
"Because I wanted to stay in Chicago." Even to me, it sounds incomplete. I turn my glass between my hands. "Because of Sam."
Jake stays quiet.
"Anna called one morning while I was at his apartment, and I turned her down in less than five minutes. Then I got back into bed with him. He put his arm around me and went back to sleep."
"Did you tell him?"
"No."
Saying it out loud makes the problem clearer than I want it to.
"He had no idea I'd just made a decision with him in the middle of it." I stare down at the table. "I wanted that to mean something, but I never gave him the information that would've let it mean anything to him."
Jake's expression softens. "That sounds more like you."
I look up. "Excuse me?"
"Deciding something enormous by yourself and then being pissed nobody noticed."
"I liked you better when you lived several thousand miles away."
"No, you didn't."
Unfortunately, I didn't.
Jake reaches for his glass. "You've been doing versions of that since you were sixteen."
My stomach tightens. "Doing what?"
"Handling whatever you need without telling anybody there was a need in the first place."
"That's not what happened with Sam."
"Not all of it," he says. "But you can't tell me none of it."
I put my glass down harder than I mean to. Jake doesn't flinch. "When everything happened with your dad, your mom stopped functioning for a while and your brother was barely home. I came over one night and found you making spaghetti while the whole house was falling apart around you."
The pub seems to get louder around us. "Jake."
"I asked if you were okay. You told me somebody had to be fine."
The kitchen comes back before he finishes: the pot boiling too hard because I was trying to do three things at once, Jake at the table with his backpack still on because he'd come straight from school.
"You were good at handling it," he says. "You still are. But you didn't ask anybody to help, and you didn't tell us what you needed. You just kept cooking."
I stare at him. "Sam is not my mother."
"No. But you're still you."
"He could see me. He knew me."
"Yes, and I understand why you thought he should know when something changed. But he knew your routine, Autumn. That's not the same as knowing you'd changed the terms in your head."
I hate that sentence almost immediately. "He thought we wanted the same thing."
"For a while, he probably did. You gave him reasons to think that." Jake pauses. "You need to own that."
My throat tightens.
"Summer told you."
"Enough of it. She told me what you overheard, and she told me you went back afterward."
I look down at my plate. "I did ask him."
"Yeah."
"I stood in front of him and asked what I was to him. I told him what I needed. I asked if he wanted me."
Jake nods. "And he answered you."
The answer leaves one clean line through all the months before it: the night I finally asked. I gave him the information. He had it. Jake reaches toward my plate, and I slap his hand away before he gets there.
"Those are mine."
He laughs as he pulls his hand back. For some reason, that tiny interruption is what lets the rest of the thought finish.
I should've told Sam sooner that casual had stopped being enough. I should've told him about London. What he said to Bex was still fucking shitty and his to own. So was the answer he gave me when I finally asked.
I sit with that for a while.
Jake doesn't try to fill the silence. He goes back to his dinner, and when I finally push the plate toward the middle of the table, he glances at me before taking a chip.
"One."
He takes two. I should've known better.
"You came all the way to London to steal my food."
"I came all the way to London because I missed you."
He says it without hesitation. I look at him across the table.
"I missed you too. I like it here but I miss you and Summer so much."
His expression softens, just a little. Then he eats the second chip.
"Still a thief."
"Never claimed otherwise."
We don't talk about Sam again. This time Jake actually keeps his word.
He stays through the weekend. By the time I take him to the airport, the weekend feels both longer and shorter than it should. We stop near the entrance with his bag between us, people moving past in both directions.
"Send me pictures."
"Of fish?"
"Of Ireland. You can be in one or two if necessary."
Jake smiles. "Demanding."
"You flew through London and disrupted my entire weekend. I'm entitled to proof you made it to the destination."
"You spent most of yesterday making fun of a medieval drinking vessel."
"It deserved it."
He reaches down for the handle of his bag, then leaves it there.
"I'm glad I came."
The words settle between us without making anything awkward.
"So am I."
Jake looks at me for another second before pulling me into a hug. I wrap my arms around him, and this time there's no moment where I have to remember how. When he speaks, his voice is close to my ear.
"You're allowed to have wanted him."
My eyes close. He lets me go before I can decide what to do with that.
"Jake."
"I'm not asking you to do anything about it." He keeps one hand on my arm. "I'm saying wanting him wasn't the mistake."
I look at him. He doesn't elaborate. For once, I'm grateful.
"Go catch your flight."
He picks up his bag. "Call me when you get home."
"You're the one getting on a plane."
"And yet I can worry about two things."
I roll my eyes, but I'm smiling when he turns toward the doors.
"Holloway."
He looks back.
"Try not to fall into a river."
His grin appears slowly. "I'll do my best, Hayes."
I watch until I lose him in the crowd.
Then I go home.
The wind cuts through my coat on the walk from the station, and I start thinking about the orange one I left in Chicago.
I had room for it. That's what pisses me off.
There was space in the suitcase. I stood in front of the wardrobe before I left and decided not to bring it. I thought I'd be fine without it.