The Love Liability

Prologue

THE UN-CUTE MEET

six months ago

LOUISA

The back of this U-Haul looks like what happens when you give a person one day to move due to a chaotic breakup, a complete psychological collapse somewhere around the fifth ‘EVERYTHING’ box, and absolutely no architectural vision (or even history playing Tetris.) There is no system here.

No logic. No evidence that the woman who packed this truck (me) has ever encountered the concept of a right angle or, frankly, even the concept of consequences.

(Ask my dad.) Instead, the rental is packed to the brim with every worldly possession I own, crammed together like passengers on a budget flight with no legroom.

Even though I’m only moving the contents from one small apartment I shared with someone to another small apartment I don’t, every single item from the last decade of my life is currently in a pile of poorly labeled brown cubes like a densely packed metal coffin filled with every decision I’ve ever made (and too many thrift shop sweaters) all stacked with zero plan for unloading.

It’s a Ship of Theseus life that has been disassembled and reassembled too many times to still be recognizable, but still somehow is.

The city smells like exhaust and hope, possibly exhausted hope, it's hard to tell from the curb. The version of me who decided I can absolutely do this alone was a woman of grit and conviction. The version of me currently standing here staring into the abyss, she is damp with the sweat of moving boxes since 7 a.m., and regretting every decision she has ever made (specifically the twenty-three boxes labeled for vibes rather than a plan for actual contents.) She is a woman who has started to suspect that version of herself was a liar. It’s not the first time I have found myself in a predicament of my own making.

Where I make decisions with eyes much hungrier than my stomach can actually consume. (Every relationship I’ve ever been in.)

And no one has ever accused me of having a plan. (Clearly.)

I've been unloading the truck for an hour. The compromised boxes with their crushed corners and prayer-held bottoms. My microphone was carried with a tenderness people reserve for sleeping infants, and is now sitting in the middle of my empty new apartment looking like a very expensive deity I'm about to beg for something. (I am.) I carried it in first. I always carry it in first. It is, in every meaningful sense, my firstborn child. The child I have poured every single dollar into. (Dollars I didn’t have at the time.) The child who let me make a career out of inhabiting other people’s words, rather than living inside my own life.

This move was a big one. Not only because of the rush, which was more self-imposed because I knew my lease (and relationship) was ending and it was time for me to get out of there.

I just didn’t pack until the last possible minute, when Chandler and Toby came by to pull an all-nighter.

Different than the kind Chan and I pulled in college, less adderall this time, but just as frantic.

And just like college, she got me through it by the skin of my teeth. Though that was a lifetime ago.

This was a move from a walk-up to one of those buildings with a name that sounds like the British aristocracy.

(I would know, given the number of Princess Diana plates my mom had in the china cabinet growing up.) You know the buildings: the Carlisle, the Asher, or in my case, the Richmond.

The only reason this apartment even became known to me is because I happened to eavesdrop during one of my shifts at the Double Shot, where I half-barista, half-gossip with my friends.

I’d watched as the realtor grew progressively more purple in the face, annoyed that the owner was less interested in leasing the place for what it was actually worth than he was in never having to use the internet or “Docusign” ever again.

He just wanted a ghost with a checkbook and a physical pen.

Which was good news for me because I am a professional ghost. Besides the days a week I steam milk for lattes.

Majority of my time is spent hiding in whatever closet I’ve converted into my recording studio.

So, it was a match made in Luddite heaven.

Even said that if all goes well, he’ll sell it to me.

Which could be interesting, to have somewhere more permanent.

(Not sure I could get a mortgage, but a girl can dream.)

So here I am, standing in the entry to my new life. At least for the next twelve months with the option to renew, possible eventual lease to own.

I grab another box, one of the many labeled ‘EVERYTHING’ because sometime around one in the morning we lost the ability to categorize and started just emptying drawers like it was going out of business, and hike it onto my hip.

Then a second box on top of the first, because I’ve always had a complicated relationship with self-preservation and what I consider my own limits of strength.

(Emotional, physical, or otherwise.) I tuck the spare microphone stand under one arm and, in a move that future me will have questions about, I pinch my cup of Throat Coat tea between my teeth.

Because I’ve run out of hands and the universe has not yet run out of ways to test me.

This (like me) is a disaster waiting for its moment.

I shove through the inner door with a shoulder hit that my rugby-playing big brother Theo would applaud. This is exactly the kind of forward momentum he’s always encouraged, and I take my first triumphant step into the lobby of my new home.

This, it turns out, is the universe’s moment.

My foot catches the edge of a rug. The microphone stand jabs my ribs (traitor), the boxes lurch, and the laws of physics, those iron-fisted, completely humorless laws that I have never once been able to understand, take over.

It’s a full-body, slow motion, dance of failure.

The finale? The second ‘EVERYTHING box’ lands in a sound that is the onomatopoeia of my life strewn across the floor.

A clatter, a bang, a thud, and then the long, never-ending, rattling silence of chaos and consequence.

(Also the names of my left and right tits.

Joking.) The AA batteries, the command strips, the Crest Whitestrips I’ve been meaning to try for eight months, two lightning cables for a phone I no longer use but still own (just in case), and a photo of Theo and me as children at a stone-shore beach somewhere in Yorkshire.

Both of us squinting into the same grey sky, just months away from being relocated to the sunshine state.

No, that’s Florida. Whatever state California is.

The Hollywood, tech-boom state. The GOLDEN STATE, that’s it.

Like the Golden Gate Bridge. (Duh, Lou.)

The paper cup pinned by my teeth is also released and all twelve ounces of the herbaceous, yellow-tinted (erm—strong and pungent) glory of Throat Coat tea, launches into the air in a beautiful (horrifying) arc.

But it doesn’t hit the floor. It doesn’t shower my scattered life with the rain of poor decisions.

It hits a man. (More like a brick wall.) Specifically, it hits him in the center of his chest, a chest that I watch move up and down with each breath, communicating, even at our distance, that its owner does not skip the gym for anything frivolous.

And something tells me, he would consider sleep, and every single thing I own, to be frivolous.

The tea blooms outward across the white of his shirt in a pattern that might, in another context, be considered art.

(Chandler would think so.) It spiderwebs into the silk of his silvery-blue tie and darkens the lapel of a charcoal suit jacket that, I will learn in approximately forty-five seconds, ‘is bespoke,’ which is a word meaning ‘extremely expensive’ and also ‘you are a careless little girl and I hate you.’ (At least that’s how it sounds.)

He’d been reading something in a leather-bound folder.

His chin is tilted down, or was, before the collision of my entire life with his routine morning.

Now his eyes are up and locked on me. They are dark, framed by lashes that are unfair for a man to have, the kind of lashes that on anyone else would soften their whole face, but on him, they don't soften anything. They frame a jaw so sharp it looks carved from stone. (It might be.) With a mouth that has never done or said anything careless in its life. He just has that look, you know? Like a man whose every movement is premeditated, who makes sure every single step lands with purpose. He is the embodiment of a person who in no world (especially any one I’m in) has time for this.

I, on the other hand, am a collapsing tower of Jenga bricks. Which we both just experienced in live time.

In the novels I narrate, this would be a meet cute.

The cutest of meet cutes. The tea would spill charmingly, there would be a beat of held eye contact, someone would laugh first and then the other person would laugh too, and the whole thing would become a story we would tell jumping into shared sentences at dinner parties when people would say we’re the perfect couple.

‘And that's how we met, can you believe it?’ would be it for the rest of our lives.

But we don't live in those novels, and I don’t think he wants me involved in the rest of his morning, let alone his life.

His gaze is lingering but no one is laughing.

The lobby smells like licorice and clove, okay, that’s my fault, but also his expensive cologne and the stick of peppermint gum he's chewing. Either that or he’s grinding his teeth to prevent him from biting my head off.

I squeeze my eyes closed for a moment. Maybe this didn’t just happen.

But when the scent of my sweat, humiliation, and his bubbling rage doesn’t dissipate from around me, I crack open one eye and see the situation is still very much real.