Chapter 22
“So you kissed your ex-boyfriend,” Bobbi says.
His brow is pinched and I know he’s been working hard to follow along as I’ve recounted the latest series of events during the first lull in the Friday morning rush at Strange Brew.
On the other side of the counter, Claire listens intently, lips pursed.
“No, I kissed Ben,” I clarify.
“Who’s Ben?”
“Her neighbor,” Claire replies.
Bobbi turns to her. “But I thought she went out with her ex?”
“No, that’s tomorrow night,” she answers.
“But it’s not a date. It’s just a dinner thing with friends,” I add, as if that clarifies things.
Claire’s eyebrows knit together. “Does he know that?”
“Who, Ben?” I ask.
“No, your ex.”
I blink. Oh, right. That would be the obvious question, wouldn’t it? Except for the fact that I’ve barely thought about Matt over the past few weeks, let alone my feelings for him.
“We broke up,” I say. “I think he might even be seeing someone else.”
“But he still agreed to have dinner with you,” Claire says, as if the implication is obvious.
Bobbi’s eyes are wide, enraptured. “Oh my God, this is better than the last five seasons of Love Island.”
I wish that was a compliment. Instead, it sounds like my life has careened so far off course that I’ve managed to reach reality TV levels of dysfunction.
But I haven’t spent the past twenty minutes detailing the baseball game, the bar, the kiss, to impress my coworkers.
I need advice. I’m desperate for it. Sara is too close to the situation to be objective, and Ben is…
well, even closer. So my sanity barometer is the staff at Strange Brew.
“You know, you’re really glossing over the most important detail here,” Claire says to me as Bobbi takes the order of a couple who just walked in.
I turn to her from where I’m practicing steaming oat milk. “Which is…?”
“How was the kiss?” she asks, one eyebrow arched up.
Heat suddenly rushes through my veins, settling low in my belly.
I haven’t had too many first kisses, and none of them were particularly thrilling.
My first one ever was in third grade, when Dylan Fisher sat down next to me on the school bus and, after a few minutes of silence, asked if he could kiss me.
I don’t remember if I even answered or not, but he went for it anyway.
The tight seam of his lips planted against mine for a few moments, and then he pulled back, an expression on his face that told me he wasn’t impressed.
And, to be fair, neither was I. We just looked at each other as if to say, that’s what all the fuss is about?
Then there was Scott Dillard in seventh grade, who kissed me on a field trip to the aquarium. And Paul Meyers, who kissed me after prom my junior year of high school. A few others in my twenties, but none of them were particularly special.
I always told myself that Matt made up for it.
We could never agree whether our first date was the night Sara and Garrett not-so-subtly had us all show up at the same sushi restaurant in Santa Monica, or the official double date two weeks later, but there was no question about our first kiss.
Matt met me at the Santa Monica Pier and we got ice cream at Scoops before wandering down the boardwalk.
We eventually found an empty bench and sat down, eating our ice cream for a few minutes before he turned and asked if he could kiss me.
I remember it being messy, a sticky mix of mint chocolate chip and fudge swirl, but when I recounted the story to Sara later, I told her it was perfect.
Still, no matter what I told Sara, Matt and I were never what you would call “hot and heavy.” Tender, yes, but passionate? I try to make the word fit, force its shape into a hole in my memory. It refuses to budge.
But Ben… kissing him was like being plugged into a socket. Even the memory sends a pulse of electricity running through my veins. It was everything my grandmother had always promised the universe had waiting for me: excitement and passion. Divine energy and cosmic vibrations. Magic.
But the memory dampens when I remember that Ben hadn’t knocked after Pete left last night. All I got was a text.
BEN
Good night, Marnie. Let’s talk tomorrow.
I had tried to stop myself from overanalyzing it—I already knew Ben texted like a serial killer, so that part wasn’t exactly new—but there was still an odd foreboding about it, like I would be spending the entire day waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Which is exactly what I’ve done.
“The kiss was…” My words falter as adjectives flood my brain. Amazing. Addictive. Life-altering. But I push them away as I dump my latest failed attempt at steamed oat milk into the nearby sink. “It was just a kiss. It didn’t mean anything.”
Bobbi finishes ringing up an order, then turns to me. “Why not?”
“Because we’re friends.”
“And?”
“And he’s my neighbor, I just got out of a long-term relationship, I’m recovering from a traumatic brain injury,” I reply. “The list is long. Besides, I know for a fact that he doesn’t do relationships.”
Claire shrugs. “Then just do sex.”
My pulse spikes as my mouth falls open.
She looks utterly unbothered. “What?”
“Maybe I don’t want to sleep with him,” I reply.
“That’s exactly what a person who wants to sleep with someone would say,” Bobbi interjects.
I turn and throw him a scowl.
“And what did Ben say?” Claire asks.
My eyebrows pinch together. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve talked to him since, right?”
The way she says it makes me think that I should have, but it only happened last night. When would we have had the chance?
Well, that’s not entirely true. I heard him leave his apartment this morning, locking his dead bolt and testing it, like he usually does.
Except I could have sworn he paused this time, like he took a moment to consider my door before heading down the hall to the stairwell. Or had it been my imagination?
Either way, he hadn’t knocked, and he hadn’t texted again.
You haven’t, either, I remind myself.
It’s true, but only because I don’t know what to say, how to broach not only the kiss, but these feelings that have been growing in my chest for weeks.
Or how I’ll deal with the very real possibility that he might not feel the same way.
So instead, I focus on pouring another serving of oat milk into my stainless-steel jug.
“Not yet,” I answer.
Claire cringes.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s nothing,” Bobbi inserts, hands splayed like he’s brokering peace. “I’m sure he’s just giving you space. I mean, you don’t even remember breaking up with your ex, right? Ben probably assumes you feel like you cheated or something.”
I pause when I realize he’s right. This does feel like cheating, but not on Matt.
It feels like I’m cheating on Sara. She’s the one who always envisioned Matt and me getting married, living next door so our future children could grow up together.
Even now, when I’m on the phone with her, I feel like I have to withhold details of my life, prop up her expectations so I don’t break her heart.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t know that many details about the breakup to begin with—I was censoring them to spare her feelings back then, too.
Unfortunately, it’s backfired spectacularly. Sara is more intent than ever on getting Matt and me back together. Meanwhile, I’ve spent weeks following clues scattered around my apartment to try to remember the past year, and it’s only brought me closer to Ben.
I shake my head and pray to the universe that my cheeks aren’t too red. “It’s not cheating. Ben and I are friends. That’s it.”
Claire snorts. “Yeah. Friends who have tasted each other’s tonsils.”
I cringe even as a laugh bubbles out of me. “That’s so gross.”
She shrugs as if that minor detail doesn’t change the facts.
There’s a steady stream of customers for the next few hours.
When it finally slows down again at two, Claire goes on break and Bobbi disappears into the back to take a delivery, leaving me to watch the counter.
A couple of weeks ago, the responsibility would have triggered an existential crisis, but after successfully making two skim lattes this morning, I feel like I can conquer the world.
I decide to take advantage of the lull and reach down to where my tote bag is stashed under the counter to grab Ben’s copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.
I open to my bookmark and start reading where I left off yesterday, the moment Edmund reveals his identity to Caderousse.
I’m so engrossed in the story that I barely hear the bell above the coffee shop’s front door ring.
A moment later, I see a customer approach in my periphery.
I tear myself away from the book, donning a warm smile.
“Hi, welcome to Strange Brew,” I say to the woman standing at the counter. “What can I get started for you?”
The woman is smiling, too, but it fades the moment she makes eye contact with me.
“Marnie?”
My heart drops. She knows me. That must mean that I know her. Somewhere in my brain, I know I do. But it’s ephemeral, like a dream you try to remember after you wake up. Every time I try to focus on it, the details slip further away.
“Hi,” I say, trying to mask my confusion.
“Hi,” she replies, shaking her head slightly. “Sorry, I didn’t know you worked here or I wouldn’t have…”
She tries on her smile again, but it looks fragile.
She’s shorter than me, though her hair is longer—beautiful, wavy chestnut-brown locks that fall over the shoulders of her black wool coat.
She has caramel boots up to her knees and a black velvet headband that ties the outfit together in a way that I didn’t think was possible in real life.
It’s effortless in a way that I envy. Something I would have remembered, if I could.
“I’m not usually in this neighborhood,” she continues after another moment. “I just had a meeting with a client.”
“That’s okay,” I reply, even though I have no idea if that’s true or not.
Either way, the woman looks relieved.
“I kept hoping I’d run into you at some point,” she says. “I didn’t know if any of my calls or texts were going through.”
My mind flits back to those seventeen missed calls waiting when I finally got my phone back at the hospital. “I’ve been locked out of my phone for a while.”
“Oh.” She forces a short laugh. “I thought you might have blocked me. Not that I would blame you.”
My eyebrows knit together. I almost ask why I would do that, but that would mean revealing that I don’t remember.
We’d waste so much time rehashing everything I’ve been through over the past few weeks instead of focusing on her and whatever happened between us.
Suddenly, Bobbi reemerges from the back.
“Hello, welcome to Strange Brew,” he says to the woman. Then he clocks how I’m staring at her, eyes narrowed, and he jumps into action, the same way he has whenever I’ve been confused by an order over the past two weeks. “What was that order? I can get it started for you.”
“Just a latte to go, thanks,” the woman says. She looks almost thankful for the distraction.
“Sure thing,” Bobbi replies. “And what’s the name for that order?”
“April.”
The name catches on something in the back of my mind.
“April,” Bobbi repeats as he writes it on the side of a paper cup. “Got it.”
The silence is painful as Bobbi turns to the espresso machine, expertly working its knobs to brew her drink. I know I should say something else to this woman, ask her how I know her, or why, but before my broken brain can come up with the right question, Bobbi hands her the drink. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” she says, tapping her card to pay. Then she pauses before turning to me again. “It was good to see you, Marnie. For what it’s worth, I’m really happy for you two.”
For a moment, it looks like she might cry, but instead, she forces another smile and turns to leave.
Bobbi watches her disappear through the front door, then whips around to me. “What was that all about?”
I stare back, dumbfounded. “I have no idea.”
Because despite how hard I try to recall it, I can’t. But something tells me I really should.