Chapter 53 Determined
I’ve assumed the position.
All fours in the street, slacks and blouse clinging to my skin with sweat. I look like I fell into a koi pond at a press conference.
I scurry to Reed’s gate, hunched in on myself, clutching my bags to my chest. There’s a call button, and I press it, looking into the Ring camera. It’s barely late morning here.
“Reed? Please let me in! I’m not leaving until I talk to you!”
When nothing happens, I lift a hand and rap on the gate.
I’m bowed in despair for thirty seconds before the electric gate shudders into movement. Hope butterflies though my torso, swooping in arcs around my swollen heart.
The garage is closed, so I wander to the side of the house where there are a few steps and an actual door. It swings open before I can even raise my hand to knock.
Reed’s brother stands in the doorway. A more slight, pointier version of the man I’m looking for. Oliver.
“What happened?” he breathes nervously as I walk into the house. We’re in a kitchen with lots of windows and a cozy red booth-nook-table to sit around.
I’m at . . . the other end of the hall Reed led me down the first time I was in here.
“Where’s Reed?”
Oliver blinks at me. “Reed’s not here. Did you . . . fall in a lake?”
“Will he be back soon? Or is he out for the day?” I collapse onto the edge of the red bench, dropping my elbows on the table and dragging my fingers through my disheveled hair.
Oliver fills a glass with water and sets it in front of me. I drink it eagerly as he slides into the opposite side of the booth.
“Rikki, he’s in New York doing a slew of auditions that he organized to justify being on the East Coast for a few days before he needs to be back for more promo.”
My eyes slide shut.
I place my glass onto the table and flop sideways so I’m lying on the bench, parallel with the table.
Oliver lowers himself across the other side and briefly studies me. “What are you doing?”
“Can you refill my water?” I mumble as a new round of upset sleuths through me.
Oliver sets my refilled water on the table.
“What did you do?” he asks quietly.
I push myself up, dig my emergency electrolyte packet from my purse, and dump it into the water. Oliver grabs me a spoon. I mix my drink and chug it. He settles back in across from me as I put the glass down, half empty.
“Why do you assume I did something?”
“Because I know that look.”
I frown, wishing there was a mirror.
“What look?” I ask.
“Self-loathing.”
“Excuse me?” I snap.
He shrugs, unmoved by my tone. “Your body language is tense, upset, buttoned up. Your eyes are screaming for help. What did you do?” he asks again.
I flinch as Ted’s scathing little love monologue zings through me like a shock. “I hurt Reed. Unintentionally.”
I stare at the table.
Was Ted . . . right?
Do I not let people know me?
Reed said something to the same effect. You’re afraid to be known.
But I have friends who know me.
Well, Jordyn’s been in my life since I was five, and Whitney has too. Babe is my friend . . . through Jordyn. I guess we’re not “besties.” We only talk about books.
But I didn’t do that with Reed. I told him whatever he asked. I was open! I let go. I didn’t lie about my job or avoid topics—
Dread slithers across my collarbone, an icy snake, slowly encroaching on my windpipe.
But I did.
I avoided like a master.
I compartmentalized up the ass.
I built guardrails into our discussions. I made calling difficult. I made a rule to avoid ever discussing work. I took texting off the table for three weeks.
I am a fucking basket case.
The breath whooshes out of me.
Reed thought the guardrails would disappear last weekend.
He tried to call me when I clearly wasn’t in bed, and I deflected.
He told me about work all week.
He told me about his relationship history on our second date, and I never reciprocated.
How can Ted be right?
How did I misconstrue this so thoroughly?
Every guy we interviewed thinks I’m a fucking liar.
Am I?
I didn’t even tell Reed about my job. It was Micah and Jordyn. I didn’t tell him about Ted. Or Netflix.
I told him not to read my work.
How can two people be a team when there’s a plexiglass wall between them? When one of them is urging the other to keep half of their life a secret?
A fresh tear rolls down my cheek as my eyes travel up to the art piece hung behind Oliver’s head. A bottle-cap version of the solar system.
“He really cares about you.” Oliver’s voice.
I blow out a watery laugh. “I think he now associates me with the worst night of his life. I basically recreated it.”
Oliver squints. “What do you mean?”
I shrug. “I—he showed up on Sunday at my apartment to surprise me and come to the book club I do, but I hadn’t told him that I had to reschedule it this week.
And I hadn’t told him I unfortunately work with my ex-boyfriend, and we were on deadline for a piece we had to write together for Monday, and he knocked on the door, and my ex opened it and said the wrong thing.
And I said all the wrong things, and he left.
“I’ve never seen him that way. Barred off. His eyes were frozen over. The warmth that usually fills his features when he talks was just gone.”
Oliver runs a hand down his face. “I know the look. I’ve been on the receiving end many times.” I study Oliver, watching as his own trauma with Reed washes through his expression.
“What did you do?” I say.
There’s a long pause before he sighs, dropping his eyes. “It was me.”
“What was you?”
“It was me with his fiancée,” he tells the table.
“Freshman year. On Halloween. I was the lowest I’d ever been after our dad died.
I was desperate to feel something. She and I were friends.
I was visiting her at college from the get-go behind Reed’s back.
I crossed every line, and she let me do it. ”
I suck in a sharp breath.
“Yeah. I was a piece of shit, and somehow he forgave me. But he hasn’t gotten close to anyone new in his life since. I broke the part of him that trusts people.”
Christ. And he spent years in therapy, trying to fix it. And he did, just for me to fuck him up again.
We sit in silence for a full sixty seconds before I grab my shit from where I dropped it in the booth. “I have to go. I have to get home.”
“All the way to New York? You need a ride to the airport?”
I shake my head, stumbling to the door as awareness breaks against me in waves.
I’m the fucking walking, talking oxymoron.
I’m the doctor that smokes.
I’m the neurosurgeon that moonlights as an Olympic diver.
What good is a relationship therapist who can’t cultivate a healthy relationship?
An LMFT in an abuse cycle with her own fucking father?
I dig out my phone and dial Whitney.
“Rikki? It’s so early. What’s up?”
“I need you.”
“You?” Her voice falters. “You—you never—where are you? What’s wrong? I’m coming.”