32. Logan
Chapter thirty-two
Logan
Maybe San Diego is just fucking cursed.
Maybe I only have myself to blame. For saying yes to private lessons, for saying yes to what she’d asked. For going back to teaching in the first place.
Come tomorrow morning, I’m going to call the dance studio and tell them I’m done. But in the meantime, I send some texts to other contacts. I get everything ready for the next step, because it sure as shit won’t be dancing.
This time I’m done.
“Hey, can you talk?” I ask Tara when she picks up the phone.
“Yeah, what’s up?” she says on the other line.
“You think San Diego is cursed?”
She huffs out a laugh. “What? What happened?”
“She bailed.”
I can hear her sit up on the other line. “Who?”
“Julie, who else?” My anger is starting to show in my voice.
“What do you mean she bailed?” she asks, confused.
“Stop asking so many fucking questions.” I don’t mean it to come out so harsh, and I can’t help but wince after the words are out of my mouth.
“Chill out for a second. I’m trying to figure out what happened.”
“Sorry,” I mutter. I huff out a breath, exasperated. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I think it does,” she says softly.
I stay silent on the line. I don’t know what else to say, not sure why I even called. But with Tara on the other line, I feel less lonely.
“Logan, talk to me,” she pleads.
“What do you want me to say? She let the fear eat her up. She let them guilt trip her.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. She let them win. She didn’t even fight.
“That’s hard.”
“Is it though? Or could she just … tell them to fuck off?”
“It’s so much easier when you’re on the other side of it. When you’re not deep in that guilt.”
“Yeah, I don’t know anything about that.”
“You’re not mad at me, Logan. I don’t need the sarcasm,” she warns.
“She said she messed up at work.”
“Oh God, I can’t imagine how she must be feeling. Like she really fucked it up. Can you imagine how terrible she must be feeling to quit everything?”
“She’s an adult. She can make her own decisions.” She told me about how she quit so many other things in her life, why did I think this would be any different?
“I think she was definitely trying, but it was years of living like that. People can’t change overnight.” Tara's words are full of kindness, like they always are.
“Remind me why I called you again.”
“Oh sorry, were you looking to commiserate?”
“Guess not.” I sigh. “I’m fucking done Tara. I can’t do this again.”
“I know.” Her voice is gentle over the phone. “I’m so sorry about this. I’m sorry this is where you’re at.”
“I know you are.” But I don’t want an apology from her.
“Logan,” she says slowly. “San Diego is not cursed. I think you look at it as your place of failure. You look at it as the place you fucked up because your heart wasn’t in it. But that doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you human. And it wasn’t our first time there, either. It’s like you blocked out how many times we went throughout the years, and how many times we won.”
We went almost every year that we were partners.
“It’s okay to step away from things, but you seem to be harboring the most guilt about it. Yes, Julie brought something back to you with dance. She livened you up, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t have anything to do with dance and whether you keep going or not. Even if you don’t do San Diego, you’ve still got her, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” But I think about her words to me once, how it didn’t matter what happened, I would still have her. How she didn’t hold up her end of the bargain, and how I expected her to when I should have known better.
“Really?” She doesn’t sound convinced. “I’d bet that she’s scared and probably overwhelmed. But she’s not looking to get rid of you. Give her a minute.”
My sigh on the line must echo its annoyance.
“I know I said before I didn’t want you to give it up, but maybe that was my own sadness talking. I don’t know. I think … you’re allowed to let this go. Not that you need my approval anyway,” she adds. “You can let this go. It was an era of your life and now it can be over.”
Why have I held onto San Diego so much? I gave the bare minimum when I competed, and I assumed I would scrape by fine. But when I didn’t, all it did was confirm that it was time for me to go. And maybe it felt like I was being pushed out.
But I pushed myself out.
“Let me know when you make it to Arizona, okay?”
She exhales loudly on the phone. “I will.”
“Thanks, Tara,” I mumble, and I can almost feel the smile on the other line. With that, I hang up.
***
“What are you still doing up?” Gavin asks when he gets in late from work and finds me on the couch with a mostly eaten pizza pie. Fuck, how the tables have turned.
“Julie bailed on San Diego.”
“Oh, shit,” he says, surprised. “You okay?” He drops his keys on the table and undoes his tie. The apartment immediately smells like a fryer, that distinct restaurant smell that somehow gets plastered onto his clothes, embedded in the fibers.
“Not really.”
“You … want to talk about it?” He shuffles closer to the couch.
“Not really.”
“Want to watch a new documentary?”
“You know, I always felt like I had let you down. When I didn’t even place last year, I thought, Gavin helped me with this. He made sure I could keep taking those classes and I failed him.”
He furrows his brows. “Is that what you think?”
“You’ve always been my biggest fan. I know that. And that’s always made fucking up harder with you around. And failing at something I was once so good at? That fucking sucked.”
“But you know I was proud of you no matter what,” he reminds me.
“Doesn’t make it any easier.”
“I guess not,” he says, eyes wide.
“I didn’t want to face you for a while. Felt like I couldn’t.”
He nods, letting out a deep breath. “I felt like I was being a shitty brother, traveling so much for work. Never home, never around. Maybe we were both just walking around sidestepping the other.”
“Maybe we should try to do better.”
“I’m happy I got laid off, honestly. I get to be home more now. That job had turned into a fucking nightmare.”
“And the restaurant business isn’t a nightmare?” I laugh.
“Fuck, not like that job.” He shakes his head. “So, what are you going to do about dancing then?”
“I’m quitting.”
He blows a low whistle. “Okay.”
“I should have quit it all back then, but I wanted to keep pushing forward. I didn’t know if I could let such a big piece of my life go, but now I can.” I hate this part of myself right now, full of betrayal and anger, the kind I’ve seen firsthand in the competitive world.
“What happened?” He slowly sits down next to me on the couch.
“Julie gave up dancing with me, too. Might as well call it quits for good now.” That’s the ugly, uncomfortable truth. “I said yes when I should have said no. I threw myself back into dancing for her. And for what?”
Gavin just scratches his jaw, looking contemplative. “Is this about dancing? Because I feel like it hasn’t been about dancing for a long time. Probably since the beginning.”
“Maybe I just needed a partner.” That sounds dismissive enough.
“Yeah. In life.” He leans over to grab a cold slice of pizza from the box and takes a large bite. “You needed somebody to be your partner in life.”
“And Julie was going to be the answer to that?” I laugh humorlessly.
“I think so.”
“Well, she bailed,” I say, resentful.
“On San Diego. Not on you.” He rolls his eyes like he’s just as frustrated with me as I am with everything else.
“Same thing.”
“Really?” he asks, disbelieving. “Come on, get your head out of your ass, Logan.”
I don’t say anything in response. Everybody seems to think she’s coming back, and if I hold out hope, I might just get crushed when she leaves me hanging again. Everything between us got too big, everything became too much. Like a bubble that got bigger and bigger until suddenly, it burst.
“Why do I keep getting the blame for this shit? She quit on me . She let this fucking go.” My voice cracks, and my eyes start to burn. “It was saving me , and she dropped it.” There's the truth.
He says nothing, silently watching me. But then he leans over and pulls me in for a hug, instead. A strong hug that feels nostalgic, stirring up memories of when we were kids. He holds me close for a while and I take a deep breath, feeling it center me, delivering a new sense of calm.
“Let’s go to bed,” he says. And just like last time, “We’ll deal with this shit in the morning.”