Chapter 38 #2
"Has he tried to call?" Lu asks, trying to sound casual while she whisks the dye.
"No. Finally understood space," I say, then catch that surgical, measuring look she throws at me in the mirror. "Can't believe you're on his side."
"Fuck that. I'm on yours." She throws the brush into the bowl. "But you need more context before torching him. None of it makes sense."
I drag in a breath, rolling my eyes, but she cuts over me.
"When I saw him, he didn't seem like the same idiot you half-dated years ago."
"Uh-huh. You were drunk out of your mind—"
"He seemed to actually love you," she cuts in, words sliding under my skin like the scissors that just nicked too close.
A beat when I just go quiet. Then I sigh, and sigh, cutting her hair, hoping it could mend everything.
"That ended the second he told me he was a father. It's not about us anymore," I rush out and my face buckles. "I just... I thought it could be our turn, finally, but I guess this is what you get for building a relationship on a lie."
Purple drips onto the tile, just as my tears start falling in her hair uncontrollably. Everything stains.
"Baby." Lucy draws me close. "Even if you guys didn't lie, that still could have happened. She was his wife, so it's obvious that they had sex before you guys started anything."
"Lu, I'm in so much pain," I croak, stumbling on the edge of the bathtub. My head drops down.
"I know." She slips the scissors from my hand and sets them on the sink like she's disarming me. I let out an ugly, wet snort of laughter, which is definitely not giving me any relief.
Lu looks at me, and her expression suddenly weighted. "Em, it was Ben who called me."
I blink at her, then frown. "What do you mean? When?"
"That night. After your fight. That's why I rang you."
Everything in me stops cold. "What do you mean? Why would he call you?"
She shrugs. "I don't know where he got my number, but he apologized for calling so late and said he was scared something was going to happen to you. He saw you sitting at Sea Cliff. Apparently, he sees your location on his phone—"
"Oh shit." The app. He knows where I am. All this time, I thought I regained some agency, but he can literally see each of my moves.
"I have to deactivate that," I say, ready to rush out of the bathroom and do it now, but Lu grabs me, staining my arm in a purple dye.
"Wait," she says, her eyes soft but insistent.
"I think he really loves you," she says again.
I blink and frown at how serious she sounds.
"When he called me, he didn't sugarcoat it," she continues.
"Told me everything. Said I should hex him, that he feels like absolute shit for hurting you.
That if you never forgive him, I should take care of you and support you during your divorce, not let Richard play with you.
That if you need any money, he'll send it to me. He really loves you, Em."
I sink back on the bathtub edge, hands over my face to stop the sob from breaking loose. "I know. I know he does, but does it even matter?"
She tucks a falling strand of my hair behind my ear.
"You know he wasn't double-dipping, because he invited you into his world, wanted you in his family—he even got two apartments for you guys," she says slowly. "And he told you he didn't sleep with her after you guys started. You can't hold it against him that he was just living his life."
"I know. He did so many things right. That's the problem. He was perfect," I say, my voice splintering.
"Life's not neat. Look at me—" Lu points at the door ajar, listening to the laugh behind it. "Never thought I'd end up with Sophia sketching Micah's balls in my kitchen, but hey, you adjust, you make it work."
I've really hit rock bottom when I can't even laugh about that.
I drag in a breath. "That's the worst part.
I know he didn't lie, even though my thoughts scream that he wronged me—deep down I feel like he didn't, not this time.
.. Then I start wondering—" I get up, my shoulder slumping on the tile and I know I sound humiliatingly earnest, "—if I can forgive him. If I could get over it."
Lu's eyes pin mine in the mirror—like she already knows something I don't.
"And? Could you?"
I don't answer. Because what is there to answer when you're fumigated by peroxide and grief at the same time? Too much to handle.
Instead, I manage to carve her hair into a purple pixie cut and listen to their laughter echoing down the hall like a carnival when their sexy ménage à trois leaves.
I'm once again left with my anxieties, back in my old room.
Everything is almost the same because when I left for Seattle I didn't take anything, and coming back, it would not match Richard's sophisticated apartment.
Plus, I wanted it here, safe with Lu.
There's that desk where I wrote my first book when I didn't have the world in my head to tell me what should come next and I'm on the same white-metal queen bed that squeaks with every breath, where I dreamed I'd marry, build a life, unfold into someone new.
I did all those things, and somehow ended in the same place—somehow better, because I've lived, but mostly worse, because I've looped. I'm looping in a loop inside another loop.
Knees against my chest, I watch the night fall through the window.
Nights are always the worst, because they hollow me out. Especially when I'm used to Ben breathing into my hair until I fall asleep.
But nights here are also stunning. Kaleidoscopic.
Lu's new chandelier hangs overhead, stitched together from a thousand shards of stained glass like a prism, which means the room blooms in spinning fragments of pink, gold, and blue.
It paints the walls deceptively lovely. Makes me believe that broken things can be beautiful, too. That you can cry prettily.
I dig through old drawers: mugs, postcards, and paychecks I was supposed to cash years ago. Chaos as usual. Then journals.
I open that one I know I shouldn't.
It holds sketches of Ben, from the days when I was still naive about his proportions. Didn't have enough pencils for that.
It's not his body I linger on, though, but the whole page I filled with his eyes and his smile.
I study those details and almost laugh out of pain, wanting to reach back to the girl I was and tell her how harmless, how simple it all seemed when she was just sketching him. She had no idea what it meant to have him whole.
I close the journal before it breaks me, then sit back on the bed, slipping into that empty, faraway place until I realize—it's that bed.
The same one where, five years ago, Ben held me while I confessed the worst mistake of my life. Sobbed into him, told him I nearly died, and instead of turning away, he held me so tightly I actually believed I could still do something with my life.
Now, here I am again, dying, only slower this time.
It hurts way more when your heart's waiting for someone than when it stops beating.
The truth is that even through this marrow-deep ache, I love Ben, no matter what. I love him more than I ever loved myself.
But I also love myself more than I ever did because of how he loves me.
And right now, underneath it all, I can feel him—I know he's hurting too.
I pick up my phone. The wallpaper he'd set with the picture of us is gone. Now my phone picks something random. Currently: just an endless dark ocean.
I find that app, hanging back a minute because I'm not sure how I'll handle seeing his dot beating on my screen, making me feel somewhat closer to him.
Then I open it, and my whole body turns into a garden of wings, trembling and wild. He's there.
Ben. Location: Zuckerberg Hospital.
He's at work.
I could put the phone down, pretend I never saw that dot, but I hate that thought—more than I hate where we are now.
That's the thing. No matter how hurt I am, I'll wish Ben happiness. Selflessly. Truthfully.
As his best friend, I'd tell him: it's alright, it's alright, even if it hurts like this, just know that I'll always wonder what you're doing and how you are in that random moment I think of you. You won't just pass through my mind.
I slump on the bed and pull the blanket over me.
Then my eyes betray me and I look at his beating icon on my screen.
My hand shakes as I sob, pulling out a tissue after tissue that can't hold this kind of calamity.
He might have spent the week lying in bed with Lisa, whispering names into the dark, hating me for kicking him out without a chance to explain, and maybe it'd be fair.
The bed shakes under me, and I realize that Ben might not be the strong one now, but what if I can be? What if I could hold him this time? At least as his friend.
My thumb trembles above his name.
He hasn't moved on the app.
But I am.
I have to know what happened.