When the Lights Come On (Barflies Book 4)

by Katia Rose

“Yeah, you’ve gotta make sure your wedding associate is in acceptable condition in two weeks.”

  “Wedding associate.” He shakes his head and laughs, and I join in while he opens the door.

  “But really,” I add just as he steps into the hall. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do any of that.”

  He stares at me for a moment, searching.

  “I did,” he finally says. “You know I did.”

  I could reach him in just a few steps. I could cup his cheek in my hand and bring his face down to mine. I could tell him I know exactly what he means.

  Instead, I just say goodbye.

  Zach and I share a meal of Kraft Dinner that night while sitting on the couch. I try to pretend we’re enjoying one of the roomie hang-out evenings we’ve been having from time to time now that he seems less terrified to share an apartment with me, but my sling makes it hard to ignore the fact that I’m currently incapable of cooking for myself.

  “I just can’t believe you got hit by a car,” he says between bites of the packaged mac n’ cheese. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell us right away.”

  “I mean, it’s not like there’s much you could have done.”

  He waves his fork in the air to dismiss me. “We could have flown back.”

  Normally, I’d say something snarky about how superfluous that would have been. I’m blaming it on the painkillers, but all I do instead is stare down at my pasta while heat pricks the corners of my eyes.

  “Um, thanks,” I force out. “That’s really nice.”

  I shove a huge forkful of food in my mouth as a distraction and pull myself together before looking up at him again.

  He’s staring at me like I just announced an alien has taken over my body.

  “It was fine, though,” I say after chewing and swallowing. “Like I said, I had a friend here.”

  “Was it that blonde girl who’s...um...”

  “Really hot?” I finish.

  His neck starts to flush. Ingrid’s appeal draws in more than the ladies. She’s basically a ubiquitous sex magnet that could probably be used for supreme evil if she fell under control of the wrong forces.

  “No, not her,” I answer as I try not to laugh at how flustered Zach is. “She’s in Toronto with her band right now.”

  “Ah. Cool. So, DeeDee said something really funny on the plane back. There was this guy in front of us, and...”

  I listen to the rest of his story while contemplating just how absolutely in love with DeeDee he is. The dude can’t even unintentionally hint that he finds another girl attractive without feeling compelled to talk about how great she is.

  It’s nice to hear about two happy people doing happy things, and honestly, I missed having Zach around. Heart to hearts aren’t exactly the norm for us, but we’ve come a long way from when he first moved in and spent every night being scared I’d kill him in his sleep.

  “Here, let me take that.” He grabs our empty bowls after we’re finished eating and heads to the kitchen to wash them.

  The apartment is so small that the kitchen is really just the back wall of the living room, so I barely have to raise my voice over the sound of the water to keep the conversation going.

  “Hey, um, Zach. So...you’re a guy.”

  He looks over his shoulder. “Indeed. I am.”

  “Right, so...”

  I’ve been waffling on the idea of asking this all night. On the one hand, I am not the kind of person who opens up and asks for advice. On the other, I already need more help from people than I’m comfortable with. A little more won’t kill me.

  Probably.

  I just feel so stuck running circles in my own head. Talking to Zach will at least be a new direction, and I’m sure I could put the fear of being murdered back in him if I really needed to.

  “I have a question...about a guy.”

  Zach freezes in the middle of putting the bowls back in the cupboard. “Oh.”

  He finishes up and comes back to the couch. I can feel my face burning from just the simple admission. Zach is squinting at me like he’s waiting for the punch line.

  “I mean, you don’t have to—I just, uh...I mean...” I trail off into silence.

  “I’m very happy to help,” he says, his expression softening. “You know, I could also ask DeeDee to come over, if that would be better for y—”

  “No,” I interrupt. “I mean, DeeDee’s great, but she’ll just, I don’t know, want to paint my nails or something.”

  He chuckles. “Or dye your hair. That’s her thing.”

  “Yeah, remember that time she convinced me to let her temporarily dye my hair blue within like an hour of meeting me?”

  We both laugh at the memory for a moment. The DeeDee Effect is a powerful force.

  “So, what’s your question?” Zach asks as he settles into the couch a little more. “About the guy?”

  I consider laughing it off and joking about how crazy it would be if I was actually asking for romantic advice.

  Is that what this is? ‘Romantic’ advice?

  That sounds like something you ask for when you have a crush on someone in the office. It’s the farthest thing from what Youssef and I have going on.

  “Um, well...”

  “Full confidentiality,” Zach assures me when I don’t go on, holding up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  “Something tells me you actually were a Scout.”

  “I grew up in a small town! Everyone went to Scouts.”

  “Okay, Scout, here we go.” I take a deep breath and stare at the wall across the room. “Someone recently came back into my life that I hadn’t seen for a long time. We have...a history.”

  I glance at him out the corner of my eye and see he’s nodding. Every sentence I force out is like pulling a tooth, but it’s also weirdly cathartic—like the relief that blooms when you realize your mouth is actually better off without a bunch of rotten molars.

  “We were best friends for a while, and then it became...more. He was two years ahead of me in school, so we always knew he’d be leaving Brampton before me, but we didn’t really care. It wasn’t just some stupid high school relationship, you know? Or at least, I didn’t think it was. It felt...It felt real. It was a big deal for me.”

  “Just because you were young doesn’t mean it didn’t matter,” Zach says after a moment of silence. I still can’t look at him. “When we’re young we’re not...we’re not afraid to feel, you know? I think the relationships at that time in your life, whether it’s friends or dating or whatever, are made of something that doesn’t break the way relationships do as you get older.”

  “Wow.” I pull my knees up under me and adjust my sling. “That was...very wise.”

  He pretends to stroke an imaginary beard. “Just call me Gandalf.”

  I chuckle. “But yeah, it makes sense. The older we get, the more we learn to hold back.”

  Those lessons happened pretty quickly for me.

  “Me and this guy,” I continue, “we didn’t hold back. It took some time, but I...I trusted him.”

  I’m almost talking to myself now, considering the words as I say them. I wanted Youssef to know me even before I trusted him enough to let him in. He thought I didn’t give a shit about him for the longest time, that all he did was annoy me when he’d bug me about music in the hall, but it didn’t take long at all for me to realize he looked at me differently than everyone else.

  I wasn’t the pretty girl or the hot girl, the weird girl or the bitch. I was just me. I’d never been just me to anyone before.

  “We got really close, and when graduation started getting closer, we came up with all these plans about how we were going to handle things. They were stupid plans. They probably wouldn’t have worked, but still, we talked about it a lot. I thought we were serious. He was going to McGill to be an engineer, and a couple weeks before he left, I found this letter from him. I mean, a letter. It was so cliché. He literally typed it. Who the fuck types a letter like that
?”

  “Uh, an asshole?”

  “Thank you!” I raise my good arm and then let it drop back to the couch. “He was an asshole. He wrote this whole letter about how things could never work between us and how all those plans we had didn’t actually mean anything. He said he really liked me, but that it would be better if we just moved on and lived our lives.”

  “He said he really liked you?” Zach’s voice is laced with incredulity. “Those were his exact words?”

  I nod. “That part, yeah. That’s a direct quote.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Whoa!” My jaw drops. “You said fuck!”

  “I do swear, you know.” He shakes his head. “Why does everyone act so surprised about it every time?”

  To be fair, it’s as shocking as a Labrador puppy looking up at you and dropping an F bomb.

  “So what happened after that?” he urges. “Don’t tell me you just never spoke again.”

  “That’s what I was planning on.” I can feel myself fuming just like I did back then. Anger was my only defence against ending up a completely crushed excuse for a human being. “But no, he showed up at my house a week later and asked if I got the letter.”

  Zach actually gasps. “No way.”

  “Yes. Yes way. I told him I did, and he asked what I thought.”

  “He did not do that!”

  I wish it wasn’t true, but it does feel good to have someone else be as outraged as I was.

  “Unfortunately, he did. I told him he was right, that we were just stupid kids, and I wished him a good time in Montreal and told him to meet a nice girl there.”

  “Savage!” Zach holds up a hand for a high five and then realizes that would require me reaching around my sling. “Uh, never mind. I’m high-fiving you in spirit. So, that’s the guy who’s back in your life now?”

  “Yeah, and I...I don’t know what to do.”

  I hate admitting it. It’s like pointing out a wound and saying, ‘Hit me here.’ Still, getting it all out like that has left me lighter, like I can keep moving on my path even if I don’t know where it goes.

  “Wait!” Zach points a finger at me. “Is this the guy from that time we all got noodles?”

  I feel my cheeks heating up. “Uh...”

  “DeeDee said she thought you guys had a thing!” he crows. “I wasn’t sure, but it was pretty surprising to see you, you know, talking to someone.”

  He has a point. Talking is not really my style.

  “So, has he said anything about what happened?” Zach asks. “Has he apologized? Was there some kind of mistake?”

  “We...We haven’t really talked about it. At first I wasn’t interested in bringing it up. At first I wasn’t even interested in being around him at all. I don’t need that in my life, you know? But then we bumped into each other again, and it was like, okay, I’m clearly still pissed about this, so maybe if we spend some time together and I see it’s not worth being pissed about someone I don’t even know anymore, I’ll be able to get on with my life. So we agreed to hang out a couple times and catch up.”

  “But then you still had that connection, right?”

  It’s the cheesiest fucking thing to admit, but I can’t say no. Zach seems to take my silence in the affirmative.

  “And then you got in the accident? How did that work into all of this?”

  I fill him in on the rest of the story, namely the fact that Youssef has been the one taking care of me.

  “He told me he wants to ‘move forward.’” I do air quotes with one hand. “I want that too, whatever the hell it means. I feel stuck, but how do I move forward if there’s, like, this gaping hole in the past we can’t even talk about?”

  Zach watches me with his lips pursed for a moment.

  “You can’t. You guys have got to talk about this. He’s being really unfair not bringing it up himself, but it looks like it’s going to have to be you who does it.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to be the one to cave.”

  Zach makes a sound somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “It’s not about caving. It’s about moving on with your life, just like you want, and just like he seems to want to. Maybe your lives won’t move forward together, but it’s like you said: you’re stuck.”

  It may not be the answer I wanted, but Gandalf is right.

  Youssef invites me over to his place for our meeting two days later. He suggested a coffee shop first and then added that we could use his condo if I wasn’t feeling up to being out and about.

  Public locations aren’t my favourite at the moment—or ever. Everyone stares at you when you’re in a sling, whether you’ve got a baggy hoodie pulled down over your face or not. Plus, if I’m going to suck it up and tell Youssef we need to talk, I’d rather not do it next to the line at Starbucks.

  “Which leaves us with option B,” I mutter as I approach the address he gave me.

  The slate grey building can’t be more than a few years old. It’s impeccably clean on the outside, for one thing, which is saying something in a city with winters like Montreal, and the design is very ‘modern young professional living in their first condo.’

  I follow the instructions Youssef sent and get buzzed into the lobby a few seconds later. It’s all dark tiles and echoing floors, with a gurgling water feature and a guy sitting behind a desk. I start to wonder just how much Youssef is making as I cross over to the elevators.

  The ride up to his floor has me considering pressing the down button and walking right back out. I went six years without clearing the air with him. There’s really no need to do it now, or ever. I could text him and call our ‘challenge’ off. I could tell him I don’t think we should see each other again.

  But then the doors open with a ding, and my feet start pulling me down the hallway like magnets.

  Youssef is right there, behind that door, and I know I’m not going to be able to walk away. I couldn’t if I tried. I need an answer. I need to know how we ended up here.

  I raise my fist and knock on the dark grey door.

  What is it with this place and dark grey?

  Youssef pulls it open before I can knock a second time, and I freeze with my hand still in the air. My breath catches as his brown eyes lock on mine.

  I wonder when I’m going to stop reacting like this every damn time I see him.

  He really is breathtaking, though. His face is just the right combination of soft curves and sharp angles. His hair is a little wet, like he had a shower not too long ago, and the thought makes my pulse kick up a notch. I can see the dark marks on his t-shirt left by the water dripping off his hair, and my fingers itch to pull the whole thing off him.

  I let my hand drop to my side and clear my throat.

  “You live in a cave, you know that? Everything in this building is the colour of a rock.”

  He bursts out laughing and steps back so I can come inside. “Are you complaining? Seems strange, considering all you wear is black.”

  “That’s not the same thing. At least my apartment building doesn’t look like it should be subterranean.”

  “I don’t know,” he says as I kick off my shoes. “Your bedroom is pretty lair-like.”

  He’s kind of right.

  “Mmm,” I answer instead of coming up with a rebuttal. I’m too busy taking in the contents of his condo.

  The place is on the smaller side. From what I can tell, it’s a one bedroom. The exposed concrete ceiling and stark white walls stand out more than they would if he’d actually decorated. Besides a couch and coffee table, there’s not much in the living room besides a pile of cardboard boxes.

  “Did you just move?”

  “Uh, a couple months ago. I’m trying out a new look. It’s called boxed chic.”

  I snort.

  He laughs and shakes his head. “Did you just snort?”

  “I believe the proper term is ‘sound of derision.’”

  He laughs again. “Well, despite your derision, I’m still going to ask yo
u if I can get you anything. Water? Coffee? Um, beer? I think I have tea somewhere too...”

  He starts pulling open the dark wood cabinets in the open concept kitchen, but I shake my head.

  “I’m good.”

  “You sure?”

  “Mhmm.” I move past the entryway and cross the room to the huge window overlooking the balcony. Beyond it, the view is mostly low rooftops and other people’s apartments.

  “I wish I could have gotten something on a higher floor,” Youssef says as he comes over to join me. “The view from the gym here is gorgeous. You can see the river and all the downtown lights and even a bit of Old Montreal. It’s open twenty-four seven, so sometimes I go up there after I’ve played a show and turn off all the lights so I can just watch the city and listen to music.”

  I glance at him and find him staring out the window, a faraway look on his face like he’s up there right now. I can picture him so clearly, sitting cross-legged in front of some floor-to-ceiling window, headphones on while he looks down at the rushing world.

  I can picture myself there, too. We didn’t have much of a city to look down on, but we used to sit side by side and take turns picking songs to listen to while we sat on this pedestrian bridge and watched the city buses make their rounds long after our curfew.

  “Youssef.” I watch our reflections in the glass, keeping my voice steady despite the crazy pounding in my chest. “Did you really mean it?”

  “Mean what?”

  I can see us both still staring straight ahead, our reflections braced like we’re about to tumble through the glass.

  “All those...All those things you said in that letter.”

  I hear him swallow. His voice is hoarse when he speaks. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

  My heart stops and cracks all over again. I hear a rushing in my ears, and my eyes start to burn.

  “But why?” I whisper. I know I’m going to break down if I talk any louder. “I just don’t understand.”

  “I—Paige.” His reflection turns to face me in the window. “Paige, look at me.”

  I ball my sleeve up around my left hand and swipe at my eyes. I try to stonewall him, but I can’t. I only last a few seconds before I’m doing what he asked.