by Chloe Finch
Turned out she was wrong about everything.
Her phone rang. It was Zach. Her stomach turned at the sight of his name. She was tempted to hurl the phone out the window. She sent it to voicemail. He called again, and she ignored it.
The fifth time he called, she picked up.
“Fuck you,” she said and hung up.
He called again.
She picked up.
“Don’t hang up,” he said quickly, before she could say anything. “I can explain.” He sounded so relaxed. Cocky even. Just like always. She couldn’t believe she’d been stupid enough to fall for it.
“I’m sure you can. I’m a total moron. Thanks for letting me know. Apparently, I was too stupid to get it the first hundred times you tried to tell me.”
“Grace, just—”
She hung up and put her phone on airplane mode, then leaned her head against the cool window and cried the rest of the way home.
Chapter Thirteen
Zach
Zach was in emotional freefall. Derek hadn’t just screwed up both their lives, he kept fucking up Grace’s over and over. He tried calling her again. Straight to voicemail. Again.
It happened so fast. How did the best thing that had happened to him in years get royally screwed up before he’d even had a chance to get used to it? For nearly two years Zach had put up with Derek’s bullshit as he spiraled farther and farther out of control. And finally, when he tried to do the right thing and cut him off, Derek just came right back and lobbed a bomb right into the middle of his life.
Zach’s future with Grace might be ruined beyond repair now. He didn’t even remember when he started thinking about a future with Grace. When it stopped being about getting her out of his system and started being the beginning of something more real than that. He wanted to tell her. Wanted to shout it from the rooftops. He wanted to be with Grace all the time and no one else. He wanted to wake up with her smell on his pillowcase every morning.
And now it might have all slipped through his grasp. He was technically the one who said the words that could have ended things, but it was Derek’s fault. Without Derek showing up and provoking him into a stupid fight, he never would have said them. Only now, when it was too late, did he see what a spectacularly stupid idea it was to lie to protect her. He cursed himself for falling back into his worst habit—lying to make problems go away.
The sun was sitting low in the sky, and the glare was at just the right angle that it bounced off his desk and shone directly in his eyes. He lowered the shades with the switch on the wall. It was getting late, but he didn’t want to go home.
He decided to text her.
Zach: Hi. I know you don't want to talk to me right now, and I don't blame you. I know I fucked up really bad. But please know I was trying to protect you. I thought that if Derek thought you weren't involved in my life, he wouldn't try to drag you into anything else. I know that was the wrong thing to do now. I'm so sorry Grace.
He reread it. God, he sounded pathetic. He sent it anyway. A little groveling might help his case.
* * *
The next day at work he tried to get her alone. Overnight, tossing and turning in bed, he decided that if he could just explain, surely she’d forgive him. She was so much more caring than him. It was one of the things he admired about her.
He got to work an hour early and waited at the door to the training room for her to arrive. When she did, she looked as beautiful and put together as ever, wearing a pink pantsuit. He stepped in front of her, blocking the door.
“Excuse me,” she said. Her stare was icy. Maybe she wasn’t as ready to forgive him as he hoped.
“I just wanted to explain what happened in that video,” he said.
“I know exactly what happened in that video, thanks.”
“No, you don’t,” he plead.
She sighed. “You were trying to ‘protect me’ from Derek by saying you’re hate-fucking me, right? And now the entire team has seen it. I don’t need your excuses.”
“Well—yeah, actually.” She had read the text. And she didn’t even care.
“Now let me through, please.” She took a step forward, trying to move past him.
He grabbed her arm, desperate for her to listen, to just give him another chance. “Look, Grace, I know I fucked up,” he said earnestly.
“Let go of my hand, or I’m filing a sexual harassment case against you,” she said quietly. She was dead serious.
He released her arm like a hot iron and stepped aside, dumbfounded, and she walked past him into the training room without a second glance. He might have really lost her.
“What did you fuck up now?” June said. She arrived at some point during the confrontation, looking like she just stepped out of the salon, laptop bag slung over her shoulder.
“Don’t fucking worry about it,” Zach said scornfully. He took a deep breath and tried to get a hold of himself before he went into the room.
* * *
Grace
Through a stroke of bad luck, a few days later Grace was set up to job shadow with Zach for the first time. She was observing a first appointment with a prospect with Zach and another salesman, Steve. They were all supposed to meet by the elevators to ride over to the meeting together, but Zach never showed.
“Guess he’ll meet us there,” Steve said, and the two of them took the town car to the meeting.
They hung around the front of the prospect’s office building for a few minutes, and they were just about to go inside when Zach jogged up the block toward them. He was a mess. His shirt was untucked, and he smelled vaguely like alcohol.
“Hey, guys, ready to do this thing?” He said. Neither Steve nor Grace answered him.
In the elevator up to the prospect’s office, while Zach hastily tucked his shirt in and ran a hand through his hair, Steve leaned in and said discreetly, “Hey, man, are you all right?”
“Yeah, dude. I’m great,” Zach said. “Never been better.”
“It’s just…you haven’t been drinking, have you?” Steve asked.
Zach laughed. “I just told you. I’m cool. Why don’t you mind your own business?” It was needlessly aggressive.
No one said anything else until they were in the office, when they all turned on the charm and acted like everything was just great. The meeting was with the CFO and CEO of a tech company, two guys who couldn’t be much older than Zach himself. Steve set up the slides. Zach was supposed to lead the presentation, and he started off by calling the CFO the wrong name. It only got worse from there.
Grace cringed at every misstep. He lost his train of thought more than once, didn’t answer a question from the CEO, stumbled over his words—it was a train wreck. She had never seen Zach present before, but she heard enough of the bros salivating about shadowing him she knew this was out of character. In truth, she knew something was wrong the moment she saw his shirt untucked.
He only made it through the first four slides before Steve stood up.
“My partner here just had a brain transplant and still isn’t feeling himself,” he said. The CEO and CFO had the good manners to chuckle. “Thanks for kicking it off, Zach. I’ll take it from here.”
Zach nodded and sat down like he was in a trance. Steve did the rest of the presentation, thankfully saving it from total failure. He cracked a couple dad jokes and did a decent job, but at the end when he asked for a second appointment, the CEO gave them the brush-off. The whole time Steve was presenting, Zach was staring off into space, not even pretending to pay attention.
What happened to him?
* * *
At home, Grace’s parents noticed that something was up. While she was seeing Zach for those few blissful weeks, she was hardly home, spending time with Zach or catching up on the work she neglected.
Now suddenly she was moping around at home all the time. The worst part was her parents’ concern. She’d never been very good at hiding her mood. At dinner, it was just her and her mom. Her dad wa
s working late.
“Honey, what’s going on?” Her mom said. She was still wearing the polo shirt from the electronics store she worked at.
“Nothing. What do you mean?” Grace feigned ignorance, staring at the food she was picking apart on her plate.
“You seem down. What happened?”
Grace considered lying and saying it was just work stress. She’d never been very good at lying though, and with everything that happened with Zach, she’d feel like a hypocrite if she started now.
“It’s stupid,” she began.
“I’m sure it’s not stupid, sweetie,” her mom said.
Sometimes their lovingness grated on her. Now was one of those times. It seemed like they might finally start treating her like a real adult when her company was doing well. Like they finally respected her as a real person and not just their kid. Then the company folded and she moved back home and she was crying every night in bed and before she knew it her parents were treating her like a baby who couldn’t take care of herself again.
“Well, it’s not a big deal, then,” Grace said, trying to sound nonchalant. “It’s just a guy.” She rolled her eyes at herself. “This guy I thought liked me at work, but it turns out he doesn’t.”
“Was it the guy you stayed over with a couple weeks ago in the city?”
Grace blushed. She didn’t know her mom had seen her get dropped off after the weekend at the cabin. Her parents had always been remarkably cool about sex, but it was still embarrassing to be seen getting dropped off in the middle of the afternoon wearing yesterday’s clothes and his T-shirt. She thought she had snuck up to the shower before either of her parents noticed. That seemed like a lifetime ago now.
“Yes,” she mumbled.
“Are you sure he doesn’t like you? I can’t imagine anyone not liking you. Maybe he’s intimidated by you.”
Grace almost laughed at the absurdity of it.
“I’m pretty sure,” she said.
Her mom patted her hand. “Well, you know I’m here if you want to talk about it. Both your dad and I are.”
“Thanks,” Grace said with a sigh. There was the familiar guilt again. Now she felt bad for brushing her mom off, even though she couldn’t begin to understand the dumpster fire of a situation that had happened with Zach. Not to mention, at the thought of him, she was extra guilty for taking her amazing, supportive parents for granted.
“I have to head to book club,” she said. “Can I use the car?”
“Sure,” her mom said. “The keys are on the hook.”
* * *
Zach
Zach was in full self-destruct mode. He was determined to forget everything that happened with Grace, no matter how much booze it took. He started at a bar by himself, one of the last real dives in Manhattan, an old wood-paneled place down in the East Village that somehow still smelled like smoke twenty years after the indoor-smoking ban. Since the last time he was here, the hipsters had moved in and were working on ruining the authenticity by ordering IPAs and taking artistic Instagram photos of the graffiti in the bathroom. He was relieved to find it was still grimy enough to retain its charm.
Zach picked this place for the nostalgia. He and Derek used to come here when they were underage. The bartenders at the time liked Derek and usually couldn’t tell him apart from Zach, so they got served more often than not. Tonight, the bartender was a mean old guy he’d never seen before with white hair and a stain on the front of his untucked dress shirt.
Zach ordered a cheap scotch. That was a nostalgia move too. Call it an homage to the last time he drank scotch, when he was nineteen, at this very bar. His friend Jeff, who was always a little wilder than Derek and Zach, in the sense that he was more of a criminal than either of them, had stolen the plastic handle of scotch from behind the bar. They fled to the street before anyone noticed and walked up to Central Park, passing the bottle around. They drank all that was left in it, pretending it didn’t taste like gasoline.
They got so plastered Zach couldn’t remember much after getting to the park, except eventually ending up in the lobby of a fancy hotel. Derek pretended to be the doorman for the lobby bar, not very believable in his Blink 182 T-shirt and jeans with a hole in the knee. But he accepted tips from confused, rich tourists all the same. They might have lasted a little longer if only Jeff hadn’t started singing All Star, and apparently the hotel staff weren’t big Smashmouth fans. The front desk clerks tried to get them to leave and they refused, arguing, illogically, that the lobby was a public space.
Then Jeff passed out on the floor. He went down like a tree, didn’t even try to catch himself. Someone at the hotel called 911, and Derek and Zach hoofed it out of there before the cops came. The two of them fell asleep curled up like kittens under a tree in Central Park, leaving Jeff to deal with the ambulance ride and hospital by himself. Not that their abandonment mattered much—Jeff later told them he didn’t remember anything until waking up to the IV in his arm, which he then removed himself and snuck out of the hospital so he wouldn’t have to pay.
Zach hadn’t been able to stomach scotch since. Until tonight, when the burn felt right. Back then, he and Derek were both working two jobs and going to college and still had to steal food sometimes when rent was due. Life changed so much since then. But then, looking down the bar at the same grimy Coors sign that had been there ten years ago, had it really? Here he was, sitting in the exact same bar, getting drunk on probably the exact same brand of scotch. He was actually more miserable now than he was as a broke, delinquent youth. At least he knew how to have fun back then.
He tried to talk up the bartender to stave off the dark thoughts.
“Did you see that Yankees game last night?” Zach said, nodding to the small TV in the corner playing the game.
The bartender completely ignored him. Pointedly walked to the other end of the bar and started polishing a glass. There wasn’t even anyone sitting over there; the guy was just an asshole. Zach was sick of trying to be nice. He wanted to be mean. He’d had three scotches, and it was close to midnight. He decided it was late enough to go to a club.
Before he did, he slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the bar to pay for his tab, which couldn’t be more than thirty bucks. At the sight of money, the bartender came over, suddenly interested.
“Keep the rest and clean this shithole up with it.” It was a crass move. He probably looked like some yuppie Wallstreet asshole, flaunting his wealth for no other reason than to be a dick, but he didn’t care.
The bartender soured. “If you think it’s a shithole, don’t come back, jackass.”
Zach got in a cab and headed to a nightclub far away from anywhere Sterling people went after work. The last thing he wanted was to run into a rogue pack of fellows while he was trying to drink himself to death.
He decided on Le Bain, the nightclub on the rooftop of the Standard hotel, another stop on the Zach Smith nostalgia tour. It was a real bougie try-hard place with a Jacuzzi inside. A place he and Derek used to go when they were obsessed with going to every rich-person place they could get into.
It was the middle of the week and the club wasn’t very busy. A few quieter clusters of people and one bachelorette party. The bridesmaids were wearing matching black bandage dresses with sashes announcing who was who. Sister, one read. Drunk friend, read another. So tacky. Zach ordered a vastly more expensive shitty scotch that tasted the same as the one at the dive and sat at the bar, watching the dance floor. The bridesmaids were the only ones out there so far, screaming and taking photos like the nightclub was built just for them.
He was enjoying watching from the sidelines, getting thoroughly drunk. Eventually, one of the bridesmaids approached him.
“Can I get a picture of you proposing to my friend?” She yelled in his ear over the thumping music. She spoke with the cadence of someone used to getting shit done. Her hair was a razor sharp, black bob and she wore the bandage dress like she was doing it a favor. She was one hundred percent Zach’
s type—what used to be his type at least. If this was two months ago, he would revel in flirting with her all night, playing the game like he didn’t know she’d come home with him as soon as he said the word. Not tonight. The whole thing just felt contrived and gross and made him long for Grace.
“No, thanks,” he said.
“Oh come on,” she said, exasperated. “Please. It’s just for this stupid bingo game we’re playing. I won’t tag you in it or anything.”
He was sick of himself and his mopey thoughts. Sick of being the responsible brother who ruined all the fun and cleaned up after everything. He wanted to be the screw-up for once. So instead of telling her to fuck off, he said, “Not really my thing. Can I buy you ladies a round of shots instead?”
“Hell yeah,” she said and threw her arms around him. He stiffened at the contact, like it was a betrayal to Grace, even though she was the one who dumped him.
The bridesmaid ordered twelve shots of Patron and beckoned her friends over.
“What’s your name?” The one who ordered the drinks asked.
“Derek.” Why did he say that? It’s not like they knew who Zach or Derek were, and they certainly wouldn’t care even if they did. It was pointless to do the twin-swap thing without both twins there.
“To Derek!” The bridesmaid shouted. They held their shot glasses in the air, and the others all whooped and yelled, “To Derek.” Zach did the shot with them for the hell of it.
The other women dispersed back to the dance floor, which was beginning to fill up as late-night partygoers poured into the room. The bridesmaid who originally approached him grabbed his arm.
“Come dance with me.” She didn’t expect him to say no.
He wasn’t in a dancing mood. If this was a normal night, a pre-Grace night, she wouldn’t have had to ask. He would have used this opportunity to join the bachelorette party, flirting with all the bridesmaids and even the bride. He wouldn’t try to break up the impending marriage or anything, but he would want to know that he could if he wanted to. He would flatter them all, crack jokes. Get confirmation that every one of them wanted to fuck him. That all he would need to do was say the word. Tonight, the idea was revolting. These women just made him feel lonely.