“Tim.” I cut my eyes at Mara, who hangs back near the bookshelves and pretends to read the spines. “What’s going on?”
He tips the glass into his mouth, long after the last bit of bourbon is gone. When he sets it down, I notice the ashtray brimming with cigarette butts by his elbow. He gave up cigarettes years ago, opting for occasional cigars instead, because Aunt Jeannie hated the smell of the former—but always said cigars reminded her of the night they met, at her father’s birthday party. She liked the way Tim offered her a cigar as soon as she stepped onto the deck of her family’s lake house, not caring that she was a woman, not even caring that her father would’ve throttled him if he’d been there to witness it.
“Lawsuit,” he says, finally, in this voice like a truck bed of copper pipes: cold and rattling. I watch his fingers fumble with a fresh cigarette pack until he gives up, flinging it onto the desk.
Even my tunnel vision can’t block the fact Mara’s staring at me, hard. “I don’t understand, what’s the lawsuit?”
“Abandonment, missed payments.” His muttered response slurs into nothing.
Missed payments, I can sort of understand. Tim and Jeannie own so many things, it’s not farfetched to think a check or two slipped through the cracks. But the word “abandonment” throws me completely. Abandonment of what?
“I have a son,” he says, like he read my thoughts. He pauses, until his shoulders jump with a laugh I’ve never heard before. “Now there’s all these women coming out of the woodwork, waving their kids in front of news cameras.” Anger flashes through his features. He picks up the cigarette pack again and pelts the mirror on the wall. It doesn’t do anything, of course, but I get the urge to move the empty glass, just in case.
“How do you have a son? Aunt Jeannie said after Cait was born...she couldn’t....”
I can’t make sense of this. The fact my own question flatlines should give me a clue, but all I can think is that I must have misheard him.
Later, I’ll look back on this moment and marvel at how stupid I could have been. Even Mara, judging by the way she slips silently out of the suite, knows what’s going on.
Tim doesn’t notice her exit; he didn’t notice her at all. “Had an affair,” he breathes, sitting back in his desk chair. It’s real leather, passed down from his grandfather. Cohen and I used to sit in it together and spin, the rich browns and maroons of the suite blurring around us into the color of dried blood. When I got older, it became a weirdly specific goal of mine: to someday own a chair just like his.
“You cheated on Aunt Jeannie?” The polished wood of his desk is ice-cold under my palms as I lean toward him. He doesn’t even react. “When?”
“Kid’s about...twenty-two, now,” he muses. Like I’ve asked him what color his shirt is, or whether or not he got the mail today. So fucking casual I can’t stand it.
“Before you judge me,” he drawls, spinning to face me in a wobbling half-circle, “you should know Jeannie’s been doing the exact same thing all along. Of course, she’s playing the victim now—what she does best—but she had her own string going, and she knew all about mine. Don’t let her fool you.”
My stomach pitches. I push off from the desk and stalk toward the door, sure I’ll get sick all over Bourne Fairfield’s priceless Persian rugs if I stay one second longer.
“Hey,” Mara says softly, when I yank the door open. I hate that it’s got a closer; I don’t even get the privilege of slamming it shut behind me. Not that Tim would care, apparently. He doesn’t call my name or tell me to come back. Doesn’t even try to explain.
“You were right.”
“Levi…you can’t take anything he said seriously. He was wasted.”
“That’s exactly why I have to.” My shins ache. Even the Acre’s luxe carpet can’t soften my footfall, stabbing its way to the elevator. “I’ve never seen him like that.”
“For all you know it’s a bunch of people he’s never even met, just trying to cash in.”
She stands on the wall opposite me as we descend, hands on the railing behind her. When I shake my head, she stares at the ground: she knows there’s no way any of this is some misunderstanding. Grapevine is one thing. Hearing it directly from the source is another entirely.
“I’m sorry. I know you look up to him.”
She’s just trying to help. There’s no reason to take any anger out on her.
And yet, somehow, I still manage to do just that.
“Guess you were right.” The doors open. I step out first. “The secret family rumors and all that.”
“Why are you saying it in that...that voice?”
I stop in the exact center of the lobby, feet planted on the cursive A. “What voice?”
“That one. Like some sarcastic ‘congratulations.’ Do you think I’m gloating? You think I’m happy I was right?”
My brain blanks for a second, and I suddenly find myself thinking about the night of Cohen’s wedding.
“...you were right about her.”
“Wish I hadn’t been.”
Either Mara was born with some supernatural ability to see the future, or she knows and accepts something I haven’t been able to, despite the fact it’s been in front of my face more times than I can count: relationships really don’t work. They might, at first. But give it time, and every single one will end up shattered.
Or, worse: they won’t. You’ll just keep living the lie. At least then, you aren’t alone.
23
Call me crazy, but something tells me this isn’t how first dates are supposed to go.
“Levi,” I grab his arm when we’re outside the Acre. It takes a considerable amount of my weight to counter his and pull him back; when he stops and looks at me, I almost stumble.
The city hums around us, lights clicking on in windows, cars rattling from work or out to something better. This time of night used to excite me: for people like me, bartenders and insomniacs and anyone else whose internal rhythm doesn’t quite mesh with the rest of the world, sunset means the beginning of the day, not the end. It means a shiny new night of possibilities is just ahead.
Now, though, it knots my stomach. This night has too many possibilities. And for once, I can’t just forge ahead and pretend I know exactly where I’m going, or what will happen.
“Don’t let this shake your faith.”
He looks beyond my head, staring straight through the buildings, and doesn’t speak.
“Your uncle did a bad thing,” I continue. I let go of his arm to rub mine; the wind is picking up fast. “But...but not everyone is like that. And it doesn’t automatically make him a bad person, or cancel out the other reasons you looked up to him.”
“I grew up thinking he and Jeannie had a great marriage,” he says. He doesn’t sound angry anymore.
He sounds heartbroken. And that’s so, so much worse.
“Do you know how old I was, when I got engaged?” The corner of his mouth lifts into a pained smile. “Twenty-one. Everyone kept calling us ‘babies,’ said we were making things too hard on ourselves, getting married so young.”
My eyes trace the deep line in his brow, the creases on his nose where his glasses sat during dinner. I’d watched his lips form the words in silence while he read the menu, finger trailing underneath every line. Until he decided on his order, I pretended to study my menu and change my mind. Just to give him whatever time he needed.
“What made you marry her anyway?” I find myself asking. “What made you decide all those people had to be wrong?” I tilt my face toward his, even though he won’t grant me eye contact. I can’t be mad about it, I guess. It must be exhausting to stare at shifting letters, flipping symbols, and jumping lines all day, only to come face-to-face with a person who flip-flops and changes course every hour. Whenever she pleases.
“That’s the thing, I knew they weren’t wrong. I knew being so young would make marriage even more difficult. I just didn’t care. I kept thinking, ‘Tim and Jeannie got married ev
en younger than us, so why not? If they can do it, so can we.’”
The wind billows past again. I shiver, a real one, and can’t help but think of being with him on that rooftop, when he shrugged off his coat and gave it to me without a second thought.
“Then,” he says, sighing to himself, or maybe at himself, “a few years into it, people started telling me I was working too much. That I had to focus on my marriage and family, too. And I knew they were right. But I kept pouring myself into the business, because I thought that would fix my marriage. That someday, we’d have the big house and that perfect lawn and the new cars...and we’d be happy. Like flipping a switch.”
I open my mouth to tell him that’s not how it works. It’s just stuff. Some of it’s important, sure, but most of it is just filler, objects you keep close so you don’t notice the empty space around you. And all of it can disappear, overnight.
But Levi already knows this. I’ve seen it in the way he walks through his house, sticking to a worn path from the stairs to the kitchen counter, kitchen counter to sofa. I can tell it crosses his mind every time he opens a closet that’s still packed with gadgets and décor he worked so hard to get, but never used. If anything breaks—a cabinet handle coming loose, a yard ornament shattering in a storm—he leaves it the way it is, no sense of ownership or urgency to fix the house he spent so long getting for her, for them, before he lost her anyway.
So I shut my mouth for once. I stand there, staring at him, even when he won’t look at me. I wait.
“Tim.” The muscles in his neck tighten; he breathes deeply when he points to the Acre and its golden, glowing windows. “Tim lived that way. His life was all about his businesses. He was the reason I thought....”
The rapid flutter of his lungs takes over, enveloping his voice until he quiets, arm dropping back to his side. His fist clenches.
“You thought,” I finish, after a beat, “that if you just worked hard enough at one thing...everything else would sort itself out.”
He’s still staring at the hotel, breath ragged, filling my ears louder than the wind.
“You were right,” he says.
Another shiver hits, this one rattling me down to the marrow. “Okay, so the secret family thing happened to be true. But you were still right, about it just being a rumor, when it came right down to it, and that I shouldn’t have—”
“About relationships.”
His interruption might as well be a slap upward on my chin, shutting my mouth so fast I bite the tip of my tongue.
I want so badly to tell him I was wrong.
“Levi, look. When I said that....”
He holds up his hand. “I know you’re trying to make me feel better right now, but you don’t have to. I’m actually, like…” He pauses, just long enough for another airy laugh to cough its way out. “…finally thinking clearly. Seeing shit for what it is, you know?”
“You sound crazy,” I tell him, laughing along, because my nerves don’t know what other response to give.
No, I think. He sounds like me.
“You were right, about people losing themselves in the other person, or—or ending in disaster, or deciding to stay together anyway, just because they hate the idea of being alone,” he says. The metronome of his steps on the courtyard stone, back and forth in a small oval, make me flinch. “I’ve seen it happen. I lived it. You, too. You’ve seen it—you watched it happen with your mom and dad. Right?”
Every rib feels cracked when I take in a lungful of the cold, rushing air.
“People can feel real connections. They can care about each other. Just because you don’t let yourself feel those things, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
Levi was right, not me. At least, that’s what I thought. As soon as he kissed me back in the bar yesterday, I started questioning everything I’d held onto all these years.
Yesterday.
Twenty-four hours, at most. Did I really let myself believe Levi Fairfield had changed my mind, just like that? That he’d managed, in a single day, to prove wrong what I’d known to be true my entire life?
Even starting back at the beginning, with the day I moved in, the idea sounds insane. Of course relationships don’t work. Loving someone only guarantees one of two things, or both: getting the emotional shit beat out of you, or dooming yourself to a life of pretending. I used to have no problem remembering that fact. I used to have no problem walking away.
“Right?” he asks again. His pacing stops.
He looks me in the eyes.
“Yes,” I answer, right when the wind dies down.
“Let’s—” Levi cuts himself off, watching our shadows flicker in the streetlamp. “Let’s just go.”
For a second, I’m amazed he used any form of the word “us” or “we.” More than amazed. In one shining flash, I’m hopeful.
Then I take the feeling, ball it up, and let it go. If I could, I’d pitch it right into traffic and watch every tire flatten it back to the nothing it started as.
We aren’t “us,” or “we.” We’re roommates.
“Okay.” I rub my arms again as I follow him to the parking deck. The wind is even worse here, whistling through the gaps in the concrete and howling down every level.
He doesn’t hold my door. Doesn’t say a word when I angle the vents and crank the heat onto my numb fingers.
Maybe, when we get back to the house, things will change. He got a little crazy back there, sure: who wouldn’t, with news like that? Once we’re inside, though, I’m positive he’ll leave all that behind. After the way he looked at me first thing this morning, there’s no way he’ll be able to breeze past all the places we shared last night.
Breathe, I tell myself. The smell of the heater relaxes me as he drives.
Things can still be okay. This night has plenty of good possibilities left.
At the house, Levi pauses in the entryway to take off his shoes while I stand there, holding my breath. He’s in the same spot he undressed me.
“Goodnight,” he says, barely turning his head over his shoulder before starting upstairs.
“What the fuck?”
My outburst stops him, but he still turns slowly. “What?”
“‘Goodnight.’ That’s really all you have to say to me?”
His eyebrows raise, like he’s honestly surprised. “What else do you want me to say?”
“You made this huge deal about doing a real first date.” I toss down my purse. “The night went to shit pretty quick with your uncle’s...news, I’ll give you that—but we were having fun.” A piece of hair falls in my eyes. I blow it away. “At least...I thought we were.”
“We were.”
I spread my arms. “Then what’s the deal?”
“I told you.” He steps down and leans on the banister. I think of just a few nights ago: this same argument, these same stances, this very spot. If it weren’t for the role-reversal, I’d swear this was a redo.
“You were right,” he repeats. “Relationships don’t—”
“Forget what I said! I mean, God, are you really going to listen to someone who’s never had a relationship in her life?”
“And you’re better off for it.” He waves his hand at me, like I’m some shining example of well-being and adaptation. “You haven’t been cheated on, you haven’t lost your identity—you haven’t had anyone break your heart.”
“Yeah,” I blurt, “because—” My breath is a spider web, catching every word bubbling up from something I convinced myself never existed.
Because I never let anyone have my heart. Because I’ve spent at least a decade pretending I never even wanted to.
I swallow hard and look up at him. “You got a really big shock today. And I totally get that. I got one, too. Seeing my dad again, it...it shook me up a lot. All those feelings, all that relationship bullshit I said—it all kind of rushed back at once, and I completely freaked out.”
“I’m not freaking out. Do you see me freaking out?”
> “No. But that’s my point. You’re in that numb, robotic stage, shutting down so you won’t get hurt, but...” The words tangle up again.
But I won’t hurt you.
I want to tell him. I try so hard to, my throat hurts, the promise stuck there like barbs. How can I possibly promise something like that? No one can. Even if they mean it with all their heart.
“I, uh...I’ve got some work to finish.” The sound of his weight creaking up the steps crackles through the foyer. “I’m sorry tonight turned out like it did.”
“It doesn’t....” Nope. Can’t finish that one, either: It doesn’t have to.
Good, God. I sound like every clingy rebounder I’ve ever had grab my wrist on my way out the door: what are we, where’s this going, we were having fun. My first thought was always, Of course we had fun. And now the fun’s over. I could never understand why people always expected more. You were lucky to get what you got. At least walk away with some dignity.
“...matter,” I finish, and instantly, I feel something familiar settling in my bones: the rhythm of the escape. I turn and make my way to the living room. “Goodnight.”
He says it back, but I barely hear him. He’s already in his office, door halfway shut. When I hear the click of the knob, I let myself wilt into the armchair. The very same spot he gave me what felt like an endless orgasm. As soon as I passed a peak and thought for sure I’d reached the end, he’d do something—move his hand, his hips; look at me like I was some kind of goddess, dropped right into his lap—and the pleasure would keep spinning.
The tears come out of nowhere.
I squeeze my eyes shut and tip my head back against the chair. Get it together.
This isn’t me. I don’t cry over men, the things they do or don’t do. I stopped that bullshit a long time ago.
I don’t sit in the darkness with an ache in my chest, pining after what could have been, because I’ve always known the answer: nothing. Nothing special, nothing real. Nothing that lasts.
Upstairs, I hear him opening and closing file drawers, getting much more important things done. Moving on. The longer I listen, the straighter my shoulders get, and the less I cry.
Honey, When It Ends: The Fairfields | Book Two Page 16