by Amelia Wilde
“You’re right. I never did feel…like this?”
“Are you…in love?”
I shake my head, but my smile gives me away.
“Addison!” Leah cries, clapping her hands. “I knew it. You’ve been too damn happy when we text.”
“I have been happy.”
“But?”
“But it’s not…you know, all rainbows and sunshine.”
Her brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
The waiter appears at the side of the table to take our order, and Leah tells him to bring us our usual. She gets it exactly right. I don’t have to say another thing.
“I just mean…something’s been up with him lately. He’s been kind of distant. Like there’s something going on, but he won’t tell me exactly what it is. I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading too much into it.” I don’t go so far as to mention the house.
“I bet not,” Leah says matter-of-factly. “You’re not usually wrong about that kind of thing.”
I give her a look. “Oh, shut up. I never even saw it coming when Jamie packed up and left.”
“You were too busy for him anyway. He was just butt-hurt about it.”
I laugh again. It feels good to be laughing instead of forcing myself not to dwell on whatever Brett’s problem is and when he might snap out of it.
If he ever does snap out of it.
“You should see yourself right now,” Leah says, a funny grin on her face. “You’re happy even when it’s not perfect.”
“How can you tell?”
“I’ve been looking at your face for more than twenty years. How could I not tell?”
“So you don’t think I’m wasting my time?” There it is, out in the open. Maybe I am wasting my time with Brett. Maybe, just like with Jamie, I’m overlooking all the red flags, and this is just going to end in heartbreak. Maybe I wanted to be with him so badly that I’ve been pretending not to notice that we’re totally different people now.
Or maybe not.
I can’t make up my mind.
Leah smiles at me from across the table, then gives the waiter another wave, beckoning for more rolls. We usually go through three baskets.
“It’ll all work out, one way or another,” she says.
I sure hope so.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Brett
The weekend is swallowed up in visits from Marcus, in completing what seems like endless projects, in too little sleep, and not enough food.
Monday is when I finally break.
I’ve been doing this nonstop for days, renovating the house for endless hours, and I can’t stand it anymore. I need a break.
“Marcus,” I say over the whine of a buzzsaw. He’s finishing some crown molding in the living room. It’s one of about five things left to finish up before I’ll have no excuse to drown myself in this work. Before I see if it’s proven enough.
He doesn’t hear me at first.
“Marcus!”
He stops, the sound cutting off abruptly, though my ears keep fucking ringing.
“We’re done for the day.”
He raises his eyebrows, then squints at me from across the room. “You sure? This will only take a couple more hours, and then—”
The ringing in my ears gets louder. “I’m sure.”
“You want me to leave the stuff? Come back tomorrow?”
“Come back when I call you.”
He shrugs. “I’m going to leave the stuff.”
It’s what I would do.
“Great. See yourself out?”
“Will do, boss.”
I’m cutting through my bedroom before the front door closes behind him.
The bedroom we did in one day, ripping up the carpet, painting, and then laying down new carpet before the paint was even dry. Marcus didn’t want to in case the carpet disturbed the paint, but I insisted and it looks fucking great. The furniture is still the ratty old shit I had shipped here from California, but I never said I was an interior decorator. I’ll get new stuff when Addison—
When Addison what? She hasn’t been around all week, and I haven’t heard from her except for a few texts. She loves me, she loves me not kind of shit. No, that’s not fair. She always loves me, always has. I’m almost sure of it.
I just got in a little over my head with this house shit and she fell by the wayside.
My heart punches out against my rib cage, one single time, and my eyes start to flutter shut.
I need a shower. Before I can go to bed, I need a shower. At some point yesterday, or during the night, I ran a load of laundry—sheets and one pillowcase, the other pillow is MIA—through the laundry and tugged it back onto my bed in some semblance of goddamn order.
The water is too cold, and then when I adjust it, it’s too hot. At one point my head starts to fall forward and I catch myself just before I careen into the new tiling that surrounds the entire thing.
I was going to find Addison, maybe drive down to her office, and kiss her, but when I get out of the shower, it’s all I can do to towel off before I fall onto the clean sheets, tumbling directly into a deep, dark sleep, wishing I could still smell her on the pillow.
When I wake up, it’s pitch dark in the room and Addison isn’t there. Was she there when I went to sleep, or was I dreaming? I fumble to feel her body next to mine, but then I come fully awake. It was a dream, damn it, it was a dream.
I grab for my phone on the bedside table. Three in the morning.
Bleary-eyed, I throw my legs over the side of the bed and go back into the bathroom, brushing my teeth until my mouth tastes fresh and clean again. Then, of fucking course, I’m struck by a powerful thirst, my throat dry and parched, so I make my way to the kitchen, flipping on the light above the stove.
It’s no coincidence that I end up by the window, drinking a glass of water straight from the sink, staring across at Addison’s house.
All the lights are off. Of course they are. It’s a work night. She doesn’t stay up all night in the middle of the week because she’s obsessed with some project or other, like the idiot standing in my kitchen.
This is probably not very impressive.
A shiver runs down my spine. It’s the same sensation of vertigo I felt when I arrived on the U’s campus for the first time, searching for anything to cling to in the absence of Addison, running from my father’s scorn.
I’m beginning to doubt that he really meant it.
No, I don’t doubt that.
Do I?
I put the glass into the sink and pad back to my bedroom. I have to force myself not to walk straight out the front door and over to Addison’s. I want to wake her up and kiss her right now, but a knock on the door at this hour would scare the fuck out of her. I at least know that for sure.
I’m still unbalanced when I climb back into bed. In the morning it’s going to be bright out again and I’ll be able to make sense of all this. In the morning I’ll know what the hell I’m looking for in all of this. The house is almost done, and then what will I have aside from a fucking house that’s been renovated to within an inch of its life? Proof of construction skills?
Or nothing at all?
Maybe the house is a cover for—
The thought starts to crystallize, but before it does, sleep reaches out its claws and pulls me back under into a dream so vivid I would swear it was real.
It’s a memory of that summer, Addison standing on the end of the dock at the marina, her hair blowing in the breeze, laughing at me.
“Brett, you’ve got to make up your mind.”
“About what?” I shout over the breeze.
“About me.”
We had this conversation. This is a real conversation. I should walk toward her right now and tell her I love her, that it’s time to just admit it, say it out loud.
“You’re the best, Addi,” I say, and I go to the end of the dock and wrap my arm around her shoulders, kissing her temple. I don’t say more than that.
&nbs
p; I wake up still regretting it, the sun streaming through the window.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Addison
I wake up with a clarity I haven’t felt in two weeks.
Whenever I’m with Brett I know what I want. I know that I want him so much that I can hardly stand it, but after these last few nights…
It’s just not meant to be.
The thought breaks my heart and makes perfect sense at the same time.
I waited for hours last night for him to send a message, for him to notice that my car was in the driveway, for myself to make up my damn mind about going over there and knocking on the door.
But at some point, between episodes of Survivor, it dawned on me.
It’s just too unpredictable right now.
I just got out of a relationship that ended with me being completely blindsided. I don’t want that again. I love Brett. I want to be with Brett. Something isn’t working, though. He’s not ready to be with me.
This house thing has become an albatross around his neck, and nothing I do can make him see that this breakneck pace is driving him straight into the ground. It has completely taken him over, consumed him.
I turned the possible reasons over and over in my mind, but he shuts down completely when I try to get at them in person, and at this point, I just…
I sighed, putting down the cereal bowl full of chips I brought with me to the couch. I lost the taste for them after five or six and stopped eating.
I didn’t bother throwing them away before I went to bed.
When I wake up Monday morning, I’ve made up my mind. The decision is a glacier in the pit of my stomach, cold and heavy, but I’m seeing clearly.
I go for a run and my mile splits are faster than they have been in weeks, like I’m running toward something for once instead of escaping from whatever tension lives in my house.
This is going to hurt like a bitch, but I don’t see another choice.
It’s the only way to cool things down, to put us on even footing until Brett has some clarity. I just can’t live with this kind of uncertainty. Not right now. Maybe not ever.
My heart cools while I run until it’s practically stopped, and when I run back up my driveway, I’m determined. I’m going to tell him that it’s over.
Maybe we’ll have another chance one day. Maybe not. But right now, I have to do the right thing for me. That’s exactly what I was trying to do when I was getting over Jamie, and I saw Brett’s face and fell too hard to be sensible about it.
The moment comes sooner than I think it’s going to.
I’m fifteen minutes from heading out to work—I got up early this morning, ran early in the pre-dawn darkness, and showered in record time—when there’s a soft knock at my front door. The sound is tentative, nothing like when Brett usually knocks, but I know it’s him.
When I open the door, it reveals him standing on my front porch, hair sticking up at all angles, eyes huge and a little sunken in like he’s either been awake for several days or has been sleeping it off for a long, long time.
“Hey.” His voice sounds rough. “Do you have a minute?”
My mind races with the texts we’ve been sending each other over the last few days. I love you, we wrote. But is it love if you never make time to see the other person? Is it love if fixing up a house is more important than kissing them, touching them, holding them?
“Yes,” I say, stepping back to let him in. My heart beats, beats in my chest. I swallow, but I can’t bring myself to break the silence.
Brett does, with the ghost of a grin that makes me think of him at eighteen, before he disappeared. “I got a little carried away with the house.”
My mouth tries to follow suit, but the block of ice in my chest doesn’t let the smile get very far. “I noticed.”
“I’m sorry.”
I believe him, but it’s not enough. I have a moment of sheer imbalance—am I being too tough on him? Then I remember how it felt to pull up to my house and see Jamie packing the U-Haul, the look on his face that told me he didn’t really care at all that he was leaving me. That his only irritation was having to move all his things. This is the endgame with a situation like this, where one person is so consumed with something else that the relationship flounders.
It can happen even when you’re meant to be.
“I get it,” I say, but it sounds hollow.
Brett doesn’t take it that way. “You do?” He sounds incredulous and it breaks my heart.
“I understand…getting carried away with something.”
He steps toward me, but I take a tiny step back, and that’s when his face begins to change, the corners of his mouth turning down, his eyebrows drawing together, pain lighting his green eyes. “You understand, but you don’t forgive me.”
“It’s not a matter of forgiving you, Brett, it’s just—” I search every single corner of my mind for the words, and the truth hits me like a lightning bolt. “It just seems too awfully familiar to the last time you…you got consumed with something and left me behind.”
“This isn’t like that,” he says, running a hand through his hair.
“From where I stand,” I say, struggling with every word to keep my voice level, “it’s just the same, only worse, since it’s playing out right next door. I don’t—” My throat is starting to close, tears threatening, and I do not, I do not, want to cry. “I just can’t do it. I can’t do this. Ten years of—” I take a deep breath, look him in the eye.
“I can’t do this, Brett.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Brett
Addison’s words are like a bullet through my heart, a casing that blooms in my chest and reaches every single available piece of flesh, piercing it and ripping it apart. It’s like a plane going down over the desert, nowhere to land in sight, and knowing that in a few moments you’ll hit the ground and dissolve into a million pieces.
At least in that situation, the reward is a peaceful oblivion.
There’s no such hope for me right now.
“You can’t do this,” I repeat hollowly, searching her eyes for any hint that I can somehow talk her out of this, that I can somehow say the words that will make her reconsider.
But Addison is too old for that kind of thing, too smart, too independent. She’s not an eighteen-year-old anymore. She’s a grown woman who knows what she wants.
And she doesn’t want to be with me.
At least, she can’t.
In a bright, brilliant flash, I see what’s happened. I see the way she’s been waiting for me, just like she waited all those years for me to contact her. My instinct is to push the blame onto her. She could have come over. She could have fought for me. She could have irritated me, shoved her way into my solitude, ripped me away from the focus of my obsession.
But why should she have to?
She should be the focus of not just my obsession, but be my true fucking devotion.
I only saw it too late.
I wanted to impress…who? Addison? My father? Some illusion of my eighteen-year-old mind? It doesn’t matter. I was so worried about proving them wrong that I let the only person that really mattered to me, ever, slip through my fingers.
The Air Force made me bold and decisive, and I have to throttle the knee-jerk reaction to bluster, to yell, to impose my will. Adrenaline thunders through my veins. Everything in my vision goes sharp until it isn’t sharp anymore, it’s blurring at the edges, a pounding taking over in my head, and this is why I’m not in the Air Force now, this is why I’m not a pilot anymore, this is why I’m such a failure, at life, at Lockton, at Addison.
I can’t pass up the opportunity to drive the knife in farther, to twist it with a vicious hand. “Are you sure?”
She nods once, then lifts her chin in the air. There’s no quiver there, though she does blink three or four times. Her eyes don’t shine with tears. There’s no crack in her armor.
I open my mouth, waiting for the words to come, but
then I close it again. There’s nothing. There’s nothing I can say, even though with all my fucking heart and soul I wish I had something, anything, anything to make this stop, to make her take this back.
There is simply no argument to counter hers. She can’t do this and she’s right. I am not good enough for her, no matter what I do, no matter what I become. I will always be dragging her down, which is all I have done since I came back here.
I reach out for her one last time and pull her close to me, pressing my lips against her forehead, and then I turn and go, the doorknob cold in my hand, the air bracing.
The sun is just beginning to rise above the trees, the sky lighting in the lazy way of true fall.
My mind reels.
What day is it?
I barely notice the trip across both of our driveways, up onto my porch, and into my house. I lock the door, but then forget that I have and trail back to the entryway several times to check, to make sure that nobody will be able to walk in on me in my fucking grief. It’s a thousand times more powerful than whatever it was that motivated me to fix this house.
It’s very nearly fucking perfect now. The siding needs to be finished. Marcus and his guys can finish off the final few details inside. They’ve already started clearing away all the tarps and plastic sheeting on the floors, already been finishing the flooring projects that I mentioned halfheartedly. A day, maybe two, and then I’ll be able to be alone.
I need to be alone.
I sit down on the couch in the pristine living room, the paint fucking exquisite on the walls, the trim expertly installed, sanded, painted, the whole thing smelling like a new beginning, and I stare at the blank TV screen.