Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  And I miss Kit like nothing I’ve ever felt before in my life. For the first few days, I’d called her, once a day, leaving her a short message each time, asking after her father, asking if she was taking care of herself. But she never called back, and I knew with a certainty that she wouldn’t. I got a text from Zoe yesterday, shorn of detail: Her dad is going to be okay. She’s home.

  I have a hundred questions, but I don’t ask any of them. Her text, I know, is a generosity I don’t deserve.

  What else I don’t deserve? That I see Kit every night in my dreams. Whether this is a consolation or not, I haven’t decided. The sight of her in the hospital—the flat, emotionless way she’d told me to leave, the way she’d walked toward her brother, not once looking back at me—at least that’s not what I see in my sleep. At night I see her next to me in bed, her black hair webbed across the white sheets she had in her bedroom, laughing up at the ceiling at something I’ve said. Or I see her spin joyfully atop the stool she sits on to look on her microscope, rhapsodizing about the fracture pattern she’s found in her sample. I see her underneath me, her head tipped back, the long, pale stretch of her throat begging for me to kiss, to lick, to suck.

  I wake up every day, my dick hard and aching for her. And I don’t have to do anything to relieve the pressure, to take the edge off. All I have to do is lie there, let the reality wash over me again that Kit and I are over, and soon enough it’s my heart that’s aching, not my dick.

  So probably it is not so much a consolation.

  I go to work. I go through the motions. I don’t ask if Jasper has heard from Singh, or from Kit. I schedule six scouting trips for next month, because I think it will distract me, but deep down I know it won’t. Last week I signed a recruit for Greg, for the polymers division in Seattle, but I’d judged the guy for folding so quickly. I thought, Kit would never. Kit would ask a hundred more questions. Kit would have laughed in my face. At night I run the streets of Houston, because I can’t face the state-of-the-art gym in my apartment building, all its sleek, industrial newness. I run until I’m exhausted, until my throat burns and my legs shake, until I know my body will have no choice but to sleep. I’m exhausted, edgy, not fit for human company.

  Friday, I shout at an intern who spills a coffee on the quarterly report we’re going over in a meeting, and I don’t even have a chance to apologize to him before Jasper barks an abrupt, “Outside,” at me across the conference table.

  I follow him out of the room to his office, which is right next to mine. “You have a lot of fucking nerve,” I say to him. “I’ll apologize to whatshisname in there, but you don’t police me around here, Jasper.”

  “You’re out of line. I know you’re pissed at me, but we have a job to do here.”

  “Yeah, the job. That’s your big concern.”

  “You know what, Tucker? Fuck you. I’m sorry for what happened with you and this woman, and for the part I played in it. But I—we—have years invested in this company, not to mention on what we’d planned to do in the future. I didn’t do anything different than what you’ve done dozens of times. I used your playbook. You told me you couldn’t do the job with her, and I let that go—but we never agreed she was off the table.”

  “I told you I was involved with her.” It’s weak. It’s so, so weak, and I know Jasper won’t let me get away with it.

  “And what difference does that make? I’m sorry, but you get in and out of your involvements with women pretty regularly. Good on you for pulling back from the deal once you realized you wanted to fuck her, but…”

  “Jasper,” I say, cutting him off, so angry I can barely see straight. “You don’t talk about her that way. I’m dead goddamn serious. She’s not mine, and I’m probably never going to see her again, but I’m in love with this woman. Don’t talk about her that way. Or at all.”

  He crosses his arms over his chest, looks at me for a long moment. “I’m sorry. But you should have told me it was—you should have told me that you were serious with her.”

  “And you would have left it alone?”

  He lets out a breath. “I don’t know, man. I really wanted out.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. I should have told him—if I’d been thinking about the job, if I hadn’t immersed myself so completely in my life back home, I probably could have seen that Jasper would try what he did. Getting out of the non-compete—before I left Houston, that would’ve been the most important thing to me too, but I’d barely thought about it once I’d started seeing Kit. Honestly, I’d barely thought about it even before I’d started seeing her—once I was home with Dad, everything about the job felt different. Everything about me felt different.

  “Ben,” Jasper says. “I fucked up. But I did think—I thought I was doing what was best for us. What we both wanted.”

  I don’t know if I can forgive this, even if I do own my share—my negligence, my reticence to tell Jasper everything. Over a decade of friendship, but I wonder if for me, Jasper will always be the reason I lost Kit.

  “Singh didn’t take the offer,” he says, and my eyes snap to his before I cast them back toward my shoes, feigning disinterest. But I am desperate to know something, anything, that is even related to Kit. And hearing this makes me realize that as unlikely I’d known it was, I’d been nursing some small hope that maybe, possibly, Kit would come to Houston. That she’d be here, and I could try and win her back. Here, she’d need me; she’d be on her own. It’s a terrible thing to think, and I know it—but I miss her so completely that in my darkest moments, I turn to this kind of selfishness.

  “Did he say why?” I ask, embarrassed. I know I sound desperate.

  “No.” I hear a little remorse in his voice. He feels fucking sorry for me. This is awful.

  “You need to know something,” he says, as I’m headed out the door. I stop and turn back, see him take a deep breath. “Us going out on our own—I still want that. It’s going to take longer now, but we can do it. But I only want that if you do. And if you don’t…” he trails off, looks out the window. “If you don’t, that’s all right too. So—let me know where things stand, when you figure it out.” This is Jasper telling me, in his carefully neutral way, that for him, we’re still friends. That nothing that’s happened over the last month has to get in the way of that.

  I give a brief nod, and leave his office. Then I walk straight to mine, grab my things, and leave for the day. It’s early, only four thirty, but I’m guessing after my stellar performance at the meeting, no one’s going to miss me anyways.

  I go directly to the bar on the corner, fully intending to drink myself into a stupor. For the last two weeks, I’ve stayed stone-cold sober, thinking I ought to be sharp if she called, if I had to leave suddenly.

  But she’s not going to call.

  I’m nursing my second drink when I feel a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, stranger,” says a voice from beside me, and there’s Gina, leaning in for a quick kiss of my cheek. As she settles in on the barstool behind me, I can think of nothing else but the complete unfamiliarity I feel, the strangeness of Gina’s reddish brown hair, of my body in this suit, of the bluish light of this bar. “You’ve been gone forever,” she says, signaling the bartender.

  I’d forgotten, I guess, that Gina comes here every other Friday, on the weeks when her kids are with her ex. It’s where we always used to meet for drinks and conversation about work—Gina does PR for one of the refineries—and then almost always a trip back to my place, where Gina never stayed, on the off chance her kids needed her at home. It had been, for the three or so months before I’d gone back to Barden, a fairly regular hookup, and though we’d never been anything but friends with benefits, I’d still called her to tell her I’d be away for a while, to wish her the best—to end it with her, which she’d been entirely indifferent about.

  She orders a martini, three olives, takes off her jacket and drapes it ove
r the back of her seat.

  I could do this, tonight. I could drink enough to take the edge off. I could take Gina to my apartment and fuck her on every available surface in there. I could do the reckless, stupid thing and break another tie to Kit, the tie that makes her the last woman who I’ve touched, kissed, slept next to. But my leaning back from Gina—it’s automatic. I don’t even notice I’m doing it until I see a little the little wrinkle at the bridge of her nose. “Sorry,” I say, taking a sip of my drink. My standard in this bar: gin, no ice, a twist of lemon peel. It tastes horrible now. I miss the shitty beer my dad keeps at home. “Haven’t been out in a while.”

  “How’s your dad?” she asks, when the bartender brings her drink.

  “He’s all right. Thanks for asking.” I realize I have no interest in telling her anything at all about my dad, about my time at home, about anything. I’m so checked out, and it’s completely unfair to Gina, who’s doing nothing but being the polite friend she’s always been. “How’ve you been? Kids okay?” I ask this even though I’ve never met her kids, and we hardly ever talked about them. Gina wasn’t interested in anything that involved from me, and the feeling was mutual.

  “Kids are good,” she says, keeping her eyes on me as she takes an olive from her martini and pops it into her mouth.

  I feel nothing. I feel like I won’t feel anything ever again.

  “Gina,” I say, and in her name I’m trying to tell her everything I don’t want from her.

  She smiles over her drink at me before setting it down. “Ben. It’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve had a rough—I’m not at my best.”

  “What happened?”

  I shrug. “Got knocked on my ass by love. Fucked it up, of course. Now I’m back here, pretty much hating everything.”

  “Been there,” she says.

  Gina’s a good friend, a good person—she had a shitty divorce and an even shittier custody battle, and I’ll bet if I sat on this stool and got sloppy drunk and told her all about Kit, she’d listen. I’ll bet she’d give me cocktail napkins when I’d cry, and I’m not even ashamed to say, I could probably get a cry going without being sloppy drunk.

  But I don’t want to tell anyone about Kit. It’s over and it’s awful, but somehow saying nothing about it is an effort at protecting the part of Kit that I’d failed to protect before. Somehow I tell myself that I can hang on to her longer if I keep her to myself.

  I set a fifty on the table, for me and Gina, for the bartender I’d rudely barked my drink order at an hour ago and get off my stool. I lean down and brush a kiss on Gina’s cheek, a polite, friendly gesture that still makes my skin feel tight with wrongness. “You’re still gorgeous, G,” I tell her, pulling back and putting my suit jacket on.

  “Ben,” she says, as I’m walking away, “take care, okay?”

  I nod and head out, seeing nothing and no one around me as I make the long walk to my apartment, and there’s nothing and no one there, either.

  * * * *

  I wake up the next morning, late, to the sound of my phone’s video call ring. I’m in no mood to answer—I drank too much last night, having stopped off at a corner market on my walk home to buy six cans of lousy beer, and my mouth might as well be full of sand. Sensible Ben would have had two glasses of water and a couple of painkillers before bed, but if I remember right, there’d been a moment where I’d thought of it, and then decided I’d deserved the hangover.

  Even though I’ve pretty much lost hope on the Kit-calling-me-back front, I’m too conditioned to check the screen, just in case.

  It’s River’s number, and I scoot up in bed, glad that I’ve got a t-shirt and shorts on.

  “Hey,” I say, wincing as I see myself in that little corner box. I look like shit.

  “You look like shit,” says my dad, who’s standing behind River, the windows of the salvage yard’s office visible behind them. The kid has entirely lost the lavender hair color, but he’s replaced it with a few bright red tips at the front. It looks ridiculous, but whatever. We’re all entitled to being fourteen, I guess, and anyways, I’m too grateful for the call. It’s the first time I’ve talked to River since I’ve been gone. He doesn’t hear all that well on the phone, and so I’ve had to settle for texts or updates from Dad.

  “Hey, man,” I say to him, conscious of the way my mouth moves, making sure he’ll be able to follow me. “How’s classes?”

  “Summer session ended yesterday. I got a B-plus in physics,” he says, plain as anything, but there’s a little quirk to the corner of his mouth that tells me he’s proud.

  “That’s great. Now you’re a free man.” I pick up the phone and take it with me to the kitchen, awkwardly holding it out in front, but I’ve got to get some water in me. Even this little bit of conversation feels impossible around the dryness of my mouth and throat.

  “Still got another month here,” he says.

  “Oh, it’s some big chore, huh?” Dad shouts, too loud. He’s terrible at FaceTime—this is why we never do it on our own. “You know it’s Saturday, right, kid? That’s supposed to be your day off.”

  Even with the crappy picture, I don’t miss the flags of color on River’s cheeks. “Your dad sucks at social media,” he says, by way of explanation.

  I swallow down another few gulps of water, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “That seems like a given, Riv. What are you up to?”

  River shrugs, does the hair toss for hair that’s not there anymore. “I set the yard up with a Twitter account.”

  “What a bunch of nonsense!” Dad shouts again, and River reaches up to adjust his hearing aids.

  “It’s a good idea,” River says, looking at me now, and the way he goes to me for approval—it gets to me, makes me feel ten feet tall and terrible, all at the same time. “Most local businesses are on there, and they’re already following us back. Plus, those auction sites you guys use, they’re on here, and it’s a better way of watching what’s coming up for bidding.”

  Fuck if I don’t feel a little streak of pride, hearing River talk about yard business. And a little bit of envy too. “It’s a great idea,” I say. “Dad, do what River says.” River doesn’t quite beam, but he definitely looks happy, proud.

  We talk for a bit about yard business, mostly me trying to ignore the pounding in my head while River and my dad talk about customers, new stuff they’ve had coming in. They ask me about work, and I offer the most mundane, disinterested answers. I’d rather hear about them. From all these miles away, it feels comforting to have this piece of the yard, and of Dad and River, with me. “We gotta go, Smalls,” Dad says, too loud still, then turns to look at me. “Closing the yard for a couple of hours to go to River’s house for lunch.” He puts a finger up to the side of his head, twirls it to indicate what he thinks of River’s mom.

  “Dude,” River says, pointing toward the screen. “I can see you right there.” But he’s laughing a little, a pattering huff to his breath. Suddenly I want to be at that crazy lunch more than anything. The day ahead of me feels formless, empty—just computer work and whatever I keep on the TV as background noise.

  River gets up and goes out of frame, so my dad looks down through the screen at me. He’s got this furrow in his brow, a look I remember well. I’d given my dad so many years of brow-furrowing shit before I’d left home. “Miss you, kid,” he says, and it takes me so much by surprise I almost drop the phone. My dad has never told me that before, not even when I first left home.

  I clear my throat, once, twice, a third time, even though it’s still dry as the Sahara in there. “I miss you too.” For a second, we’re just looking at each other in our little boxes, me and Dad. He looks the way I hope to look when I’m his age—sure, he was hurt, but he’s still strong, still healthy. He was my hero my whole life, and he still is.

  “I’ll call you later,” he says, still furrowed
up in the brow, and I know he knows I was out drinking last night. I know he’ll call to make sure I’m not doing the same tonight, that I’m not out doing something stupid.

  “Yeah, all right.”

  “Hey, Ben, wait,” River says, coming back into frame right as I’m reaching to press the button to disconnect. There it is, that ten-foot-tall feeling again, because River’s actually never called me by my name before.

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell Kit about my B-plus, okay?”

  Terrible feeling, back again. “Sure, man.”

  Once the screen has gone black, I lean forward, my forearms pressing on the cold granite countertops. From here I can see the whole living space of my apartment, pristine and un-lived in, except for where I tossed my suit jacket on the arm of the couch last night. I can hear, barely over the quiet hum of my refrigerator, the city sounds outside. I wonder whether Kit misses me, or whether that look in her eyes at the hospital telegraphed exactly how easy it was for her to cut me out of her life.

  I don’t want to be here anymore, I think, with a clarity that is completely uncharacteristic of the hangover I’m sporting. I want to fly home today, hear my dad tell me in person about the lunch with River’s family, maybe watch a ballgame with him and Sharon. I want to open the salvage yard tomorrow and start working on that fucking chandelier again. Mostly I want to sit on Kit’s porch until she talks to me. Until she lets me back in that house again—her home, her place. But I know I can’t. I know I have to slow down, think of my responsibilities. Yesterday, Jasper was right. I’ve worked a long time toward the goals he and I had set together, and no matter what, I’d been unfair to the job, and to him. I’d done what felt good in the moment, hadn’t talked about the hard things, and because of that I’d hurt someone I’d loved. I’d possibly fucked up a friendship.