by Jason Letts
“Right. I know it’ll work out. Keep at it!”
I shut his office door behind me and took the ride home to my apartment, which felt like a death march. Even picking up Chinese food from the shop at the corner didn’t do anything to reduce the chilling revulsion I got at putting the key in my lock, knowing what I was going to find on the other side.
I didn’t have enough pictures on the walls to insulate myself from how decrepit they looked. The floor tiles were cracking. The tiny space itself made me claustrophobic and the air had a faint smell to it that I joked in my head was asbestos. Sometimes it didn’t seem like a joke. No amount of Febreeze or smelling candles could erase it completely.
As I crawled into bed to sleep, I thought about how it didn’t make me feel any better about being here even though I’d be unconscious for the next eight hours. There was no escape from how dirty the place made me feel.
Maybe there was more to Dr. Alex’s suggestion than I thought. Was I waiting around for Keenan to invite me to move in with him because I was more of a reactive person than I imagined myself to be? The only thing I knew was that I had to get out of this apartment as soon as possible, even if it meant Keenan and I would be breathing the exact same air twenty-four hours a day.
The next day ended in the same disappointing way, with Keenan telling me that he was going to have to be on the phone with them all night. He was groggy and I was irritated. When I left I promised myself that the next time I spoke to him I’d take a step toward seeing if he was interested in having me move into his place no matter what.
That night was the worst I’d ever had in my apartment. It sounded like the person in the floor above was taking a hammer to the floor once every two minutes. Every time I was about to fall asleep I’d hear another loud crack. Or when I must’ve fallen asleep the noise woke me up some time later. I don’t have the slightest idea what someone would be doing to make that noise. I was so tired when I got up that I couldn’t be bothered to put on a dress and threw on jeans like everybody else for the first time ever.
When I got into work the next morning and saw Keenan wasn’t there, I checked my email and saw a hastily-written message from him that appeared to be sent at 4 am. It said he was just getting to bed and would be in whenever he got in. These prolonged discussions with the prospective foreign partners that took place in the middle of the night would be even more inconvenient for Keenan if there was someone trying to sleep in his bed, but by the time I moved in there was no way they’d still be going on. At least that’s what I hoped.
Keenan came in shortly before lunchtime, and for the first time ever he had jeans on as well. They looked too good on him, but he still had a bit of a shambling gait one might expect from the walking dead.
“I’ll pick you up something to eat,” I said. He grunted his agreement.
I returned with roast beef subs and his favorite coconut water a short time later and took a seat in his office with the door closed behind us. He set his sub right on the keyboard and proceeded to unwrap it without any sort of thanks at all, which left me slightly irritated. Somehow this entire week had slipped by and only a few more hours of work stood between me and the flight I’d be taking to Austin the next morning.
What I wanted more than anything was a positive note to leave on, a better place to come home to.
“Is it good?” I asked him. He swallowed a big bite and nodded at me. I knew that I had to strike the exact right note to make this work. “I am sorry about all of these late nights. It must be a big pain to suddenly be working the night shift. It can’t go on much longer, can it?”
Keenan rubbed the side of his face and blinked hard.
“I hope not,” he said. “I feel like I’ve had to explain the entire Internet to them. They want to know everything, see everything, talk about everything in exhaustive detail. I know that if I mess up once and act tired or annoyed once they’ll vanish and I’ll never hear from them again. I keep thinking this has to be the last thing, but it never is. I know tonight they want to cover some client case studies and payment processing. They won’t be happy if each of those topics doesn’t take an hour.”
I’d hoped for a better way to lead in but knew it wasn’t going to come. I had to make the leap myself.
“You know, I’ve been thinking how much easier things might be for you if I was around a little more often. I understand that stressful crunch-times can require some additional support. The least I can do is make sure the first time you eat isn’t after noon,” I said.
Keenan looked at the sub in his hands, then at me, and then at the sub again. He set it down.
“More often? You already spend about half the nights over,” he said.
I nodded, though inwardly I wondered how deep the resistance he just expressed went. The train had left the station and there was no stopping it until it got to its destination.
“Well, yeah, other than this last week,” I said, trying to smile a little while remembering to be more assertive. “If I’m already there half the time, it won’t be too hard to be there the rest of the time, right? I mean, we still have some different things to do in the evenings sometimes, but think of all the extra fun we could be having.”
My attempt at positivity and flirting didn’t seem to find any kinship in his eyes.
“Fifty percent is still a lot though,” he said.
I restrained myself from sighing. Was I going to have to explain the entire Internet to him for him to know what I wanted?
“What I’m saying is that we’ve been doing really well together,” I said, putting a more positive spin on it than was justified, “and it might make sense to take the next step. Don’t you think moving in together would be good given where we are and how it’s going?”
Voila, a naked attempt to push for exactly what I wanted. There was no way Dr. Alex could say I wasn’t asserting my interests now. But there was little room for me to bask in it, since Keenan, whose tired eyes were already squinting a little, seemed to find never-before-used ways to further express a lack of enthusiasm with his face.
“Is this something we can talk about later?” I’d heard those words and that tone with other men in response to different questions. Later always meant never or I didn’t have eight fingers and two thumbs. It grated on me that I was getting brushed off, especially after going through all the trouble for lunch.
“I know we’ve got a lot to do here at work to get where we want, but aren’t we going anywhere in our relationship? I think in the ways that we need each other this could really help,” I said.
I was taken aback to see a harsh look form on Keenan’s face, like I’d crossed some terrible line.
“You’re saying we have to move in together for our relationship to be going anywhere?” I bristled at his accusatory tone and threw it right back at him.
“That isn’t even close to what I said, and, no, that isn’t the only way to move a relationship forward, but I think it could be the right step for us at this time. Considering the professional challenges we face, being more united could only help us tackle them. Obviously it’s your apartment we’re talking about.”
I could see one of Keenan’s hands clutching the cup of coconut water and squeezing it. He began looking around the room as if he’d never set foot in it before.
“I really don’t see things the same way,” he said.
“Don’t you want to be together?” I couldn’t believe what I was saying or where this was going. He had to get this was important to me, and even if he didn’t want to there were ways to defuse the situation without things getting out of hand.
“If what you expect is that I’m going to say you can move in, I’m telling you that is not something that’s going to happen.”
That wasn’t one of them.
He could’ve finished his statement by adding the word “now,” implying that later on he might be more open to moving in together, but he didn’t. It came off like he was fine that I was the girl who came o
ver to sleep with him every once in a while and that was all it was ever going to be. Dr. Alex got back in my head, and I could see her raise her eyebrows as Keenan dictated the terms for our relationship. But I knew I wasn’t the type to just play along and let myself get rolled over. It was already on the tip of Keenan’s tongue, but I had to jump first or I’d never be able to look at myself in the mirror.
“That’s not going to work for me. I’m sorry this was such an unwelcome proposition. You won’t have to worry about any more.”
I got up, wrapped sub in hand, and walked briskly for the door. He had a stunned expression on his face that gave me a little satisfaction, but he didn’t call after me and I had nothing left to do but close the door on him.
When I returned to my desk and sat down I had my own moment of unfamiliarity with the surroundings. The white-painted walls in the retrofitted factory building, the twenty or so people including my first hire Lena who were working quietly at their workstations, even my own little glass room signifying my place as the company’s number two, what did they all mean after what just happened? What did my conversation with Keenan mean for anything?
It took me a while to realize that I’d frozen myself in place with my fingertips against my desk’s sleek black surface. Did I just break up with Keenan because he wouldn’t let me move in? Based on what I said, did I even really break up with him? Could I crawl back and say I’d meant those words literally and I just wouldn’t be asking him for anything else?
No, it wasn’t even that he’d rejected my interest in moving in with him. It was the callous way he did it. Having a discussion about the kind of relationship we had and where we were going didn’t interest him. With his tone and face he told me I could take it or leave it, and I had no doubt I left it. This wasn’t an outcome I’d imagined going in, but I would rather leave under my own power rather than stay and feel subservient. Of course, this did mean I was stuck in my same apartment.
But after tonight I’d still manage to escape it for an entire week, and my preparations for the trip consumed the rest of the afternoon. Thoughts about all of the great times Keenan and I had together ate away at my attention. Surely he wouldn’t let me just dump him after we did this, that, and the other thing. They had meant something to him, I knew without a doubt.
It was nearly five o’clock when I felt like I had to do something to see if he could really accept we were done. I’d been filling out expense reports based on the receipts I already had, and I got up to hand them in to him. It seemed like a stretch that he would see I’d volunteered to save the company money by flying economy and say he couldn’t live without me, but I had to try.
This time his office door was just slightly ajar. I held up my fist to give it a knock and nudge it open, but I held back when I heard his voice.
“Look, Cassie, I don’t know. We’ll figure it out. I’ll talk to you later.”
I turned around on the spot, dumped the papers in his mail box, and returned to my desk. It seemed like a strange coincidence that he had gotten on a call with his ex-girlfriend just hours after I’d told him I was done. Burning up, I realized it was now already after five and he was perfectly content for me to leave for the trip without any sort of a goodbye at all.
The only thing he’d given me to take were the instructions about meeting with Gary Polling of Interlink House, because evidently that was the only thing that mattered to him. I began to get suspicious that the real purpose of this trip for him was to get me out so he could have some space. From the call with Cassie it seemed like he was going to take full advantage of it.
And if that was the case, I wasn’t going to spend a single minute pining after him.
CHAPTER 2
As I got in line for my United flight to Austin, I happened to be standing behind an older couple who were looking at pictures of their grandkids on an iPad until they hastily pulled out their boarding passes to be scanned. I did the same, feeling a pang of regret over my sudden separation. It wasn’t turning out to be as easy to swallow as I’d hoped, and watching old couples revel in their happy lives together didn’t help.
I smiled at the flight attendant, who returned it halfheartedly before I passed on my way to my seat. It made me wonder if I would actually open my mouth to speak at all other than during my panel discussion during the festival’s conference. South by Southwest was one of the biggest, most well-known conferences in the country, where someone could go from seeing the latest in technology to seeing the latest hot movie star with a simple turn of the head.
Every so often I’d check my phone to see if there was anything from Keenan he wanted me to know before getting there. Even though the flight was cheap, I didn’t have much of a choice but to book a room at the Four Seasons for over six-hundred dollars a night. There wasn’t a vacancy left in town at cheaper chain hotels or even Airbnb for anywhere that wasn’t completely skeevy.
It was hard to keep my thoughts away from Keenan, but I hoped I’d find enough to distract me with the various exhibits and performances going on all over the place. If the best musical and performing artists in the world couldn’t give me something else to focus on, nobody could.
Sometimes I’d settle for pondering my mission to strike a deal with Interlink House as a convoluted way to thinking about Keenan. I already had a tip that he’d be attending another gathering related to marketing, and that was going to be my best shot to reach him. My best approach was to wow him with the number one billion, which was the number of impressions we could promise to buy for our clients each month.
Somehow I’d managed to exhaust myself of all the things I had to think about and something in the air made me nauseated reading on my phone. I was left with little else to do for the rest of the flight than look around at the plane, which appeared to be falling apart at the seams. This was because the video screen in front of me was nonfunctional, though I could tell from those sitting next to me that the only thing playing for free were advertisements of the things you could pay to watch.
I had a window seat over the wing and got the sense that I could hear something rattling around inside the engine, which was unsettling to say the least. There was a crack across the overhead panel of the row ahead of me, which caused the light to continuously flicker. The surface of my seat was peeling. Someone had evidently jammed a pen into the headphone jack and broken it off, because there was dried ink splatter and a sharp bit of plastic sticking out that required some balancing so it didn’t jab me in the thigh.
The four-hour flight cost less than half as much as one night in the hotel, and the cheapness of it irked me more every second. The last time I’d flown was on a spring break trip with my club soccer team in college, and maybe because I was younger nothing about it had bothered me. The pilot announced our descent as soon as I began to seriously chafe at the overweight man sitting next to me, whose snoring sounded like he was choking on a hunk of pork as he unconsciously listed ever closer.
By the time we landed, I was ready to trample over the elderly couple to get to the exit. I restrained myself, barely, but when I finally did reach the terminal I felt like I was taking my first breath for hours. Austin-Bergstrom International Airport was huge and packed with late-morning travelers, but each step I took to get away from that plane seemed to ease the sense of defilement I felt.
While I’d done my planning for the trip, I’d vaguely thought about walking the ten miles from the airport to the hotel since I had most of the day before an introductory meeting for the conference and a good grip on my small wheeled luggage, but right now I couldn’t reach my destination fast enough and was so over being thrifty. Even an Uber would’ve required too much waiting. I jumped in the first cab available so fast I barely registered that the weather was over eighty degrees.
We sped off out of the covered pick-up area into the blazingly bright sunlight, which I hadn’t seen anything like in nearly six months of a never-ending New York winter. The attractive city waited ahead, glinting in t
he sun and teeming with excitement. It put me in a far better frame of mind when I caught a glimpse of the Colorado River, which was also referred to as Lady Bird Lake. Thinking about how something could be a river and a lake at the same time threatened to make my head explode if I pondered it for more than two seconds, but I was more than happy to mentally check out and enjoy the sweeping vista.
Fortunately traffic moved at a relatively brisk pace and soon enough the cab pulled up to the entrance of the Four Seasons, a bastion of polished stone columns and well manicured shrubberies that were thriving in the arid climate. Austin got three-hundred days of this sun a year and it struck me like I might’ve just walked into heaven.
“Welcome to the Four Seasons,” a uniformed doorman with tan skin and a graying mustache said, appearing suddenly at my right when it was time to retrieve my luggage from the trunk of the cab. I smiled as he led me inside, where I was blasted by air-conditioned air and glimpses of the reception area and the hotel’s bar, called Trio. There were dozens of people around, some hanging out on plush couches, others standing around randomly and looking down at their phones. I wondered how many of these people were here for South by Southwest. Probably all of them.
When we reached the front desk, the courier disappeared and I had to wait a moment for the person ahead of me to finish. That gave me time to further admire the charming lobby with tables covered in fresh-cut blue and white flowers under a chandelier. Similarly colored glass sculptures sat on sills beside a regal fireplace. I’d never stayed in a place nearly this fancy.
“Hi, can I help you?” The young female clerk behind the counter pulled me back to reality. I hastily stepped forward and tried to shake off any feelings of embarrassment.
“Yeah, I’m here to check in. Sarah Faverly.”
“Wonderful. Give me just a moment,” she said, turning to her computer.