Admit You Want Me

by Holloway, Taylor

  When I fell silent, I felt like I’d just run a marathon. All of my energy had been expended to tell that one, short story. I didn’t even have the energy to continue eating my ‘special comfort pizza’. I pushed my plate away from me on the little coffee table Lily and I were eating at.

  Kate and Lily digested my words for a moment.

  It was Lily who eventually breached the silence. “Emma, I’m proud of you.”

  I pushed back into the couch and then drew my knees up to my chest. “For breaking up with Ward?”

  “For making a hard decision.” Lily set her head on my shoulder in a little half-hug. “I’m not going to say that I’m chuffed that you and Ward are done, even though I am, because I can tell it’s hurting you right now. But you did it for the right reasons. Unlike Adam, and unlike Ward, you’re a rational adult. You make the best choices you can with the information you have.”

  Kate nodded on the monitor, clearly agreeing. “Lily’s right,” she said eventually. “You made the choice you needed to make for yourself.”

  “Then why do I feel so shitty?” My head was buried in my knees, so my voice was somewhat muffled.

  Now it was Kate’s turn to answer. “Because you cared about my stupid brother. He’s lovable in his way, even I know that. But you knew from the start that you didn’t like casual relationships and you entered into one with Ward anyway. It wasn’t a great decision, but I get it. But when it got to be too much for you, when you knew you were getting in too deep, you were smart enough to end it.”

  I swallowed hard, blinking away tears. Having my decision validated by my friends felt good, but it was cold comfort.

  “I think I want to go lay down now,” I whispered, unfolding myself and grabbing my plate to wash it off. Lily touched my wrist.

  “Leave it,” she said. “I’ll clean up. Go do what you need to do. Take care of yourself. It’s all going to be better soon. I promise.”

  I sunk back down to the couch and hugged her. Lily and Kate were good friends. “Thanks for taking care of me,” I told Lily. Kate looked somewhat guilty, but Lily just smirked at me before answering.

  “You’ve done the same for me more than once. What are friends for?”

  I was lucky to have them. They were on my side and reminded me why I was right to end things with Ward. If it wasn’t for Kate and Lily, I probably would have put on just a trench coat and gone down to the bar to seduce Ward back or something similarly ridiculous. As it was, I curled back up under my sheets and tried to believe their promise.

  It’s all going to be better soon.

  38

  Ward

  Kate found a new waitress the very next day. Her name was Cameron and she seemed pleasant, professional, and motivated. According to Kate, Cameron was going to be moving to Dallas in a few weeks and we needed to find a more permanent fix, but it hardly mattered. It could be Cameron or anyone else serving the tables in the main room. Emma was gone but business went on.

  Cameron came by the bar to grab her latest batch of beers, and I had to pull them really quickly because I’d been zoned out and talking sports with a regular. She flashed me a friendly, disinterred smile as she scooped them up and headed back off. Kate had told me that Cameron was married to a woman. Apparently, my sister wasn’t taking any chances from here on out.

  “Where’s Emma at? Is she sick or something?” Lucas asked me a moment later. He’d come up to the bar to get orange slices because obviously Cameron didn’t yet know his unique need for citrus in his beer. I had a bad feeling that what he ate in the bar was his only source of fresh fruit, so I humored him. I tossed him an entire orange, hoping it would shut him up and make him go away. Instead, he brightened and sat down on a barstool to peel it.

  “She quit.” I pretended to be intensely focused on wiping the condensation off the taps.

  Lucas sat up straight. His voice was several decibels softer when he spoke. “Are you OK man? Did you two break up or something?”

  Lucas and I had been friends since college. Actually, he did most of my coursework for me when we lived together. I didn’t even ask him to, he wanted to do it. He was one of those super-genius type guys that interpreted it as an opportunity to learn. The guy was a triple major, extra honors in everything, classic overachiever. Lucas would gather up the papers I brought back on the rare occasions I went to class, and just do all my homework. Which was, coincidentally, why I graduated with a decent GPA when most athletes make the obligatory minimum to graduate (professors are not allowed to fail us, but they won’t give us A’s, either).

  Lucas had known me for a long time. Long enough to see through my bullshit. He could tell I was not ok.

  I sighed. “We weren’t dating. You know I don’t date.” That didn’t answer his question though. “I don’t think I’ll see her again.” Technically that didn’t answer it either, but I couldn’t do any better.

  Although his face was calm, I could almost see the wheels turning in Lucas’s gigantic fucking brain. Lucas was smart enough to develop an app that had set him up for a good five years and allowed him to focus all his energy on his next big project—one so big that he wouldn’t even tell me about. He knew I wasn’t huge on talking about feelings, very few men, including him, are. But I knew he wanted to help. He was trying very hard to find the right thing to say that didn’t violate the standards of manliness and distance we’d always maintained. It was a delicate conversation.

  “That’s too bad. I liked her.” Lucas went back to casually peeling his orange. I felt like he was peeling me instead. I’d been feeling raw and exposed all day. It had made me distracted and overly sensitive.

  In an ordinary hookup situation, I would offer to give him her number. I’d done as much before, and he’d done the same for me. But this wasn’t that, and we both knew it. He’d opened a door and now I had to walk through it. We were going to talk feelings, at least as much as we could. Neither one of us were exactly experts in this.

  “I liked her too.”

  A few feet away, Willie was eavesdropping as always. He’d been observing me curiously all evening but had clearly decided not to intervene or ask. Now Lucas was doing the hard work for him.

  “Why’d she split?” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He didn’t actually need them for orange peeling. They were strictly to reduce strain on his eyes from staring at a screen all day. But he liked them. He thought they made him look smart.

  “I think she wanted something I couldn’t give her.”

  “Ah. She moved on,” Lucas said knowingly, although he looked like he didn’t believe it.

  “I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s more that she wanted something else. Something not with me.” She’d told me that she needed to focus on her writing. What sort of a jerk gets in between a woman like Emma and the thing she’s been working her whole life toward? Certainly not me.

  “With her creepy old professor?” He looked grossed out. Lucas listened to the idle chatter at the bar more than I’d like. He had hearing like a goddamned bat.

  “Nah. Not him. She got rid of him for good.” If there was one good thing about Adam stopping by the bar last night, it was that. I’d never met Adam, and I never wanted to, but on some level, I could empathize with him. He and I wanted the same woman, although I hadn’t done anything nearly as creepy to her. He still deserved to be fired, but something told me that failing to make Emma love him was punishment enough.

  “Sounds like she got rid of you both for good.” Lucas kept on peeling his orange. He was almost done. I knew he’d leave once he reached the end. This conversation was taking a lot out of the both of us.

  “Yeah.” She certainly did.

  “Do you think she might have had feelings for you and left because of that?” Lucas asked, discarding the peels in the garbage. He raised an eyebrow at me. Behind his fake glasses, his hazel eyes were direct.

  I blinked and felt my mouth working uselessly before I finally spoke. “I, um, I do
n’t know.”

  “Hmm. Well, thanks for the orange.” He wandered back to his laptop and his table like our conversation had been no big deal.

  Possibly no conversation that I’d had with Lucas had been a bigger deal in the history of our friendship. My mind whirled around the question he left me with. Would it change things? Could she be in love me? Lucas bringing it up had made it true for me. I hadn’t been willing to go there. If Emma left because she cared about me, then what? Did I just let her go? What did I want?

  Could I let Emma go if I knew there was a chance of more with her? I didn’t know my own thoughts. I couldn’t trust my own mind. It had led me wrong once before, and it had taken me a debt restructure and a lawsuit in small claims court to be free of Jessie.

  I needed to talk to Kate. If anyone knew what I was feeling, it was her. I only prayed that I was strong enough to hear it.

  39

  Ward

  I was extremely surprised to find Lily and Kate sitting together on the patio late in the evening. Lily got up and walked away before she saw me coming, but the look on her face was unhappy. I watched her shake her head in apparent frustration as she walked off into the night, and then moved to take her recently vacated chair in front of my sister.

  “I didn’t know that you and Lily were friends,” I told Kate, suddenly irritated. My voice was sharp.

  “We go to spin class together,” she replied, surprised. “How did you think Emma heard about this job? How did you think we got that private party? Through Lily.”

  That actually… made sense. I still didn’t like it. “I didn’t know.” If I sounded a bit sullen, it was because I was.

  “There are lots of things you don’t know.” Kate smiled at me like I was an idiot. At the moment, I was ready to admit it. Especially if there was some way Kate could fix me.

  “Enlighten me, then. What do I do now?” I cracked open a bottle of water, and she leaned forward to steal it from me. She took a long sip before answering me.

  “You’re seriously asking me?”

  “I’m seriously asking you, yeah.” It sounded ridiculous to me, too.

  She savored the moment. “Ok. Here’s what you should do. Go back into the main room and continue to bartend until we close. Then you and me are gonna’ go to Kerby Lane, get some pancakes and talk this through. Neither of us has time to do this right now.”

  Frustratingly, she was probably right. It was only eleven forty-five. “Fine.”

  Willie shot me a ‘where the hell have you been?’ look when I returned. We’d suddenly gotten slammed with a big group of thirsty college kids. Cameron was running around like a chicken with her head cut off. Her first night was trial by fire. The remaining few hours of the night had never felt longer. However, I think my glaring at the customers helped them clear out a bit faster. We managed to lock the doors a full thirty minutes early.

  “Pancakes?” I asked Kate again as we walked to the cars. “Are you sure you want that at this hour?”

  “I’ve never been surer of anything in my life. Pancakes are the proper food for your relationship troubles.”

  I was about to tell Kate that I didn’t have relationships and therefore couldn’t have relationship troubles, but at this point I didn’t think it was true. I sighed instead. “Fine. Let’s get pancakes.”

  The pancakes at the Kerby Lane café—one of the few twenty-four-hour restaurants in town that didn’t suck—were legendary. I got the apple spice. Kate got the banana nut. Both were delivered with more butter than could ever be healthy, powdered sugar, and maple syrup. I shoveled the tender, fluffy carbs into my mouth, willing to admit that Kate was correct about them being perfect for the way I was feeling.

  “Ok, let’s discuss,” Kate said, staring across the top of her coffee cup at me. “We can start with the conversation I had tonight with Lily if you want.”

  “Ok… what did she say?” The fact that Emma’s scary roommate and my sister were connected still gave me the creeps. Why didn’t either one of them ever say anything? I felt like the world was conspiring against me.

  Kate was frowning. She looked just like our mom when she did, even though both of us mostly looked like our absent, asshole father. “She was telling me about Emma. Apparently, she’s really down in the dumps.”

  “Emma’s upset?”

  “Ward, she’s heartbroken.” My sister continued to look at me like I was truly a moron.

  “Oh.” I hated the idea of Emma being sad. When she’d run away last night, her face had been teary, but I chalked it up to hating the awkwardness of the situation. Now, however, after I’d spoken to Lucas and given it additional thought… “She has feelings for me.”

  Kate nodded. “Yes. She does.”

  “And she left because she has feelings for me.”

  “Yes.” Kate’s face indicated that she was impressed that I’d gotten this far on my own. I decided not to tell her that it was actually Lucas who had led me to this realization. She didn’t need that information. “She doesn’t want to feel like she’s disposable.”

  I frowned. “Disposable?” Trash was disposable. Had I treated Emma badly? I never meant to do that. “We were happy, and then she left. I didn’t do anything!”

  “Exactly. You didn’t do anything to keep her. She’s got feelings for you. She wants more than you’ve said you’re willing to give her. Don’t you get that?” Kate’s face was frustrated. “Why is that always so hard for men to understand?”

  “Which part?”

  “Any of it.” Kate pushed her pancake bite around in the syrup on her plate. “I’ve been in Emma’s shoes before. Trust me, it doesn’t feel great to know that a guy just saw you as a good time.”

  “But—”

  “I know! I know you thought that was the deal. You’re honest at least, I’ll give you that. The women you usually hook up with, they’re cool with it, too. But Emma’s different and deals change.”

  That seemed very unfair. When I didn’t have anything else to add to the conversation, Kate ate more pancakes and watched me. I felt like I needed to be the one answering questions, not asking them, but she clearly wasn’t going to make it easy.

  “What if I go talk to her and she asks me how I feel about her? What do I do?” I finally asked Kate. She frowned.

  “Then you just tell her.” My sister looked unimpressed that this wouldn’t come naturally to me. But I’d been burned before, and besides…

  “I don’t know what I feel.”

  She made a dismissive noise before saying, “That’s bullshit, and you know it, Ward.”

  “What? Why do you think I’m here?”

  “You want me to tell you what to do. You want me to tell you what you feel.”

  “Exactly!” Thank god, she’d finally figured it out.

  “But I’m not going to do that. It’s enabling behavior. You know exactly what you need to do. You know how you feel. You just want me to spell it out, because if it comes from me you’ll try to talk yourself out of it.”

  “You really won’t tell me what to do? You usually love to do that.” In fact, I believed that ordering me around was one of my sister’s greatest joys in life. She gave me more advice and instruction on a daily basis than I knew what to do with. But now, when I needed it, she was withholding her advice? It made no sense to me. Apparently, I was just a way to get free pancakes.

  “I love you Ward. You’re my brother. But sometimes I don’t like you. You act like you’re clueless when you aren’t.” Kate shook her head at me again. “Do you have feelings for Emma beyond the usual temporary lust kind?”

  I swallowed. “I might.” Even admitting the possibility seemed like it was opening me up for pain.

  “Do you think she has feelings for you?”

  “I already told you… yes, probably.” I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but there was definitely a chance.

  “Do you think there’s a chance that if you went and told her how you felt, she’d take you b
ack? And do you want that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I think that I’m miserable right now, and there’s only one way to fix it: get Emma back. I don’t know what that will take, or if it will end up hurting me more in the end, but I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Well then shit, you’ve just solved your own problem. You’re freakin’ welcome.” She reached across the table to snag one of my pancakes onto her plate. I let her do it. Or rather, I was too stunned to stop her.

  My lips had parted as I stared at her. She was right. It was simple.

  40

  Emma

  The world didn’t end because I was a sad, weepy mess. It felt like it should, but it didn’t. The world still turned, the sun came up, and the next day dawned just like it always did. The apocalypse was only in my mind.

  Day two post-Ward required me to do more than sulk, and I reluctantly dragged myself up to the library to return a few books. Technically I could have gone online and extended my check-out period, but the tiny rational part of my brain that still functioned knew that the longer I stayed locked in the apartment, the harder it would be to leave. I still had a life to live, even if it was a lonely, troubled one.

  Many of the best writers had been troubled, I told myself as I walked across campus. Very few artists managed to have functional relationships with anything, actually. If they weren’t in toxic love affairs with other people (Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Leo Tolstoy, T.S. Eliot) they had toxic relationships with substances (William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Edgar Allen Poe). Or, worse, their own minds (Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, poor Zelda Fitzgerald). Some, like Hemmingway, had toxic relationships with all three. A perverse little piece of my heart thought perhaps being broken would fuel my writing if it didn’t consume me whole.

  My introspection was interrupted by an unwelcome, semi-familiar voice calling my name. I spun and found myself face to face with Simon. I hadn’t seen him since the gallery opening a month ago. At least Ivy and Jannie weren’t with him this time. He really wasn’t a bad guy, he just hung around with questionable friends.