Good On Paper

by Jennifer Millikin

  His voice is smooth, his volume normal, but his words cut.

  I choose to ignore him. There’s no use pointing out that I chose the high-top table so he would be more comfortable. “Hi. How are you?”

  He settles onto the stool opposite me and props his elbows on the table. His shirtsleeves are rolled up to reveal muscular forearms. In college, he threw footballs and pretended to bench press me. I was happy and convinced we were meant for one another. Funny how things change.

  Henry settles his chin into his cupped hands and gazes at me. “I’m good, Nat. Did you sign?” His expression is neutral, and stupidly I wish there was some emotion there. Where is the anger? Where is the sadness?

  “Yep,” I say curtly, reaching into my bag. Suddenly I can’t wait for this to be over, for him to be gone. “Here.” I slide the box across the small space. He takes it, careful not to brush his fingers against mine. Tears swim in my eyes, and I pray they don’t spill over. Why am I crying? It’s over. It’s what I wanted. I initiated it.

  My gaze sweeps the room, seeing but not really seeing the long line of people waiting to order. The feel of his stare on my face makes me want to melt into a puddle and seep into the ground.

  “Natalie, I—” he pauses, his voice softened by a tinge of regret. “I’m not sure what to say. I don’t know how to do this.”

  “Me neither,” I whisper, swiping at my eyes.

  “Thanks for giving the ring back to me.”

  My right hand reaches for my ring finger, rubbing the bare flesh. “It was your grandmother’s.”

  Henry stands, pushing the stool back under the table. “Well, I, uh… I’ll see you around. Call me if you need anything.” He turns, stops, then shakes his head and laughs disbelievingly. “Never mind. You won’t need anything. Aidan is here. Like always.”

  I lean left and peer around Henry.

  Aidan is early. Aidan is always early, but on a day like today, he probably hustled in from Brooklyn after school was finished.

  “Shay,” Aidan nods at Henry. Calling him Shay is a relic from college.

  “Costa.” Henry’s voice has dropped an octave. He looks back at me, his glare full of meaning, silently hurling his accusations at me, as if they haven’t been flung a million times before.

  Henry stomps out, bumping into people as he goes.

  I look at Aidan. His eyes are on me, his gaze soft. He comes to me, folds my head into his chest, and blocks me from view while I fall apart.

  2

  Aidan

  Natalie’s text came through on my lunch hour. I bit into my sandwich and pulled my phone from my desk.

  Natalie: I’m doing it today.

  I wrote her back right away. You’re certain?

  Natalie: What’s the point of waiting?

  I asked her what she needed, and she told me where to meet her. I don’t know why Henry wanted to get the ring from her in person, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I learned a long time ago not to voice my opinion when it came to Henry.

  As soon as the bell rang, I ran to the train. It’s a good thing I did, because Natalie needed me. Right now she’s curled into me, her hair falling down her back and snot smeared on my blue sweater. She hates crying in public. My back is to the rest of the place, shielding her. The scent of strong coffee and sweet syrup makes my mouth water, but Natalie’s not about to let me go. Suppressed sobs shake her shoulders, and I feel the tremble in my chest.

  Her heart is breaking. It’s been breaking for a long time, but it’s the finality that’s getting her now. She didn’t imagine this for herself. She wanted forever. Happily ever after wasn’t an abstract concept. If I didn’t already know this for certain, I’d only have to pick a book off her shelf and read the last twenty pages. The characters in her books always fall in love.

  “Nat,” I whisper down into her hair. She has a cowlick at the crown, and I learned this years ago, the first time I held her hair while she vomited up strawberry Boone’s Farm. “Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink?”

  She lifts her chin and looks up at me, swipes a hand under her nose, and nods.

  “Let’s go.”

  She grabs her purse and lifts the strap over her head, positioning the bag on her hip.

  I pull napkins from the dispenser and hand them to her. “You need to wipe your face.”

  She smiles and leans over, pretending to wipe her snotty nose on my sleeve. Shoving the napkin into her hand, I keep one and attempt to clean up the front of my sweater.

  “Sorry.” Natalie frowns apologetically.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not the first time.” Turning, I start for the exit. She follows. Amid the noise of conversation, I hear the tap tap tap of her heels.

  “You threw up on my feet once.” Her voice floats into my ears and I cringe. It’s not my favorite memory.

  “What do I have to do to erase that from your memory?” Pulling the brass door handle, I prop open the door with a foot and let Natalie walk through first.

  “I’ll never forget it. It was the night you said you loved me.” She tucks her hands inside the back pockets of her jeans and peers at me, her head tipped to one side.

  “Friend-love,” I clarify. I don’t do love. Never have. It’s better suited for people who are not like me. People like Natalie.

  She rolls her eyes. “Well, duh.”

  “Come on.” I start down the crowded sidewalk. Natalie is in step beside me. “I want a beer. The dark kind you can almost chew.”

  “Gross,” Natalie says, wrinkling her nose.

  “You know what I mean.”

  There’s a beer garden a few blocks away. We get there, settle into our seats, and Natalie orders a light beer with some kind of fruit in its name.

  “So, you’re divorced, huh?” I sit back and cross an ankle over the opposite knee.

  Natalie scowls.

  “I don’t know what else to say,” I tell her. It’s the truth. What does a person say to their best friend right after they’ve signed their divorce papers?

  “I guess so,” Natalie says slowly. Even more slowly, she says, “I am divorced. I’m divorced. I’m twenty-eight, and I’m divorced. I married my college sweetheart, and now we’re divorced.” Her voice is thick by the time she reaches the end of her sentence.

  “We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “You don’t have anything to say?” Her words are a challenge. I can’t blame her. We both know I’ve never been Henry’s biggest fan.

  I shake my head and nod my thanks at our server when she sets down our beers.

  “Don’t go quiet on me now, Costa. I know you have a mouthful of words waiting to tumble out.”

  “I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this.” Sipping my beer, I watch her. She surveys me with shrewd eyes, knowing that I’m holding back.

  What I want to say is something along the lines of I knew it would come to this. Of course I knew. Henry Shay was one of my college roommates. He’s not a bad person, and he wasn’t back then either. They just weren’t right together, no matter how hard Natalie tried. They seemed like they should be right for each other. He played football, she was on the dance team. On every surface, in ways only eyes can see, they looked like a match made in heaven. They fit together. But underneath, geometry doesn’t matter. Below the surface is where it gets messy.

  Henry was incapable of handling what comes beneath the surface of Natalie. Two years ago, Natalie wrote a book. In the last year, she has sent her manuscript out to at least a hundred different agents. As rejection after rejection rolled in, Natalie became more and more upset. Henry approached Natalie’s despondency the only way he knew how: to try and point out what she’d done wrong. What Henry didn’t understand was that Natalie had done nothing wrong. When Henry took Natalie to the library to look at books on how to become a better writer, I wrote crude comics on her rejection letters that I knew she’d find later and laugh about. For a while I thought maybe I had the advantage because I knew Natalie a
few years longer than Henry, but I stopped thinking that. Henry is so short-sighted, I don’t know if he would’ve ever been able to see Natalie’s soul. And yet, despite all this, she loved him.

  “You should take this experience and turn it into a book.” I’m only half kidding. I bet she could sprinkle some of her talent and magic on it and create a bestseller.

  “Yeah, sure.” She snorts. “Readers will arrive in droves to learn about my failed marriage.”

  I shrug. “They might.”

  “Readers don’t want to read a fail. They want a happily ever after. They want a tidy, romantic experience to come in a cute box with the pale pink silk ribbon wrapped around it.”

  “Why don’t you change it up?” I know it’s risky suggesting this, given Natalie’s current mood, but I forge ahead. “Give them something messy.”

  Natalie eyes me. “Quit trying to change the subject.”

  “Did you want to keep talking about your divorce?”

  “Not really. Let’s talk about you.”

  “What’s there to talk about?”

  “How’s the new girl?” Natalie raises her eyebrows and puckers her lips.

  I run a fingertip over the frost on the outside of my glass. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” Of course I know what she’s talking about, there’s just no point in discussing the girl I swiped right on recently. She will be like all my other relationships: casual, unimportant, and short in duration.

  Natalie sips from her beer but keeps her eyes trained on me. “What’s her name?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I repeat.

  “You’re lying.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because your mouth is moving.”

  I give her a look and she laughs, but her eyes have turned wistful. “My grandpa used to say that.”

  “I always liked your grandpa.” Right before he passed away, Natalie and I went to see him. He placed his frail, liver-spotted hand in my offered hand and asked me if I was going to make an honest woman out of his granddaughter. She’s already engaged, I wanted to tell him. I only nodded and smiled. I didn’t want his last moments to be anything but calm. He was drugged, he probably thought you were Henry, Natalie said to me later. She was already nervous about the upcoming wedding, so I didn’t tell her that her grandfather had said my name twice and knew exactly who I wasn’t.

  Rubbing the pad of my middle finger around the top of my glass, I keep going until it makes a tinny, musical sound. “Her name is Allison,” I say, keeping my eyes on my makeshift instrument so I don’t lose focus and spill.

  “Are you seeing her tonight?” Natalie finishes her beer and pushes it to the center of the table.

  I stop what I’m doing and look up. The sounds of the bar have replaced the music I was making. Natalie waits for a reply, but I’m trying to read her emotions. Her face is expressionless, but the vulnerability I see in her eyes allows me to read her like a book.

  “I’ll cancel,” I offer, and the second the two words have left my lips she tells me to keep my plans.

  “Allison would be very disappointed.” Natalie gets the attention of our server and signals for the check.

  I grab her hand and pull it down to the table. “We don’t have to leave yet. I’m not meeting her until seven.”

  She slips her hand out from under mine and lightly pinches the top of my hand. “I have to finish packing.”

  My eyes roll upward, my gaze lifting to the exposed piping in the ceiling. “Shit,” I mutter, looking back down to Natalie. “I forgot about that.” Weeks ago I’d told her I would help her move.

  “It’s fine. I don’t need help. Honestly,” she adds when she sees the look on my face.

  I feel like a real asshole. My best friend’s moving out of the apartment she shared with her husband and I’m not going to be there to help her.

  “Will Savannah come over and help you?” Internally I’m crossing my fingers. Savannah is Natalie’s coworker and new roommate.

  Natalie opens her mouth but hesitates. Two seconds pass, then she decides to tell me the truth. “Savannah went home to Texas for two weeks. She left yesterday.”

  That settles it. I’m canceling.

  “I’ll be fine, Aidan. Really.” Natalie gives me her serious look. It’s the mom look without being a mom in the first place.

  I hold up my hands. “Fine. I believe you.” I definitely do not believe her. And there’s no way I’m going to let her pack up her apartment alone.

  Our server stops by and leaves the check on the table. Natalie reaches for it, but I’m faster. “I got it.”

  She tries to swipe it from me. “Let me.”

  “Are you suggesting I can’t afford to buy you a beer?”

  “You can’t.”

  She’s right. Technically, anyway. If I would tap into my trust fund, I could buy every patron in every bar in Manhattan a beer and not put a dent in the pile. But I don’t want that money. That money is soaked with years of cover-ups, outright lies, and subject changes. It’s not dirty money in the traditional sense, but it might as well be.

  “Tonight I can. I got my holiday bonus.”

  “It’s not even Thanksgiving yet.”

  I lay a twenty on the bill. “Please stop talking.”

  Natalie laughs. “Never.” She points at the bathroom and slides from her seat.

  While she’s gone, I pull out my phone and send a message to Allison through the dating app. Something came up. Can I have a raincheck for next Friday night?

  Allison responds immediately, agreeing. Natalie comes back to the table but doesn’t sit. She waits for me to swallow the last of my beer and moves aside so I can stand up.

  When we get outside, Natalie turns to me. “Thanks for the beer. And for everything else.” She steps into me and wraps her arms around my middle. We hug for a moment and she pulls away. “Bye, Aidan.” She turns, heading in the direction of her apartment. Or, her soon-to-be old apartment. I follow, making my steps loud on purpose. She turns back and stares at me.

  “What are you doing?” Her eyebrows are drawn together in suspicion. She shivers, tucking her hands into her jacket pockets.

  “I was thinking about how long it has been since I helped someone move. I’m overdue and I need to check the box before the end of the year. Can you help me out?”

  Natalie’s head tips to the side. “And Allison?”

  Tucking my hands in my own pockets, I shrug and rock back on my heels. “I rescheduled for next Friday night.”

  In the glow of the streetlight and the traffic, I see the relief filling Natalie’s eyes. “Thank you.”

  Walking forward, I sling an arm around her shoulders and turn her around, steering her down the street.

  “Always, Nat.”

  3

  Natalie

  My cereal tastes weird here.

  My skin feels drier.

  The air smells different. There is still the scent of old wood, the unmistakable layers of tenants past, with one glaring omission: lack of any manly scent. The absence wasn’t something I noticed yesterday, not with Aidan here helping me move in, but now it feels like a slap in the face.

  A small groan escapes me as I reach into the fridge for the orange juice. My shoulders burn even with that one small movement. I know as the day goes on I will begin to feel the aches in other muscles. So many boxes, so many steps. Thank god I had Aidan.

  I pour my juice and turn, studying the front of the fridge. Savannah smiles back at me, her blonde hair and pink tips glowing in the picture’s sunlight. She’s leaning on an upright snowboard, her free arm wrapped around the waist of her boyfriend, Drew.

  The rest of the fridge displays the drawings of Savannah’s nieces. Peering closer, I read the childish writing in the corners and learn their names: Zoe and Charlotte.

  Like the kitchen, the rest of the apartment is clean and fully stocked. I walk through the place, my free hand running across the back o
f the couch, then across the top of the table. Furnished, Savannah had said when she offered her place to me. Everything but a bed, but you can buy a new one. You don’t have to bring any bad juju furniture with you. Those words were what I needed to finally sign the papers. Until then I’d been in a fog, stuck in the logistics of it all. When Savannah offered her spare bedroom to me, I finally saw the formation of a plan. Henry took what he wanted to keep, and the rest I sold on Craigslist. Including our bed. Sleeping on my old marriage bed, tangled up in smells and memories? Now that would be bad juju.

  Aidan was here yesterday when the delivery guys brought in my new bed. Black wrought-iron, the exact type of bed Henry had vetoed when we were picking out our own.

  Aidan watched the guys assemble the end, and when they left, he said, “You know you’re going to have to break that in.”

  I balked. “Excuse me?”

  Aidan rolled his eyes. “Not with me. But you know the saying. The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.”

  I let the comment pass. Now, looking at my bed in the bright morning light, I wonder if he’s on to something. The idea repulses and intrigues me in equal amounts. I’m not surprised Aidan suggested it. Casual sex is the only kind of sex he has. I’ve never understood why he’s against relationships. Of all people, he’s the poster boy for falling in love. Twenty years ago his mom wrote a book about her romance with his dad, and it still resonates in the hearts and minds of readers everywhere. My own mother read and re-read the book until the binding was bent and lined. When I was older, I bought my own new copy and fell in love with the idea of love. Not just any love though. Nothing like the love my parents had, if that could even be called love. I wanted what Aidan’s parents had. Blinding, sweeping, lose all reasoning love.

  Setting my juice glass on the dresser, I look around and survey the scene. Boxes cover a majority of the wood floor, some stacked four high. I walk over to the ones marked CLOSET, courtesy of Aidan, and open the top box. I unpack until my cell phone rings from its spot next to my forgotten juice.