Party of Two

by Jasmine Guillory

  God, he sounded so pathetic. But to be fair, he felt as pathetic as he sounded.

  Wes nodded.

  “Okay, but I asked you if the two of you could be happy together. You just told me about you and your happiness. Can Olivia be happy? With you?”

  Fuck.

  “Did I really . . .” Max dropped his head in his hands. “Of course I did. I’m a selfish jerk, that’s why she broke up with me in the first place, isn’t it?”

  Wes smacked his shoulder after a few moments and Max looked up.

  “Okay, enough wallowing. How are you going to try to get her back?” Wes asked.

  Max knocked his beer bottle onto the floor.

  “If I knew that, don’t you think I would have done it already?” he yelled. Then he looked at the bottle, aghast.

  “I can’t believe I’m throwing things. I’m an asshole, what’s wrong with me?”

  Wes picked up his phone.

  “I’m ordering some food. Like my momma always says, you can’t have important conversations on an empty stomach. This is why toddlers have so many tantrums; they get hungry and lose it. You probably haven’t eaten all day, have you?” Wes looked him over. “Actually, from the looks of you, you probably haven’t eaten all week.”

  Max tried to remember the last time he’d eaten.

  “I think there were crackers on the airplane. And yesterday I had a few Girl Scout Cookies for dinner; there were some Thin Mints left in my freezer.”

  Wes clicked a few buttons on his phone, then went to the kitchen and tossed Max a bag of potato chips.

  “First of all, pizza is on its way. Second, eat those. Third, drink this.” He put a glass of water in front of Max. “After all of that, we can talk. Chips are the wrong thing, you need an apple, or some vegetables, but it’s all we’ve got, so make the best of it.”

  Max didn’t want the water, or the chips, but he knew that look on Wes’s face all too well. He opened the bag and stuffed a handful of chips in his mouth. After that, and a few sips of water, he turned to his friend.

  “Thanks. And . . . Wes, I don’t know what to do. I’m usually good at countering any argument, you know I am. But I don’t know how to deal with this one. You’re right, I need to figure out how to make her happy; I want to make her happy, more than anything. I told her I loved her, I told her I was sorry, I told her I miss her, but that was the wrong thing, and I don’t know what the right thing is. I feel like I’m letting my chance at the woman I love slip away, but I’m frozen.”

  Wes tipped the bag of chips toward him and took one, then pushed it back to Max.

  “Eat more of those. Now, do you know why those were the wrong things to say?”

  Max ate another handful of chips.

  “I feel like I’m back in law school and got called on and didn’t do the reading. No, of course I don’t know why! If I knew why, don’t you think I would have said something else?”

  Wes took a sip of his beer and relaxed against the couch cushions.

  “Yes, I do think that, asshole. The point is you gotta figure it out.”

  There was silence in the room for a while as Max finished the bag of chips and took two more sips of water. Then he took a long, deep breath.

  “Because those things are about me. Not about her, or how she’s feeling, or the problems she brought up, or how we can resolve them.”

  Wes gave him a smug smile that Max was sure his political opponents hated.

  “See, I knew all you needed was a snack.”

  Max would get furious at Wes’s treating him like a damn toddler, but he knew he deserved it. Plus . . . maybe he had needed a snack.

  “That’s exactly right,” Wes continued. “In order to get her back, you need to tell her how you’re going to fix this, how the two of you can fix this together.” He looked at Max for a long moment. “Do you think you can? Fix this, I mean?”

  Max closed his eyes.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’s decided there’s nothing I can do, maybe she wants nothing to do with me or politics or anyone who has ever had their name in the paper, but I’ve got to try. I’ve got to see if there’s a way around or through this for us.” He winced. “Why didn’t I realize that before? Am I that self-centered?” He looked at Wes. “Please don’t answer that.”

  Wes patted him on the shoulder.

  “It’s not important how long you took to get to the party, what’s important is that you got here at all. And if I can give you some advice . . .”

  “‘If,’ he says, like there’s any way I could stop him from doing it,” Max said to his water glass.

  Wes kept talking like he’d heard nothing.

  “Take your time with this. She doesn’t like snap decisions; be thoughtful on this one, as much as it kills you.”

  Max grinned.

  “Speaking of, I think I forgot to tell you I almost proposed to her on the spur of the moment when we went to Hawaii. Scratch that—I would have proposed to her, but she stopped me.”

  Wes turned to face Max, his mouth wide open.

  “Yeah,” Max said. “So. You’re probably right about taking my time with this.”

  A few minutes later, the buzzer rang.

  “And there’s our food,” Wes said. “I’m warning you, I got a salad and I’m going to make you eat at least ten bites of it before you have any pizza.”

  Max ignored that. He’d just remembered something Olivia said a long time ago. He might have an idea of how to do this.

  But he still had to figure out what to say to make her realize how serious he was about her, about them. And the biggest question was, would she be willing to give this another try, despite everything?

  God, he hoped so.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In the two and a half weeks since she’d broken up with Max, Olivia had tried to be angry. It was always easier to get over something—or someone—when you were angry at them. Pure, righteous anger, that’s what she needed. She thought of that moment when he’d looked at her across the auditorium with that patented charming smile, to try to get her to talk publicly about her arrest, and she hoped she’d feel that wave of fury she did at the time. But instead, all she could feel was sorrow.

  How had she let herself fall in love with Max in the first place? He’d been determined to date her from the very beginning, but she’d known they wouldn’t work—she should have listened to herself. And now she just missed him so damn much.

  Just to get it over with, she’d sent Alexa and Jamila identical text messages on that Monday afterward: “Max and I broke up, I don’t want to talk about it.” Jamila had obeyed her command and hadn’t asked her a single question about it, and so had Alexa . . . for the first few days. After that, she’d somehow gotten Olivia to spill the whole story to her. She was fiercely on Olivia’s side, but also kept beating the whole “don’t give up on love” drum, which Olivia ignored.

  She decided to go back to the New York version of Olivia, without all these damn ups and downs. Yes, fine, the ups had been incredible, but the downs weren’t worth it. Some combination of dating Max and moving back to California had made her emotions so heightened, and she was sick of it. She tried to put Max out of her mind, to go to the gym and work and home and the gym again and get up and do it all over again. And, for the love of God, to stop feeling her damn feelings.

  She still thought about Max constantly, but keeping busy helped. Those first few nights she cried herself to sleep, but after a while she didn’t even have the energy to do that.

  And then one night at the gym, as she flipped channels to find something to watch while she ran on the treadmill, she accidentally turned it to MSNBC. And there was Max. A surge of happiness went through her as she heard his voice. It felt like an automatic, instinctual reaction; apparently her body hadn’t caught up to her brain. She’d been so used to
being happy when she saw him, it was hard to remember she was supposed to be sad now. She stared hungrily at the tiny screen. She stopped flipping, turned off the treadmill, and just stood there watching him. She’d missed him so much. When his segment ended and they cut to commercial, she realized tears were streaming down her face.

  After that night, she watched the news every single night to see if she could get a glimpse of him. God bless cable TV bookers who were so susceptible to perfect hair and charming grins—he was on at least two weeknights out of five. He always had something smart to say, and seemed like he was always in a great mood . . . though was it just her imagination he’d lost weight? It probably was. Maybe he’d already found someone else. Someone who lived in DC and could be around all week with him and didn’t have a job that got in the way and who liked impulsive romantic gestures and would beam and wave at the press like she’d been doing it her whole life.

  The depression that hit when she thought of whom Max would date next didn’t stop her from watching him whatever chance she got. Ellie had told her to feel her feelings, well, now she would feel them all! She’d probably never see him again in real life, so if she needed to watch him on TV for a few weeks or months to help herself get over him, that’s just what she was going to do.

  One night, he was on along with another senator to talk about climate change, and the topic got heated very quickly, as climate change conversations often did. Oh hell, who was she kidding, as every kind of political conversation did these days. Finally, the other guy shouted at Max, “Senator, if you care so much about the environment, what are YOU doing about it? If you think all of this helps so much, you should pledge right now that you and your entire staff will walk to work, and you’ll all go vegan. If you’re asking all of us to make changes, shouldn’t you make all of these changes yourself?”

  Max’s eyes narrowed and his cheeks got pink, even under all the TV makeup. She was still charmed that he blushed when he got excited or heated about something, damn her. But she cringed as soon as he opened his mouth—she knew Max was mad enough to spit out an immediate agreement on behalf of himself and his entire staff; that’s just how he was. She’d seen him do things like this on TV before.

  “As a matter of fact, I . . .”

  But then Max did something that surprised her. He stopped himself and took a breath. Then he started over again.

  “I think you’re trying to distract from the point, Senator. My point has always been that it’s not individual personal choices that matter, it’s about the need to regulate corporations and get them to commit to reducing their carbon impact. Corporations are responsible for the vast majority of global emissions—not individuals. This isn’t to say I encourage irresponsible use of our natural resources; as a matter of fact, I do walk to work every day while I’m here in Washington, DC. But we have to attack this problem from the source; unfortunately there’s no amount of plastic a family can give up, or straws we can stop using, that will make a significant difference to climate change—this is a structural problem, and we need to solve it with structural solutions.”

  Olivia paused the TV and sat back on the couch. Not only was that a fantastic answer, but Max had behaved in a very un-Max-like way. She’d seen it in his eyes; he’d almost made the rash, quick decision that would impact not only him but every member of his staff. But he’d pulled himself back from the ledge, and thought about it, and had done something a whole lot smarter.

  Had he paid attention to what she’d said that night? And had he really listened and made a change? Or was she being irrational and taking this personally when it had nothing to do with her?

  Just then, her doorbell rang. She stood up automatically to go get her delivery. It was only when her hand was on the doorknob she realized she hadn’t ordered delivery.

  Who the hell could be knocking at her door?

  Her heart jumped. Could it be Max? Maybe he’d come back to say how much she mattered to him. How much he wanted her back. How he’d do anything.

  She stood on her tiptoes and looked through the peephole. Jamila, not Max. Of course, not Max. He was in DC, remember? On TV? Granted, she’d recorded the show, it had been filmed hours before, but that wasn’t enough time for him to get from DC to L.A.

  She took a step back and opened the door.

  “I was wondering if you were going to let me in,” Jamila said. She strode past Olivia into the house.

  “Oh, I didn’t . . . did we have plans?” Jamila had a bag of food in her hand and walked straight toward the kitchen with a determined look. Maybe she’d texted Olivia about dinner and Olivia had texted back without remembering it? That was unlike her, but the past few weeks had been unlike her, too.

  Jamila set the bag down on the counter and took a bunch of food cartons out of it.

  “Sure, we had plans. If by ‘plans’ you mean you haven’t shown up for the Wednesday volunteer night in three weeks, and that I haven’t heard from you since I walked you to your car when you ran out of the community center except for that curt text that you and Max broke up, and you’ve ignored all of my texts, and I was worried about you. That’s definitely what ‘plans’ mean to me—that’s also what friends mean to me, by the way—but you might have a different definition.”

  Olivia felt guilty and touched, all at once. She hadn’t wanted to show up to the food pantry, because everyone there had met Max, and they all knew the two of them were dating, and she didn’t want to deal with their kindness right now. She knew it would take only one question and she’d throw herself into the arms of one of the sympathetic older ladies there and sob for hours. So she just hadn’t shown up. But she should have texted Jamila to say she couldn’t come. And it made her weirdly happy Jamila had worried about her like this.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not doing . . . great about all of this, and I didn’t want to have to answer questions about Max or listen to people talking about him or wonder if anyone was talking about me . . . I couldn’t deal with any of that. So I just stayed away.” She put her hand on Jamila’s shoulder. “But I’m really sorry for ignoring you these past few weeks. Thanks for being a friend. I appreciate it. I really don’t know what I would have done without you that night. Or for these past six months, really.”

  The stern look on Jamila’s face softened. She took plates down from the cabinet and scooped food onto both of them. Olivia just stood back and let her do it.

  “Okay. And me, too. No one was talking about you, and no one knew,” she said, “but I understand how you felt. Do you want to talk about what happened? And how you’re doing? Or do you want to watch Housewives?”

  Ooh. Thai food and Housewives seemed like a much better idea for a Wednesday night than MSNBC and the crackers from the back of her cabinet.

  “That second thing, please. I’ll get the drinks.”

  A few minutes later, she followed Jamila into the living room, holding their glasses in each hand. It wasn’t until she saw Jamila stop cold as soon as she walked into the room that Olivia remembered what was paused on the TV.

  Jamila looked from Max’s face, frozen on the screen, to Olivia, and back.

  “Okay, change of plans. When you said you weren’t doing great, I thought maybe you meant you were ‘doing too much online shopping’ not great. I didn’t realize you were ‘watching your ex-boyfriend on TV just so you could get a glimpse of him’ not great! I assumed you were far too together for that!”

  Olivia sat down on the couch.

  “Yeah. I’m good at seeming together. But I . . . we . . .” She sighed. “I broke up with him, but I still love him so much, and I don’t know how to handle it. So yes, I’ve been watching him on TV to get a glimpse of him. But he just now did something that really confused me, and I still don’t know what to think about it.”

  Jamila sat down next to her and handed her a plate.

  “Just now as in he called you, or as in T
V Max did something?”

  Olivia picked up a spring roll and dipped it in peanut sauce.

  “TV Max, but—so one of the reasons we broke up was because he would always jump into things without thinking about what would happen, or about how other people would react. You saw that, a little bit, at the community center.”

  Jamila nodded.

  “Right,” Olivia said. “Well . . . okay, I’m going to show this to you.”

  Olivia rewound the clip and pressed play. Afterward, she pressed pause again.

  “Well, he looks like hell, if that’s what your point was,” Jamila said. “Thin and miserable, and even his always perfect hair is all wrong. He’s missing you. Bad.”

  “Really, you think so?” Olivia asked. She looked at the TV again. His hair really was all wrong; way too long, far too much gel. She shook her head. “No, that wasn’t my point, and while that’s nice of you to say, that’s not what I was asking for.”

  Jamila shrugged.

  “Whether you were asking for it or not, it’s true. That’s a depressed man trying to pretend he’s fine if I’ve ever seen one, and I’ve seen lots of them.”

  Olivia bit her lip. Was Jamila just saying that? She sounded serious, but she could just be trying to make Olivia feel better. And was it true?

  “Okay, we can talk about that later. And maybe I’m making too much of this. But I was absolutely certain he’d yell back at that jerk that yes, he would walk to work, and he would become a vegan, and so would his whole staff. Because that’s how Max is—he talks first, and thinks afterward, or not at all. And it’s worked out for him for the most part, so he’s never thought he needed to change things. But this time, he didn’t do that.”