He glanced my way, finally. “Okay. You’re not allowed to anyway. Dave will kill me.”
It was a twist of the knife in my gut, a reminder that regardless of the roller coaster my emotions had been riding for weeks, he’d stayed grounded in big-brother territory. I tried to keep my face neutral, to hide the hurt, but I must have given myself away because his eyes pinched at their corners, distress etching new lines there for a moment.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just . . .”
“It’s okay. We are what we are. It’s fine, really!” My voice sounded loud and overbright. I summoned a big smile. “But this is why I need the space. It’s all about the reset. Imagine I’m bowling pins, and all of me has been knocked down, but this isn’t an automatic bowling alley. So instead of a nice, tidy reset, I have to wait for a really old dude to reset my pins one by one. Maybe it’ll take a while, but the end result is the same.”
“Sophie would totally flunk you for that analogy,” he said, the first hint of a smile appearing. But even the shadow of his smile was enough to give me some of my breath back, to let me inhale around the pain in my gut. It was a glimmer of hope that maybe we could be okay, find a new footing where we were friends on both sides, not just on his.
“Probably. Don’t tell her.”
He nodded, and a silence fell between us. I didn’t know what else to say. I sat with an easy smile on my face, but I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it up. I didn’t want to talk in my overbright staccato again, so I looked at him and then past him to my kitchen, down the hall, back toward my living room windows, even though the blinds were drawn. Everywhere but at him. He cleared his throat. “I’ll go, I think. I have to . . . I’ve got stuff to do.” He walked to the door and hesitated. “I don’t know how to . . . I mean, what comes next?”
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” I joked.
It was a long moment before he nodded. “Whatever you need, Hannah.” He closed the door behind him.
I sank down, letting go of the sofa and grimacing at the unpleasant volcanoes my grip had created in the fabric. I smoothed them out, and it didn’t help. I did it, I thought, pressing harder. I said all the things I needed to. And I kept it together. But when the fabric still tufted up in weird lumps, I punched it, trying to get it to settle. And I punched harder. And faster. And even though I had said and done everything exactly how I’d planned, even though the cushion upholstery was settling back to normal, I realized I was crying. And it was a long time before I stopped.
Chapter 15
Jay went for it. I couldn’t believe it, but he did. I e-mailed him and explained that I was as emotionally distant as I’d promised from the start, but I was interested for the first time in seeing if there was a cure for it, and would he like to go to dinner again?
YES.
Simple, all caps. It made me feel better.
We met for dinner, and it was weird. I kept worrying about saying or doing anything to give Jay the impression that I was open to love or something. So I laughed, but not too loud or long. And sometimes if I’d laughed too many times in a row, I would give him a polite smile when he said something funny instead. Which had to be confusing because sometimes I ended up doing the polite smile for his funniest comments.
He cracked fewer jokes as the evening went on. By the time he pulled into my apartment parking lot, I was ready to throw myself from his car before it even made a complete stop. Surely some massive scrapes and contusions would be better than the soul-crushing awkwardness. It couldn’t be worse.
I flew up the stairs and stopped in front of Will’s door, ready to open it and complain about how badly the night had gone. I’d turned the knob halfway before I realized that this was the habit I had to break: Will. And he was indirectly the reason the night had gone so badly. I let go of the knob, hurrying down the hall and digging out my phone as I went. I should be calling Sophie, not Will.
I closed my front door behind me just as I heard Will’s open, but I shut mine before he could even finish calling my name.
“Good news,” I said when Sophie picked up. “The Jay date was a disaster, but I’ve had no Will contact today. So that’s one day down, the rest of my life to go, and I should get through this fine.”
“What happened with Jay? He sounded like he had potential.”
“He did. I don’t. I was a total psycho. I was like an android with a damaged emotion chip, laughing too loud at some stuff, not at all at the actually funny stuff. I even moved all glitchy, dropping silverware all night, dribbling my water when I drank at dinner. It was weird and horrible.”
“Oh, sweetie. I’m sorry. What went wrong?”
“I told you. My wiring misfired. It was humiliating.”
“I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think it was.”
“It was so much worse.”
“Well . . .” Sophie drew out the word, and I knew she was trying to find the right thing to make me feel better. She believed that every situation in life had a magic set of words but that some were harder to find than others. “So here’s the thing.” That was what she always said when she’d found the words she needed. “You’re saying this was all you, not him, right? That he was fine, you were the weirdo at the table?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.” I was too demoralized to complain about her bluntness.
“So would you want to try again to get to know him better?”
“Yes. Except for the part where I’d ever have to look him in the eye again. Or let him see my stupid face again.”
“I like your stupid face. Be nice to it. But also, this is where I give you some tough love. Ready?”
“Should I flex all my feelings in case you’re going to punch me in them?”
“Definitely. Got my fist cocked and everything. Jay is not the love of your life. But he is the first guy who has been interesting enough for you to be nervous and screw up the date and, even better, feel embarrassed about it.”
“Even better?” I repeated. “How is that even better?”
She laughed. “Trust me. You need to take another shot at this Jay guy, try hanging out with him some more. You can’t quantity date in this situation. Everyone is going to fall short of Will. You’re going to have to go for quality, and Jay is it, I think. At least for this round. So fix it.”
“It’s not that easy.” I gave a maniacal laugh, and Sophie squeaked. “That’s what I did when he made some dumb pun about being on a roll while he buttered his bread. But then he told me this truly hilarious story about this work trip that went wrong, and I overcompensated for being a dork by being a robot. He finished the story, and I went, ‘Heh.’ Like, a laugh-till-you-cry hilarious story, and I say ‘heh.’ Heh!” I hollered.
“Ouch!” Sophie hollered back. “That was bad. But didn’t you say you’ve been totally straight with this guy from the start? So play that card again. Text or e-mail him or something right away. And tell him that due to your conflicted emotional issues or whatever, you’ve sort of forgotten how to be normal, you overthought it because you didn’t know how to feel, you forgot to feel, and you want a do-over.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You need to. I know you. If you slink away, it’s going to make you gun-shy about going out again for a while, especially if it’s someone you find cool. That’s not going to help you with Will. So think it through. What’s the worst that can happen, really? Just e-mail him. Tell him what’s up. And maybe he doesn’t respond. So what?”
“But maybe he does, and he says something about how we’re not a good fit.”
“I still say so what. It’s not like you have to look him in the face while he says it. And the flip side is that he might not have thought it was nearly as big a deal as you do. Or that even if he does, he’s game for another shot.”
“I kind of hate this.”
“That’s why you have to do it. You can’t fall back into that rut of being like, ‘Oh, I like Will, so what’s the point?’” She said it in a falsetto,
and I grimaced.
“I don’t sound like that.”
“I was going for the silly quality, not fidelity of sound.” She paused for a moment, and I heard clicking.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Fidelity of sound is a cool phrase. I wrote it down so I don’t forget it in case I want to name my band that.”
“The band you don’t have?”
“It’s just a thing people say. Anyway, this is not the point. The point is that I was making fun of you, and now you need to let that work and shame you into at least giving it a shot. E-mail Jay.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You have an answer for everything.”
“Yeah.”
“All right. How does this sound?” I opened my laptop and my e-mail and hit “Compose.” “Dear Jay, I’m not always terribly awkward. I can provide sworn affidavits that say so. I think I was trying so hard not to be weird that I was weird. But it’s entertaining to watch, right? So can I make it up to you with lunch this week? Or something where we’re not sitting across from each other trying to figure out when eye contact is too much or not enough. How about . . .” I trailed off, trying to think of what to suggest. Running? No. That was what I did with Will. I’d spend all my time running with Jay thinking about how different it was from running with Will. Which would mean Will was more or less on the date with us. No more of that.
“That’s good,” Sophie said like I’d given a great analysis of Beowulf. “But how about what? What are you going to ask him to do?”
“How about bowling?” I said to Sophie as I typed it. Why not make the life metaphor I’d used with Will my reality? “I suck, and I promise you’ll feel good about yourself.”
“I like it,” Sophie said. “It’s kind of, sort of the flat-out perfect tone. Hey,” she said, her voice suddenly bright. “Can I use that e-mail as an example when I teach my mood and tone unit next month?”
“No!”
“Fine. I think it’s great even if you’re not going to share it. You should send it.”
“No?”
“Yes. Do it.” I hesitated. She pressed harder. “Do it now before you talk yourself so far out of it that I can’t talk you back into it.”
She was right. I didn’t have anything to lose. If I’d humiliated myself, this wasn’t going to make it any worse. He would probably say no, thanks, but at least I might have rehabilitated myself by having a sense of humor about everything.
“Okay, I hit send.”
“Good girl! Now I have some news for you.”
A nervous undertone ran through the words, piquing my interest immediately. “Spill.”
“You say that like you think it’s going to be juicy.”
“It will be. I can feel it. Stop stalling. Spill.”
“I—”
I waited. “Yes. You what?”
“Have a date.”
“What? With who? Yay!” Sophie was pretty, and she charmed people regularly, but she always claimed too much grading or exhaustion when the weekend rolled around as a reason she couldn’t invest energy in dating.
“So your friend Jared texted me. And I texted back. And we’ve been talking, I guess. I mean, mainly by text. But he called me last night. And he asked if I’d like to meet, and I said yeah.”
“Hooray!” I shouted. “When? Where? This weekend? What are you doing?”
“I don’t know. Not this weekend. I’ve got too much—”
“Don’t you dare say grading.”
She stayed silent.
“Sophie,” I groaned. “You will always have too much grading. I promise you that your students are not dying to get their final grades on their unit tests. I’d bet most of them would rather not know, am I right? Grading cannot be a thing.”
“But my AP class—”
“Will only benefit from you having a life outside of you dreaming up what to torture them with next. Whoa. Incoming,” I breathed as Jay’s name showed up in my inbox. “E-mail from Jay.” I clicked it open and skimmed it. Bowling sounds good. But can we mix it up with some other humans so that the strain of my jokes falling flat doesn’t kill me and I can hide behind conversation with them? He wanted to double date. Perfect. “Tell Jared you’d love to go out with him sometime, and in fact, you want him to come bowling on Saturday.”
“Not really how I pictured my first date with Jared. He seems too sophisticated to bowl.”
“Then I’m wrong about him being your future husband. People who are too good for bowling are no-fun-having-cranky-pants.”
“True. I’ll ask him.”
“Because you’re the best friend ever.”
“Also true. Now. We need to discuss last night’s Eye on the Runway.”
We chatted for another twenty minutes about our favorite reality TV vice, but the second we hung up, my house felt too quiet. I itched to text Will for . . . nothing, really. It was the same reason I’d texted him hundreds of times before. But it wasn’t time yet. I hadn’t elbowed out nearly enough space for myself.
Instead, I e-mailed Jay so we could start nailing down the bowling date. And when we’d said everything there was to say about when and where to bowl, the apartment felt kind of echo-y again. So I turned on the TV, cranked the volume up five clicks louder than usual, and squeezed a throw pillow to my chest to keep my hands tied up for two reruns of Friends until the urge to text Will had passed.
Not passed. Become manageable.
I was going to need some new hobbies.
* * *
It was emotionally harder and logistically easier than I’d ever thought it would be to avoid Will. I wanted to imagine him picking up his phone and putting it down as many times as I did. But if my mind wandered that way, I forced myself instead to imagine him out on a date with someone new. It was a string of petite blondes. With PhDs. And ambition. And good senses of humor. And lots of stamps in their passports. In other words, I pictured him going out with his real dream woman, and every time my mind tried to paint my face into that picture, I erased it and replaced it with someone who looked like she could be in a swimsuit catalog.
I made sure never to leave or come home when I thought he might be heading out too. I’d started a lot of my days in the past by walking down to the parking garage with Will. I had no idea that it would be a harder habit to break than, oh, say, heroin.
The second day of no Will contact was torture. The third day was torture. The fourth and fifth days were torture. The sixth day improved to miserable. It was Saturday, the bowling date with Sophie. Well, with Jay. And I would have backed out on it except I couldn’t bail on Sophie. I met her at her apartment two hours before dinner so we could drive over to the bowling alley, where we were meeting Jared and Jay.
“Hey,” Sophie said, opening up to let me in. “Don’t change.”
“You don’t even know what else I brought,” I said, hefting the bag with two more outfits I’d lugged over.
“Don’t need to. You look super cute. I won’t like anything else that well.”
I glanced down at my coral striped knit shirt and skinny cuffed jeans. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Hey. Is this going to be weird for you?”
“Probably. But that’s why we’re doubling. So you can kick me when I start making an idiot of myself. You’ll be able to tell because Jay’s smile will start looking painted on instead of real. His eyes might dart toward the exits.”
“Not that, dummy. I meant hanging out with me and one of your recent dates.”
“Right. That. I thought about it. But Jared and I didn’t connect in that way, you know? So as long as you two connect, and I’m pretty sure you will, then there will be no reason for any of us to feel awkward. Except, you know, for me. Because I’m going to make an idiot of myself in front of Jay again.”
She studied me, but I didn’t have anything to hide. I could foresee zero problems with Jared. “All right. Then let’s go pick out what I’m supposed to wear to meet my future husband.”
Hanging out with her until dinner was the first tolerable two hours I’d had since my breakup with Will. No, not breakup. That was a word for people who’d been together in the first place.
By the time we got to the bowling alley, my smile had regained some of its muscle memory. Maybe I could get through this date with Jay without looking like an idiot.
I spotted both Jared and Jay in the entrance alcove seated on opposite benches. I introduced everyone, studying Sophie’s reaction to Jared as casually as possible. Her cheeks pinked when they shook hands. Good sign. Jared gave her a big smile, and when Sophie looked away for a moment, he shot me a quick look and a lightning-fast “thank you” quirk of his eyebrows. I gave him a nod.
Jay watched the whole exchange with interest, and when Sophie turned back to Jared, I grinned at him. I’d filled him in via e-mail on my one-and-done date with Jared, and Jay’s expression said he found the whole thing amusing. When he caught my eye, he wiggled his eyebrows in a wild exaggeration of the message Jared had sent with his, and I burst into laughter and walked over to give him a hug. “Thanks for going out with me again even though I was a total weirdo the last time.”
He shrugged, a smile turning up his lips. “It seems like the benign kind of weird. And weird is interesting. So saying yes was kind of a no-brainer, especially when you suggested a double date stuffed with potential drama and loaded silences. How was I going to say no to that?”
“Yeah. Well, you’ve seen how it is with Jared and me,” I said, raising my voice on his name. He and Sophie looked over. “Jared, although it was hard for me to move past it, I forgive you for dumping me. I promise to be a grown-up tonight.”
He pretended to weigh out my statement. “All right, then. If you can be so big about me dumping you, I’ll be gracious too and not rub your nose in it that I crushed your fragile sense of worth like an eggshell.”
This time it was Sophie who erupted in laughter. She tucked her arm through Jared’s. “You’re going to do just fine. Now let me rent you some fancy shoes.”
Always Will Page 15