by Amy Gentry
“No waterbed sofas tonight,” he said. “They get punctured a lot, I guess by all the—” I lost the last part of the sentence, and Jason repeated it, leaning in and putting one hand on my shoulder for balance as he indicated his lifted foot.
The music surged. Instead of hearing the words, I only felt his touch on my bare skin. “The what?”
“High heels.”
I laughed nervously, and Jason used the hand on my shoulder to steer me toward a bar thronged with humanity. Observing the brutal coolness competition at the bar, I could see that the process of ordering a pair of twenty-dollar cocktails was going to take a while. “Maybe I should find us somewhere to sit,” I shouted into Jason’s ear, standing on tiptoe. He nodded.
I made my way toward a few seats near a giant white brick fireplace, but before I could get there, a couple of guys appeared out of nowhere, drinks in hand, and settled into them. I made the rounds, trying to look casual as I strolled the topiary aisles and passed a suite of Ping-Pong tables, where I narrowly avoided being hit by a whizzing white ball. The sun began to set; the angle of the glow became more acute, the glare off the nearby buildings dazzling. Having explored nearly the whole rooftop without spotting any empty seats, I wandered around a corner that seemed quieter and leaned against a sun-warmed wall to catch my breath. I’d been there only a moment when, without warning, a speaker near my head started blaring a clashing electronic beat complete with high-pitched shrieks; another DJ had arrived and started his set, undaunted by the already loud ambient music. The sonic chaos drove me back toward the bar, where Jason was still waiting, empty-handed. He saw my expression and his face fell.
“This is miserable, isn’t it?”
I shrugged noncommittally, not wanting to hurt his feelings and too tired to raise my voice again.
“Let’s just go.”
I nodded, relieved, and we stumbled back to the elevator, which was disgorging fresh heaps of the young and beautiful. On the way down we were alone in the elevator, but after the mayhem above, the silence was too peaceful to break. I had time to wonder what, in the past year, Jason had grown used to while I was trying out material in Austin coffee shops. Had he been hanging out on rooftops with Aaron Neely, hobnobbing with the kind of person who brings a bikini to a midday meeting and takes a dip afterward?
Just before the elevator doors opened, I tried it out. “So, you come here a lot, then?”
“This was my first time.” He looked sheepish. “I just wanted to impress you.” I snorted, and he started laughing too. “Since you’re such a big shot now.”
I stopped to glare at him, then broke up laughing again.
“It’s pretty awful, though, isn’t it?” He pointed to the ceiling with its forest of vintage lamps as we walked out of the hotel.
“I think the word you’re looking for is basic,” I said. “But what a view.”
“I hear they have a great happy hour at R & R.”
We walked through the well-shaded grounds of the Central Library on the way back to the car, pausing to linger under the fantastical foliage. Jason put an arm around me, casually, as if it were no big deal.
“So—you’re staying another night?”
This time Jason had ordered an omelet with hash browns. As I ate my burger, I thought, Jason will always be the kind of guy who orders breakfast for dinner. Maybe I knew him too well at this point. “A few more days, at least.”
“Are you apartment hunting?” He thwacked the ketchup bottle over his hash browns a couple of times.
“I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. Anyway, it’s not like I have tons of money lying around. I’d have to nail something definite down before I—”
“That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.” A glob of ketchup landed on his plate, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I was only kind of joking last night about splitting the rent. I haven’t had much luck in the roommate department since you left, and I can’t afford to live alone much longer. So if you did need a place . . .” He trailed off, placed the ketchup bottle on the table, and poked at the mess on his plate.
I couldn’t believe it. He was asking me to move in with him. Without so much as a word about what had been going on between us—the touching, the handholding, the date spot—he was asking me to reappear in his life as if I’d never left it. With no idea what, if anything, we were to each other.
“What exactly are you saying, Jason?” I knew, but I needed him to say it. To admit, at least, that he needed me.
But he began backpedaling immediately. “Or not. If you’re not into the idea.”
I continued eating my burger and kept my mouth full for the rest of the meal so I’d only have to nod yes or shake my head no.
When we got back to Jason’s place, he put on a comedy special we’d both heard about, and I relaxed a little into our old, familiar rapport, chuckling intermittently, picking apart the jokes, pointing out what worked and what didn’t.
And then, half an hour into it, he was leaning on me again.
“Don’t do that,” I said, throwing his arm off the back of the sofa.
“What, this?” He ruffled my hair.
“I’m serious. Stop.” I jerked away. “Jason, what is this? What are we doing here? I need to know what’s going on.”
He took a deep breath and smoothed his hair back off his forehead in the old gesture of frustration. “Dana, when I said I’d had bad luck with roommates, I meant—well, my last roommate was actually a girlfriend. Ex, now.” He shook his head, his hands on his knees. “It turned out she was just using me for my industry contacts. It totally destroyed my sense of trust.”
I sat, stony-faced, and waited for him to finish.
He gave me a look of earnest appeal. “I know I’m sending mixed signals here. But I’m just not ready to make any new commitments yet. Do you know what I mean?”
I stood up. “I’d better go.”
He looked surprised.
As I spoke, I hunted around for my heels. “If you’re expecting me to sit here and listen to you talk about your girl problems yet again—I just can’t do it anymore.” I laughed. “God, how many times have I listened to you bitching about some skinny blonde who didn’t treat you right? Poor Jason. Poor, poor Jason.” The blood was rising to my face. Where had I kicked them off? “And to think, I was worried that maybe you only wanted me to move in because I’m an asset. Now that I’m more successful than you and all.”
His expression changed into one of angry protest, but I stopped him before he could get a word out.
“But no, it’s not even that crass. I was flattering myself. You’re just on the rebound. Again. And you want someone to listen to you and pet your head and pick up your mess. Well, I don’t care if this bitch used you or cheated on you or what.” Thinking of what my mom had said about Jason, I threw my shoulders back. “I don’t pick up other people’s messes anymore.”
“Dana—” He put a hand out toward me and I flinched away.
“Destroyed your sense of trust,” I sneered. “That, by the way, is bullshit. If you don’t trust me by now, you’re never going to.”
“Hang on a minute. Who doesn’t trust who?” He stood up too, and I moved around so that the sofa was between us. “You haven’t even told me why you’re here. You’re obviously sitting on something huge. You’ve been carrying it around like it’s a state secret or something. Your phone is blowing up—it can’t all be agent calls and Cynthia Omari or you’d be returning them. You’re pretty keen to hide who it is, aren’t you?” I looked away. “So what are you doing here? Showing up out of the blue, without even returning my text—holding hands, cozying up, crashing in my spare room.” His indignation was swelling. “For all I know, that’s your boyfriend trying to get hold of you.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I snapped, finally spotting my shoes under the kitchen table and leaning down to grab them.
“An ex, then?” He stepped in front of the door, perhaps unconsciously. “
Or someone else you’re not going to tell me about?”
“Maybe it’s none of your business.” Since he was blocking the door, I wheeled and stormed down the hall to my old room. My gym bag was lying open on the mattress, and I grabbed my jeans off the floor, where I’d dropped them when I’d changed hastily earlier in the evening, and threw them into it.
“This is exactly what I mean,” he said, following me. “This. All this time we’ve known each other, you’ve never opened up to me.” He took a few steps toward me, and I stood up, shouldering the gym bag. “Am I supposed to leap into a relationship with someone who won’t ever talk to me about what’s eating her?”
“What’s eating me—” I pushed past him and headed down the hall, Jason right on my heels.
“Let’s start with that meeting today. It didn’t go well. Will I ever know what happened?”
“You could start by asking.”
“And have you walk out, like you’re about to do right now.”
“Damn straight I am,” I said, marching toward the door, grabbing my purse on the way. I stopped and turned around with my hand on the doorknob. “Since we’re telling the truth here,” I said, “don’t pretend you’ve ever wanted to know how I feel, Jason. You’ve done your best to avoid it the whole time we’ve known each other. If you ever asked—and I told you—then you’d have to admit—”
I choked, thinking of all those afternoons hanging out with Jason, how I’d tried to shove my feelings down, pretend them away. The clueless, clumsy teenager I’d been, spending the night over at a boy’s house, hoping one day he’d see me as more than a friend. And instead of the teen-movie ending I’d been waiting for, the kiss and the corsage and the cool soundtrack, I’d been violated so deeply that I couldn’t have put it into words for anyone, even if I’d wanted to. That. That was what having your trust in the world destroyed looked like.
But he was still standing there, playing dumb. He was going to make me say it.
“You knew how I felt,” I said. “And you used me anyway, all those years. You used me for an ego boost whenever your ass got dumped. And you used me for my talent when you couldn’t get anywhere on your own.” He looked as if I’d slapped his face, but I kept talking. “I’m not going to play this game anymore. It’s an insult to us both. I’m done with it.”
I let the door slam behind me.
The phone inside my gym bag in the passenger seat buzzed nonstop the whole drive to Days Inn. I wished like hell it was Jason calling to apologize and beg me to come back, but I knew without looking who it was. As soon as I got to my room, I threw the bag on the bed, and the phone tumbled out onto the paisley bedspread, quivering and flashing the word Unknown.
Something in me snapped. I picked it up, pushed the talk icon, and screamed, “Leave me alone!” at the top of my lungs. Then I powered the phone off and threw it across the room. It bounced on the baseboard and disappeared under the bed.
I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed, exhausted. Thank God for motels, with their miniature plastic-wrapped toiletries, anonymous and disposable. I unwrapped a bar of soap the size of a Saltine, massaged it to a lackluster lather, and smoothed the suds over my skin. Splashing cold water on my face with one hand, I groped blindly for a towel with the other. Just as I found it and buried my face in it, a burst of noise started up in the bedroom, a high-pitched electronic gargling that made me drop the hand towel into the wet sink.
The motel phone was ringing.
As I came out of the bathroom, the first ring ended. After an abnormally long pause, the next shrill scream came, accompanied by a blinking red light on the phone base. I walked slowly toward the nightstand, hoping against hope it would stop its shrieking by the time I got there. I sat on the side of the bed and listened to it ring three more times before putting out my hand and lifting the cheap plastic receiver to my ear, straining at the short and tangled cord.
“Hello?”
“Dana,” said Amanda. “Just listen to me.”
I slammed the phone down. I tried to unplug it, but there was a sturdy plastic casing around the connection to the phone, and the other end was unreachable under the bed. The buttons under the number pad were smooth pitted black, their icons worn off, and I jabbed them all at random, hoping one of them was a do-not-disturb button.
Instead I got the front desk. “Please don’t let anyone call my room,” I pleaded, almost in tears, but the hotel clerk answered me in a voice rendered nearly indecipherable by the connection, and I eventually hung up, uncertain whether he had understood me or not.
Without getting undressed, I turned out the light and lay back in bed, crying in frustration, waiting and waiting for the phone to ring again. Then I fell asleep.
15
Scratch. Scratch.
I opened my eyes. The noise was coming from the door. At the crack along the bottom, a faint bleed of light ended abruptly in shadow.
Scratch.
The bed moaned as I lurched upright, and the scratching stopped. The shadow moved to one side and paused there.
The bedside clock said 3:05. My heart hammered. I lay back down as quietly as possible.
She was here. She must have seen me check in to the motel yesterday, called my room last night to confirm the number. And now she was trying to get in.
In the silence, my breathing seemed unnaturally loud. I lay rigid, trying to keep the bedsprings from crying out again, and pictured her staring at the door from the other side, waiting. We stayed like that for an eternity. The silence lasted so long, I felt my mind drifting back toward sleep and had to fight to keep my eyes open. Time seemed to slow and swell, stretching itself into a dark elastic rope between us. Amanda would never let me go. She couldn’t, because the darkness that tethered us to each other came from inside me. She would go only when it was gone. And I couldn’t get rid of it without her.
There was a soft knock.
As if sleepwalking, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and then eased my feet to the floor. The shadow was still there. I slid my feet over the worn carpet, one after the other.
Another knock, this one a little louder.
“Dana? Are you awake?” The low, familiar voice ran through me like a slug of bourbon, turning everything it touched warm and tingly. I ran to cross the remaining distance, flipped the deadbolt, turned the handle, and yanked the door open to see Jason, sallow in the yellowish motel lights, fidgeting from side to side awkwardly, his face twisted into a pained grimace. I burst into tears.
“Oh God, I scared you. I’m so sorry.” He looked at my face, flushed from crying, and then looked down. “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
My heart was still hammering. “How did you find me?”
He held up a plastic hotel pen. “You left this in my house. I found your car in the lot and got your room number from the parking spot.” In his other hand, he showed me a piece of paper ripped from a spiral notebook, a few words scribbled near the top. “I swear I was just going to leave a note on your door, but—I couldn’t think of what to say.” He crumpled up the note and stuffed it and the pen into his pocket. “So now that I woke you up like a complete idiot, do you think we could talk for a minute?”
I hesitated, still wiping my eyes. Then I stepped back and let him cross the threshold. “I’m not getting back to sleep any time soon anyway.”
“I know. My timing sucks.” He stalked over toward the bed as I closed the door behind him. I took my seat at the table by the window and watched him pace. “I wish I could be like you, Dana.”
“Short, stacked, and Latina? Not going to happen.”
“That’s fine, keep joking. I don’t have any right to ask you to be straight with me. I haven’t earned it. But I’m going to be straight with you.” He took a deep breath. “What I meant is—you’ve always held it together. You don’t let stuff drag you down, make you feel—wrong inside.” He frowned, searching for words. “It’s intimidating. You don’t need peop
le like I do.”
“That’s such a line, Jason.” I thumped my fingers impatiently on the side of my chair. “That’s what you tell yourself, but it’s total crap. You know it is.”
He whirled to face me. “Remember after graduation? We had all these big plans. Get out of Amarillo, head to Austin. Face the world together.”
“Yeah, and you went right ahead and did all that. Without me.”
“Not for long.” He started pacing again. “I couldn’t hack it on my own. Besides, you’re the one who changed the plan, Dana. You always do.”
“What can I say, the glamour of the Sears returns desk was too much to resist.”
“Oh, cut the pity-me crap,” he snapped. “You changed on me senior year, and I never knew why. You stopped laughing at my jokes. You didn’t care about college anymore. I thought you wanted space.” He sighed. “I didn’t know what else to think.”
So he had noticed something after all. “You think I didn’t want to go conquer the world with you? I was going through something, Jason. I needed you more than ever.” Looking back on that time, I couldn’t remember what I’d needed, only a hazy numbness, but I pressed on. “And you left.”
“Yeah, and I was miserable on my own. Why do you think I talked you into following me?” He seemed suddenly tired. “The same reason I talked you into coming out here—and I’ve been trying to do it again ever since you showed up at my door.” He gave me the look that killed me every time, his dark eyebrows furrowed, his hair swinging forward. “I’m no good without you, Dana.”
To cover the twinge it gave me, I looked away and sighed theatrically. “That’s all very touching, Jason,” I said. “But from where I stand, it seems like you’ve been doing fine. Getting jobs, palling around with Aaron Neely, dating actresses—”
At the mention of his love life, he scowled furiously, some fight obviously left in him. “You don’t get to bring that up. That relationship almost killed me. I lost who I was.”