One Last Time: A Second Chance Romance

by Roxie Noir

  And worst of all, I can’t stop thinking about the very good advice that I heard coming out of my mouth: do you like him more, or do you like being angry more?

  I finally fall asleep, only to jerk awake, my mind still spinning like it’s a flywheel set in motion. Fall asleep, jerk awake.

  I wonder if I actually learned anything from my shitshow of a marriage and divorce. Asleep. Awake. I wonder if I’m mad at Seth for any reason except that he’s mad at me because I’m mad at him because he’s mad at me, and maybe we’ve been digging this hole deeper for years and there’s nothing at the bottom of it.

  Asleep, awake. How dare he think I want a boyfriend who talks about golf. Asleep, awake. I’m not enough. I can’t be enough. Statistics and probability and mathematics all say that I won’t ever be enough.

  Asleep, awake. But the past mattered. It always mattered. There’s no erasing it, no sweeping it under the rug, no acting as if everything came before didn’t decide today.

  Asleep.

  Awake, and it’s morning. We didn’t close the curtains last night and sunlight is streaming into the bedroom. Over on the couch I hear Ava make an awake noise.

  I had an idea during one of my asleep / awake cycles last night, and it’s come back to me.

  “Hey,” I say, still facing the ceiling. “Are you any good at crafting?”

  Ava sighs a long-suffering sigh. Rolls over. Waits for me to look at her.

  “Bitch, I was in a sorority,” she says.

  I burst out laughing.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Seth

  I’m lying on my couch, nearly to level 1,568 in Candy Crush, when there’s a knock on my door.

  “No,” I mutter to myself, and swap some more jelly beans.

  The knock sounds again, louder this time. That means it’s almost certainly a sibling.

  Not that there was any doubt. Most other people in my life have the decency to call or text first.

  “I’m the first one here?” Eli asks when I open the door.

  I stand in the doorway, not inviting him in.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’m the first one here,” he says, giving me a taunting, delighted grin I don’t really like. “You should probably get dressed.”

  I’m in an old Loveless Brewing t-shirt and plaid pajama pants, because five minutes ago, I was playing phone games on my couch, but I step back and let him in anyway.

  “I’m fine,” I tell him.

  “Of course you are,” he says, taking off his coat and hanging it up. “That’s why you texted me at one o’clock this morning asking if there’s a meaningful difference between heavy cream and whipping cream.”

  “It’s an important question.”

  He walks into my kitchen and leans against the island, eyeing a plateful of cookies.

  “You’re going to be the leading cause of obesity among Loveless Brewing employees,” he says.

  “Those are tahini,” I say, nodding at the plate.

  “Ooh,” he says, grabs one, takes a bite. Considers. “Odd, but pretty good.”

  Next is Daniel, who knocks but doesn’t wait for a response before trying the door and finding it unlocked. It occurs to me that all four of them have keys to my place, so I should probably be grateful that Eli didn’t just waltz in.

  He joins us at the island. Eli points out a small white spot on the back of one shoulder, so Daniel gets a wash cloth and dabs at it.

  “You sure you don’t want kids?” he asks Eli sarcastically. “Once they stop spitting up, they start teething.”

  “I’m the world’s happiest uncle,” Eli says, taking another cookie.

  “I don’t need an intervention,” I say, knowing full well that resistance is futile. “This has happened before. It happens all the time, I just need —”

  “You scheduled a phone interview with a brewery in Kansas,” Daniel interrupts, putting down the washcloth and taking a cookie. “Weird. What are these?”

  “Tahini,” Eli says. “It’s the same stuff that makes hummus taste like hummus.”

  “I like it.”

  “Were you going through my emails?” I ask, leaning on the island and pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “Do I have to start locking my —”

  “You added it to your work calendar, dipshit,” Daniel says, genially. “The one you shared with me at least five years ago?”

  “You look at that?”

  Daniel doesn’t dignify that questions with a response, just gives me a look.

  When Caleb arrives, he’s got a duffel bag with him and doesn’t even knock.

  “Hey,” he says, walking over. “Mind if I put this upstairs?”

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  He grabs a cookie and eats it as he walks away, toward the stairs.

  “These are good,” he calls as he climbs. “What’s in them?”

  “Hummus,” answers Daniel.

  “Tahini, which is also used to flavor hummus,” corrects Eli.

  When Levi gets there, he knocks. Eli shouts for him to come in.

  “You all ready?” he asks, coming over to the table. He’s got on a black wool coat, not his usual Carhartt work coat, which means something is really up.

  “Let’s go,” says Daniel, brushing his hands off.

  “Should we drive together?” Levi asks.

  “Drive where?” I ask.

  “You shouldn’t wear that,” Caleb says, apparently noticing my pajamas for the first time.

  “Why?”

  “Different pants, at least,” opines Levi. “Can I have one of these? They look good.”

  I give up. I’m not going to win a battle of wills with all four of them, and besides, lying on my couch and playing dumb phone games while trying not to think about my ex isn’t that great of a night either.

  “Go for it,” I say, and walk for the stairs.

  “Weird but good, right?” Daniel confirms.

  “What’s in them?”

  “Tahini,” I call, climbing. “Which is the thing that makes hummus taste like hummus, they’re not hummus cookies.”

  “I know what tahini is,” Levi calls back.

  Apparently, being the sad-sack guest of honor means I get to ride shotgun. Eli drives, since it’s his car, which leaves Levi, Caleb, and Daniel in the backseat. None of them look thrilled about it, but it seemed easier to take one car.

  When we park, I sit there for a moment, just looking at the sign. Last time I was here, it was cracked, peeling, and in an ugly faux-western font. These days it’s surprisingly classy: WHISKEY BARREL in a nice serif, lit from below.

  “You know I’m banned for life from this place, right?” I ask.

  Everyone but me opens their car door.

  “That was eight years ago,” Levi says, extracting himself. “And they never did strike me as the sort of establishment that kept careful records.”

  He’s right, of course. The inside of the Whiskey Barrel is also new, and now it’s the trendy kind of divey, instead of the divey kind of divey. The neon beer signs are gone, the carpet replaced with wood, the barstools faux-industrial instead of from the 1980s. There’s a craft beer selection, including our very own Southern Lights IPA on tap. I get something else.

  I keep waiting for the familiarity to strike me, but it doesn’t. I’ve thought about that night a hundred times, maybe a thousand, but right now I’m back in the place where it happened and it just seems far away.

  “It’s different in here,” I tell Levi, looking around as we walk to the pool tables in the back.

  “Interesting,” he says. “I guess things change.”

  It’s busy, but not crazy. We get a pool table with no problem. Eli immediately organizes some sort of tournament, the structure of which I don’t bother to follow, and informs Daniel and Levi that they’ll be playing each other while he, Caleb, and I drink beers and watch.

  “How’s Thalia?” I ask, since I haven’t yet today.

 
; “Good,” he says, and smiles like he can’t help it. “I mean, she’s going a little crazy, finishing her thesis and waiting to hear back from graduate programs, but she’s good.”

  I still find it strange that he’s dating someone still in college, but I keep my mouth shut.

  “And you?”

  “I’m actually okay,” he says, taking a sip of beer, then putting it down on the table. “I’m getting a couple of recruiting calls a day from people who want to pay me way more than academia ever did.”

  “Cyber security stuff?” Eli asks.

  “Some of it,” Caleb says. “Apparently there’s more demand for mathematicians than just teaching other people how to be mathematicians.”

  “So you’re really okay?” I ask, and he laughs.

  “I really am,” he says. “I mean, I don’t have a job yet, and it won’t be the same, but my life didn’t implode the way I was afraid it might.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I jumped and didn’t know where I would land,” he admits, watching Daniel miss a shot by about six inches. “There were times when I was afraid I gave up too much, but now that I’m on the other side it feels kind of good. Whatever happens, it was the right thing.”

  We all drink. Levi lines up a shot, takes it. Balls click together, but from his frown, I suspect that whatever he was hoping for didn’t happen.

  “Relationships always have an element of diving into the unknown and praying for the best,” Caleb says, and gives me a look. It’s pretty similar to the look Levi gave me ten minutes ago. Almost as if they’re related or something.

  I’m tempted to tell him that I know what happens. The same thing always happens and I wind up here, drinking with my brothers, wishing it hadn’t.

  Except the bar’s changed. My brothers have changed. Daniel’s got two kids. Eli’s happily married to his old nemesis, Levi’s engaged to his best friend’s sister, and even Caleb has a girlfriend. It’s me who’s still stuck, holding onto old hurts like they’re a lifeline.

  I’m not going to look over and see her with another man, his ring on her finger. That was a different bar, a different Delilah, a different time.

  It’s a strange, slow shock when I realize the last thing: that was a different me.

  Pool balls click. Daniel whoops and Levi laughs. Eli makes some sort of notation, and then grabs my shoulder.

  “You,” he says, and points at the pool table.

  We play. I don’t excel and I don’t embarrass myself, but I’m glad to have something to do with my hands, something to think about besides how time moves and we bend to it. Besides how the past echoes through everything but doesn’t have to shape it.

  “Seth,” Eli says. I’m bending over the table, trying to line up a complicated shot that’s almost certainly going to fail.

  “Eli,” I say back. I wonder if I need more of that blue chalk stuff. It always helps, right?

  “She your soulmate?”

  I take a deep breath, ignore his attempt at a psych-out, and take the shot. It doesn’t work the way it did in my head.

  “What kind of question is that?” I ask. I gesture at the table, waiting for him to take his turn.

  He doesn’t. He leans against it, the end of his pool cue on the floor, and spins it between his fingers.

  “A yes-or-no one,” he says.

  “Fine. Yes,” I say, mimicking his stance.

  Eli grins.

  “I lied. It was a trick question,” he says. “There’s no such thing as soulmates.”

  “Then why —”

  “I wanted to see what you’d say,” he says. “Because if you said no, then fuck it, have another beer and forget the whole thing. But you’ve got a whole different problem.”

  I just wait. Eli’s clearly winding himself up to something, and it can be best not to get in his way.

  “There’s no such thing as soulmates,” he repeats. “And that means nothing is going to save you. Not fate, not true love, not your destiny being written in the stars or some nebulous concept of she’s the one. The only thing that matters is whether you want to be with her enough to work for it.”

  He grabs his beer from a side table and drinks, watching me.

  “So romantic,” I finally say.

  “Effort is romantic,” he says. “Putting in the work is romantic. Talking through it is fucking romantic, Seth.”

  “Take your turn,” I say.

  Eli shrugs, puts his beer down, and plays pool.

  He kicks my ass. I have another beer, and keep looking over at the spot where she was sitting all those years ago.

  Only I can’t remember where, exactly, she was. I can’t remember what it looked like when I first saw her, whether she was standing or sitting. The tables have changed, the layout has changed, the decor has changed.

  I want to be angry, but I can’t even remember how. All I can do is wish she were here.

  “Okay,” I say, coming up to Levi and Caleb at a table.

  They halt their conversation — probably about trees or tents or advanced degrees, I don’t know — and look at me.

  “I need your help,” I tell them.

  “Sure,” Caleb says.

  “Building something.”

  “What do you need built?” Levi asks.

  I tell them.

  They look at each other. Levi frowns. Caleb shrugs.

  “It’s not a good idea,” Levi says. “It’s pretty irresponsible.”

  “You agreed to build a nine-year-old a trebuchet,” I point out.

  “I’ll do it,” Caleb says. “It’ll be fun.”

  Levi sighs. He takes another drink of his beer.

  “All right, I’m in,” he says.

  Chapter Fifty

  Delilah

  “This feels kind of cutesy,” I say, examining a sticker pack that says Way to go! In big pink letters.

  “Then don’t use that sticker,” Ava explains, patiently.

  “You never know, he might like it,” Lainey points out.

  I look down at what I’ve got in my cart: an overpriced, flat-bound journal with a classy black cover, glue, corner stickers, watercolor pens, washi tape, decorative paper, and a multipack of glitter.

  The glitter was Ava’s doing. She seems to think I’m going to need it at some point, and frankly, I don’t know that she’s wrong. Glitter’s a pain in the ass, but I like it.

  She looks into my cart skeptically.

  “This doesn’t feel like enough stuff,” she says, matter-of-factly. “You’re sure you don’t also want to decorate some water bottles? Or make some t-shirts? Ooh, or friendship bracelets? I haven’t tried those for years but I remember them being really fun.”

  “This isn’t for spirit night at the sorority,” I say. “This is…”

  I stop, because I still haven’t fully explained to myself what I’m doing. It’s a craft? An apology? A you were right about some things? A you mattered all along?

  “It’s a gift,” Lainey says, simply. “And the recipient isn’t really into friendship bracelets.”

  “I mean, I’ve never asked,” I point out.

  “I feel okay making that assumption,” she says.

  “Okay, but at least get puffy paint,” Ava says. “Just a little? How can you come here and not get puffy paint?”

  I make a face, and Ava just laughs.

  “Joke,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’m not ten. C’mon, let’s go make this dignified scrapbook for your man.”

  When I bring the box out, Lainey and Ava are sitting at my kitchen table, waiting. All the crafting supplies are there, neatly organized on one side. Lainey laughs at something that Ava said, and Ava gives a wicked little grin.

  “All right,” she says, standing up when I put the box down on the table. “Do you want to give me a run down of what I’m looking for, or should we just dive in and see what we can find? How are we grouping things? Chronologically, or thematically, or do you want to do some sort of chromatic organiz
ation? I know you’re an artist.”

  Apparently my little sister has turned from Ava, sweet baby angel to Ava, sorority social chair. I’m starting to see how she climbed as high as she did.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not even totally sure what’s in here, I never really went through it, I just put more stuff in sometimes and then shoved it into the back of my closet.”

  “We could see what’s in here and then decide,” Lainey suggests.

  Ava nods, once. It’s very official. I have the urge to offer her rubber gloves, just to watch her snap them on and get to work.

  The first thing out is a Loveless Brewing cardboard coaster, pilfered from Fall Fest two years ago. Then, hotel key cards. A bottle of hotel shampoo. (“You definitely can’t scrapbook that,” offers Ava.) Notepads. Printed directions. A receipt, the various odds and ends of our non-relationship that punctuated my regular life. The bright spots I kept going back to, even when I thought I shouldn’t.

  There’s a cocktail napkin from the Harrisonburg Marriott, and underneath that, the photos. Down here it’s all jumbled together, a whole slew of stuff that I threw in this box all at once. Us in a formal prom photo, my fluffy purple dress so big it’s almost out of frame. Candids of us at my house, at his house, doing cute young couple stuff. Selfies from when I visited him at college.

  Gifts: cards, a necklace, a bracelet. One of those bobbing-head drinking birds that he gave me once. Ticket stubs from movies we saw together, the ink barely legible. Letters he wrote me while we were apart, tchotchkes, all the flotsam and jetsam of a relationship.

  There’s so, so much. There’s more than I remembered, but somehow, I know every single thing. I remember the necklace with the star on it, the eighteenth birthday card signed Love, Seth, the ticket stubs from when we went to see Avatar together and the 3D glasses gave him a headache.