Jilted

by Lilah Suzanne

  “I did not pack a summer wardrobe; it gets hot too soon here.”

  “Feel free to leave,” Carter replies, reflexively grouchy. They’re supposed to be better than this now. “Sorry, no. It is hot.” Still, how long does she plan on crashing with him? Doesn’t she have friends and a life to get back to? At some point soon this thing with Eli will have run its course, as her relationships always do.

  Paige complains about the heat again, then about Carter having no air-conditioning as well as no refrigerator, and then leans against the counter next to him. “Whatcha up to?”

  He angles the screen of his laptop. “Applying for a job,” he says, then clarifies, “A job is a place where money comes from. You should try it.” His boss at his old firm put him in touch with a similar firm in New Orleans. He hopes they have an opening, as he really needs the cash flow if he’s ever going to get this house into shape.

  Paige kicks the back of Carter’s knee so his leg buckles. “So hilarious,” she says, deadpan, then waves a hand to indicate the house. “I thought you were doing this for a job.”

  Carter frowns. “No, this is just for fun, I guess.”

  “Hmm,” Paige says. “If you say so. And actually, I have plans. Big plans.”

  Carter makes a vague noise of quasi-interest and hunches over to finish polishing his résumé and cover letter. A minute ago, this job seemed like a great idea. It pays well; he already knows how to do it; it has a pretty solid dental plan. His fingers hover over the keyboard. Suddenly, full coverage for crowns and root canals doesn’t seem quite as appealing.

  “Carter! Don’t you want to know my plans?” Paige pinches his elbow.

  “Ow. Okay.”

  “Yay!” She claps her hands, pushes up from the counter, and then holds her palms up flat next to her face as if framing it. “Picture it: Paige T. Jacob, Artist Agent.” She moves her hands, framing her face from different angles with eyes and smile wide as she poses.

  “Huh,” Carter says.

  Paige’s hands drop. “That’s it? ‘Huh.’ Come on, Carter. Be happy for me.”

  Carter huffs in exasperation and closes his laptop. He’s clearly not going to finish this job application today, now that the morning has become all about Paige. “I don’t know,” Carter says. “What do you even know about art? You represented pharmaceuticals. It’s not exactly the same thing.” He’s not trying to be harsh, but a better use of her skills would be to find another drug company that’s hiring. There have been too many flights of fancy around here lately.

  “Okay, first of all.” Paige holds up one finger. “I can sell anything to anyone because I’m that good. Two.” A second finger snaps up to join the first. “I have excellent taste and I know retail. And tres, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Eli and Link and their artist friends, and they’re all so talented but, like, they have no idea how to sell themselves. Eli is lucky and he hustles, working himself to the ground to get the reputation around town that he has, but it shouldn’t be like that.” She shrugs; a little of her righteous anger fizzles out. “I think I could really help and I think I’d be really good at it. And I want to do it here. In New Orleans.”

  “Okay,” Carter says, trying to be supportive. She will probably be good at it, now that he thinks about it, but, “How can you afford to start a business?”

  “I took out a loan.” She toys with her hair and avoids eye contact.

  “You took out a loan,” Carter repeats. “With your credit?”

  “Okay, fine. Dad gave me a loan.”

  “Wow.” Carter is genuinely impressed. Their father is absurdly tightfisted; Paige really can sell anything.

  “And don’t worry, I’ll find my own place.” Paige says, patting his shoulder. “I don’t want to camp out in your sad house any more than you want me here. Eli thinks I’ll like the part of town where he lives. Little more modern, you know. We’re pretty excited about all of this.”

  Carter smiles. He’s actually proud of Paige these days. She’s still herself, irritatingly so, but she’s grown. “So you and Eli are a ‘we,’ huh? Or are we still talking about the royal we?”

  “Shut up,” Paige says with a laugh. She shoves him so hard he crashes into the counter. Somewhere around age thirteen, Carter grew taller than her, but it’s never hampered her ability to kick his ass. “And what about you and Link?” she demands. “Are you a we? You never answered me.”

  Carter rights himself, rubbing at his waist where it collided with the counter’s edge. “I don’t know what we’re doing,” he answers honestly. “We’ve done everything out of order, and it’s confusing. And to make it more complicated, look what Matthew sent me last night.”

  He pulls his phone from his pocket and opens his messages to a picture of the two of them, him and Matthew, posing on a beach at St. Barts, happy and tan and arm in arm. Paige peers closely at the picture, then recoils in horror.

  “Carter, that bathing suit is so small! My eyes!”

  Carter snatches his phone back. “Forget about the bathing suit.”

  “I wish I could,” Paige says, pained.

  “Just.” Carter sighs. “Why do you think he sent me a picture of us? It means he was thinking about me, right? So, what? He wants to get back together?” Carter doesn’t want that. But then, he didn’t delete the picture right away, either.

  “Who cares.” Paige says, taking the phone and deleting the picture for him. “You forget about Matthew, and I’ll forget the horror of seeing you in a bikini bottom.” She shudders. “Now, I have some artists to agent.”

  She heads out of the door as Carter calls, “It was not a bikini bottom, it was a European swim trunk!” He looked fine. Still, he’s glad she deleted it. Carter didn’t even want to go to St. Barts, to some all-inclusive resort for couples only. He had fun; he isn’t immune to tropical decadence and free-flowing drinks; but the entire thing felt false, decadence for the sake of decadence and forced romance around every corner. Of course, he knows now why it felt so fake.

  Why didn’t he delete the picture?

  An electric sander sits in the corner, waiting for Carter to smooth years of nicks and scratches and worn footpaths from the floors. He goes for a walk instead. The sky is cloudless, the sun relentless. By the time Carter makes it through the neighborhood, past the trolley line, and into the small park where he likes to work sometimes, his shirt is soaked with sweat. This must be why Link’s summer wardrobe favors tank tops and shirts that slink off their shoulders and are cut off at their ribs. Carter sits on a bench by the lake and fans his shirt away from his damp, sticky torso. Thinking about Link’s wardrobe and its lack of coverage isn’t helping cool him off.

  The art museum sits, elegant and gleaming white, on a hill next to the park. Carter goes in today for the first time, into the blessedly cool grand hallway. The interior and exterior are done entirely in a Neoclassical style, in the Beaux-Arts tradition seen in countless government buildings and museums across the country. Carter has always found the style beautiful—with all its symmetrical arches and columns, dramatically vaulted ceilings, grandiose balconies, sweeping stairways, and polished white marble—if a bit cold and rigid, and needlessly showy.

  He wishes Link were here so he could tell them about the connection between Beaux-Arts architecture and American colonialism, and Link could explain what he’s supposed to be seeing, or not seeing, in the artwork. Carter strolls past the Renaissance art, the historical wing, then moves through more modern collections. His footsteps are silent on the carpet, and he feels out of place and out of time as he takes in pieces he seems to understand less and less.

  Carter stops at a painting with blobs and splatters of color, tilts his head, squints one eye. He holds his hands up in a frame as Paige did to her own face, then drops them when it doesn’t help to clarify anything. Carter wants it to be something, the painting. He likes when things make sen
se. It isn’t supposed to be anything in particular, Link said, and perhaps that’s Carter’s entire problem. He’s trying to make sense of everything instead of letting it be.

  Twenty-seven

  The hot, humid weather continues to get hotter and more humid, and the progress on Carter’s house continues to be painstakingly slow. He gets a job offer from the local firm he applied to, and Paige nets enough clients to move out. Her stuff arrives from Aurora on a moving truck in the afternoon of a day that hits ninety-nine degrees. Carter and Eli and Eli’s very tall and very muscular friend Malcolm haul furniture and boxes up four flights of stairs.

  “Just put that in the corner,” Paige says from the galley kitchen, arranging dishes in the white cabinets she insisted were a must-have. Carter puts a heavy side table in the corner; his back aches and his arms are weak from so much strain.

  “The other corner,” Paige calls. Carter grits his teeth and moves it to the other back corner. “No. Carter. The other corner, by the couch. Come on, use that brain of yours.”

  Eli puts a box on the dining room table and gives Paige one of those couple-looks that communicates something they’ve clearly discussed at length.

  Paige dramatically rolls her eyes. “I mean, that corner is fine. I’ll move it later. Thank you for helping, Carter. You can go if you want.” She looks at Eli, who nods happily, then adds, “I know you were super busy buffing that one spot on your living room floor that you’ve been buffing for two weeks.”

  “Sanding,” Carter replies, pushing the table tightly into the wrong corner, then setting a heavy box of books on top. He’d like to see her move that. “I’m not buffing it; I’m sanding it. Buffing merely removes the top layer of polyurethane sealant for surface damage issues. Sanding is for deeper wood damage; it is more extensive and takes longer.”

  Paige gestures with a frustrated chop of her hand from Carter to Eli. “See?” she says. Eli shakes his head in dismay, but Carter isn’t sure which one of them it’s directed at.

  Malcolm brings up the last boxes, and he and Eli and Carter sit on still-askew furniture with bottles of water as Paige buzzes around, rearranging and unpacking. “Place is nice,” Malcolm says. He’s an artist, too. Watercolor, he said.

  The place is a standard-looking apartment, not unlike Paige’s standard-looking apartment back in Aurora. It’s nicer, though: newer, bigger, with updated appliances and a garden tub, and a saltwater pool in the courtyard. Somehow, Paige followed him to a place she’d never been with no plans and no prospects and accidentally became a better version of herself. Meanwhile, Carter has been buffing the same ten-square-foot patch of floor for weeks. Sanding.

  “What’s Link up to today?” Carter asks, aiming for casual as he presses the cool bottle to his neck. He and Link have seen each other socially, at gatherings to watch sports, group get-togethers at bars, and that one chain burger restaurant where everyone seems to end up. Carter stays on the periphery, and Link stays busy, talking to everyone, everyone except for Carter as Link has been keeping a careful distance. Carter could almost measure the exponentially greater space between them every time he and Link cross paths.

  “Still working on that big piece,” Eli says with a shrug.

  Malcolm is sitting on Paige’s yellow sunflower settee. It’s fascinating to think of someone that hulking working on an art form as delicate as watercolor painting. “Wait, I thought that was done,” Malcolm says. “The snake thing, right?”

  Eli turns with an eyebrow raised. “Not quite,” he says, terse.

  Malcolm’s dark eyes cut over to Carter. “Ohh… right, right. My bad.”

  Carter removes the water bottle from his neck and stares at the water inside. So he wasn’t imagining it. Link really doesn’t want to see him. But hasn’t he been respectful of Link’s boundaries? Hasn’t he taken things slow, the way Link wanted? He’s made peace with their relationship being suspended in ambiguity. Hasn’t he?

  Paige comes bustling in. “I need two of you to help me move the bed. I changed my mind; I want the headboard in front of the windows.”

  Carter stands. “I really should go back to sanding, so.” He drops the water bottle in the recycling bin that’s now tucked neatly away in the kitchen, and moves the box of books off the table, then moves the table next to the couch. In one afternoon, Paige’s new home will be mostly settled. Carter hasn’t felt at home in nearly half a year.

  “Hey, Carter, wait.”

  Carter grimaces at the threshold of the open door. He’s tired and hot and completely out of patience for her bossiness. “What.”

  “Okay, wow.” Paige holds her hands up in defense. “Surly today.” She gives him a card that’s painted blue and decorated with hand-drawn sketches of yellow fireworks surrounding a red sun. On the back in block letters is the who what where when of a party invitation. “We’re having a housewarming slash celebrating my new career slash summer solstice party at the warehouse. You should come.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he says, intentionally noncommittal. He doesn’t want to be here; he doesn’t want to go to a party; he just wants to be miserable alone. He starts to leave again. Paige stops him by slamming the door in front of his face. Carter sighs. “Paige, I need a shower and some ibuprofen. I can’t think about a party right now.”

  Paige’s face softens. “Please, Carter?” She even touches his arm. “None of this would have happened without you. I want you there to celebrate too. And some of my friends are coming from Aurora. Meredith will be there. She still likes you for some reason. Come on.”

  Carter almost agrees just so he can leave, and Paige will stop being so unsettlingly nice to him. Almost. “I dunno…”

  “There will be so much alcohol, I promise.”

  “Okay,” Carter says, finally making his escape and stepping into the breezeway. “But I’ll be in a bad mood the whole time. and you can’t stop me.”

  Paige says, “I wouldn’t expect anything less,” before the door clicks closed with a settled finality.

  Then all Carter has left is his house. And all his house has is its good bones: the solid, sturdy construction that still waits to be something new. He sits in the dark on his sleeping bag, sweaty and irritable, well into the evening. He’s alone. It’s not a relief, yet it’s not as terrifying as he’d feared. It’s just, well, lonely. Is this what Eli was talking about? Does it get worse or better from here? He wants to talk to Link about nothing and everything, wants to know what he did wrong. But when he thumbs open his contacts, he pulls up Matthew’s name and scrolls to the message he never answered about the picture Paige deleted.

  That was fun, Carter replies to the text about their luxury beach resort vacation. It’s not even true, really. At least Matthew is trying. A reply comes immediately.

  How are you?

  He’s never been so lost in his entire life.

  I’m fine, he texts back. It’s also a lie, but a familiar one. In that way, it’s comforting.

  I wish I could see you in person, Matthew sends back.

  Carter’s fingers hover over the keyboard. He frowns at the glowing screen. It would be easy enough. It would be close enough to happiness that Carter could stop feeling so alone and adrift and unwanted. He doesn’t need Paige here to tell him that Matthew only wants him because he’s lonely too.

  At least they were lonely together.

  Carter shuts off the phone and tries to sleep in the sweltering upstairs of his perpetually unfinished house.

  Twenty-eight

  As Carter approaches the warehouse for Paige’s party, fire blasts in sprays from behind the roof. It’s not the controlled, steady burn of Link’s soldering tool, but wide, wild arcs flaring across the dark sky. Carter parks across the street beneath the train overpass. The gravel lot around the warehouse is packed with cars, and even from here the rapid beat of drums carries loud and clear, with whoops and laughter joini
ng the sound as he walks closer. Carter balances a flat plastic container in both arms and follows the noise and flashes of light around to the back.

  It’s nearly as raucous as the street party Link took Carter to on his last night in New Orleans, way back in February before they—before he—before. There’s a drum circle and people in costume walking on stilts above the crowd, a cleared area with fire spinners and fire hula-hooping and fire breathers, and a stage where performers are spinning and dancing on silks suspended from rafters. Carter’s pace slows, then stops. It’s both too dark and too bright, too busy, so much going on that he can’t process it all.

  Even on this hot night after a hot day, he endured a hot oven and made cupcakes for the party. He anticipated a gathering of Link and Eli’s usual group of friends that Carter still feels weird around, that they’d all hang out and watch sports and eat snacks, but this? This is a party. Carter blinks down at his container of cupcakes, feeling suddenly very small and very silly. He takes a step back. He wishes he hadn’t made cupcakes. He wishes he hadn’t come. He spots Link, who is rolling a non-flaming hula hoop around one arm as they talk to a few people. Carter goes unnoticed. He takes another step back. Paige crosses in front of Link, hand in hand with Eli, stops to chat, then moves on to talk to someone else. Some of her friends from Aurora are mingling among the artsy crowd in a somehow seamless blend of Paige’s two worlds.

  It’s always been this way with them: Paige fits in, she adapts. Paige swans through life with an ease that has always escaped Carter. That same ease was one of the most appealing things about Matthew, initially. That Carter could attach himself to someone so naturally likable, so he could be too. On his own, Carter isn’t interesting enough, not even with cupcakes. He isn’t charming and popular like Matthew and Paige, he isn’t creative and artistic like Link and Eli and their friends. He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t belong anywhere. Carter turns to leave.

  “Carter! Hi!” It’s Meredith, Paige’s friend who still likes him for some reason.