by Raquel Belle
I got in my car, turned it on, and just sat there. I stared at the empty space in front of me, till the phone rang and Naomi’s name scrolled across the console.
“Hey,” I said.
“Whoa …what’s up? You hungover or something?” she said.
“No, I’m fucking… I’m upset.” I tried to take a calming breath. Breathing hardly ever fucking worked. I needed to punch something.
“What happened?” She asked. “You told Beth?”
“Yeah, I fucking told Beth, and now she’s hurt and wants nothing to do with me,” I said.
“At all?”
“She said she’s not ready to talk yet.”
“Then that’s all she means. She’s not going to break up with you over some cult meeting. Did she care about it that much?”
“She didn’t even mention the meeting or anything. She thinks I don’t trust her and…well, how I told her didn’t do much for the situation.”
“How the fuck did you tell her?” Naomi asked.
“Right after we had sex, and she told me that she loved me too,” I said.
Naomi was silent on the other end of line for what felt like way too long. “Anthony Preston, you really are a stupid son of a bitch,” she finally said in a low voice.
“Yeah, I know, okay? But after she told me she loved me, I just couldn’t hold the shit in anymore. I didn’t want to lie to her, so I came clean and…like I thought, everything got fucked up.”
“But why then? Why not in the morning or the day after that?”
“I’d been drunk earlier and I had a shit ton of caffeine pumping through my veins. My brain wasn’t working right. Maybe I’m just a fucking moron, who the fuck knows? I can’t lose her though. I don’t want to. Beth is…she’s different.”
“This is what you need to do—go to her place or call her. You guys still have to go over the recording, right?”
I sighed. “There’s like an hour left on it, but she has the file.” Beside the car, a bike messenger whizzed by and expertly coasted around a delivery truck. I shook my head and then leaned back. “She might just send it to me instead of agreeing to listen to it together.”
“True,” Naomi said. I knew she was trying to figure out a way to help, bless her. She cleared her throat. “Are you done with your feature?”
“Just about. I need to talk to Jonathan again about what the society means to him, when it was that he joined and why…that sort of thing. Speaking of, I’ve gotta make an appointment with him.” I wiped my hands down my face and sighed, heavily. Maybe I’d just wait until Beth came back and try to talk to her again. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do, so scheduling the Fitzwales interview could wait.
“Keep trying to get in touch with her is all I can say. There’s nothing left to figure out until you get a real gauge of how she feels.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna sit out here until she comes back,” I said.
“Well, you don’t have to stalk her Anthony, nor should you,” Naomi said. I shrugged, knowing she couldn’t see it. But I didn’t want to let Beth disappear from my life and melt into the city, another ex, gone with the season. Beth was supposed to stick, and I needed her to. Naomi sighed. “At least give me permission to say, I told you so when you need to get bailed out of jail.”
I smirked. “Permission granted.” We got off of the phone, and I rolled the windows down and turned off the car, settling in to wait.
***
Beth came back almost two hours later, walking fast towards her building. I quickly rolled up the windows and hopped out of the car.
“Beth!” I called. With one hand on the already-open door, she glanced my way, hesitated, then pulled the door open wide, silently telling me to come in. I hurried into the warm mail hall and quietly followed her to the elevator, unsure if I should start talking first or wait for her to say something.
“I’m mad at you,” she said as the doors slid open. We stepped in alone. Beth pressed the button for her floor, and the elevator cruised upward. I pressed my lips together to keep the burning in my chest at bay. There was so much I wanted to say to try and make it all better, but I knew that if I just dumped all of that on her, she might not be receptive to it. So, I waited.
Beth pushed her straightened hair behind her ear and leaned against the elevator’s back wall. “I’m rewriting my feature,” she said when the elevator stopped on her floor.
“What?” I kept up with her clipped pace down the hall. “Why? Why throw away a perfectly good article that’s basically done?” My heart beat fast and hard in my chest, like I was a kid in trouble, and it just reinforced how much I wanted everything to be good with us again.
“Why do you think, Anthony?” Beth turned sharply on her heel to face me. We stood a foot away from her door. The hallway was quiet, and she kept her voice muted, but the frustration and the hurt were still clear in her tone. “I don’t care that you went to another meeting because Nathan wants you to join. I do care that you kept it from me for so long. How can I believe that you sat on that just because you didn’t want to mess things up between us? I don’t know where we stand anymore, Anthony! The agreement we had was fragile to begin with…”
“It wasn’t fragile, Beth, and I never kept any information from you. What happened at the second meeting stayed out of my feature. I promise.” Beth’s neighbor down the hall stepped out of his apartment and looked at us pointedly. He was an older dude, wore a smock that was covered in paint, and didn’t bother to say a word.
“Sorry, Mister Keaton…” Beth said. She unlocked her door, and we stepped inside.
“We weren’t even that loud,” I muttered, while closing the door behind us.
“He’s the landlord,” she said. “Look, I can’t be sure of anything concerning our previous arrangement, Anthony. It all feels null and void right now.” She slashed at the air, as if she were throwing something away. “It was you who went to the first meeting. You gave me the premise for my feature and then you went to another meeting and never told me? How do I know this wasn’t one of your backstabbing plans all along? Just to screw me over so that your story could come out on top?”
“It wasn’t like that, Beth, I swear! If I wanted to screw you over, I wouldn’t have come back with the recording in the first place.”
She didn’t care, though. She shook her head and rubbed her temple. “Whatever, I can’t trust that that’s all true, so I’m rewriting my feature. Keep the rest of the recording for all I care. Write about the second meeting too, if you want.”
“What about your deadline?” I said. My heart felt like a rock—weighed down by remorse and resentment aimed at myself. All because of a couple of stupid miscalculations.
“Don’t worry about it. Just focus on your work, Anthony.” Beth gave me a flat smile that didn’t touch her eyes, and she bent down to pick up Huevos. “You can go now.”
“What about us?”
Beth shook her head, glanced at the ground, and shrugged. “I don’t know. Ask me again when both of our features are out.” Her voice trembled, and instinctively, I took a step towards her, but she took a step back.
“Forget the features,” I said. “What about us? I didn’t lie to you, I…I messed up.”
“You kept it from me, Anthony.” Beth held Huevos closer to her chest.
“I didn’t want to. Beth, give me a chance, please. I love you. That wasn’t a lie.”
Beth flinched when I said love. She took a deep breath and rubbed her eye with the back of her hand. “I need some time, Anthony. I have to focus and get this feature re-written.” Her voice was detached, and I knew there was no more getting through to her, at least for the time being.
“I don’t want to go, so let’s please work this out,” I said, as I stepped towards her. She didn’t move, and instead, she crossed her arms over her chest, still refusing to look at me. “Please, I can’t stand this, Beth.”
“It’s not all about you, Anthony. Fuck, I need space!” I wanted
to hold her or kiss her, remind her that outside of work, what we had was real. But she was right, I was being selfish now, and anything else I did would only make her angrier.
“Fine…I’ll go, but only because you want me to.” She didn’t respond. She watched me leave then promptly locked the door behind me. “Fuck…fuck.” I stormed down the hall, skipping the elevator for the stairwell. I called Naomi as soon as I got to the street.
“Did you talk to her?” She answered, sounding confused.
“Yeah, and she basically told me that she can’t trust me anymore. She’s changing her entire feature over this! Isn’t that overreacting?” I paced on the sidewalk beside my car.
“Well…”
“Then she tells me to talk to her once our features have come out. What kind of shit is that? It’s not like I kept something crazy from her. It’s not like—”
“You stabbed her in the back?” Naomi said.
I took a breath and leaned back against my car. “Right. I didn’t. I just…” I couldn’t even finish.
“It’s called reasonable doubt, Anthony. If she’s had issues with men in the past, she’ll clam up at any sign of deception,” Naomi said. It was creepy how right she was sometimes. Naomi sighed. “So, give her time and talk to her again.”
“I don’t want to give her time. I want everything to be back to normal. I want to go to sleep with her tonight!” A man passing by gave me a crazy side eye. I realized, belatedly, that I was having a fit on the side of the street. I unlocked the car door and got in.
“Wow, well Anthony…” Naomi said. “You have to respect her space. If she really does love you, she’ll come around.”
“I guess… I’ll be working if you want to find me,” I said.
“Anthony, it’s Saturday.”
“I know what day it is,” I snapped.
“Damn it, Anthony—”
I hung up the phone. Naomi would know that my anger wasn’t aimed at her. I sped home and e-mailed The Tribune’s resident assistant to schedule me another interview with Jonathan.
***
My cell phone rang with a call from the front desk. I sat at my dining room table staring at my almost-done feature with a glass of scotch in my hands. With a sigh I traded my glass for the phone and answered.
“Good evening, Mister Preston, we have Naomi at the front desk for you?”
“Yeah, send her up.” I sighed and ended the call. I dragged myself out of the seat, unlocked the front door, then got another glass for Naomi and topped off my drink. Naomi came inside, fighting with her coat, which she threw in the coat closet along with her boots. I watched, as she wordlessly stomped into the kitchen, picked up the glass and held it out in a sort of mock toast. I’d poured her a finger of scotch and she downed it in one gulp.
“It’s fucking freezing outside, you know that?” She said and poured herself some more. “It’s rain-snowing, that fucking flurry shit that I hate, and it’s windy, so I took the subway and walked and… Anyway, I feel like I trekked through a winter hell-scape to get here.” She took another swig of her drink then took a deep breath. She pushed her hair out of her face and fixed the collar of the white shirt underneath her maroon sweater.
“You didn’t have to come over,” I said. Naomi speared me with an icy glare. “Thanks for coming over.”
“Yeah, so what happened, is she talking to you yet?”
“No, I haven’t heard from her all day. It’s fucked. Everything is fucked,” I muttered into my glass and took a sip.
“It’s not. She’ll come around,” Naomi said and chewed on her bottom lip. “You know, I owe you for getting Jess and I back together.”
“Please, you don’t owe me anything,” I said, waving the comment away.
“But why did you wait so long to tell her, Anthony? Really. You knew that the longer you waited, the worse you were fucking yourself over.”
I shrugged, unable to offer an explanation past what I’d already given. Then it occurred to me, “You know how my last relationship ended, Nao. I made one mistake and told her about it, and she wanted nothing to fucking do with me again. After so many years it ended on a dime.”
“Yeah but that’s different—you can’t deny that the two of you were growing more platonic by the month.” I looked down at the counter and Naomi lightly hit my arm. “It’s like this whole thing with your family, you know? You’re terrified of their rejection or disappointment, and so you’d rather avoid them. Beth is different, and you know it.”
“How is she different? She won’t see me, hell, she’s refusing to even speak to me.” I put my glass down and ran my fingers through my hair, pushing it back.
“She’s different because even though she hated you at first, the two of you are in love now. Despite you basically making her professional life hell, she still gave you a shot. So this…I don’t think this will break you guys, and you shouldn’t either. Don’t give up,” Naomi said, “and don’t feel like you have to be perfect, Anthony. You’re fucking human, too.”
“You think she’ll forgive me?”
“When she calms down…yeah I think she will,” Naomi said, as if she knew it for a fact. I hoped like hell that she was right. If I lost Beth for good, I knew it would fucking hurt for a while…a really long while. All I would think about is what could’ve been between us, because what we have and what we could have is fucking big. I knew that with every fiber in my body.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Beth
My phone rang like a fire-alarm at my elbow scaring the life out of me. I stumbled out of the awkward position I’d been huddled in at the table and answered the phone.
“Hello?” I held the phone up to my ear as I sank to the floor. Huevos padded over to me to make sure I was okay.
“Hey! Beth, it’s Naomi.” She threw me completely off guard. My mouth opened then closed. I didn’t know what to say because I wasn’t sure how much she knew.
“Oh, hey, how are you? How was Thanksgiving?” I stood up and saved the feature I’d gotten halfway through.
“It was actually really nice. I’d love to catch up and trade stories if you’re free?”
I blinked at Huevos, then glanced at my computer, and figured I could use some time to decompress. I’d been writing for what felt like five hours straight, and my back was killing me. Plus, Naomi would be the only person I could talk to without hearing I told you so.
“Uh, sure, actually that sounds great. Where do you want to meet up?” I finally got off of the ground and walked towards my bedroom.
“I’ll text you the place. It’s in Brooklyn,” she said. We agreed to meet in an hour and then hung up. I quickly showered, changed into something warm, then I was out the door. Naomi sent me the address to a trendy teahouse that was also a bar. It had an intimate feel though it was cavernous inside. The tea bar and regular bar shared a long space along the back of the building, and there were intimate tables and lounges set up throughout the huge seating area. I spotted Naomi at a table tucked into the back corner of the room. Her silvery blonde hair was tousled and hung loose down her back. She had no makeup on but she looked gorgeous as ever, while she stirred her tea.
“Naomi, hey,” I said when I reached the table. She looked up with a happy smile and stood, giving me a tight hug.
“How are you?” Her tone wasn’t lighthearted or ready for small talk, and of course she knew what was up, so she looked at me with concern.
“I… I’m good,” I said and sat down across from her.
“I know you’re lying but before we get into it, the tea bar is fantastic, so let’s go pick something out for you,” she said. Naomi looped her arm through mine when I got up, and we walked to the bar. I got one of the house recommendations, Dragon Pearl tea, then had my cup delivered to our table. We settled in again, and I took a sip from my cup. Instantly, my body felt warmer and somehow comforted, while the flavor of the tea itself bloomed on my tongue. For a moment, I was in another state.
“Yep, that’s called a ‘tea high.’ I experienced it myself the first time I came here,” Naomi said.
“It’s so good,” I said.
“It’s a comfort drink, for sure. When I was going through it with Jess, I’d come here and drink tea instead of killing my liver. Though, there was still plenty of alcohol when shit hit the fan between us.” Naomi tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and shrugged out of her leather jacket.
“How was Thanksgiving with her family, though?” I sat back with my hands wrapped around the warm mug. It was cool inside the building, which I guessed was on purpose. They wanted to let the tea warm people up as opposed to the furnaces. “You’re back sooner than I thought you’d be.”
Naomi nodded. “I have a big client I need to pitch a design to in the Hamptons, so I wanted the weekend to prepare. Jess is still in Boston.” She paused to sip her tea. “But, um…we had a great time. Her family is actually great. They welcomed me with open arms, and the food was good. We were both nervous for no reason.” She smiled. “Though, I could tell that her mom was a little skeptical of me, but in the way that a mom generally is when their kid brings someone home.”
“Oh, understandable,” I said. “So, why then, did Jess really wait so long to bring you around her family?”
“She’s like the chief officer of commitment-phobes. But it’s time for her to get used to it. Her family is coming for New Year’s, so I’ll see them again soon.”
“That’s great! I’m glad everything’s finally moving forward again for you guys,” I said.
Naomi tilted her head to the side and put down her cup. “Wish I could say the same for you and Anthony… What’s going on there?”
