Verity

by Colleen Hoover

  Graham jumps up and pulls his wallet out of his pocket. He pays for the food and the poor delivery guy pushes open the door to the stairwell just to get out of the hallway faster than if he were to walk back to the elevator.

  “Smells good,” Graham says. He sits back down and grabs the container of chicken and broccoli. I hand him a fork and let him eat it, even though the chicken is my favorite. This isn’t a time to be selfish, though.

  I open the Mongolian beef and start eating, even though I’m not hungry. But I’ll be damned if Sasha or Ethan will eat any of this. “Whores,” I mutter.

  “Whores with no food,” Graham says. “Maybe they’ll both starve to death.”

  I smile.

  Then I eat and wonder how long I’m going to sit out here in the hallway with this guy. I don’t want to be here when the door opens because I don’t want to see what Sasha looks like. But I also don’t want to miss the moment when she opens the door and finds Graham sitting out here, eating her Chinese food.

  So I wait. And eat. With Graham.

  After several minutes, he sets down his container and reaches into the takeout bag, pulling out two fortune cookies. He hands one to me and proceeds to open his. He breaks open the cookie and unfolds the strip of paper, then reads his fortune out loud. “You will succeed in a great business endeavor today.” He folds the fortune in half after reading it. “Figures. I took off work today.”

  “Stupid fortune,” I mutter.

  Graham wads his fortune into a tiny ball and flicks it at Ethan’s door. I crack open my cookie and slip the fortune out of it. “If you only shine light on your flaws, all your perfects will dim.”

  “I like it,” he says.

  I wad up the fortune and flick it at the door like he did. “I’m a grammar snob. It should be your perfections.”

  “That’s what makes me like it. The one word they misuse is perfects. Kind of ironic.” He crawls forward and grabs the fortune, then scoots back against the wall. He hands it to me. “I think you should keep it.”

  I immediately brush his hand and the fortune away. “I don’t want a reminder of this moment.”

  He stares at me in thought. “Yeah. Me neither.”

  I think we’re both growing more nervous at the prospect of the door opening any minute, so we just listen for their voices and don’t speak. Graham pulls at the threads of his blue jeans over his right knee until there’s a small pile of threads on the floor and barely anything covering his knee. I pick up one of the threads and twist it between my fingers.

  “We used to play this word game on our laptops at night,” he says. “I was really good at it. I’m the one who introduced Sasha to the game, but she would always beat my score. Every damn night.” He stretches his legs out. They’re a lot longer than mine. “It used to impress me until I saw an eight-hundred-dollar charge for the game on her bank statement. She was buying extra letters at five dollars a pop just so she could beat me.”

  I try to picture this guy playing games on his laptop at night, but it’s hard. He looks like the kind of guy who reads novels and cleans his apartment twice a day and folds his socks and then tops off all that perfection with a morning run.

  “Ethan doesn’t know how to change a tire. We’ve had two flats since we’ve been together and he had to call a tow truck both times.”

  Graham shakes his head a little and says, “I’m not looking for reasons to excuse the bastard, but that’s not so bad. A lot of guys don’t know how to change a tire.”

  “I know. That’s not the bad part. The bad part is that I do know how to change a tire. He just refused to let me because it would have embarrassed him to have to stand aside while a girl changed his tire.”

  There’s something more in Graham’s expression. Something I haven’t noticed before. Concern, maybe? He pegs me with a serious stare. “Do not forgive him for this, Quinn.”

  His words make my chest tighten. “I won’t,” I say with complete confidence. “I don’t want him back after this. I keep wondering why I’m not crying. Maybe that’s a sign.”

  He has a knowing look in his eye, but then the lines around his eyes fall a little. “You’ll cry tonight. In bed. That’s when it’ll hurt the most. When you’re alone.”

  Everything suddenly feels heavier with that comment. I don’t want to cry but I know this is all going to hit me any minute now. I met Ethan right after I started college and we’ve been together four years now. That’s a lot to lose in one moment. And even though I know it’s over, I don’t want to confront him. I just want to walk away and be done with him. I don’t want to need closure or even an explanation, but I’m scared I’ll need both of those things when I’m alone tonight.

  “We should probably get tested.”

  Graham’s words and the fear that consumes me after he says them are cut off by the sound of Ethan’s muffled voice.

  He’s walking toward the door. I turn to look at his apartment door but Graham touches my face and pulls my attention back to him.

  “The worst thing we could do right now is show emotion, Quinn. Don’t get angry. Don’t cry.”

  I bite my lip and nod, trying to hold back all the things I know I’m about to need to scream. “Okay,” I whisper, right as Ethan’s apartment door begins to open.

  I try to hold my resolve like Graham is doing, but Ethan’s looming presence makes me nauseous. Neither of us looks at the door. Graham’s stare is hard and he’s breathing steadily as he keeps his gaze locked on mine. I can’t even imagine what Ethan will think in two seconds when he opens the door fully. He won’t recognize me at first. He’ll think we’re two random people sitting on the hallway floor of his apartment building.

  “Quinn?”

  I close my eyes when I hear Ethan say my name. I don’t turn toward his voice. I hear Ethan take a step out of his apartment. I can feel my heart in so many places right now, but mostly I feel it in Graham’s hands on my cheeks. Ethan says my name again, but it’s more of a command to look at him. I open my eyes, but I keep them focused on Graham.

  Ethan’s door opens even wider and a girl gasps in shock. Sasha. Graham blinks, holding his eyes closed for a second longer as he inhales a calming breath. When he opens them, Sasha speaks.

  “Graham?”

  “Shit,” Ethan mutters.

  Graham doesn’t look at them. He continues to face me. As if both of our lives aren’t falling apart around us, Graham calmly says to me, “Would you like me to walk with you downstairs?”

  I nod.

  “Graham!” Sasha says his name like she has a right to be angry at him for being here.

  Graham and I both stand up. Neither of us look toward Ethan’s apartment. Graham has a tight grip on my hand as he leads me to the elevator.

  She’s right behind us, then next to us as we wait for the elevator. She’s on the other side of Graham, pulling on his shirtsleeve. He squeezes my hand a little harder, so I squeeze his back, letting him know we can do this without a scene. Just walk onto the elevator and leave.

  When the doors open, Graham ushers me on first and then he steps on. He doesn’t leave room for Sasha to step on with us. He blocks the doorway and we’re forced to face the direction of the doors. The direction of Sasha. He hits the button for the lobby and when the doors begin to close, I finally look up.

  I notice two things.

  1) Ethan is no longer in the hallway and his apartment door is closed.

  2) Sasha is so much prettier than me. Even when she’s crying.

  The doors close and it’s a long, quiet ride to the bottom. Graham doesn’t let go of my hand and we don’t speak, but we also don’t cry. We walk quietly out of the elevator and across the lobby. When we reach the door, Vincent holds it open for us, looking at us both with apology in his eyes. Graham pulls out his wallet and gives Vincent a handful of bills. “Thanks for the apartment number,” Graham says.

  Vincent nods and takes the cash. When his eyes meet mine, they’re swimming in apology.
I give Vincent a hug since I’ll likely never see him again.

  Once Graham and I are outside, we just stand on the sidewalk, dumbfounded. I wonder if the world looks different to him now because it certainly looks different to me. The sky, the trees, the people who pass us on the sidewalk. Everything seems slightly more disappointing than it did before I walked into Ethan’s building.

  “You want me to hail you a cab?” he finally says.

  “I drove. That’s my car,” I say, pointing across the street.

  He glances back up at the apartment building. “I want to get out of here before she makes it down.” He looks genuinely worried, like he can’t face her at all right now.

  At least Sasha is trying. She followed Graham all the way to the elevator while Ethan just walked back inside his apartment and closed his door.

  Graham looks back at me, his hands shoved in his jacket pockets. I wrap my coat tightly around myself. There’s not much left to say other than goodbye.

  “Goodbye, Graham.”

  His stare is flat, like he’s not even in this moment. He backs up a step. Two steps. Then he spins and starts walking in the other direction.

  I look back at the apartment building, just as Sasha bursts through the doors. Vincent is behind her, staring at me. He waves at me, so I lift a hand and wave back to him. We both know it’s a goodbye wave, because I’m never stepping foot inside Ethan’s apartment building again. Not even for whatever stuff of mine litters his apartment. I’d rather him just throw it all away than face him again.

  Sasha looks left and then right, hoping to find Graham. She doesn’t. She just finds me and it makes me wonder if she even knows who I am. Did Ethan tell her he’s supposed to get married next month? Did he tell her we just spoke on the phone this morning and he told me he’s counting down the seconds until he gets to call me his wife? Does she know when I sleep over at Ethan’s apartment that he refuses to shower without me? Did he tell her the sheets he just fucked her on were an engagement gift from my sister?

  Does she know when Ethan proposed to me, he cried when I said yes?

  She must not realize this or she wouldn’t have thrown away her relationship with a guy who impressed me more in one hour than Ethan did in four years.

  To read more of Quinn and Graham’s story, visit www.allyourperfects.com