by Rachel Del
I slammed back my fourth shot of the night. “I hate you.”
“Why? Because I’m right?”
I frowned. “Because you’re right.”
It went about as well as I could have imagined it would. Wanting the home court advantage, I’d asked him to meet me at one of my favorite coffee shops. I’d already ordered and devoured a vanilla latte and by the time I saw him walk through the front door, I was on my second cup. My heart hammered in my chest as he approached the table. Both of his hands were in his pockets and his chin was low, almost tucked against his chest. He looked like I felt.
“Hey,” he said. That one word heavy with equal parts of both concern and relief.
My heart had yet to slow down. “Hey,” was all I could muster.
He motioned towards the counter. “Want anything else?”
“I’m good.”
I uncrossed my legs and planted my feet on the ground, ignoring the instinct to run.
He sat down across from me two minutes later, a steaming cup of black coffee in one hand. He took a small sip and then his hazel eyes met mine. “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Pen.”
I blinked once, twice. “You can thank Ash for that.”
He smiled softly. “Whatever got you here, I’m grateful.”
Silence descended on us. I wasn’t sure what I should say, what he would say. I looked down at my lap and then back at him, knowing that I had to do this, for the both of us. “I saw you the other day.”
He looked confused. But he’d know, soon enough.
“With her.”
He blanched, keeping his eyes locked on mine as though he were willing himself not to look away. He swallowed hard.
“I talked to mom. She told me everything.” The next part came out as a whisper. “How could you?”
His face was etched with pain. “Penny…”
I lifted a hand. “I need to get this out before you say anything, because you need to hear it.” I took a breath. “I’m ashamed of you. I looked up to you for so long, dad. I thought you could do no wrong. And maybe that’s immature of me, but I can’t help it. I had this picture of you that has since been shattered. I knew something was going on with you and mom, but I never thought … how could you do that to her?”
He didn’t say anything at first, just sipped his coffee slowly. “What did she tell you?”
“That you two had drifted apart, that she wasn’t what you wanted anymore. That she couldn’t be what you wanted.”
“She told you all that?”
I shook my head. “She gave me the bullet points; I filled in the rest myself.”
He pushed his coffee to the side and reached across the table for me. I pulled my hands away.
“That’s not how it happened, Penny.”
I rolled my eyes.
“No, listen to me. Your mother isn’t telling you the whole story.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “When did you start seeing her, dad? Because I’m guessing it was before you and mom had even called it quits.”
I took more deep breaths than I could count, willing myself to calm down … willing my anger to subside.
My father’s eyes fluttered closed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Penny,” he said, his voice heavy with sadness. “Your mother is severely unhappy, and she has been for a long time. For a while we tried medication, and for a while everything would be better. But then she’d go right back to how she was before. Your mother is a good person, Pen, but she has made mistakes just like I have.”
“What are you saying?”
He sighed. “I’m saying that long before I even knew Gretchen existed, long before the thought of being with someone else ever existed…”
“Yes…”
“I found out that your mother had been seeing someone else. For quite some time, too.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re lying.”
His voice was thick and heavy. “Why would I lie about something like this?”
“I don’t know, to make yourself feel better? Because, if mom did it first, then what you did wasn’t so wrong?”
“As much as you don’t want to believe that your mother is capable of such a thing, it’s the truth.” He swallowed hard. “By the time I met Gretchen, our marriage had been long over.”
I jumped to my feet, catching my father by surprise. I stared at my feet. “I don’t believe you.”
When I finally looked into my father’s eyes, I saw not anger, but disappointment.
“I didn’t come here to tell you any of this today, but I couldn’t walk away from you again without you knowing the whole truth. I did that once, and it took three months to get you back. I can’t risk that again.”
My father climbed to his feet and stepped towards me. Tentatively, his arms rose and found their way around me, pulling me against his chest. I wanted to push him away, but it felt … good. Too good.
I realized, with startling clarity, that I’d missed him.
It took me a few moments to realize that he was crying. He was doing his best to hide the shaking of his body, but his tears had begun to land on my shoulders.
We stood in silence, both of us unwilling or unable to speak, but I knew.
I knew he had been telling the truth.
Alex opened his door shirtless, a pair of tight fitting navy blue sweatpants hanging off his hips. I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around him.
I needed him more than ever.
“Everything’s a mess.”
Chapter 37
Alex
“She’s gone, Alex.”
“What do you mean ‘she’s gone’? Who’s gone?” I grabbed Penny by the shoulders, pulling back so I could look at her. Her eyes were red and puffy. “Pen?”
She wouldn’t look at me as she spoke. “P.J., she’s gone.”
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a modicum of relief. Full-on, riddled with jealousy relief. What could I say? Writing or not, P.J. had been taking up a hell of a lot of Penny’s time this summer. I was secretly happy to potentially have her all to myself once again. Still, I knew I couldn’t tell her that. My gaze was hard on her. “Gone, how?”
She brushed past me and sat down at the couch. I blanched when I saw that I’d left my unpaid bills out on the coffee table in front of her. Her eyes passed over the mail, but nothing seemed to register on her face.
“I haven’t seen her since we got into that argument.”
My eyes softened. “So she’s not really go—”
“I’ve gone to the coffee shop every day since I last saw her. I wanted to apologize. But she hasn’t been there, Alex. She’s either fantastic at holding grudges or … or she’s really gone.”
I sat down beside her, brushing the mail to the side of the table in a way that I hoped looked completely casual. “Wow, I really didn’t think your life could get any more fucked up than it already was.”
She huffed. “And yet, here we are.”
“Here we are, indeed.”
She folded her legs underneath her and dropped her hands into her lap. I could tell that there was something she wasn’t telling me, but I knew better than to push her.
“Can we please talk about something else? Anything else. I need to be reminded that there’s still hope for me, even if everything is such a complete mess. How’s work these days? You still miserable?”
I pulled in my bottom lip between my teeth. “You know… it was … better … for a while there.”
My thoughts drifted back to my last day with Monica, long enough for me to picture the look of pain on her face when I’d said Penny’s name.
The sound of Penny’s fingers snapping in front of my face brought me back to the present. “Whoa, where’d you go there, buddy?”
“Sorry. Um, what was I saying?”
Penny smirked. “I asked you how work was and you said it was better for a while.”
“Right. Yeah, it was better for a while, but now … I don’t know. I don’t thi
nk that place is a good fit for me.”
“I’ve been telling you for years that your talent is completely going to waste there.”
It was the same old story, told on a different day. I knew how it went. And I knew she was right. “I don’t disagree, but things are … complicated right now.”
I thought about the unpaid bills stacking up on my coffee table.
“I’ve got to suck it up for a little while longer, and then I’ll start looking for something new.”
I glanced at Penny from the corner of my eye, but it seemed as though she had nothing else to add. I hadn’t expected her to give up so easily. I shifted on the couch beside her, debating what to say. I knew her well enough to know that we could talk about me all night, but it would never help her clear her own mind. “Pen, please don’t take this the wrong way, but what do you really even know about P.J.?”
She wrinkled her nose. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Um, everything? And no offense, but don’t you think it’s strange that she wants to spend all this time with someone more than half her age?”
I didn’t wait for her answer before jumping from the couch. I came back a moment later with my laptop in hand. Penny looked as though she had been considering my question.
Finally, she looked up at me. “What do you care?”
Penny
Alex brushed off my response with an almost unnoticeable shrug of his shoulders.
“What are you doing anyway?” I asked, leaning over to look at the computer screen. He had P.J.’s name typed into the Google search bar.
“I already looked. She’s basically impossible to find.”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he did what I had done when I first arrived home from California with her book in my hand; he dug deeper. I let out a sigh and fell back onto the bed, the sound of his fingers on the keyboard lulling me into a trance. I don’t know how long I was out before I heard him say my name. When I opened my eyes, he was still sitting beside me, but he had a look of concern on his face.
“There is nothing about her online, nothing. That doesn’t make sense. If she’s this big published author, then where’s her website, where are the interviews and Amazon pages?”
I shrugged as though I hadn’t wondered the same things myself.
“Maybe it’s a good thing she’s gone, Pen. I don’t think you should be spending time with her anymore.”
I flew up from the bed. “I’m sorry; you don’t think I should be spending time with her anymore? Who do you think you are, my mother?”
Alex was unusually calm. “This just doesn’t feel right, something is off.”
I turned to him, my mouth open and ready to speak, but something stopped me.
Alex studied me, curiously.
“I gave her my pages…” I whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“The memoir I’m writing … she was helping me with it. I gave her a copy the last time I saw her, and now she’s gone.”
Not only a copy. The only copy.
When I lifted my head, my gaze locked with his.
“You don’t think…”
“No,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “She wouldn’t.”
But the truth was that I didn’t know what P.J. was capable of.
Chapter 38
Alex
Penny looked paler than I’d ever seen her. I reached over and took her hand. “There’s got to be a reasonable explanation.”
“You literally just finished telling me you think something is off.”
“I’m trying to be supportive.”
She smirked. “Well, you suck at it.”
“What would you like me to do?”
She pulled her hand from mine and sank down further in the couch. She ignored my question. “She’ll show up. I know she will. Something must be going on.”
“You don’t have her number?”
She shook her head. “It seems weird that I don’t, but I never thought of it. I always knew where she’d be and when, you know?”
Sure, I got it. But it was yet another thing to add to the list of things about P.J. that made me uncomfortable. I kept that thought to myself, though.
Penny closed her eyes and dropped her head onto my shoulder. I sat quietly, enjoying the moment. Perhaps, if I didn’t move, we could stay there forever.
“Tell me you have something to drink,” she whispered eventually.
I had to think about it for a moment. “Believe it or not, I don’t. But I can go grab something for us. What will make you forget about P.J. the fastest?”
Penny’s eyes crawled sideways and a smile crossed her face. “What do you suggest?”
“I find that tequila is quite effective at dulling the senses.”
“Great. Patron?”
Well, I’d walked right into that one.
“Uh, sure. I’ll be right back.”
I grabbed my wallet and keys and slipped on a pair of sandals, but it wasn’t until I had closed my apartment door behind me that I let out a deep sigh. Of course she wanted Patron, any sane person would have chosen it. And I’d known from the moment I met Penny that I would never be able to deny her anything.
I thought of her curled up on my couch at home, probably looking for a movie for the two of us to watch. I wasn’t worried that I’d come home to her sparking up a rom-com. The girl had more class than that. In fact, she was likely looking for something that she knew I’d love.
It was getting dark by the time I got back with the tequila and my stomach was growling, but one look at Penny and I had forgotten everything. She had changed out of her jean shorts and baseball tee, and into one of my tee-shirts. I caught a glimpse of her red panties as she shifted on the couch.
She smiled when I came through the door. There were already two shot glasses on the coffee table in front of her and she’d managed to scrounge up a few snacks. I cringed for a moment, wondering what she must have thought of my near-empty fridge and barren cupboards.
I motioned to the chips. “I’m surprised you found anything. I’ve been existing on mostly take-out lately.”
She patted the seat next to her with a smile. “Tequila, now.”
I sat down beside her, hesitating with my hand over the cap.
Penny looked at me from the corner of her eyes. “Everything okay?”
“Mm hmm.”
All I could do was pretend that everything was fine. That I hadn’t just spent forty-five of the last two hundred dollars in my bank account on alcohol.
I poured us two shots, which we quickly shot back.
“Do you think I’m too trusting?”
I shrugged. “That’s not a bad thing, is it?”
“It could be. I may have just lost my entire book.”
Second shot.
Penny’s leg had been inching closer and closer. Finally, without taking my eyes off the movie, my hands landed on the soft skin beneath her knees and I pulled her legs over top of mine. She sighed, sinking into the couch.
I thought about her lips.
Third shot.
The credits rolled, but Penny didn’t move. I looked down at her, my vision blurry around the edges. “Are you still with Ryan?”
Penny’s mouth formed into a tight line. “We said we weren’t going to talk about him.”
“So that’s a yes.”
I thought about her naked back.
Fourth shot.
“You’re too good for him, you know. Like, you two aren’t even on the same planet.”
She looked me right in the eye this time. “We aren’t going to talk about this.”
“Why not?”
“Because we agreed not to. And because I don’t want to. And because it’s none of your business. And because you’re wrong.”
I thought about how her hand might feel on me.
I poured two more shots. “About you being too good for him? I’m certainly not. He’s a selfish prick and you’re … an angel.”
I downed the fifth shot and immediately wished I hadn’t.
Penny shot up from the couch looking angrier than I’d ever seen her. I thought she might leave. Instead, she took down her shot, swallowing roughly, training her hazel eyes on me.
“You listen to me and listen clearly—” Her words were slurred.
I thought about how she’d eat me alive.
Penny
“I can’t keep trying to live up to the person you think that I am, Alex. It’s too hard. It’s too much pressure.” I blinked hard, fighting off the tears. “You put me up on this pedestal and there is just no way that I can be that person. I will never be that person.”
My breathing was heavy and labored. I felt like I was going to be sick.
“I don’t —”
“Yes, you do. You’ve always had this picture of the perfect me in your head. Well, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep disappointing you!”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me against him. His hand grasped my chin and lifted my face until my eyes connected with his. “Listen to me, Penny. The picture that I have of you in my head? It’s you, as you are right now. This. Today. The good, the bad, all of it. I want all of it.”
He stepped closer, squaring his shoulders.
“Stop looking at me like that, Alex.”
He moved closer, his eyes burning into me. “Like what?”
“Like that. Like you are right now.”
My eyes locked on his. I couldn’t look away. I wouldn’t be the first one to.
“Penny.”
The way my name slipped from his lips had me grabbing the wall next to me for support.
“Please, stop,” I begged.
He stepped closer still. “I’m not doing anything, Pen.”
But he was wrong. His smoldering gaze was cracking me in two. “You are, Alex. You’re looking at me like you want to kiss me—”
He wet his lips. “That’s because I do.”
I swallowed, peeling my eyes from his to glance at his lips. “This is crazy.”
He slid his finger under my chin and lifted my head until my eyes returned to his. “It makes perfect sense to me.”
