The Bet

by Lily Zante

  “I wish you’d stop breathing down my back.”

  “Breathing down your back? What happened? What did he say?”

  She didn’t reply.

  Cara walked towards her, pointing the hairbrush at her. “You still have feelings for him, don’t you?”

  “No. No, I don’t. I don’t.” She didn’t, but she was starting to wonder about all the things he’d said to her in the past, in his defense.

  “You can try and convince yourself you don’t, but I can see right through you, Iz.”

  “I’m in shock because I haven’t seen him for a while, that’s all.”

  “You’re in shock because you’re not over him. I knew you were lying.”

  Izzy grabbed a cushion and sat down on the couch in silence.

  “What happened?” Cara insisted, moving closer. “What did you guys talk about?”

  Izzy hugged the cushion closer to her, and shrugged.

  Cara was relentless. “Great. So you’re not going to tell me. What about Shoemoney? Why did he throw the wine at him?”

  She looked up. “He said it made him mad when he saw him, and he couldn’t help himself.”

  Cara sat down beside her. “It made him mad?”

  She recounted the conversation, having already gone over it in her head for what must have been the twentieth time in the past hour. Over the past few weeks, as her anger had started to die down, and was replaced by a sense of sadness, she had been left with memories pushed so far away, she had to make an effort to recall them.

  “He said he wanted to kill him, and he would have punched him, but he didn’t want a scene.”

  “Fan me down with a million feathers,” said Cara, flapping the hairbrush in front of her. “I wish I had a guy who was that crazy about me.”

  She lifted her head. “He’s not crazy about me. It’s guilt that he’s feeling.”

  “Or, you could be completely wrong,” said Cara, exaggerating her words, “and he could be crazy about you.”

  Cara was a fool who romanticized everything. “I can’t forget what he did. That would be stupid. That would be me thinking with my heart instead of my head.”

  “You need to do more feeling, and less thinking, Iz, because logic doesn’t have the feels. Logic is cold, hard facts, and it misses what the heart instinctively knows.”

  “You hopeless romantic.”

  “You sad, miserable pragmatist.”

  But she had been thinking, and she’d remembered those days, those moments, those slices of time they had spent together. The times they had kissed, and he’d held her in is arms, his body hard, his face a picture of torture, as she’d run her hands over him, and he would stop her from getting carried away.

  There’s no rush, is there? He’d say.

  She’d thought that he was quite the romantic, and so different from the womanizing asshole.

  “How many times does that man have to tell you he’s sorry? Sounds to me as if he knows that what he did was stupid and he’s trying to get that through to you. We all make mistakes, Izzy. Why can’t you get over your high morals and forgive him?”

  “Once a jerk, always a jerk.”

  She was surrounded by jerks, it seemed. Even the guy on the last double date had tried to cop a feel at the cinema until she had ‘accidentally’ poured her popcorn all over him.

  Xavier had never tried to cop a feel accidentally, and he’d gotten his own form of revenge back on Shoemoney, no matter how small, he had stood up for her. She tried to imagine being at the restaurant surrounded by his family, by that formidable mother of his, and Tobias, and to have had the guts to get up and do what he did.

  Tobias must have hit the roof.

  “I’d really like to be alone, Cara. Please. Can’t you go out and leave me?”

  The muscles around Cara’s face tightened. “I’m not convinced you’re over him.”

  “I am.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to. We weren’t together for that long.”

  “You spent a long time in the friend zone,” countered Cara.

  “We spent more time in the war zone,” she replied, remembering how things had been early on.

  “I’m not leaving until you make a choice.”

  “What?” she cried. What sort of choice?

  “Prove that you’re over him. Come out with us tonight, or text him.”

  “Text him?” she shrieked, in horror. “Why?” Cara was being totally unreasonable. She shook her head. “I will not.”

  “Not what?”

  “I will not text him.”

  “So you’re coming to the house party? Great, because I’ve got the perfect guy for you. He’s going to be there tonight, and I know you’ll—”

  “I’m not coming to the party either, and you won’t hook me up with anyone.”

  Cara clasped her hands to her hips not unlike a Marvel super hero. “I swear to god I’m not moving from here until you make a decision either way.”

  “Then you can stay there all night.”

  “And I’ll tell everyone to come over and we’ll have a party here instead,” Cara threatened.

  Izzy’s nostrils flared in defiance. She hadn’t realized that her friend could be as stubborn as she was. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Try me. I will not have you sitting at your desk when you don’t even have exams at the moment!”

  Izzy ground her teeth together. “If I text him now, you promise to get lost?”

  “Gladly.”

  Izzy threw her a vicious stare, before stomping over to her knapsack.

  “I want to see what you write,” said Cara.

  Izzy pulled out her cell phone and stabbed the keypad. “There,” she said, shoving her cell phone in Cara’s smiling face.

  Thanks

  Cara’s gaze flickered upwards. “It’s not much, but it’s something. Well done.”

  She spun around on her heels, rushed into her bedroom, came out seconds later with her jacket and rushed towards the door.

  “Don’t wait up.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Thanks

  He nearly fell off his treadmill when her text came in.

  Thanks

  He stopped the machine, and read the message a couple of times as it slowly came to a halt.

  Thanks

  What did she mean by that?

  Wiping his face, he got off the treadmill and walked around as the sweat trickled down his back and face, and he reread the one word.

  Thanks

  She might have texted him by mistake. It was a sobering thought. But then again, it might have been her reaching out.

  Getting in touch.

  Making contact.

  Being vague, and not trying to make it mean anything.

  It could be any number of a thousand fucking things.

  He walked over to the windows and looked out at the park. Most days he could see kids playing, and people walking, some with dogs, some without.

  Today, it had to be a couple sitting on one of the benches kissing like they didn’t have a room to rent by the hour.

  What he wouldn’t give to be one half of that couple.

  What he wouldn’t give to be sitting on that bench with Izzy.

  What he wouldn’t give to do things right.

  He turned away and looked at her message again.

  Should he reply?

  Or wait?

  Ask her if she had texted him by mistake?

  Not ask her anything at all?

  Should he thank her?

  Try to be funny?

  Or sensible?

  Or what?

  He should wait. At the very least, he would wait.

  He held out for 27 minutes, before sending back a smiley face emoji. And then felt down when she didn’t send a message back.

  The next morning he checked his cell phone before he even got out of bed. She still hadn’t replied. So he texted back:

  For what? It was great to
see you again

  She didn’t text at all for the next few days. He checked every 5 minutes. Found himself getting a dopamine hit each time his cell phone pinged with a notification, and then came down from his high whenever it was a message from one of his VAs, or his friends.

  It was a text message from Izzy a week later, that slowly got things rolling.

  I have an interview for a summer internship at Stone Enterprises

  He was smiling when he replied back:

  Congrats real happy for you

  You deserve it

  And he was back to checking his notifications every 5 minutes after that, going on that emotional rollercoaster ride of hearing from her and forcing himself to wait before replying. When she didn’t reply, he waited an entire day before asking the question which had been eating at him for a week, he asked, her:

  How was your double date?

  Her reply came back, not so instantaneously:

  Not so good

  Smiling, he wrote back:

  There are some real jerks out there, you need to be selective

  I’m extremely selective now

  He asked:

  You are?

  She replied:

  To the point of not dating at all

  He liked her answer, and typed:

  I hope I didn’t put you off men altogether, Laronde

  To which she replied:

  You don’t have that much of an impact in my life, Stone

  His face fell at the harshness, and the finality of her words, and then, in the next moment, when she sent him a smiley face, his spirits soared. She was joking. The meaning of the written word, especially when it came to things like texting and email, was difficult to gauge at times, but in the flick of a second, she’d shown him that she had the ability to control his moods.

  He tried to make sure his texts were friendly, and sensible, with no hint of anything. It was like starting over, finding out about one another, and trying not to flirt.

  The light conversation continued, one liners mostly, nothing heavy, or long, but enough.

  A bridge, a stepping stone, a pathway.

  A way back to her, he hoped.

  They continued like this for a week or so, until the texts became longer, and soon she switched to emailing him, because, she said, it was easier for her to email during study time, than texting which took longer.

  It was progress of sorts.

  And soon, it became a long slow month of progress, but in the right direction.

  One day, as he left the Stone Enterprises building after a meeting with Tobias to discuss investment, he stepped out into the street and saw Izzy coming out of the revolving doors, just behind him. Knowing the date she had her interview with the accounting department, a minor detail which Tobias had casually passed on to him, had helped.

  They stared at one another in a combination of surprise and shock, and then she explained that she had just completed her second interview for her internship, and had just been told that she had been accepted. She would begin as soon as college ended for the summer.

  “I got this thanks to you,” she said.

  “I had nothing to do with it. This is Tobias’s company.”

  “That’s odd,” she said, giving him a pointed stare. “Because I actually called up HR months ago and asked about internship programs, and they told me they didn’t run them. I even sent them my resume, asking for summer work, months ago, but they turned me down because there were stronger applicants than me.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “I thought so, especially when Tobias asked me to apply for a new internship program the company was running. What are the chances of that?”

  “That is interesting.”

  “And they’ve accepted me,” she said, smiling for the first time in a long, long time. Her smile reached inside him, filling him with her obvious joy.

  “You must have dazzled them with your brains.”

  “I dazzled them with something, but something tells me this was your doing.”

  He looked at her, not giving anything away but feeling good that he had done something that would help her.

  “Thanks,” she said, unable to stop smiling. She looked happy, and because she was happy, it made him happy.

  They stood looking at one another, but smiling, for a change. It had been the longest time since they had exchanged a smile, and a look like that.

  It didn’t seem as if they were strangers, and it didn’t seem as if they had fallen out, because their recent communication had given them a new springboard to launch from. Things felt not-so-odd, this time. She’d grown her hair longer, and it suited her, her bangs framing her face like that.

  “Had any good veggie food lately?” she asked.

  “Not lately. But… “ He cleared his throat. “I heard about a new place opening on a few blocks from here.”

  “Oh, what place?”

  “I can’t remember what it’s called,” he confessed.

  “Hmm.”

  “If you ever want to try it, you should go.”

  “But you don’t remember what it’s called,” she pointed out.

  “It’s uh—Benito, or Venito or something like that.” He scratched the side of his face, trying to remember, but the name wouldn’t come to mind.

  “I’m kind of hungry now.”

  Her admission caught him by surprise. “You are?” It seemed the obvious question, and yet he had to think twice before he asked it. “We could try it out now, if you want.” He held his breath.

  “Now?”

  “You said you were hungry.”

  And that was how it had started. A lunch, and conversation, and getting to know one another all over again.

  Nothing like the old days, but good.

  Good enough.

  A week later, another lunch date, followed by dinner a few days after that. Nothing like the old days, though. The conversation was always light, always.

  One weekend, they took Jacob to the park. As Jacob raced around on his scooter, Xavier thanked her, for letting him come with them.

  “I thought about what you said,” she told him, “And I want to believe you. This is me believing you, so don’t ever deceive me again.”

  “Never,” he’d told her.

  A few days later they somehow ended up holding hands while he walked her back to her apartment, and Cara looked at him as if he’d won a trophy.

  And then a week later, a kiss. Not the sizzling making out sessions of before, but slower, cautious, measured moves, but Izzy Laronde had a way of giving him a hard on that most girls gave him being fully naked. She could do that with something as simple as a kiss.

  “I wanted to believe you, and now I do,” she’d said. “I remember how you wouldn’t let me touch you, and I found it odd.”

  “It’s true,” he told her. “All of it. I didn’t want to go too far with you not knowing. I wanted us to start with a clean slate. But everything we did, came from here.” He’d held her entwined hand to his heart.

  And after that, the kissing progressed rapidly and reached scorched earth levels at warp speed.

  So when, one night, as they sat in the car and kissed, and she asked him what had happened to the weekend in The Hamptons, he had to ask her a couple of times if she was sure she still wanted to go.

  Because he wasn’t sure what she was asking, and he didn’t want to risk taking anything for granted.

  “I’m willing for us to have a second chance,” she’d said.

  Chapter 52

  The Stone mansion in the Hamptons wasn't so big as to be imposing, or impersonal.

  She liked the look of it from the moment she climbed out of Xavier's Ferrari. According to him the shingle-style house with its 8 bedrooms, and 10 bathrooms was a 5 minute walk from the beach, and a short drive from the quaint town center.

  “There’s nice places around here,” he told her. “Some nice restaurants, and bars we can go to.”

  Dif
ferent to New York. She could already tell that the pace of life here was slow, and calmer. Exactly what they needed.

  She had taken the chance on him, and things between them were almost back on track, back to how they had been before they had split. Everything about him, everything she had learned as they rediscovered one another again had made her believe they had a chance to salvage what they’d once had.

  But even though they had both been looking forward to this weekend, each of them seeing it as the chance to spend much needed time away, she had noticed that Xavier had seemed quiet. He seemed more guarded, more careful with his words, and his touch.

  Sometimes she missed the old Xavier. She missed his raw manliness, his assured cockiness, and the swagger that was so him.

  They hadn’t bothered to unpack, but he had given her a quick tour of the house, “So that you can get your bearings,” and then, they had gone out for a walk along the beach. The sand here wasn’t as powdery and as white as the sand on Kawaya, but darker, and dense, packed together, so that it stuck in clumps as they walked along the shore.

  It was while they were walking along on the beach, that he took her hand, and, like always, she let him, then pressed her fingers in a little more, getting used to the feel of his warm flesh.

  Every now and then he would turn at her and smile, as if he needed to know everything was fine, that she was okay. That they were okay.

  “You don’t have to look so scared,” she said.

  “I’m not scared.”

  “You seem different, sometimes.”

  “I’m trying to be a better version of me.”

  “I don’t want a better version. I want you, the guy I was getting to know, once upon a time.”

  “You want him back?” he asked, stopping and looking at her, “The cocky, arrogant, asshole?”

  She tilted her head, as if deciding. “Yes, maybe lose the arrogance and the asshole-ness, though.”

  She had scared him, and it had been for good reason. He'd hurt her, and at least now he seemed to understand how much.