by S. Massery
Avery’s face lights up, fast enough that I could’ve imagined any other emotion except for love. I forget my negative feelings and focus on the happiness. He kisses me hard, bruising my lips. This whole visit has been a rollercoaster of emotions. Is he happy? Upset with me?
“I was planning on waiting, but with your lease coming up…”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Charlotte Harper Galston, will you move in with me?”
It isn’t until later that the sense of déjà vu clicks. On my phone in the bathroom, I pull up a video I once watched on repeat. Ave, say it again for the camera? His face appears. He kisses her temple. I said, Elaina Sydney Williams, will you move in with me?
Should I be hurt he used the exact same… wording? Full name. Happiness. And when I said yes, surrounded by an impersonal room filled with boxes that I had already packed, he kissed my forehead. We had sex again after that, slow and passionate and probably more aptly described as love making. In rewind, it feels cheapened.
I am his do-over girl.
I brush away the tear that tracks down my cheek. It snuck up on me, and I don’t generally cry. I close the app and pocket my phone, creeping back into the bedroom. Avery stirs as I slide under the covers, rolling closer to me before I’m fully settled. I don’t get a chance to turn on my side before he has his arm over me, palming my hip and pinning me to the bed. His leg twines with mine, immobilizing me.
After twenty minutes of counting Avery’s slow breaths, I wiggle out from underneath him. I tiptoe to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water, and tuck myself up on the couch.
A million thoughts course through my head:
Am I okay being a do-over girl?
Does he even realize he did it?
Does he close his eyes and see her instead of me?
I fall asleep on the couch.
Avery finds me at three in the morning.
“I found a place already, Avery. I put down the deposit already,” I say as I follow him back into the bedroom.
He blinks at me, bleary-eyed. “You want to discuss this now?”
“I…”
“Jesus, Charlotte. Go to sleep.”
I say, “Avery.”
He grunts, already climbing back into bed.
I say again, “Avery.”
“Charlotte,” he answers back, mocking.
We are mean as we orbit each other, with sleep still in our eyes. Every word that comes out of our mouths is barbed. And still, we push forward.
“There are things we need to talk about,” I say. The urge to shake him comes to mind. I smooth my palms along my thighs as I stand at the foot of the bed.
“Tomorrow,” he mutters. “Lunchtime. Now, sleep.”
I sigh, hoping he remembers this in the morning. And then I do as he asks: I crawl into bed with him and sleep.
40
Georgia’s name pops up on my phone as I’m walking to work.
It’s funny how spending time with someone invokes the feeling of missing them. Although it’s only been a few days, I miss her voice. Sudden worry fills me at the sight of her name. She is never awake before eight o’clock on purpose.
“Guess what!” she says when I answer. Her voice is cheery for such an early hour. Relief floods me, easing my adrenaline rush.
“What’s up?”
“I just accepted a new job!”
“Oh my god, congratulations! Details!” I can’t help but shriek the last part, causing some heads to turn on the sidewalk ahead of me.
“It’s with a marketing firm in Seattle!” She had mentioned applying for new jobs when I was with her, but she hadn’t heard from any of them. “It’s a really good company, Charlie. I’m excited to finally put my marketing skills to good use. They work with a nonprofit out there that pairs caregivers with disabled people. How cool is that?” I roll my eyes. She has such a giving heart, it’s sickening sometimes. “Seriously,” she says. “Where I’m at now is so… snobby.”
“That’s what you get in Chicago,” I tell her.
“And…”
“There’s more good news?”
Her voice is hushed. “I asked Henry to come with me.”
I squeal. “Excuse me? Are you real?”
I pull the phone away from my face and stare at her name. Flashes of us in college, neither of us able to keep a solid boyfriend, spring to mind. Late nights soothing each other’s breakups with chocolate and rocky road ice cream and The Notebook…
She laughs in my ear. “He said yes,” she says. She sounds happy. Really, really happy.
“You’re moving with your boyfriend to a city across the country!”
I picture her boyfriend: tall, averagely built, a nerd. They had been dating for almost a year before I moved to Boston. He dotes on her, loves her. I had been surprised they hadn’t moved in together before then. When I brought it up, just a few weeks after I moved from Chicago, she had told me, I wouldn’t do that to you. It still hadn’t happened, even though I left for Boston six months ago.
I had been mildly insulted. Was she implying that I couldn’t live alone?
I love living with you, goober, she had added. But now that I am living alone, I realize: she was right. I loved living with her, too. I had sowed my ‘wild’ oats, and now I was agreeing to live with Avery. Speaking of which…
“Avery asked me to move in with him,” I blurt.
“Really?”
“I’m sorry—I don’t mean to steal your thunder. It just came out.” She makes a noise of disagreement. I lower my voice and say, “He said it in the same way that he asked his ex.”
“How…?” I filled in her unspoken questions: How do you know? How did he ask?
“I found a video a while back on her Facebook page. In it, he was all, Full name— will you move in with me? And then two days ago, he said, Charlotte Harper Galston, will you move in with me? The similarities kind of… suck.”
“Oh, what an ass. Did you kick him to the curb?”
I roll my eyes and wish she could see me. “No, but, Georgia… I don’t know how to feel,” I whisper. “I don’t…” I realize I’m outside of work already, so I sit down on the bench facing the street. “I already have a place. I put down the deposit a few weeks ago. I’m set to move in a few days from now. My parents are coming to help me move, and…”
“And you’re thinking, ‘Why is he springing this on me now?’”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Charlie?” Tom’s voice cuts through the cold morning. “What are you doing out here?”
I turn, and he is poised at the entrance to the building. One gloved hand is at the door. “I’m just finishing a personal call, Tom,” I say. He nods and disappears into the building.
Georgia laughs into my ear. “You going to be late?”
“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s gotten used to me being late.” I tug my hat down further on my head. It’s going to take forever for my butt to warm up; the freezing metal bench has numbed my lower half.
“Do you want my unbiased opinion?”
“Can you do unbiased?”
She coughs to cover a laugh. “Ask yourself if you want him in your life, and if you see yourself with him in a few years. If it’s a yes, then, hell. Move in with him. If it’s a no? You know how it has to go. This guy has put you through some shit, Charlie.”
“I know you don’t like him because of what happened more than a year ago—”
“It’s not just that!”
“What is it then?”
“He has strung you along for a while. Hot and cold. It just…” She pauses, and exhales. “Look. I just don’t want you to get hurt, okay?”
“Same,” I say. “I have to go.”
“Love you,” she says.
“Love you, too.”
Avery shows up at my office at 12:30.
“Hey, babe,” he says as he knocks on my door. Rose is a few feet behind him, looking pissed. I imagine that he probably ignored her and the
receptionist. I give her an apologetic smile, and she turns on her heel.
“What are you doing here?”
He holds up a bag. “I figured you wouldn’t want to go out in this weather. It just started snowing a few hours ago.” He tilts his head in the direction of the windows, which are slanted closed. Tom has been in a conference call since nine; the door has been firmly closed with a do not disturb instruction left for me.
“We can eat here,” I offer. Tom would kill me if I left my post and someone went into his office. Avery nods, and I catch myself staring at his lips a beat too long. I point to the couch, and we both take a seat. “So, how’s your day?”
“You said you wanted to talk, remember?”
I nod, now recalling his gruff dismissal in the middle of the night. “I’m sorry I brought it up so late—early—”
He holds up his hand. “It’s okay. Now that I’m conscious, though, I wanted to talk to you about all your worries and whatever else was keeping you awake.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I just… Why spring it on me now? I went through all the work of finding a place and paid the deposit. Do you expect me to drop it?”
“No, babe, of course not. While I was home, I had some pretty serious talks with my parents. Individually and together, they told me about how they progressed their relationship. It was a conversation that I really needed in order to learn. Grow.” He takes my hands in his. “You already know that I love you, even if I don’t show it how you want it.” That makes me smile a little. “I just realized that it was time to get more serious. We’ve been dating for a long time, and I want to come home to you. I want to wake up with you. Every morning.”
I’m waiting for him to answer my other questions, and so I just squeeze his fingers and keep my mouth closed.
“We looked at your new apartment together, right? Well…”
It clicks. “You want to move into the new place with me?”
He looks into my eyes, searches my face, and smiles. “Is that acceptable?”
I throw my arms around his neck, pressing my lips to his neck. “Yes,” I say against his skin. “Definitely acceptable.”
41
Past
I’m angry at my mom. She won’t leave me ALONE. All I want is some peace, right? No, she gives orders and expects me to jump up and obey. Guess what, Mom, I’m not an effing robot! I can’t wait until I can get away from her. Away from this stupid house. Orders. I don’t like orders. Colby used to order me around. I used to do whatever he freaking wanted. ‘Open your mouth, Charlie.’ ‘Drink this.’ ‘Tell me you love me.’
Gah. No wonder I have issues.
You know what would fix it? A nice little pill that mellows me out. One that makes me forget the world. One that makes me happy. One that makes me float.
Colby had a never-ending supply of little pills that made me feel all sorts of things. But then, I never was able to fend him off. He ordered me to take the pills, and then did whatever he wanted because I’d be so high, I didn’t care.
Not caring was nice.
Now? Sober me cares a lot. Sober me wants to erase his fingerprints from my skin. There aren’t enough showers in the world to get the memory of his hands off of me. Out of me. I still hear his voice in my dreams. Okay, they’re nightmares. I still hear him, laughing, telling me what to do, to calm down, to kiss him, to love him.
I wish he was rotting in jail. (He isn’t. He got out on parole and his parents sent him back to California.)
Oh, but how I miss him.
That’s what I’m angry about today, journal. Not my helicopter mother—she needs to back off, though. I’m angry at myself for missing Colby.
Ugh.
This stupid journal isn’t working. I don’t feel better. I feel about 10 times worse.
42
Does going home to Avery make me nervous?
It’s not like I’m walking into an unknown. We’ve lived together for two whopping weeks—and the first ten days were bliss. We had sex every night, made dinner together, talked about stuff. But suddenly, I’ve started working later and later, and Avery has started going to work earlier and earlier. Just last night, I crawled into bed at ten, and he was already asleep. I kissed his cheek, and he rolled away from me.
When someone knocks on my office door, my heart nearly stops.
Eve pokes her head into my office, smiling at bit at the expression on my face. “Hey, sorry to startle you,” she says. “Why are you still here?”
“Because I’m avoiding going home,” I say. It feels good to be honest.
“We could get a drink,” Eve suggests.
I think about it for a split second. “Yes, please.”
We end up at the bar where we met a few months ago. The bartender leers at our chests, and we dutifully ignore him until he comes over to take our order. “Wine for the lady,” Eve says with a nod in my direction, “and whiskey for me.”
“So,” I say once our drinks are in front of us. I’m not sure what to say. Besides Georgia, with whom I faithfully FaceTime with every weekend, I have never had many friends who are girls.
“Why are you avoiding going home?”
I take a big swallow of my wine. “Two weeks ago, I moved in with my boyfriend.”
Eve looks at me like I’m crazy. “That’s not supposed to be a bad thing.”
I say, “No.” I think, It may be. “We’re… not coping well, I think. We may kill each other from neglect.” I force myself to laugh, because the alternative is to cry.
“It’s been two weeks, Charlie. It’s going to take some time. You’re young. Both of you still have a lot of growing up to do.” Eve leans back on her stool. “When I was in college, I lived with three roommates. I fell in love with one of them, and we had this secret relationship until we graduated.” She smiles a little, but it’s sad. “Rachel and I were too similar in some instances, and polar opposites in others. We fought constantly. At first, it was something we did to keep the charade up that we were just friends. People would think, ‘Oh, they don’t even really like each other that much as friends.’ And then we’d sneak into the bathroom or a bedroom and fuck. It was fueled by those arguments, and the adrenaline.” She shakes her head, now, and I have a feeling she’s cursing herself. “When the arguments fizzled out, and the adrenaline wore off, we realized we had nothing to talk about.”
I grimace. “That sounds….”
“It was messy,” she says. “Especially when we both realized it.” She holds up her hand, pausing my question before I’ve even begun to ask. “The thing is, we still had to live with each other for the rest of the summer. We were still convinced we were in the middle of this white-hot romance. We agreed that it was passion that made us argue, and passion that made us compatible.”
I wait, breathless. I wish I hadn’t put off friendship so long with Eve. I know she’s telling me this for a reason, to make a point, but her life sounds interesting.
“She realized before I did that we weren’t going to work. I realized it only after I caught her sleeping with our other roommate.”
I jerk back. “She cheated on you?”
Eve lets out a hollow laugh. “I can’t even say I was surprised. Rachel and Mike had this weird, epic friendship. I envied them.”
“She cheated on you with a guy?”
“She’s bi.” Eve raises one eyebrow at me, and I feel disappointed in myself. Snap judgements don’t help anyone. I can’t make any assumptions about who people love. “And yes, they’re actually married.”
“He… they…” I shake my head, at a loss. “What?”
She watches me. “I found out later, from my third roommate, that Rachel and Mike had a long, sordid history. I was just a speed bump in Rachel’s path.” She exhales. “I just wish I had known beforehand. We weren’t as subtle in our own apartment, and I’m sure Mike suspected, if he didn’t outright know.”
I shake my head. “That wasn’t fair to you.”
Eve makes a fac
e, as if she doesn’t believe me.
“No, it wasn’t fair. Listen to me. Mike didn’t tell you about Rachel and him. The other roommate didn’t tell you. Rachel, who you dated, didn’t tell you that you two were both living under the same roof as her ex-boyfriend. That’s messed up.”
“I read this book once, and it reminded me too much of my situation,” Eve says. “The main character, a girl, was in a relationship with a guy. And, for some reason that I don’t remember, they broke up. How they pined for each other was devastating. The girl finally found him again, reached out, and the guy had someone else. A fiancée.”
I shake my head, because I don’t understand how this relates to her.
“I’m the fiancée in the story. I’m the one who tore the main character’s world in half, because when she was brave enough to go after her man, I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“How did the book end?”
She smiles, and it in itself is heartbreaking. “Well, someone was crushed.”
“Probably not the main character,” I guess.
“No,” she agrees.
I reach over and take her hand. She squeezes my fingers. I fear we’re both overcome with this emotion that I can’t name. It is despair’s cousin, and sadness’s child, and anger’s sister.
After a minute of silence, Eve excuses herself to the restroom. “One more round,” I tell the bartender. His eyes still skip from my eyes to my chest and back, as if a damn tennis match is happening on my skin. “House red. Whiskey straight.” He looks like he needs the reminder. He grunts and pours, but it’s like I have magnets on my breasts. “For god’s sake,” I mutter. This is a tame shirt, a wide scoop neck sweater that doesn’t show a hint of cleavage, and that makes me madder. “I’m not even showing that much skin!”
