by S. Massery
In other words: she came to Boston expecting him to be single.
“And how did she take it last night?”
“About as well as could be expected.” He shakes his head. “No, probably worse than that.”
I nod. I don’t know this girl, but I can picture how she might react. Ugly.
“There’s more,” he whispers. After a moment, he says, “I think she may have moved here.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Permanently?”
He shakes his head. “She insinuated she’d be around for a while. I don’t think she got a job here or anything like that. Her dad has money; she could be at a hotel for who knows how long. I don’t know… I’m sorry, Charlotte.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “You’re okay?”
He blinks. “Why are you asking if I’m okay?”
“She’s your ex. You aren’t affected because she’s here? Trying to see you?”
“Oh, well. Yeah, it’s kind of shaken me up a bit.” He leans over and kisses my forehead. “Thank you.”
I press into his touch for a moment before rocking back. “Why are you thanking me?”
He raises his eyebrows. “For being understanding.”
I am only understanding because I understand.
50
I have a new routine.
After Avery leaves for work, I slide the ring out of its box, sit on the floor, and hold it. I stare at it and twist it so it catches the morning light and memorize every detail. I never put it on, though. That’s an experience that a woman should get with her new fiancé: the moment of putting on the engagement ring for the first time. So, while I admire, and I poke my index finger through it to warm the metal on the inside, it never touches my ring finger.
Is it unhealthy?
I ask myself this every single time I peel back his underwear. I pray that it hasn’t disappeared. If it were to disappear, I might think I hallucinated the whole thing. While I stare at it, I picture the life ahead of us. I haven’t met his parents yet. Is that important to him? It’s important to me. I don’t want to marry into a family that hates me for chaining him to the east coast. I wonder where we’ll live; I wonder how soon my parents will start mentioning kids—and then I realize that’s a joke, because they already mention it. Big wedding? Small wedding? My mother doesn’t do anything small—that answers that question. I wonder how we’ll raise our kids, if he’ll push for more than one. I don’t necessarily like kids, but maybe I’ll like one that comes out of my belly. Will he help me paint the nursery? Will he deal with my mood swings with grace? Will he get me pickles in the middle of the night if I get a craving, or hold my hair in the morning if I have morning sickness?
Stop, I have to tell myself.
And then my thoughts turn to how little I know of Elaina. I’ve turned into a stalker, really, the amount of times I check her social media. It was a sucker punch when I discovered that they recently became friends with each other on Facebook again, and they also followed each other’s Instagram and Twitter accounts.
She showed up like a blazing comet, and Avery was left blinded by her. Me? Just blindsided. I carefully ask about her at dinner, or as we get ready to leave for work in the morning. That’s another thing that has changed: my level of effort.
Suddenly, there is a competitor. I’ve always been competitive in the best sense of the word. It shouldn’t be surprising that, given Elaina’s arrival, I am suddenly waking up when he does, touching him more, eating breakfast and leaving for work with him. If he has noticed this about-face, he does not mention it. When we part ways in the morning, I sag. I exhale a breath of relief.
“Plans to see Elaina today?” I ask at dinner. Sometimes, “Did you hear from her today?”
His eyes cut to mine, always weighing my misery as a tangible thing. How thick is this dark cloud surrounding Charlotte today, he must consider. Sometimes he answers, “I didn’t see her today.” Sometimes, and increasingly more often, he will tell me, “She was waiting for me outside of work. We walked home together.”
I feel her presence like a pulled muscle: a twinge of pain when I move the wrong way. I want to know where she is, how she can be stopped or discouraged, but I don’t know how to do this with any degree of subtly. This means that I must resort to bluntness.
“We should invite her for dinner,” I say to Avery one day. It has been raining all weekend, and the temperature made a nice transition from cold to chilly. The end of the season snow we got two weeks ago was finally melting away. April, and spring along with it, was finally arriving.
“You want to have dinner with who?”
“With Elaina,” I confirm. My stomach does a weird flip. “We can have her over. She can bring someone, if she wants.”
His eyes flash. I bite back a question about that bothering him, because it clearly does. The idea of her dating someone else has him tense. “That could be fun,” he says.
“Okay,” I answer. “When?” It’s Sunday morning, but we have the rest of our lives to plan a dinner with his ex-girlfriend.
“Let me call her.”
I bite my lip. I didn’t know he still had her number, or that they were on a familiar enough basis to call each other. Deep down, I assumed they probably communicated. But I didn’t want my imagination to run away from me. Did they snapchat nudes to each other? Did she say, I wish you were here, in place of I love you? She wasn’t able to say those three little words to him before—would she say it now that he wasn’t hers?
“Elaina,” he greets her. “Charlotte and I were wondering if you’d like to join us for dinner?” He nods as she says something, her voice indecipherable. We meet eyes. “When?” he repeats for me. I shrug. “Sometime this week. When are you free?”
He cups the mouth part of his phone after a moment.
“Does Friday work?”
Five days to mentally prepare. “Yes,” I agree.
He nods again and angles his shoulders away from me. “That works for us. No, you don’t need to bring anything.” And, quieter, “I don’t know. Probably not…. I have to go, okay?”
Once he hangs up, he breathes harshly: a sharp inhale and a long, shaky exhale. He turns back to me and hugs me tightly to him. “I know that you don’t really want to do this,” he says.
“No,” I answer. I really don’t. “But she’s here.”
He pulls back and meets my eyes. “She’s where?”
I tap his temple with my index finger. “She practically lives here, now, and…”
“And you want to know her?”
Something like that.
“What are we going to cook?” My cooking skills can be questionable sometimes.
He perks up. “She likes chicken marsala.”
I wrinkle my nose. Doesn’t he know I hate mushrooms? “Chicken parm?”
“No, she’s lactose intolerant.”
I blow out a breath. “Fish?”
He nods. “Yeah, fish would be good. I haven’t had any in forever.”
Because I suck at cooking fish, I want to say, and you don’t buy it. Instead, I say, “I’ll see what the fresh fish the market has.” He can cook the damn fish.
We leave it at that. I step back in the circle of his arms and sigh when he pulls me closer.
“Movie?”
He shakes his head and gently pushes me back. “I have to go meet Steve,” he says. “Actually, I’m already running late.”
I follow him into the bedroom. “It’s a Sunday. Is this a work thing?”
“Yeah,” he says from the closet. “I took some papers home on Friday, but he’s leaving for New York at the ass crack of dawn tomorrow. He needs them for a presentation.”
I nod. “Okay, well. You’ll be home after you meet with him?”
He shrugs. “We may do lunch or something.”
I hold back a sigh. “Okay.” I look around the room, wondering how much neater it could possibly get. Since stressing about Elaina, I have had a single-minded focus of cleaning e
verything. Avery never said a word about how the place suddenly shined.
“Maybe I’ll go see Rose, then,” I say.
He says, “That would be fun. Go do that.” He comes out wearing a sweater and my favorite pair of his jeans—they’re dark, low slung, and hug his butt and thighs in a way that makes my body heat.
Wasn’t Steve leaving their company? I can’t remember when Avery mentioned it. I almost don’t want to remember. I don’t want to catch Avery in any sort of lie.
I kneel at his dresser and reach for the ring. Once it’s in my hands, I call Georgia. It has been too long since I last spoke to my best friend, besides the occasional emails at work and texting. “Charlie, it is seven o’clock in the morning. This better be good,” Georgia growls.
I laugh. “I forgot about that damn time change. Sorry, Georgie. I just missed your voice.”
I can practically feel her waking up through the phone. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah….” She snorts. “Okay, no,” I admit.
“Spill it, sister.”
“Before I do, how are you and Henry?”
She makes a dreamy sighing sound. It makes me want to slap her, because I can only imagine the in-love expression on her face. “Oh, Charlie, he’s so perfect. I mean, obviously he’s not perfect by any sense of the word, but he’s perfect for me. Do you remember how you and I got along really well, and it was seamless living together?”
“Of course.”
“It’s better than that because I get to have awesome sex with my handsome boyfriend every day. Usually more than once.”
I wince, because… that sounds nice. That sounds like the way it should be: two people, completely compatible and at peace with each other.
I feel broken when I tell her, “I don’t have that.”
She grunts. “I could’ve told you that.”
I breathe through the lump in my throat. “I found a ring in his underwear drawer. I keep looking at it. I’m holding it right now.”
“Fuck,” she whispers.
I rub at my forehead. “He made me a pie for my birthday. Or, no, he picked one up from the grocery store and thought I wouldn’t notice.”
She snorts. “That’s original.”
“I pretended my parents hadn’t done the exact same thing every year of my childhood.” All I had wanted was a cake like everyone else. But I let myself smile, because my news kept getting better.
“Oh, and I’m meeting his ex-girlfriend.”
“WHAT?”
Georgia is taking this well.
“I know. She showed up from San Diego and apparently will be in town for a while. She keeps seeking out Avery, so…”
If she were here, she’d be grinning at me. As it is, her voice sounds devious when she agrees, “So you’re keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
“Maybe she’ll back off if Avery and I put on a show of being in love.”
“Just don’t fake it,” she warns.
I run my thumb over the diamond before tucking it back into its box. It doesn’t stir excitement—just dread.
“I think I already might be.”
51
In truth, I think I was hoping I’d be struck by lightning before Friday rolled around. To my everlasting dismay, that doesn’t happen. I leave work early, pick up fresh cod, and bolt home. The apartment is already spotless, but I can’t help puttering around until they arrive.
When the buzzer sounds, my heart stops. Avery isn’t here yet and she is? I double check to make sure it’s her, and her voice floats through the speaker. “It’s Elaina,” she says. Her phantom voice—just her voice—feels invasive. I hit the button that will unlock the downstairs door and feel like I’m going to throw up. I want to take it all back. I wish I didn’t know she existed, I wish I didn’t invite her, I wish I wasn’t here without Avery backing me up….
Stop panicking, I order myself. Channel your mother.
Elaina knocks on the door, and I swing it open wide. We take each other in; I wish I had not changed out of what I wore to work, because she looks dressed up, comfortable, and pretty. She wears leggings, a long blouse and vest, and shiny boots with knit socks peeking over the top. With that outfit, she fits right into New England. Opposed to her, I wear black jeans, which have a bit of mud on my calf, a t-shirt that I just remember has a hole in the armpit, and fuzzy neon green socks.
While I consider myself pretty average—in height, in my mousy, almost-blonde hair, murky blue eyes, and so on—she is like a petite version of Aphrodite. Olive skin that makes me assume she has a Mediterranean heritage, thick brown hair, and cool brown eyes. More than that, she has this presence that seems to amplify herself. I die a little, because if she is here to reclaim Avery, I don’t know how to stop her.
“Please, come in,” I say and step aside.
She enters and takes off her boots by the door, next to mine. I allow myself a small smile. I hear her inhale and exhale slowly, and I have to wonder if she’s nervous. Once her boots are off, she straightens and holds out her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Charlotte,” she says.
I reach forward and take her hand, although it feels like I’m betraying myself by saying, “It’s nice to finally meet you, too, Elaina.” I wave my hand around the apartment like an idiot. “Please, make yourself comfortable.” But not too comfortable, I think. “Avery should be back soon.” I ignore how her eyes light up at the mention of his name. “Would you like something to drink?”
“No, thank you, Charlotte.”
I almost tell her that she can call my Charlie, but we aren’t friends.
There’s little merit in that, though, because my boyfriend doesn’t even call me Charlie. And for the first time in a long time, I wonder at his intentions with that. Does he do it to keep separate from me? To hold himself apart?
Regardless, there’s nothing I can do about that now. I watch from the doorway as Elaina sweeps through the apartment. She contaminates everything she touches, which is most things. There are new pictures on the walls of Avery and me, blown up photos that my mother had professionally done of the family, shots of his family laughing and posing in front of a campfire. My favorite is the one of him and Charlie, his best friend, clutching each other. It looks like they were high school aged, wearing almost ill-fitting tuxedos with obnoxious boutonnieres. Avery has a smirk that says, I rule the universe, and Charlie looks like he’d follow his friend anywhere.
She only lingers on that for a moment. She mirrors Avery’s smirk and then giggles. “I was there,” she says. “Not, you know, there. But I went to his school’s prom with another guy.” She shakes her head and moves on. “Charlie flirted with me for about two seconds, until my date threatened to punch him in the face.”
I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say to that.
She moves on to the painting I finally had the courage to hang a few weeks ago. It was one of my most recent works, after the solar eclipse that hangs in our bedroom. I never told Avery what that particular painting meant.
“Where is this city?” Elaina asks me. This painting was of the Chicago skyline in abstract: the sky was a mess of swirling reds, yellows, oranges, warm purples, and browns. The buildings, collectively, were vertical splashes of cooler colors: blues, greens, shades of purple and black.
“Chicago,” I answer. You’re coming into your own, Georgia had said when I sent her a picture of it. You’ve got something special. She had sent me my old paintings—most of them were incomplete—right after I moved to Boston. They sat, still rolled in their cardboard and plastic cylinders, stacked in my closet.
“Who’s the artist?”
She is eyeing the painting too intensely, dissecting it. And so I answer, “I think it says Anonymous on the back, under the frame. What do you think?”
“I think it’s gorgeous, but unsettling.” I tilt my head, trying to see how it unsettles. “It’s like the sky is on fire. The end of the world.”
“Yes, it
could be.” The world could end tonight, at dinner, and we’ll all go up in a blaze of flames. It would be preferable to the embarrassment that I’m sure is coming.
I hear the door open. Avery calls out, “Hey, babe,” before he is fully visible. His eyes swing from the second set of boots, to me, and then to Elaina in the far corner of the room. “You’re already here,” he says, an octave higher than his regular voice.
She grins, and her eyes clearly say, I love you, but she shuffles her feet and folds her arms across her stomach. “I am. I wanted to get to know Charlotte uninfluenced.”
He raises one of his eyebrows. “Oh?” He sounds like me.
She smirks.
“How is that going?”
Maybe he knows I can be as tight-lipped as a clam when I want to be.
“I learned a good deal,” she says.
Oh?
She glances at me, then back to Avery. Her cheeks turn a rosy pink that I used to wish I had. “She’s smart, obviously,” she winks at me, “and talented. She knows how to clean, because this place is spotless.” Avery looks around, as if just now noticing the lack of disarray. “And she’s proving to be a great hostess and a very funny woman.”
I hardly breathe, because I was not expecting her to be genuinely nice.
Avery, though, latches onto one thing: “What did she do to prove she’s talented?”
Elaina waves her hand around at my entire apartment. “I have to assume you didn’t decorate, Avery. I’ve seen your style.”
...And, there goes my good mood.
He smiles. “You’re right.” We meet eyes, and he gives me a real smile. “You are talented, Charlotte. I’m sorry I didn’t notice your cleanliness.”
Elaina says, “What did you get us?”
I just now notice the paper bag in his hand. He puts it on the counter and pulls out a six pack. “Sam Adams IPA.”
I try not to let the wince cross my face, because, okay, maybe he assumed that I had wine here. Honestly, I almost wish he had bought tequila to make the night more bearable. But then Elaina grins at him, and I know they’re sharing some secret memories of drinking those beers somewhere. They had probably followed it with sex.
