by Emily Henry
I had to admit there was something singularly hilarious about line dancing angrily, but that didn’t stop me from doing it. We finished two more songs, took two more shots.
When we went back out for the fourth song—a more complex dance for the proficient to enjoy while the caller used the toilet and rested his vocal cords—we had no hope of keeping up with the choreography, even if we hadn’t been tipsy by then. During a double turn to the right, my shoe caught on an uneven floorboard and Gus grabbed me by the waist to keep me from going down. His laughter faded when he saw my face, and he leaned (of course) against the support beam, my nemesis from earlier, drawing me in toward him by my hips. His hand burned through my jeans into my skin and I fought to keep a clear head as he held me like that. “Hey,” he murmured, dropping his mouth toward my ear so I could hear him over the music. “What’s wrong?”
What was wrong was his thumbs twirling circles on my hips, his whiskey breath against the corner of my mouth, and how stupid I felt for its effect on me. I was naive.
I’d always trusted my parents, never sensed the missing pieces between Jacques and me, and now I’d started getting emotionally attached to someone who’d done everything he could to convince me not to.
I stepped back from him. I meant to say, I think I need to go home, or maybe I’m not feeling well.
But I’d never been good at hiding how I was feeling, especially this past year.
I didn’t say anything. I just ran for the door.
I burst into the cool air of the parking lot and beelined toward the Kia. I could hear him shouting my name as he followed, but I was too embarrassed, frustrated, and I didn’t know what else, to turn around.
“January?” Gus said again, jogging toward me.
“I’m fine.” I dug for my keys in my pocket. “I just—I need to go home. I’m not—I don’t . . .” I trailed off, fumbling the key against the lock.
“We can’t go anywhere until we’ve sobered up,” he pointed out.
“Then I’ll just sit in the car until then.” My hands were shaking and the key glanced off the lock again.
“Here. Let me.” Gus took it from me and slipped it in, unlocking the driver’s side door, but he didn’t step away to let me open it.
“Thanks,” I said without looking at him.
I flinched as his hand brushed at my face, swiping hair from my cheek. He tucked it behind my ear. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
Now I looked up at him, ignoring the heavy flip-flop of my stomach as I met his eyes. “Why?”
His eyebrows lifted. “Why what?”
“Why can I tell you?” I said. “Why would I tell you anything?”
His mouth pressed closed. The muscle in his jaw leapt. “What is this? What did I do?”
“Nothing.” I turned toward the car, but Gus’s body still blocked the door. “Move, Gus.”
“This isn’t fair,” he said. “You’re mad at me and I can’t even try to fix it? What could I have possibly—”
“I’m not mad at you,” I said.
“You are,” he argued. I tried again to open the door. This time he moved aside to let me. “Please tell me, January.”
“I’m not,” I insisted, voice shaking dangerously. “I’m not mad at you. We’re not even close enough for that. I’m just your casual acquaintance. It’s not like we’re friends.”
Twin grooves rose from the insides of his eyebrows and his crooked mouth twisted. “Please,” he said, almost out of breath. “Don’t do this.”
“Do what?” I demanded.
He threw his arms out to his sides. “I don’t know!” he said. “Whatever this is.”
“How stupid do you think I am?”
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you don’t tell me anything,” I said. “It’s not like you respect me or my opinions.”
“Of course I respect you.”
“I know you were married,” I blurted. “I know you were married and that you split up on your birthday, and not only did you not tell me any of that, but you listened to me spill my guts about why I do what I do and what it all means to me, and—and talk about my dad and what he did—and you sat there, on your smug little high horse—”
Gus gave an exasperated laugh. “‘Little high horse’?”
“—thinking I was stupid or naive—”
“Of course I don’t—”
“—keeping your own failed marriage a secret, just like everything else in your life, so you can look down on all the cliché people like me who still believe—”
“Stop,” he snapped.
“—while you—”
“Stop.” He jerked back from me, walked down the length of the car, then turned back, face angry. “You don’t know me, January.”
I laughed humorlessly. “I’m aware.”
“No.” He shook his head, stormed back toward me, and stopped no more than six inches away. “You think my marriage is a joke to me? I was married two years. Two years before my wife left me for the best man at our wedding. How’s that for cliché? I know goldfish that lived longer than that. I didn’t even want the divorce. I would’ve stayed with her, even after the affair, but guess what, January? Happy endings don’t happen to everyone. There’s nothing you can do to make someone keep loving you.
“Believe it or not, I don’t just sit through hours of conversations with you silently judging you. And if it takes me a while to tell you things like ‘Hey, my wife left me for my college roommate,’ maybe it has nothing to do with you, okay? Maybe it’s because I don’t like saying that sentence aloud. I mean, your mom didn’t leave when your dad cheated on her, and my mom didn’t leave my dad when he broke my fucking arm, and yet I couldn’t do anything to make my wife stay.”
My stomach bottomed out. My throat clenched. Pain stabbed through my chest. It all made sense at once: the hesitancy and deflection, the mistrust of people, the fear of commitment.
No one had chosen Gus. From the time he was a kid, no one had chosen him, and he was embarrassed by that, like it meant something about him. I wanted to tell him it didn’t. That it wasn’t because he was broken, but because everyone else was. But I couldn’t get any words out. I couldn’t do anything but stare at him—standing there, out of steam, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths—and ache for him and hate the world a little for chewing him up.
Right then, I honestly didn’t care why he’d disappeared or where he’d gone.
The hard glint had left his eyes and his chin dropped as he rubbed at his forehead.
There were millions of things I wanted to say to him, but what came out was, “Parker?”
He looked up again, eyes wide and mouth ajar. “What?”
“Your college roommate,” I murmured. “Do you mean Parker?”
Gus’s mouth closed, the muscles along his jaw leaping. “Yeah,” he barely said. “Parker.”
Parker, the art student with the eccentric clothes. Parker, who’d picked most of his left eyebrow away. He’d had pretty blue eyes and a certain zaniness that my friends and I had always imagined translated to a golden-retriever-esque excitability when it came to sex. Which we were all fairly sure he was getting a lot of.
Gus wasn’t looking at me. He was rubbing his forehead again, looking as broken and embarrassed as I’d felt thirty seconds ago.
“On your birthday. What an asshole.”
I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until he responded: “I mean, that wasn’t her plan.” He looked away, staring vaguely through the parking lot. “I sort of dragged it out of her. I could tell something was wrong and . . . anyway.”
Still an asshole, I thought. I shook my head. I had no idea what else to say. I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face into his neck, feeling his deep breaths push against
me. After a moment, his arms lifted around me and we stood there, just out of reach of the parking lot’s lone floodlight, holding on to each other.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into his skin. “She should have picked you.” And I meant it, even if I wasn’t sure exactly which she I was talking about.
His arms tightened around my back. His mouth and nose pressed against the crown of my head, and inside, a mournful Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young cover picked up, guitar twanging like its strings were crying. Gus rocked me side to side. “I want to know you,” I told him.
“I want that,” he murmured into my hair. We stood there for another moment before he spoke again. “It’s late. We should grab some coffee inside so we can get home.”
I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to pull away from Gus. “Sure.”
He eased back from me and his hand ran down my throat, resting on the crook between my neck and shoulder, his rough thumb catching the edge of my collarbone. He shook his head once. “I’ve never thought you were stupid.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say, and even if I had been, I wasn’t sure if my voice would come out thick and heavy, like my blood felt, or shaky and high, like my stomach did.
Gus’s eyes dipped to my mouth, then rose to my eyes. “I thought—think it’s brave to believe in love. I mean, the lasting kind. To try for that, even knowing it can hurt you.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?” he murmured.
I needed to clear my throat but I didn’t. It would be too obvious, what I was thinking, how I was feeling. “You don’t think you ever will again?”
Gus stepped back, shoes crackling against the gravel. “It doesn’t matter if I believe it can work or not,” he said. “Not believing in something doesn’t stop you from wanting it. If you’re not careful.”
His gaze sent heat unfurling over me, the cold snapping painfully back into place against my skin when he finally turned back toward the bar. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get that coffee.”
Careful. Caution was something I had little of when it came to Gus Everett.
Case in point: my hangover the next morning.
I awoke to my first text from him.
It said only Ow.
18
The Ex
There were no more nights on our separate decks. On Sunday Gus came to my house looking like he’d started going through a trash compactor only for it to spit him back up halfway through. I felt at least as bad as he looked.
We put the chaise lounges on the deck flat and lay out there with ice packs on our heads, chugging the bottles of Gatorade he’d brought over. “Did you write?” he asked.
“Whenever I picture words, I literally gag.”
Beside me, Gus coughed. “That word,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“Should we order pizza?” he asked.
“Are you kidding? You almost just—”
“January,” Gus said. “Don’t say that word. Just answer the question.”
“Of course we should.”
By Monday, we’d mostly recovered. At least enough that we were both working at our own tables during the day (two thousand words hammered out on my end). Around 1:40, Gus held up the first note of the day: I TEXTED YOU.
I REMEMBER, I wrote back. A HISTORIC MOMENT IN OUR FRIENDSHIP.
NO, he said. I TEXTED YOU A MINUTE AGO.
I’d left my phone charging by the bed. I held up my pointer finger as I hurried from the room and grabbed my phone. The text just said, Do you know how to make a margarita?
Gus, I typed back. This is fewer words than the notes you wrote me to tell me about this message.
He responded immediately: I wanted to put in a formal request. Writing notes is a very casual form of communication.
I don’t know how to make a margarita, I told him. But I know someone who does.
Jose Cuervo? he asked.
I pulled open the blinds and leaned out the window, yelling toward the back of our houses, where the kitchen windows were. “GOOGLE.”
My phone buzzed with his response: Come over. I tried not to notice what those words did to me, the full-body shiver, the heat.
I went back for my computer and walked over barefoot. Gus met me on his porch, leaned against the doorjamb.
“Do you ever stand upright?” I asked.
“Not if it can be helped,” he answered, and led me into his kitchen. I sat on a stool at the island as he pulled out the limes then went into the front room for his shaker, tequila, and triple sec. “Please, don’t trouble yourself to help,” he teased.
“Don’t worry. I would never.”
When he’d finished making our drinks we went out onto the front porch and worked until the last streaks of sunshine had vanished into that deep Michigan blue, the stars pricking through it like poked holes, one at a time. When our stomachs started to gurgle, I went back to my house for the rest of the pizza and we ate it cold, our legs outstretched, feet resting on the porch railing.
“Look,” Gus said, and pointed up at the deep blue sky as two trails of silver light streaked through the stars. His eyes were doing the thing, the Gus thing, at the sight of them, and it made my chest flutter almost painfully. I loved that vulnerable excitement when he first caught sight of something that made him feel before he could cover it up.
He looks at me like that sometimes.
I jerked my focus to the falling stars. “Relatable,” I said flatly.
Gus let out a half-formed laugh. “That’s basically us. On fire and just straight up dropping out of the sky.”
He looked over at me with a dark, fervent gaze that undid the careful composure I’d been rebuilding. My eyes slipped down him, and I scrambled for something to say. “What’s the big black blob about?” I tipped my chin toward the updated tattoo on the back of his bicep, where the skin was a bit paler than his usual olive.
He looked confused until he followed my gaze. “Yeah,” he said. “It used to be something else.”
“A Möbius strip. I know,” I said, a bit too quickly.
His eyes bored into mine for a few intimidating beats as he decided what to say. “Naomi and I got them.” Her name hung in the air, the afterimage of a lightning strike. Naomi. The woman Gus Everett had married, I presumed. He didn’t seem to notice my shock. Maybe in his mind he said her name often. Maybe having told me she existed felt the same to him as if he’d shown me their photo albums. “Right after the wedding.”
“Ah,” I said stupidly. My cheeks went even hotter and started to itch. I had a knack for bringing up things he had no interest in talking about. “Sorry.”
He shook his head once, and his eyes kept their sharp, fiery focus. “I told you I wanted you to know me. You can ask me anything you want.”
It sounded sort of like, Get on top of me! Now!
I hoped I looked very pretty, for an overripe tomato.
Dropping the topic was the smarter idea, but I couldn’t help testing him, seeing if I, January Andrews, could really ask the secretive Gus Everett anything at all.
I settled on “What did it mean?”
“As it turned out, very little,” he said. Disappointment wriggled through my stomach at how quickly our open-book policy had deteriorated.
But then he took a breath and went on. “If you start at one point on a Möbius strip and you follow it straight around, when you’ve done the full loop, you don’t end up back where you started. You end up right above it, but on the other side of the surface. And if you keep following it around for a second time, you’ll finally end up where you started. So it’s this path that’s actually twice as long as it should be. At the time, I guess we thought it meant that the two of us added up to something bigger than we were on our own.”
He shrugged one shoulder, then absently
scratched the black blot. “After she left, it seemed more like a bad joke. Oh, here we are, trapped on opposite sides of this surface, allegedly in the same place and somehow not at all together. Pinned together with these stupid tattoos that are five thousand percent more permanent than our marriage.”
“Yikes,” I said. Yikes? I sounded like a gum-popping babysitter trying to relate to her favorite Hot Divorced Dad. Which was sort of how I felt.
Gus gave me a crooked smile. “Yikes,” he agreed quietly.
We stared at each other for a beat too long. “What was she like?” The words had just slipped out, and now a spurt of panic went through me at having asked something I wasn’t sure Gus would want to answer, or I would enjoy hearing.
His dark eyes studied me for several seconds. He cleared his throat. “She was tough,” he said. “Sort of . . . impenetrable.”
The jokes were writing themselves, but I didn’t interrupt him. I’d come this far. Now I had to know what kind of woman could capture Gus Everett’s heart.
“She was this incredible visual artist,” he said. “That’s how we met. I saw one of her shows in a gallery when I was in grad school, and liked her work before I knew her. And even once we were together, I felt like I could never really know her. Like she was always just out of reach. For some reason that thrilled me.”
What kind of woman could capture Gus Everett’s heart?
My polar opposite. Not the kind who was always rude when she was grumpy, crying when she was happy, sad, overwhelmed. Who couldn’t help but let it all hang out.
“But I also just had this thought, like . . .” He hesitated. “Here’s someone I could never break. She didn’t need me. And she wasn’t gentle with me, or worried about saving me, or really letting me in enough to help her work things out either. Maybe it sounds shitty, but I’ve never trusted myself with anyone . . . soft.”
“Ah.” My cheeks burned and I kept my focus on his arm instead of his face.
“I saw that with my parents, you know? This black hole and this bright light he was always just trying to swallow whole.”
My gaze flickered to his face, the sharp lines etched between his brows. “Gus. You’re not a black hole. And you’re not your father either.”
