REAL LIFE
Friday
ON THE DRIVE home, we’re silent. Now that the truth is out, Wyn and I can’t even look at each other. He won’t look at Parth either, keeps his eyes fixed out the car window.
As soon as we get inside the cottage, everyone retreats, and rather than endure any more awkward or painful run-ins, I tuck myself away in the first-floor powder room.
When I make my way up the stairs, though, Kimmy and Cleo are coming down, bags in hand, bound for the guesthouse.
Cleo doesn’t look at me.
Neither of them says anything, but Kimmy flashes a tense smile and squeezes my hand as we pass. A lump forms in my throat at the whine of the front door opening behind me.
I don’t go to Wyn’s and my room. The bubble has popped, this pocket universe collapsed. Instead, I take the kids’ room. It’s tidy, the twin beds returned to opposite walls and neatly made. Cleo and Kimmy left no trace of themselves here apart from the lingering scent of Kimmy’s peppermint oil.
I sit on the edge of the bed, feeling the loneliness swell, not knowing whether it’s pressing against me from the outside or growing from within.
Either way, it’s inescapable, my oldest companion.
I shuck off my clothes and crawl into bed. I don’t cry, but I don’t sleep either.
The argument replays in my mind on a feverish loop until it feels like the words melt together nonsensically.
I ask myself, again and again, why I didn’t tell them. All the same half- assed answers cycle through my mind until I’m as sick with myself as everyone else is.
I turn onto my back and glare up at a beam of moonlight on the ceiling.
I wasn’t afraid they’d be mad at me, exactly, for how things ended with Wyn. I was afraid of their sadness. I was afraid of ruining this trip that meant so much to them. I was afraid of ruining this place where they’ve always been happy. I was afraid they would resent me and never say it, afraid they wouldn’t like me as much without Wyn, because I didn’t like me as much without him.
I was afraid they’d ask me what went wrong, and no matter what answer I cobbled together from the rubble, they’d see right through it.
They’d know I wasn’t enough.
I’m not the brilliant doctor my parents wanted me to be, and I’m not the person who could give Wyn the happiness he deserves, and I’m not the friend Sabrina and Cleo needed.
I’ve tried so hard to be good, to deserve the people around me, and I’ve still managed to hurt all of them.
The blankets feel too hot, the mattress too soft. Whenever I roll over, I thwack the wall.
If there were a TV in here, I’d put on Murder, She Wrote, fall asleep to its blue glow and softly jaunty soundtrack.
The silence leaves too much room for questions, for memories to vine around me, hold me captive.
Not just of the fight but of the dark place, of the weeks before and after losing Wyn. Of crying into a pillow that smelled like him, and waking up from dreams of him, my chest filled with knots. Of trying to flush him from my system with a double date with Taye, her boyfriend, and their friend.
Of coming home, sick to my stomach, and cleaning the apartment. As if scrubbing the grout and the condiment splatters on the kitchen cabinets could make everything about my life look different. Make me different.
I remember standing in my kitchen, my phone clamped in one hand, wishing there were someone to call.
That if I called my mother, she’d say, Come home; I’ll take care of you.
That if I called Wyn, his soft voice would tell me it had all been a mistake, a misunderstanding, that he’d love me forever, like he promised.
Even if I did feel capable of telling them the truth, Sabrina and Parth would’ve just gotten to sleep, and Cleo and Kimmy would need to get up in a few short hours; and if I called Eloise, she’d assume someone died, because we never talk on the phone.
I was so close to dialing Wyn that night that I blocked his number.
And the longer I went without calling any of them, the more impossible doing so felt, the more embarrassed I was by the truth.
I spent my whole life trying to get here, and why? It wasn’t what I pictured.
No, it’s worse than that. Because honestly, I’m not sure I ever bothered to picture it.
I imagined giving relieved family members good news in hospital waiting rooms, and I pictured my own parents’ happiness and pride, their faces out in the crowd at graduation, their adoring notes at the foot of the family Christmas card. I pictured a house with air-conditioning that always worked and doors that stayed open, and long dinners at nice restaurants, with everyone laughing, pink-cheeked. I imagined downtime, thoughtful gifts for my parents, the family vacations we’d never taken, their mortgage paid off. I imagined all their hard work finally repaid, all their sacrifices not only compensated but rewarded.
I imagined them thinking it was all worth it. Telling me how much they loved me.
All my life, when I thought of my future, that was what I pictured. Not a career. The things I thought would come with it.
Happiness, love, safety.
And that dream had been enough for a long time. What was school if not a chance to earn your worth? To prove, again and again, that you were measurably good.
One more deal I struck with a disinterested universe: If I’m good enough, I’ll be happy.
I’ll be loved.
I’ll be safe.
Instead, I’ve pushed away everyone I love.
My heart clangs in my chest. I need to outrun these feelings.
I stand and tear the sheet off the bed, wrapping it around my shoulders. The temperature drops a solid ten degrees as I make my way into the hallway, another few as I descend the stairs, but I still feel hot and stuffy.
The kitchen is a wreck. I set my sheet aside and, in my underwear, put away the dishes, loading the dirty ones into the empty dishwasher. I wipe down the counters. I sweep. I tell myself it will make a difference. That tomorrow, when everyone comes down, tonight’s wreckage won’t look quite so bad.
The anxiety doesn’t let up. My skin feels too tight, hot and itchy.
Gathering the sheet again, I let myself out back.
The wind does little to break the feverish feeling. I climb down to the bluff, and in the dark, the water seems louder, powerful but ambivalent. I imagine what it would feel like to be swept up in it, to drift across its back. I imagine being carried away from this life, opening my eyes in a different place.
Something Sabrina said intrudes on the fantasy: You’re losing the love of your life because you’re too indecisive to just pick a wedding date and a venue.
I know things are more complicated than that, but those words keep replaying, braiding in and out of what Wyn told me earlier.
I genuinely convinced myself that was the kind of guy you wanted to be with. And you kept pushing the wedding off. You never wanted to talk about it. You never wanted to talk about anything.
You were never mad at me. You never fought with me. It felt like you didn’t even miss me.
I kept so much of what I was feeling from him, thinking the weight of my emotions would only drive him further from me, push him back behind a door I couldn’t open.
And even after he told me that tonight, I felt trapped inside myself, unable to get the words out.
Now they wriggle in my gut, burrowing deeper, gaining ground.
As soon as I make the decision, time accordions. The steep climb up the bluff, the length of the patio, the creaky stairs, the hallway—it all blurs past and I’m standing at his door.
Knocking quietly. Maybe have been for a while, even, because the door’s already swinging open, as if he’s been waiting.
That would explain why he’s fully dressed, but not why he looks so surprised.
Not the way his lips part and his brow furrows as I seem to float into the room, inflated with helium-light purpose.
And it definitely wouldn’t explain the packed luggage sitting by the door.
At the sight of it, a hot coal slips down my throat, hits the deepest pit of my stomach and sizzles. “You’re leaving?”
His steel-gray gaze flicks back toward his luggage. “I thought that might be easiest.”
“Easiest,” I murmur. “How? Only like three flights leave the airport a day, and none of those departs in the dead of night.”
He grabs the corner of the door and clicks it shut behind me. “I don’t know,” he admits.
Finally, I manage, “No.”
His brow lifts. “No, what?”
“We’re not done fighting,” I say.
“I thought we weren’t fighting,” he says.
I step in close enough to feel the warmth radiating off him. “We’re in an all-out brawl.”
He looks away, the corners of his mouth twisting downward. “About what?”
“For starters, about the fact that you packed your bags up in the night,” I say, pressing closer. He takes a half step back. My voice wobbles. “And I don’t want you to go.”
His hands come to my hips, holding me but keeping me at a distance. “I shouldn’t have come in the first place,” he says. “This is all my fault.”
“No, it’s not,” I say.
“It is,” he says, insistent.
I press closer. Our chests brush. “There,” I say. “There what?”
“Something else we have to fight about,” I say.
Faintly, grudgingly, he smiles. It doesn’t last. He glances away, his brow tightening. “I’m so fucking sorry, Harriet,” he says. “If I’d just stayed away this week like I said I would . . .”
I set my hands on his shoulders, and his eyes snap to mine, a current flaring in them. I push down gently, and he sits at the edge of the bed, his head tipped up to study me in the light of the lone bedside lamp. His thighs fall apart as I step in between them, my hands trailing up over his warm shoulders to his jaw. His eyes flutter shut, and he turns his face into my palm, kissing its center.
His hands come to my waist, and I slip my knee over his hip. His eyes open, inky dark, and he takes my weight as I slide my other knee over his far hip, shifting over him.
“This is fighting?” he murmurs.
I nod as I sink into his lap. His Adam’s apple bobs. His hands clutch the underside of my thighs, the bedsheet still caped around my shoulders. He says, “This is what you wore to fight?”
“I’m new to this,” I say. “I didn’t know there was a standard uniform. Do you want me to go change?”
His gaze wanders down me, considering. “Did you pack anything smaller?”
I shake my head. “Not unless you know a good way to wear a toothbrush.”
“We can make do with this,” he says. “Now, what are we fighting about?”
“Everything,” I say.
He cups the back of my neck while his other hand drags me up his lap, fitting us together. “It’s usually easier to start with something minor, and then let it slowly become about everything. At least that’s how my parents always did it.”
“Your parents,” I say, “did not fight.”
“Everyone fights with the people they love, Harriet,” he says. “What matters is how you do it.”
“There are rules?” I ask. “There are.”
“Like the uniform,” I say.
“Like no name-calling,” he replies. “What about honey?” I ask.
His hands move to the tops of my thighs, slide back and forth against them, the coarse texture of his palms making my skin prickle and rise. “I’d have to double-check with Parth and Sabrina, Esquires, but I think honey is allowable,” he says. “No jury would convict. Nothing meaner than that, though.”
“What else do I need to know?”
“It’s okay to walk away,” he says. “Everyone says Don’t go to bed angry, but sometimes a person needs time to think. And if you need that, it’s okay, but you should tell me, because otherwise . . .” His jaw flexes on a swallow. “Otherwise, the person might assume you’re leaving for good.”
I swallow too and move closer, our chests melting together. “What else?” “There doesn’t need to be a winner and a loser. You just have to care
how the other person feels. You have to care more about them than you do about being right.”
“This doesn’t sound like fighting,” I tell him.
“This information came straight from Hank,” he says.
I can’t help but smile. “Then I guess we’d better trust it.” “Do you want to try?” he says.
“Something minor?” I say. He nods.
“You load the dishwasher wrong,” I say. He breaks into a smile. “Wrong?”
“Fine, not wrong,” I say. “But in a way that I hate.”
His smile splits open on an exhalation of laughter. “Go on. Don’t hold back.”
“You fill the bottom rack too full,” I say, “and the water can’t get to the top rack. And you don’t rinse things well enough, so even when everything does get soaped, there’s still, like, full pieces of cereal stuck inside the bowls.”
He fights his way back to a somber expression. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You’re right. I hurry when I do the dishes, and it ends up making more work. What else?”
“I don’t like when you downplay your intelligence.”
“I’m working on that,” he says. “And honestly, the medicine helps. So does feeling good at my job.”
My rib cage seems to shrink, or else my heart grows. “Good. You should be at least a fraction as proud of yourself as I am of you.”
“Those,” he says quietly, smiling, “are not fighting words.” “That’s because it’s your turn,” I say. “You’re mad at me too.” “I am?” he says.
“Furious,” I say.
He squeezes me to him. “Furious,” he breathes. “About what again?”
Sabrina’s words replay in my head: You’re losing the love of your life because you’re too indecisive to just pick a wedding date . . . Parth saw what Wyn wrote . . . you sat there and let your life happen to you instead of fighting for what you want.
My stomach flip-flops. “Maybe because of the wedding.” “What wedding?” he says.
“Ours,” I say.
“We didn’t have one,” he says.
“And maybe you think I didn’t care,” I say. “Or that I was afraid to commit to you, and that’s why I couldn’t make any decisions. Maybe you think I was intentionally putting it off.”
He swallows, murmurs, “Weren’t you?”
My head swims at the confirmation, the final piece of the puzzle clicking into place, five months too late. Tears gloss my eyes.
It wasn’t one moment when everything went wrong, when I failed him, when we lost each other. There were dozens, on either side. Missed signs. Dropped lines.
It fucking hurts to realize it. To understand that I made him think I didn’t want him.
“I was trying to be easy, Wyn,” I choke out. “You were so unhappy. And I didn’t want to rush you while you were mourning. I didn’t want to need you when you were in so much pain, so I pretended I was fine. I was scared that if you realized what a wreck I was, you wouldn’t want me, so I pushed you away.”
His mouth softens, but his fingers draw tight. “Harriet,” he says, all rough tenderness, the exact contradiction of Wyn Connor, funneled into one spoken word. “I always want you.”
It takes me a second to get anything out. “Another thing I’m mad about . . . I hate when I hurt your feelings and you don’t tell me, so I have to try to guess what I did and how to fix it. Like tonight.”
“Tonight?” he asks.
“When we got back in the car. You wouldn’t even look at me.”
“Shit, Harriet,” he says. “I was just embarrassed. About this entire fucking week. About dragging you into this situation when it turns out there was no good reason.”
“But when you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I assume things, Wyn,” I say. “And it’s all I can think about. That I’ve messed things up.”
“That’s not healthy,” he says.
“I know, but it’s the truth,” I say.
“Well, I don’t like that,” he says. “You should know you’re safe with me. You shouldn’t spend every moment second-guessing how I feel when I’ve spent eight years telling you outright.”
“And you should have known I didn’t want anyone else.” My voice splinters apart, my heart going with it. “You should have known that you were it for me, from the night we met. I would have done anything to fix it, but you wouldn’t fight for me. You said you would, and I believed you, Wyn. And I understand why you couldn’t. But I haven’t forgiven you for breaking my heart.”
His hand scrapes into my hair, his mouth burrowing against my neck. “Good,” he says. “Don’t forgive me. Stay mad at me. Don’t get over me.”
“And I’m mad at you for not coming to me tonight,” I say.
He tilts my chin, kissing the other side of my throat, whispering softly, “I would’ve made it to you eventually.”
“You packed your bags,” I say.
He laughs jaggedly into my skin, his hands going back to my thighs, hoisting me up snug against him. “It was bullshit,” he says. “I was trying to convince myself it would be best if I left you alone. The sad thing is, I actually believe it, Harriet. But I wasn’t going to. I was on my way to find you when you got here. How do you think I answered the door so fast? Why do you think I was already hard, Harriet?”
A pleasant shiver climbs my thighs. “Maybe you were doing a crossword,” I say.
He kisses the soft skin under my ear. “I couldn’t leave you alone. I’ve never been able to.”
“You’ve left me alone for five months,” I point out.
“You blocked my number,” he says, his fingers tightening on me through the thin sheet. “Or else you’d know that’s bullshit too. It wasn’t one unsent text message that Parth saw, Harriet. It was the ones I’d sent you too. The ones you didn’t reply to.”
My heart flutters up through my esophagus, a giddy canary catching a breeze of cool air. His calloused hands turn my face up to his, and he kisses me deeply, coarsely.
My nerve endings light up in concentric circles that reverberate outward. Cellular fireworks. Neurological Ferris wheel spokes. My hands sift into his hair, and he flips us onto the bed, the twin sheet falling over us as gently as snow. He shifts his weight back long enough for me to slough his shirt off, then stretches himself over me again, our mouths colliding, his knee dipping between my thighs. His hands roll heavily over me. My nails scrape over his warm back.
He kisses down my sternum, sneaks his tongue under the fabric, follows it with his teeth. I cry out from the relief and the simultaneous need. We arch closer. His hand works behind my back, finds the clasp for my bra, and after a brief struggle, he’s pulling it away from me, tossing it out of our way, and our chests are finally pressing together, mine flattening under his. He groans. His palms move heavily over my chest, cupping, lifting me to his mouth.
The bed creaks as we move together.
He shifts onto one elbow, his other hand grating down my ribs and waist until it reaches the side of my underwear. He jerks them down my hip, and his hand skims my thigh. “I miss hearing you,” he whispers against my ear. “All the little sounds you make.”
Just by saying it, he’s coaxed out a few more. “We should fight more often,” I say.
“I agree.” He jerks my underwear down over my other thigh. I reach for the buttons of his pants, and his head lolls against mine on a groan as I slip my hand into his waistband.
“Did you find condoms?” I whisper.
“Before dinner.” He fishes a strip of three out of his pocket and tosses them beside us. “I’ve been carrying them around all night, like some fucking teenager hoping to sneak into the bathroom at prom.”
“If I’d known,” I say, “we could’ve skipped the fight entirely.”
He grabs my thigh and places it against the outside of his hip. “Please don’t leave,” he says in a low grate. “When this is over, don’t go sleep in another room. Stay with me all night.”
“I won’t leave,” I promise, sliding his pants down, kissing the jut of his hip.
His arm straps around my low back, and he rolls us again so that I’m on top of him. He lifts his hips enough to push his briefs down, and then I fold over him, nothing separating us now. Nothing has ever felt so blissfully good as this simple contact. He grasps my hips, sliding me over him, our breath shallowing. He pulls my wrists above his head, stretching me over him, and drags his parted lips, his tongue, over my chest.
I search through the bedding for the condoms, tear open the first one, and work it onto him. As I lift up, he takes hold of my hips, his eyes heavy and dark, guiding me onto him. His head tips back, a throaty sound emanating from him as I rise up and sink lower. He feels so familiar, so right, but after all this time, strangely new.
Our movement is slow but urgent, so intense I keep forgetting to breathe for a second too long, like nothing else is quite so necessary for my survival as this. His hands are careful on my jaw, his lips soft on mine, his tongue skimming into my mouth almost tentatively until I can barely take any more gentleness, any more restraint. I’m tired of him holding back any piece of himself.
When I tell him so, he flips us over one more time, my arms pinned above my head. Sweat slicks our skin as we become feverish, wild. I bow up under him, meeting his rhythm, trying not to come apart, not yet. I say his name like it’s a spell.
Or a goodbye and I love you, a promise.
I just know my heart agrees: You, you, you.
• • •
WE LIE IN a sweaty heap, Wyn toying with one of my curls, his lungs lifting and lowering me like a boat on a tide. “Do you forgive them?” I whisper.
“Honestly,” he says, “I was having trouble being mad. I know they shouldn’t have lied, but . . . I don’t know. It’s felt worth it. To be here. To see you.”
“To me too,” I whisper, holding him a little tighter. Then, after another minute: “Do you think they’ll forgive us?”
“Yes,” he says.
“You didn’t think about it,” I chide. “I didn’t need to,” he says.
I lift up to peer into his eyes. “How are you so sure?”
“More Hank wisdom,” he says. “Love means constantly saying you’re sorry, and then doing better.”
I smile, let my fingers play across Wyn’s chest. “He did okay with you, Wyn Connor. He’d be proud.”
He wraps his arms tight around me. “I’m glad you think so.”
Within minutes, I’m asleep, dreaming of a sunlit pine forest, the warm wood of a table beneath me, the smell of clove everywhere. And I know this place, even if I can’t name it. I know that I’m safe, that I belong.
