Book Lovers(33)

I take a breath. “Let’s just act like—”

At the same time, he says, “We should pretend it never happened.”

I nod.

He nods.

It’s settled.

He grabs his umbrella off the ground, and neither of us bothers with “good night.” He just nods again stiffly and turns and walks away.

It never happened, I think with some force.

Which is good, because my reckless decisions always have disastrous consequences.





9





WHEN I WAS twelve, my mother was cast in a crime procedural. She hit it off with the showrunner. Before long, she was seeing him nightly.

Four episodes into filming, he reconciled with his estranged wife. Mom’s plucky young detective character was swiftly killed off, her body discovered in a meat locker.

I’d never seen Mom quite so distraught. We avoided whole swaths of the city afterward, dodging anyplace she might run into him, or be reminded of him, or of the job she’d lost.

After that, it was an easy decision for me to never fall in love.

For years, I stuck by it. Then I met Jakob.

He made the world open up around me, like there were colors I’d never seen, new levels of happiness I couldn’t have imagined.

Mom was ecstatic when I told her I was moving in with him. After everything she’d been through, she was still a romantic.

He’s going to take such good care of you, sweet girl, she said. He was a couple of years older than me and had a well-paying bartending job and a tiny apartment uptown.

A week later, I hugged Mom and Libby goodbye and schlepped my stuff to his place. Two weeks after that, Mom was gone.

The bills came due all at once. Rent, utilities, a credit card we’d opened in my name when things got particularly tight. Mom’s credit was shot, and I wanted to help pull my weight.

I’d been working at Freeman Books since I was sixteen, but I made minimum wage and could only manage part-time while I was in college, and someday, the student loans I’d taken out would come back to haunt me.

Mom’s actor friends did a fundraiser for us, announcing after the funeral that they’d raised over fifteen thousand dollars, and Libby cried happy tears, because she had no idea how little of a dent that would make.

She’d been on a fashion design kick and wanted to go to Parsons, and I debated dropping out of my English program to fund her tuition, though I’d already sunk tens of thousands into mine.

I moved out of Jakob’s place and back in with Libby.

I budgeted.

Scoured the internet for the cheapest, most filling meals.

Took on other jobs: tutoring, waitressing, outright writing classmates’ papers.

Jakob found out he’d gotten accepted into the Wyoming writing residency and left, and then there was the breakup, the utter desolation, the reminder of why the promise I’d made to myself years ago still mattered.

I stopped dating, mostly. First dates were allowed (dinner only), and though I’d never tell anyone, the reason was that I’d have one less meal to pay for. Two if I ordered enough to bring Libby leftovers.

Second dates were a no-go. That’s when the guilt kicked in—or the feelings did.

Libby playfully heckled me about how no one was good enough for a second date.

I let her. It would destroy me to hear what she thought of the truth.

She worked too. Without Mom’s income, we had to tighten our purse strings, but Libby never wanted to spend money on herself anyway.

Sometimes, after complaining to her about a particularly bad date, though, I’d come home from classes or a tutoring shift to find her already asleep in her room (I’d moved out into the living room, where Mom used to sleep, so she could have the bedroom to herself) and a bundle of sunflowers sitting in a vase beside the pullout couch.

If I were normal, I might’ve cried. Instead I’d sit there, clutching the vase, and just fucking shake. Like there were emotions deep in me, but too many layers of ash lay over them, deadening them to nothing but a tectonic murmur.

There is a spot in my foot I can’t feel. I stepped on a piece of glass and the nerves there are dead now. The doctor said they’d grow back, but it’s been years and that place is still numb.

That was how my heart had felt for years. Like all the cracks callused over.

That enabled me to focus on what mattered. I built a life for me and Libby, a home that no bank or ex-boyfriend could ever take from us.

I watched my friends in relationships make compromise after compromise, shrinking into themselves until they were nothing but a piece of a whole, until all their stories came from the past, and their career aspirations, their friends, and their apartments were replaced by our aspirations, our friends, our apartment. Half lives that could be taken from them without any warning.

By then I’d had all the practice in first dates that a person could get. I knew which red flags to watch for, the questions to ask. I’d seen my friends, coworkers, colleagues get ghosted, cheated on, bored in their relationships, and rudely awakened when partners turned out to be married or have gambling problems or be chronically unemployed. I saw casual hookups turn into miserably complicated half relationships.

I had standards and a life, and I wasn’t about to let some man destroy it like it was merely the paper banner he was meant to crash through as he entered the field.