The Unsinkable Greta James(63)

She’s silent for a long time. On the other end of the line, Howie clears his throat. “Okay,” he says. “Roger that.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to.”

Greta sighs. “Let me think about it a little more. I’ll call you later.”

“Right-o,” he says, and then he hangs up the phone.

There’s a dress code in the dining room tonight, so Greta pulls out the nicest thing she brought, a short black dress and a pair of heels. On her way down, she spots Davis and Mary sitting on a small sofa near a panel of windows, faces pressed together as they beam into a phone. As she gets closer, Greta hears the sound of Jason’s voice. She’s about to make a U-turn when Davis looks up.

“Greta,” he says so loudly that she jumps. “We’re talking to Jase. Come say hi!”

For a second, she considers saying no. But there’s no graceful way to escape this situation, and so—grimly, awkwardly—she walks around the back of the couch and stoops to see Jason’s face on the screen.

“Well, don’t you look nice,” he says with that dazzling smile of his, his eyes dancing with amusement. “How’s life at sea?”

Davis hands Greta the phone, then hauls himself off the couch. Mary stands too. “You two catch up,” she says. “We’ve got to get ready for dinner.”

“What about your phone?” Greta says, holding it out to him, but Davis waves this off.

“We’ll get it later,” he says, and then—almost as an afterthought—he adds, “See you, son,” before walking off down the hall.

When they’re gone, Greta lifts the screen again, and suddenly it’s just her and Jason, who is laughing. “Typical,” he says. “Always trying to pawn me off.”

“Hey,” Greta says. “Congrats on the engagement.”

“Congrats on yours,” he says, and on the screen, she can see very clearly how quickly her face turns pink.

“Yeah, that’s not actually—”

“What?”

“Real. We broke up. Months ago.”

He looks surprised. “Oh. I guess you can’t always believe what you read online.”

“Shocking, I know.”

“Well, mine is one hundred percent verified,” he says gently. “You’re hearing it straight from the source.”

“I’m really happy for you.”

He nods. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I wasn’t sure how.”

She peers at him through the screen, thinking how odd this is. They’ve never even really talked on the phone before. “You don’t owe me anything,” she says, but not unkindly, and he ducks his head and runs a hand over his close-cropped hair. When he looks up again, his expression is hard to read.

“I do, actually. That night in Columbus, I wasn’t just messing around. I need you to know that,” he says, suddenly serious. “Olivia and I were on a break. I’m not saying it wasn’t still a shitty thing to do, but we’d been going through a rough patch, and I wasn’t sure we’d make it, and I’d been thinking about you. A lot. And then your mom died, and I came back to see you, and I guess maybe I was trying to figure out if we could ever…you know.”

“What?” she asks, trying to keep her face neutral.

“If we could ever be something,” he says. “Something real.”

Greta resists the urge to put the phone down. It’s too hard to look him in the eye right now. She thinks back to that day, the way he stood there in her childhood bedroom, running a hand over her old guitar. “And then you found out I was with Luke.”

“No. I mean…yeah. But it wasn’t just that,” he says, clearly eager to be understood. “It was more that I remembered how things are with you and me.”

“How’s that?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “I guess you’ve always sort of kept me at a distance.”

“Jason,” she says, impatient now. “My mom had just died.”

He holds up a hand. “I know. But that’s how it’s always been. Ever since we were kids. You keep things light.”

“So do you.”

“Maybe when we were younger,” he says. “But things change.”

Greta feels her face get hot, thinking about all the years he snuck out of her bed while it was still dark, all the times he was careful not to leave anything behind. She remembers walking up the Bowery on a freezing cold night after too many drinks, the two of them shouting at each other because she’d found out that he hadn’t invited her to a Christmas party he’d thrown, and then—in the course of the argument—he found out that she hadn’t invited him to her birthday dinner either, and they went back and forth like that, before both stalking off in opposite directions, each stubbornly waiting several days for the other to make peace, until Jason finally showed up at her apartment with a bottle of wine and a sheepish grin, his coat dusted with snow, and they fell into her bed and spent the rest of the weekend there, only to part again on Monday morning with the casual, businesslike air of two people with no attachments or responsibilities to each other.

She’d always assumed there was a mutual understanding between them, but maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe it was just her.