Follow Me(86)
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
MAX
All I had wanted was to see her. She had disappeared from my screen, and I just wanted—no, I needed—to see that she was okay. I grabbed the flowers and headed to Cat’s apartment, the keys she’d given me jangling a happy tune in my pocket. Those flowers—orange, her favorite color, which I knew because two years ago she posted a photo of her open palm filled with orange Starbursts captioned as such—would get me through the door, I was sure of it. Then we would start talking, and then she would realize how awful I felt that she’d had to find those photos. I felt sick whenever I thought about how easy it would have been to store that folder anywhere other than on the desktop.
But then she was looking at me like I was a stranger and asking questions I didn’t like in an accusing voice, and it was like she didn’t understand. I had done everything for her. I’d been a devoted follower for years, made her my religion. I’d decorated my apartment with art she would like (I even sourced a print of her favorite Jackson Pollock after reading about it in a blog post titled “Let Me Tell You Why Jackson Pollock Is the Bomb,” posted May 21, 2014) and peppered my shelves with books she liked, from Gone Girl (WTF?! , she had captioned an image of the book on September 3, 2012) to a dog-eared, secondhand copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Poems (finding the poem that had inspired her tattoo and flagging the page with a bookmark, so that she might stumble across it, then flip over her wrist to show me the very same lines indelibly marked on her body).
I’d kept a detailed spreadsheet of all the music she posted about or added to public playlists, and then I used that as a guide while I painstakingly assembled a record collection from scratch. That first Ted and the Honey album had been hard to find—there hadn’t been many pressings, and with the band having hit mainstream success, people weren’t parting with theirs—but I did. Knowing how much she loved them, I even listened to their entire catalog despite the lead singer sounding like he had a mouth full of gravel and the whole thing being a bit too noise-rock for my liking. I knew which songs were her favorites, and I learned the lyrics, would be able to sing along if the situation demanded. I even threw out all the animal products in my kitchen in case she decided to open my cabinets. How could she not understand?
Did she have any idea how much effort I had put into our first meeting? I’d originally planned to “meet” her at bar trivia, hoping I could catch her alone at the jukebox. How about something from Abbey Road? I’d planned to say. When she asked what my favorite song from the album was, I would say “I Want You” both because I knew it was her favorite (“Unpopular opinion: I Want You is the best track on Abbey Road,” she had tweeted last April) and because the words were true. I imagined her catching the double meaning and the corners of her glistening, bitable lips curling up, and then the two of us discussing the finer points of Lennon’s songwriting and debating which Beatle had the most successful solo career, conversations that I had researched and prepared for. But then that idiot Connor had tried to swoop in on her and ruined the evening.
Even so, fate had offered a silver lining: that night I saw Cat Harrell in person and realized Audrey’s best friend was the same Cathy from Camp Blackwood. Later, when I observed Audrey and Cat discussing the Rosalind preview through the RAT, I realized that would be a better venue for our first meeting. Audrey would be primed and in her element. All I needed was get myself in the room and I could let Cat do the rest.
I agonized over the perfect location for our first date, knowing I needed something that appealed to Audrey’s aesthetic interests but that also looked effortless. Audrey liked things that were lovely but easy, and I knew hitting that sweet spot was the key to charming her. That Kalorama Heights mansion ticked all the boxes, and it wasn’t hard to extract the lockbox code from Tag. Then there was everything I had done to make the setting perfect for her: the small fortune I’d spent on candles and foliage, the recipe I’d carefully selected based on her expressed desire to go to Thailand (and the travel blogs I’d read about Thailand so I could pretend I had been there), the way I had practiced making that damn dish three times a day for days until I knew I had it down. By the time the date arrived, I had never wanted to look at tofu curry again.
Everything else—the picnic carefully selected to be as photogenic as possible, the Tabasco I sprinkled on popcorn after noticing her multiple tweets over the years about loving spicy food, the Negronis I’d learned how to mix after seeing a Story in which she raved about them, the donation I’d made to the Hirshhorn to gain access to the Rosalind preview, the anonymous comments and posts I’d made in a deliberate attempt to unsettle her so she would seek shelter in my arms, and so much more—had all been done because I loved her. Why couldn’t she see that? I had done everything for her, had bent myself completely into a knot in the service of pleasing her.
But she didn’t understand that, and so I knew I needed more. I needed to touch her. I just needed to take her small, soft hands in mine and kiss her rosebud lips, and then everything would be okay again. She would feel the electricity crackling between us and understand we were destined. Our love was unbreakable; it could survive anything.
But she kept evading me, and as I reached for her, certain that this would be the magical touch that reaffirmed our connection, suddenly she was slipping, falling head over heels down that spiral staircase, leaving a trail of water and blood behind her.