My Favorite Half-Night Stand(66)

“Go on.”

I tug on my sleeves, pulling them down over my fingers despite the heat. I feel like I need a force field around me, some mental armor. “I lied to you—have been lying to you. For a few weeks now.”

Reid leans forward, away from me, to rest his elbows on his knees. “Okay.”

I’m not sure how to say it, so I blurt it out to get us both out of this miserable tension. “I’m Cat. I wrote the letters.” A heavy silence rolls through the room. He’s staring straight ahead to where Jimmy Kimmel is giving a monologue on the muted TV. “I never meant for it to get this far, and I don’t even know why I did it. Actually, I do, I guess. But those are excuses and—”

“I know.”

His voice is quiet. So why does it feel like a lead weight has just swung from a crane into my torso?

Reid straightens, rubs his palms on the front of his pants, and then stands to face me. He stares down at me, and he doesn’t have to say anything else for our entire conversation to echo in my memory.

“She was really great, and I thought maybe we had something. She talked to me about things. It felt like we were really becoming friends. And—I’ll admit—I maybe wanted more. She’s moving and it’s sort of a bummer that I’m not going to meet her.”

“That is a bummer. Do you think your feelings for her will affect . . . ?”

“I’m not sure. I liked our dynamic of straightforward honesty. I want that in a partner.”

Straightforward honesty.

He prompted me, gave me chance after chance to come clean, and I lied, right to his face.

I can feel the pressure of his attention, but I keep my eyes on the carpet, too humiliated to look anywhere else. “I think I realized when you figured it out.”

I hear his exhale. “I noticed your scar. Plus Monopoly, Girls Trip, the mentions of your dad, of a sister. Then I think it really clicked when the typo in one of your messages suddenly jumped out at me.”

“I’m so sorry, Reid.”

His silence seems to morph in front of me, and it’s in this moment I realize I’ve never really seen him angry before. I’ve seen him yell at someone on the freeway, watched him rebuke a careless intern for doing something unsafe in the lab. But I’ve never seen this. A frown pulls at the corners of his mouth and contorts it into an expression that seems almost perverse on his perpetually patient face. It’s disappointment, anger. The house is so quiet around us I can practically hear it rolling off him in waves.

He turns away, reaching for an empty beer bottle to take to the kitchen, but he stops halfway there. “What the hell were you thinking, Millie? Was it a joke?”

I choke on the words. “No! Of course not. I didn’t really think it through. I just— You guys were right about my profile, and so I changed it without telling anyone.”

“Why the name Catherine?”

“It’s my middle name. It made it feel less—”

“Deceitful?” He spits out a sharp laugh, and I wince.

Of course he didn’t know my middle name.

“I never set out to be dishonest. I was as surprised as you were when I got the message saying we’d matched.”

“So, you couldn’t have said, ‘Oh, funny thing, best friend. Even a computer program figured out that we’re sort of perfect for each other. Maybe we should give it a shot?’ ”

He stares at me as I stand and walk toward him, his gaze cold and unyielding. “I swear I thought you’d figure it out,” I say. “The Monopoly thing was meant to clue you in. But then it didn’t, and—”

“And you decided just to roll with it, have some fun?”

“No! I was going to tell you! But then you guys were making cracks about how the girl in the photograph must have been ugly, and how hot Daisy was . . .” I stop, swiping away hot tears with the sleeve of my sweater. “I got a little competitive and—”

“Jealous?” he finishes.

I look up at him. Something in me gets a little angry, too, at this being acknowledged out loud. But I really can’t justify that feeling, so I just nod. “Yeah. I was super jealous, Reid. I didn’t want you with her, even if I didn’t exactly know why yet. But it changed after that.” I move another step toward him and take a chance, reaching out to grip his arm. “Everything I wrote was true, every word of it. I said those things, that was me.”

He pulls away, and I crumble.

“But it wasn’t you. I love being with you, Millie. You’re smart and funny and I want you more than anyone I’ve ever known . . . but you never tell me anything. What’s missing—what’s always been missing between us—is the honesty I got in those letters. And you expect me to give you credit for being honest, in disguise, on some stupid dating app—after the fact?”

“I know, and you’re right. It’s hard for me to be like that in person, to talk about feelings and emotion. I’m just . . . I’m not good at it.”

“Maybe you’re just not good at being honest.”

It lands like a physical blow. I imagine a missile launched with pinpoint precision, crashing through my ribs to obliterate the hidden places I rarely examine myself, never mind share with anyone else.

“Is there—is there anyone you’re totally honest with?” he adds, and I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but somehow, this is worse. Because it’s not just anger or hurt in his voice anymore, it’s pity.