Georgie, All Along (91)

“I’m sorry for not telling you. I can see how I should have, because I never would have wanted you to find out about it that way. I would never have wanted it to hurt you.”

I nod, tossing the towel onto the counter and shoving my hands into my pockets. Leave it, I’m telling myself, trying to absorb her apology, trying to let this go. Across from me, she looks tired and ten kinds of messy, her hair falling out of its ponytail, her clothes rumpled. It reminds me of the first day I ever saw her, and what I want is to hold on to how much things have changed since then: I want to get in the shower with her and press her body close to mine. I want to have dinner and hear everything she’s got to say. I want her to fall into an exhausted sleep beside me on my couch; I want to carry her to bed and have her murmur nonsense to me when I do.

But I’m still tense, restless. Bruised. I’ve been hit with that big, pounding wave again, but this time, I’m beneath it, struggling to get air. I remember all the times, over the last two months, where I messed up with Georgie because I panicked—that night she first asked me about my family, and I ran out of that house like I had a hound from hell on my heels. The night her parents found us on their couch. Last night, at The Bend.

I know I can’t do that again, don’t want to do that again. I want to get up to the surface, to get a breath and hold on to something stable.

That’s it, I think, a tentative relief spreading through me. I need to be sure of things, sure of her, and it’ll be like I didn’t see those pages at all.

Make it sturdy, I’m thinking. Make it stable.

“Georgie,” I say. “What do you want?”

She blinks at me, a look of surprise on her face. “What do I—?”

“With your life,” I say, but I can hear already it’s coming out wrong. I clear my throat, reaching for that stable thing, somehow. “With us. What are we doing here?”

She furrows her brow, opens her mouth and closes it again, and that delay, that confusion on her face—it’s a crack across my sternum. I can’t help it: I make a noise, something like a scoff. Impatient and frustrated.

“What is your problem?” she snaps now, crossing her arms, the notebook pressing close to her chest. “If it’s Evan, you’re being ridiculous. It’s you I’ve been with every night, Levi. It’s you I—”

She doesn’t say it, that thing from her text message. She stops and presses her lips together tight for a second, and the crack gets wider, deeper.

“It’s you,” she finishes.

“It’s not Evan,” I say, but I know it’s a lie, or at least it’s not all the way true. It is Evan. It’s Evan and Olivia and my dad, and my mom, too, and the way I’ve never fit with any of them. The way I looked down at that notebook and felt, for a long, terrible second, like I didn’t fit with her, either.

I’m trying so hard to fix that feeling, to chase it away with certainty. With settling this between us, with getting her to say she’ll stay.

“Then what is it?” she says, and it’s going too fast—for the first time since I’ve known her, Georgie’s expansiveness is a liability to me, pressing me tighter in my defensive, familiar corner. I can hear Carlos’s voice from long ago, one day on the job—when I was young and sad and aching—telling me to slow down while I worked, to be careful not to make mistakes.

But I can’t listen. I’m too desperate to get this done.

“I know what I want,” I say, and I make my voice sound so confident. I say it as if I’ve got it all figured out for us: I’m laying planks and hammering them tight into place, sturdy and stable. “I want you to stay here. You can live here, with me.”

She’s staring at me, her lips slightly parted. Her cheeks pale.

After long, silent seconds, she says, “And what am I doing, in this plan of yours? Beyond living with you?”

My jaw clenches. “You’ll be here for your parents. You can help Bel. Work at The Shoreline, if you want. I won’t have a problem with it.”

She drops her eyes, nods down at the floor. “Huh,” she says, and it’s the saddest-sounding syllable. Slow down, I’m telling myself now, knowing I’m fucking it up but still too defensive, too underwater, to know how.

This is how it used to feel, I think, to start trouble.

“I don’t need your permission to do a job, Levi.”

I swallow. “That’s not what I—”

“And my parents do fine without me. They’ll be back on the road soon, probably. Also, Bel’s moving back to DC.”

“She is?”

She nods again. “Turns out, she doesn’t even like it here. Some reinventions don’t stick.”

I know she can’t mean me; I know she wouldn’t mean me. But when I’m this version of myself—when I’m the version of myself that’s so close to the boy I’ve been telling her about, when I’m hurt and desperate—it sure seems like she does, and the temperature inside me turns up.

“Levi,” she says softly, trying her best to turn it down. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to figure out if we have a chance together,” I say, still impatient.

“You’re not. Not right now, you’re not.”