Georgie, All Along (92)

“Don’t tell me what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing.” I lift my chin at the notebook. “There’s one of us here who’s spent the last two months of their life living according to a fifteen-year-old project, and one of us who has a life here, a house here. A business to run.”

She blinks at me in shock, and I know I’ve hurt her, deep down. Used a thing that was important to her, to us, against her. I’m trying to press her into that tight corner with me, trying to hammer her into place, and I know already it won’t work.

It would never work on Georgie. Arms stretched out to the world, expansive Georgie.

I drop my head, lifting my hands and running them through my hair, sick in my stomach and in as much trouble as I’ve ever been.

“One of us is a mess, is that right?”

“It’s not what I meant, Georgie. Let me—”

“No, Levi. I don’t think I will let you explain this time.”

When I look up, she’s turned her back on me; she’s making her way back to the bedroom. Hank doesn’t follow her. He stands in the space she left, looking back and forth between my face and her retreating form.

When I step into the bedroom, she’s holding her tote bag from Nickel’s, shoving what she can into it—the clothes she’s got lying around, her tablet—fuck, her robe that I love so much. I take this opportunity to ask the dumbest question possible. “What are you doing?”

She barely looks up to answer me.

“I’m leaving.”

“Georgie. Wait.”

She stops, straightening from where she’d bent to pick up a shirt from the floor, her cheeks flushed and her eyes flashing.

“No, you wait,” she says, her voice loud and hard and unfamiliar to me. “You know what? You are absolutely right that one of us is living according to a fifteen-year-old project, but I don’t think you know which one of us it is.”

“What does that mean?”

It’s her who scoffs now, and she packs that sound with more frustration, more derision than I could’ve ever managed. She stomps into the bathroom, emerging a second later with the two bottles of hair stuff she uses in the shower, and I want to howl in protest.

“What, Georgie?” I ask her, softer now, but she doesn’t stop moving.

“Nothing about what you saw in this notebook would bother you if you were thinking about me,” she says, jerking the canvas bag open and pulling it out. “It wouldn’t bother you because you know me, Levi. You know where I’ve been all these nights, and it’s not with your brother, who is nice enough but not for me.”

She tosses it onto the bed, almost to right back where I found out.

“You’re thinking about you. You’re thinking about your family, or your dad, because you’ve been trying to prove him right or wrong about you for years. You’re thinking about yourself, going to work and coming home and never being anything but this cleaned-up version of Levi Fanning who won’t ever put a foot wrong again, because you won’t try anything different. You think I’m living according to a fifteen-year-old project?”

“Georgie,” I say again, because that temperature in me—it’s turned way down now, and I’m cold straight through.

“Stay here, is that right? That’s what you want from me?”

“Yes,” I say, but I know it’s the wrong answer.

Her shoulders sag, her stuffed-full bag nearly touching the floor, and she lifts her free hand to her forehead, rubbing across it.

“I was so excited,” she says quietly, “I was so excited to tell you what I figured out today.”

“Tell me,” I say, desperate now. I’m trying to make a fist around the finest, driest sand. I take a step toward her, and she takes a step back.

“I don’t think I will,” she says, all the fight gone out of her now. “I trusted you with this, Levi,” she says, her voice cracking. She gestures at the notebook. “With my . . . my mess.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“And you threw it in my face. Tonight of all nights.” She wipes a tear from the corner of her eye, barely escaped. I want to fall to my knees at her feet, to say something, anything to make her stay. Instead I sink down to the edge of the bed and go silent. It’s the same as so many other times I’ve been in trouble: I’m shutting off from the inside out, trying not to see or hear or feel a thing.

But I could never shut Georgie out that way, and I know it. I know this is going to hurt like nothing else.

“I’m not apologizing for not having it all figured out anymore, Levi. I thought maybe you and I could . . . I don’t know. Figure some things out together, a little bit at a time. But maybe you’re not ready for that. Maybe you need to do some of that alone.”

And yeah, I was right. I can’t shut her out, because I see her go—back straight, bag over her shoulder, out the bedroom door and down the hall. I hear her whisper softly to Hank, hear his collar clink in what sounds somehow like confusion.

And when the door closes behind her, I feel it all.





Chapter 21


Georgie


One great thing about finally accepting your present-tense self—your in-the-moment self—is that you are free from thinking about, to give a random example, you and the man you love getting in a big, heartbreaking fight two nights ago. You are similarly free from thinking about, to give another useful and random example, what might happen two nights from now, or two hours from now, or perhaps two minutes from now, in terms of whether that man you got in a fight with might figure his shit out and call you.