Scandalized(71)

* * *



My mom is beside herself with worry when I get to the house, but I promise her that I will drink an entire bottle of wine and unload everything if I can only have an hour to go pound the pavement alone.

I pull on my running shoes and bolt from the porch with angry music blasting in my ears. Eden made me a playlist titled Men Are Trash, and I admit, it’s exactly what I needed to channel this confusion and hurt into something kinetic. I didn’t stretch first—no doubt I’ll regret it, but not nearly as much as I’ll regret letting my subconscious guide me two and a half miles down the road to the Kim family’s old house.

It’s been repainted. No longer a pale yellow house with a soft patch of grass, it is now a rich cream with olive-green trim, a xeriscaped yard, and two Teslas parked out front. For as much as the house looks brand-new, the shape of the front window is the same, and I can imagine sitting on the soft velvet couch just inside, can hear the slapping echo of Alec’s skateboard down the sun-warped street.

My brain tunnels through time. At this exact moment yesterday, I was getting ready for the gala. And less than twenty-four hours ago, Alec was cleaning my skin with body wash and his big hands, telling me about the place he wanted to take me for dinner on our first night in London next month.

I haven’t cried yet, but before I can actively hold myself together, I’m bursting into tears, letting it all out on the dashed yellow line in the middle of Pearl Street.

What the fuck just happened?

I tried to do the right thing, tried to protect everyone, and ended up losing my job and my new boyfriend in a single afternoon.

My life has emptied of meaning so suddenly that it almost feels like I’m closing in on myself, collapsing inward. Sitting at the curb, I stare at a line of ants moving past the round toe of my shoe. Slowly my eyes lose focus until the ants turn into a blurred black line, waving on the concrete, doing nothing but moving forward one step at a time.



* * *



I return to my parents’ place at least two hours later than I’d planned, to find my mother on the porch with her phone in her hand, Eden standing next to her. They march toward me, lectures ready, words overlapping.

I let them have this. I didn’t take my phone. I was just dumped and fired. I didn’t notice how much time had passed on the curb until the sun was gone and I realized my old iPod had played the playlist at least three times through.

They gather me inside, depositing me on the couch. Some food materializes. Eden is on one side of me, Mom on the other, and I hate this familiar comfort.

Even though we did this exact same thing only six months ago, this time it feels infinitely worse.





Twenty


I spend five minutes in my car at the curb outside my apartment on Sunday morning. Just working up the energy to climb the steps, to go inside and face a laptop with a résumé that needs to be updated, face a suitcase full of things I had at the hotel, face a bed that I last slept in with Alec beside me.

The optimism and elation of Friday morning feel like they happened a decade ago. My parents wanted me to stay a few more days but I honestly could not handle the weight of their concern on top of my own terror about the future.

Under normal circumstances, I would have immediately recognized the shadow on my doorstep. If my brain wasn’t full of heartbreak and insomnia, I would know the broad expanse of those shoulders, the narrow taper of the waist. I would recognize the baseball hat, the black T-shirt, black jeans. And in particular, I would see the hand carefully lowering a royal-blue shopping bag to my apartment doormat and remember that I claimed that hand as mine just over a week ago.

But it takes a beat for my conscious brain to turn on—long enough for me to instinctively say, “Um, hello?”—and as soon as the words are out, awareness hits, and my heart splinters into a thousand pieces.

I would bolt back to my car if my feet weren’t cemented to the ground. I never expected to see Alec again. Thirty-six hours ago, he told me he was flying home to London and made no indication that we would ever speak again. I spent the weekend running until I had bloody blisters on my heels and strict orders from my mother to sit my ass down. But every time I did, I immediately wanted to get up and drive home to pull my Batphone out of the trash and see if he’d called, already knowing he hadn’t.

Alec freezes with his back to me and then slowly turns. He fumbles to pull off his sunglasses, and the moment his eyes are visible, I feel the reaction to his appearance like a fist to my solar plexus. He looks terrible. His skin is sallow; stubble shadows his chin. His eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, perfect lips cracked.

I’m unable to easily describe what this does to my heart. The only way to blunt the instinct to move to him and hold him is to tear my eyes away from his face.

He clearly didn’t expect to see me, either. “Gigi.” His eyes do a quick scan of my body. I bet I look a lot like I did in the hotel lobby in Seattle, but this time I want to shove the truth of it in his face. My hair is wrapped up in a greasy, messy bun, eyes bloodshot and flat. My limbs are shaking from overuse and exhaustion.

I direct the question over his right shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m…” He gestures to the bag. “You left some things at the hotel.”

I release a sharp, abrupt laugh. Boy, did I. My trust in men. A desire to love again. My career. Oh, maybe also some clothes. “I was instructed to pack up pretty fast.”