Текст книги "The Absence of Olivia"
Автор книги: Anie Michaels
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
Chapter Seventeen
Present Day
The next day, Monday, I didn’t go to Devon’s house. I was up hours earlier than normal, pacing back and forth in my room, trying to decide what to do. I worked myself up so much I made myself sick. I didn’t want to see Devon, didn’t want to face his devastation again, but I felt terrible for essentially leaving him in a bind. Then, the other side of my brain would tell me that, surely, he wasn’t expecting me, and he’d figure it out on his own. Then, the tiniest part of my brain, the evil part, would whisper that it was about time he was the one to get his kids ready for school and out the door without my assistance.
Finally, twenty minutes before I would have usually left and headed to his house, I forced myself to take three shots of tequila, purposefully taking away my ability to drive. I took the shots, turned off my phone just in case he tried to call – which I knew he wouldn’t – and crawled back into bed. The tequila took me away in less than twenty minutes, and I spent the rest of the day in bed.
The next morning didn’t go much differently. I worried myself into a fit about whether to go or stay, but finally convinced myself to go to work instead and catch up on what I’d put off Sunday and Monday. Once at my studio, I relaxed a little, but every time my phone rang I expected it to be Devon. But he never called. That fact both relieved and worried me.
Wednesday and Thursday, the same thing happened. I made myself go directly to the studio, never hearing from Devon. But on Thursday, I did hear from Nate. Honestly, I’d been too preoccupied with everything, and too unsure about men in general, to contact him. My mind would drift from the life-altering kiss with Nate under the waterfall back to the even more shattering kiss I shared with Devon, and all those thoughts would always be followed with shame. I shouldn’t have been kissing anyone.
My phone buzzed in my desk drawer. I’d tossed it in there hoping it would keep me from checking it every three minutes to see if Devon had reached out to me. I opened the drawer and saw a text from Nate.
**Hey.**
That titillating text was quickly followed up by –
**Did you like that first message? It took me three days to decide on it. Didn’t want to seem too eager. How’d I do?**
I couldn’t help it; I giggled. Then I frowned. God, I was fucked up. I couldn’t even let myself laugh. I stared at my phone for a few minutes, trying to figure out what the hell my next step should be. Eventually, I decided to approach the situation like you would a Band-Aid. I was gonna go the quick and direct route.
**I can tell you put a lot of thought into it. Listen, I had a really great time with you the other day, but I think it’s best if we not see each other again. I’m not really as available as I thought I was. I’m sorry.**
I sent the message and held my breath. I didn’t know what I was expecting. He could respond a million different ways. He could be angry, hurt, indifferent, offended. His response, however, wasn’t anything I could have anticipated.
**You can tell yourself whatever you want, Lyn, but you were fully available to me on Sunday. I think your brain is talking you out of it now. See me again and let me remind you how good we are together.**
My jaw dropped after I finished reading his text and, even though it totally added an unwanted layer to my confusion, my heart sped up at his words, too. Before I could even fathom a response, another text came through.
**Just meet me for dinner. In public. Nothing physical can happen in the middle of a restaurant. I’ll behave. I just want to see you. Even if it’s just for you to tell me we can’t see each other again.**
I knew, deep down, I didn’t owe him anything. One date didn’t obligate me to any further contact with Nate. But then I thought about the way his hands felt running up and down my back, how his lips pressed so softly and familiarly into mine, and I gave in. In truth, I wanted to see him one last time too – even if it was only to say goodbye. I typed my response.
**When?**
**Tonight. 6pm. At Xavier’s.**
**I’ll be there.**
I breathed out a large sigh, and then put my phone down, hoping to concentrate on some work – or at least pretend to. A few minutes later, my phone buzzed again with another text from Nate.
**Thank you.**
I let my phone fall from my hands and dropped my head into my palms, letting out a frustrated groan. I couldn’t fathom why I was surprised. It seemed my super power was finding seemingly perfect, good, smart, sensitive men, and finding ways to make it impossible to be with them.
That evening I walked into Xavier’s and, once I told the maître d’ who I was meeting, was led to the far back corner of the restaurant where Nate was sitting at a small table for two. He stood when he saw me coming, his face holding tension and looking worried. He stepped behind the vacant chair and pulled it out for me. I gave him a smile, it was not lost on me that he was going above and beyond to be nice. The waiter walked away as Nate pushed my chair in, but before I could even say hello to him, Nate pressed his lips just below my ear and whispered to me, “I’m glad you came.”
My skin prickled at his words and my breath caught. Then I tamped it all down because I was here to tell him goodbye. I was not here to imagine his lips moving up and down the skin of my neck, whispering words against me.
Before I could respond, he was sitting in his chair across from me, his long legs brushing mine under the table as he folded himself into the chair. Almost instantly, our waiter appeared and Nate was ordering a rum and coke. He looked at me expectantly and I found a way to make the words “Vodka Sour,” slip past my lips. When Nate gave me a wistful smile, I nearly crumbled. I was just seconds from grabbing my purse and leaving, unable to look at him, knowing it was the last time, thinking about everything that we’d never have together, when I heard his voice.
“Stop overthinking this, Lyn. We’re only having a drink. Ordering dinner. I’m not here to pressure you into anything or make you feel guilty or sad or angry. I just want to talk. And, this might be stepping past my boundaries, but I feel like you need someone to talk to. Let me be that person.”
I let out a breath and nodded, a little relieved that he hadn’t planned some big speech about going out with him again.
“Tell me about Devon.” He’d just delivered the most surprising and unexpected request in the history of fucked up relationships.
My eyes darted to meet with his and I must have looked panicked because he held up a hand, almost like he was trying to defend himself.
“I know you probably don’t want to talk about him with me, but I know everything you’re dealing with right now is centered around him.” He stopped talking as the waiter appeared, leaving both our drinks on the table. Before I could stop him, Nate ordered dinner for both of us, then sent the waiter on his way. He’d ordered us steaks, which normally I’d be excited for, but I didn’t feel like eating. As the waiter walked away, Nate reached his hand over the table and gently wrapped it around mine. “It’s okay to tell me about it all, Lyn. If you keep it all bottled up, it’ll just eat you from the inside out.”
Is that what’s been happening to me for the last nine years? I’d been slowly hollowing out? That seemed like an apt description. How much of me could there possibly be left? How much longer could I live like this before I disintegrated entirely?
“Start from the beginning,” he said softly, with so much kindness I wanted to cry. He was so good.
I took a deep breath and decided to give him exactly what he wanted. “I met Devon my freshman year of college. Some guy dumped a soda down my shirt and Devon gave me the shirt off his back. Literally. He was nice and funny and sweet, and when I walked away from him, I was smitten. I looked for him everywhere for the next few weeks. Walked through the same café where we’d first met, hung out in coffee shops, casually asked my friends if they knew who he was. I was consumed with him. I wondered who he was, what he was going to school for, if he had a girlfriend. He became almost mythical to me. Like some magical college-boy apparition.” I stopped and lifted my glass to my lips, needing both the liquid courage and to wet my mouth for the speech I was about to deliver.
“I had nearly gotten to the point where I didn’t believe he actually existed, until one day my best friend introduced me to her new boyfriend, and it was him.”
“Ouch,” Nate said just before sipping his drink. He didn’t seem put off by the beginning of my story, didn’t seem to mind too much that I was telling him about my infatuation with another man, so I continued, feeling like I was already a little lighter after letting some of the words out.
I went on to tell him everything. Every single detail I could recall. We ate. We drank. He listened attentively, almost raptly, asking questions when I left out something he couldn’t piece together, nodding and sincerely paying attention to my crazy story.
“One night, at Liv and Devon’s rehearsal dinner,” I said, trying to gather the courage to tell him one of the most shameful parts of my past, “Elliot proposed to me.” I inhaled, and then took another sip of my drink, despondent to see the glass was empty. Nate raised his hand and gestured to the waiter that we needed another round. I smiled at him, my head a little light and fuzzy from the alcohol, but not lit enough that I wasn’t in control. I knew, even then, that Nate was giving me a gift.
“I said yes, but I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have given him that hope. I just didn’t know how to tell him no in front of the entire dinner party. However, even though I might have had the best intentions, what I did the next day was even worse.” I felt the tears welling in my eyes, the sharp pinching in the back of my throat, and I knew tears were imminent. I dropped my head into my hands and tried to keep the tears at bay. I didn’t want to cry in a restaurant in front of Nate. I’d cried so much in the past few weeks and months, crying should have felt unremarkable and unsatisfying to me, shouldn’t have been the release it was. I should have been immune to crying by that point. But I wasn’t. I was still on the verge of tears and knew the release would feel like a weight lifting off me. Problems weren’t solved by crying, but sometimes the only thing to make you feel better was to let the cathartic tears fall and the sobs break free.
“I watched Devon marry Olivia, lost my shit, and ended the engagement in a bathroom right after the ceremony,” I sobbed the words out, not even trying to maintain any kind of façade of composure. Nate had given me free rein to open up to him, and for better or worse, my floodgate was officially wide open. He let me cry, let me weep quietly, and when I looked back up at him I didn’t get the look of contempt I was expecting. I didn’t wilt under his stare of disdain. Instead, he was looking at me with calm compassion. He looked as though he wanted to wrap his arms around me, but didn’t want to frighten me away.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ve never told anyone about that before. It was, uh, a little overwhelming.” I reached for my purse, grabbing a tissue, and blotted my face.
“So, you’ve spent the last nine years in love with your best friend’s husband?”
“Give or take a year, yeah.” I nodded and pushed back the tears. Hearing someone else say the words, having someone else acknowledge everything I had been dealing with was a heavy feeling. And the fact that he said the words without judgement, made it that much more difficult to hear. I wanted him to be disgusted with me, to be angry, to tell me that I deserved all the unhappiness I was feeling. I wanted him to help with the hollowing-out process. I nearly handed him a proverbial shovel and said, ‘Here, dig out every good thing I have inside of me, every happy memory, every moment of contentment, and get it out. Then, bury me under it, so all that’s left is a shell of a shitty person, buried underneath everything she ruined.’
“That sounds terrible,” he said sincerely. And it was then I was convinced that Nate couldn’t be a real person. He simply couldn’t be that perfect.
“It was terrible,” I said through a sniffle, and I caught the tiniest hint of a crooked smile pull up on one side of his mouth, but he pushed it back. “But then, the most terrible thing of all happened.”
“She died,” he said with a nod. I frowned, unable to stop them, more tears spilled. Nate got up, moved his chair so he was next to me, and then let me cry on his shoulder as I wept for my friend. I’d not had one person let me cry for her. I’d helped so many other people deal with her death, but no one had ever just wrapped their arms around me and let me mourn her, my best friend.
“Olivia died and we all just ended up in this really weird state of limbo. I stepped in to help because that was the one thing she’d asked me to do. I helped him because it’s what I thought she wanted. But the longer I was there, even before you came into the picture, the more wrong it felt.”
“I get that.” Of course he did. “It must have felt strange, maybe even wrong, to be with him, almost in a domestic way, in her absence.”
“Yes,” I cried, my voice louder than I intended. “In the years before she was married, I would have given anything to take her place, but after she died, I didn’t want to be her replacement.” I wiped the puffy skin under my eyes, realizing I must have looked like some sort of soggy raccoon, and tried to continue. “I loved her,” I whispered. “Even more than I loved him.”
“I know,” he whispered back to me.
“So now he’s upset because he knows I went out with you, even though, he and I, we’re nothing. We never were anything, except, maybe, a ruse. A sick, weird, twisted, relationship.”
“Do you love him?” Nate asked the question with gentleness and genuine curiosity, and I felt like I owed him at least the truth. Or my own personal version of it. I wanted to give him the most truthful answer I had.
I took a moment to think about his question, because I wanted to give him the most honest answer I could. “I thought I did. Nate, I really thought I did. But, I want to believe love doesn’t make someone feel this way.”
“I want to believe that too.”
We took a break from talking, letting everything I’d said sink in, and ate our meal. The quiet, which usually would have made me uneasy, was welcomed and not at all awkward. He continued to sit next to me, although he moved over a little to give me room to eat, but I liked that he was so close – that he hadn’t taken the first opportunity to move away from me, to distance himself. When our knees brushed under the table, I tried to ignore the fact that I liked it.
“I’m sorry you had to listen to all that,” I said, finally, after the waiter had taken our dinner plates away. “But, obviously, you can understand why I’m unavailable right now.”
“I can understand why you think you’re unavailable, yes.” He picked up his linen napkin and wiped his mouth, his eyes giving away that he was getting ready to say something of importance. “I think,” he said, putting his hands down and looking me straight in the eyes, “you’re confused and sad and probably dealing with a little bit of depression following the death of your best friend.”
I couldn’t argue with him, but I also couldn’t fathom where he was taking me with his words.
“The way I see it, in this moment, you’ve never been more available. At least, not since you met Devon.”
I opened my mouth to argue that point, but he continued to talk, cutting me off.
“It sounds, to me, like you’re holding all the cards, Lyn. Maybe you’re not used to the feeling, seeing as how you’ve been playing by everyone else’s rules all this time, but you’re in a position to choose now.”
I listened to his words, but didn’t really take them in, couldn’t comprehend them. It had been a long time since I felt like I was in the driver’s seat of my own life, and if this was what it felt like, I wasn’t ready to drive.
“Lyn,” he whispered, placing his hand over mine again, gently rubbing his thumb on the top of my hand, sending shivers straight up my arm. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life being someone’s second choice?”
I froze. “It’s not like that,” I whispered, my voice so low I wasn’t sure he could even hear me.
“It is like that, babe,” he said sweetly. But the sweetness with which he said the words did nothing to lessen the devastating effects they were having on me. “If your friend was still alive, he wouldn’t be with you. The last decade of your life shows that.” His thumb was still moving over my skin, but I was no longer feeling tingly. I was feeling emptier and emptier by the minute.
“I think I need to go,” I rasped, reaching for my purse, starting to stand, until his grip tightened on my hand. My eyes flashed to him.
“Please, I’m sorry, don’t go yet. I’d feel terrible if you left upset. Just…sit. We can talk about something else.”
“Talk about something else?” I asked, my voice growing angrier. “You basically just told me that I’ve spent my entire adult life as insignificant.”
I didn’t know what I was more upset about: that he’d said those words to me, or that they were true.
The truest words I’d ever heard.
He was right.
I was insignificant.
And I did it to myself by allowing it. I let myself be his second choice ever since the beginning.
I collapsed into the chair, bringing my free hand to my mouth, wondering how I’d spent the last nine years being nothing. Nate still held my hand, still tried to comfort me, as I came to the most desolating revelation of my life.
After a few minutes, I felt Nate’s other hand come to my shoulder as he gave it a gentle squeeze.
“You deserve to be someone’s first choice, Evelyn.” After his words, his hand dropped from my shoulder and I missed the warmth and the pressure immediately. I wanted him to hold me again and just comfort me, but I couldn’t ask him to do that; it wasn’t fair. Instead, he also pulled his hand away and moved his chair back to the opposite side of the table.
“So,” he finally said, his voice light and airy, as if I hadn’t just had an emotional breakdown. “I think, after listening to your story, I’d have to agree with you that you’re not really available right now.”
I quite nearly laughed at his words. In fact, a little sputtering chuckle made it past my lips through the tail end of my cries.
“However, I don’t think you’re as big of a lost cause as you seem to believe.” He paused and I watched as his eyes fell to the table, his fingers fidgeting with his napkin. “Look, you’re worth so much more than you’re asking for. You ask people for the bare minimum, and then thank them when they give it to you. You deserve more.”
His words were sending shockwaves of warmth through me, igniting the tiniest flame inside me. It was hard to believe the words, but they meant a lot coming from his mouth.
“Let me see your phone,” he said gently.
I raised an eyebrow, questioning him.
“Trust me on this.”
I relented and handed him my phone, watching as he lit up the screen and moved his thumbs quickly over the screen.
“Okay. In exactly one month, an alert is going to come up on your screen. All it’s going to say is ‘Nate.’ That is just me, checking in. If you’re in a better place and feel like giving me a call, I’ll be waiting. If you see my name and cringe, then don’t worry about me, just keep moving forward and I’ll wish you all the best. The ball’s in your court.”
“Nate, I don’t-“
“Nope,” he said, cutting me off. “You don’t get to turn me down now.” He said all that with a smile. “When that alert comes up on your phone, decide then. And I promise, whatever you decide, I’ll be okay with, as long as it’s your first choice.”
“Okay,” I whispered, unsure of what he thought would come of waiting a month. I was broken on the inside. He shouldn’t want anything to do with me.
“I’m glad you agreed to meet me tonight, Lyn. I’m grateful you told me your story. But, I think you need to rest.”
He wasn’t wrong. Realizing your life was in shambles, and you’d spent it practically begging everyone to see you as worthless was exhausting.
“That sounds good.”
He walked me out of the restaurant and continued with me to my car. I opened the door and turned back to him, ready to thank him for dinner and tell him goodbye, but he surprised me by being only inches from me. Our eyes met and I stilled as his hand came up and pushed my hair behind my ear.
“Any man who wouldn’t pick you, wouldn’t wait for you, is an idiot, Evelyn.” His hand dropped slightly, and his thumb feathered over my bottom lip. Then his fingers gently tucked under my chin, pushing it up just barely. “You get yourself sorted out, and if you feel like you want to give us a second chance, call me when you see my name on that phone.”
He leaned closer and I breathed in right as his lips pressed against mine.
“Talk to you later,” he said after he pulled away from the softest and sweetest kiss I’d ever been given.
“Bye,” was all I could say as he walked away from me. A rather large part of me hoped in a month I’d see his name and want to call him. But in that moment, I knew I had other things to take care of. The first being me.
