What the fuck was wrong with me? Aside from everything that was always wrong with me, why did I say that?
Well, there were a few reasons.
My firm had not stopped calling for the past two weeks. They wanted updates and timelines. Some indication of when I’d be back to work. I couldn’t give them one.
The lease on my condo was due to renew soon. For reasons I could not explain, I hadn’t been able to sign the papers.
My attorney was finally doing something right and making progress on deals for my parents, and I was relieved about that. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe any of it would come to fruition.
I had a new general manager lined up for SPOC though I kept thinking about how Ayla would need several months off for maternity leave this winter. What was I going to do then?
So, I said this to Sunny because it was front-and-center in my mind. Because I didn’t know what to do about it. Because I was tired and stressed and just worn the fuck down from holding everything together for so long that I couldn’t keep those words to myself.
Sunny glanced over at me, her brows raised. “Is that so?”
Instead of walking back that statement, I embraced the tension corded between my shoulders and barreled ahead. “Yeah, well, with Ayla taking over the general manager job and the charges against my mom possibly being dropped, I should be heading back to Singapore soon enough.”
“So, this is how it goes.” Sunny gave me a thoughtful nod and kept walking. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I repeated. If she was troubled by this news, she didn’t show it. And that troubled me. Maybe she hadn’t heard me. There was a lot of screaming at this festival. Or maybe she didn’t understand. “What does that mean?”
“It means it’s okay, Beck. We don’t need to know what comes next,” she said. “All we need to know is that we have right now. We’re just having fun. Right?”
“We’re just having fun,” I repeated, since that was the only thing I could do tonight.
“Yeah,” she said, staring up at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. “We’re having fun together. You don’t have to stress about what happens when things change for you.”
“Right,” I said, the word cracking out of me with such force that my jaw hurt. “Fun. Okay. Good to know.”
Sunny leaned away, skimmed a glance over me. “What’s happening here?”
“Nothing,” I said, nowhere near in control of the velocity of my words. “Just havingfun.”
She frowned and my heart gave a trombone-y thump that couldn’t be healthy. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Is there something to talk about?” I asked. “Since we don’t need to know what comes next?”
“I can only promise this moment,” she said. “That’s all I can ever give because nothing else is certain.” When all I could do was stare at her like she’d just peeled back the surface of the earth to reveal an ocean of apple cores, she went on. “I don’t make forever plans, Beck. I have today and probably tomorrow and a bit beyond that but I refuse to pin down the future because I don’t know what it will be until I get there.”
“Sunny, sweetheart, I love that for you but what the fuck? Did you not just open a business?”
“I did, and that means I’m going to put my energy into building something specialright now. It doesn’t mean the rest of my life will be Naked Provisions.”
I didn’t understand this. Not a single word of it.
“We should get you home.” I stared at my watch much longer than necessary because I was afraid Sunny would see the swirling hurricanes in my eyes. “You’ve had seventy-one minutes of walking around, one questionably vegan slab of fried dough, and zero living fireflies. Let’s call it a night.”
I didn’t know what to say on the drive back to Sunny’s house. I didn’t trust myself to keep a lid on all the snarly noise that pressed up at my edges and blurred my vision. And I didn’t trust myself to stop before I said something I’d never be able to take back.
Sunny’s parents called to check on her as they had several times a day since the accident and that distraction gave me a minute to breathe. I didn’t figure anything out but I didn’t feel like I was going to crack my jaw from all the clenching.
Once Sunny closed the front door behind us, she said, “I’m not doing this, Beck. Either you tell me what’s wrong or you take yourself home and glare at your own walls.”
Again, I said the first—and worst—thing. “When were you going to tell me that you werejust having fun?”
She dropped onto the sofa and folded her legs in front of her, her hands clasped in her lap. “To be clear, you’re upset that I didn’t dissolve into a fit of screaming and crying because you told me that you won’t be living here forever and ever, as I always knew? That’s the problem?”
“The problem is that I don’t know what the fuckfunmeans to you because I thought we had a real relationship but I guess I was wrong about that.”
