I get looped into a conversation with the kitchen staff about the restaurant scene in Asheville. How all these awesome breweries have popped up, how Asheville is now a solid beer destination. They go behind the bar and get me little sips of different beers, but I’m driving, so I don’t get crazy.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice it’s just her and Fuckin’ Mark at the bar. They’re both sitting on stools facing one another, their knees maybe touching. While I’m busy convincing myself not to storm over there, Mark takes something out of his pocket. It’s a baggie. He dumps a bunch of what’s probably coke right onto the bar, takes a card out of his wallet, starts cutting lines.
Annie freezes. Gets stiff as a board. Her posture is all wrong.
She stares at the lines. She looks at Mark. Mark leans in, mistaking that look for interest. She looks at the lines again. Looks at Mark again. He shifts his stool closer, so that she’s practically between his knees.
Her eyes begin darting all around the restaurant, looking for something. I’m shocked to realize that she’s looking forme.
Her eyes finally hook onto mine, and it seems like there’s a line that pulls taut. Tense. Something isn’t right. She has the same expression she had when I pulled her out of the car at that rest stop. She looks like she’s going to cry.
And then Claire comes over and wedges herself right into my side. She rests a hand on my thigh. “Hey, big guy,” she says. She’s drunk. I can smell the liquor on her breath; she’s that close.
I’m still looking at Annie. Her eyes dart to Claire, and the line gets cut. Snaps right in half.
By the time I get Claire’s hand off me, Annie isn’t looking at me anymore.
Am I supposed to do something? Am I supposed to go over there? She won’t even let me open her car door for her, for fuck’s sake. Will she lay into me if I go over there?
Claire strikes up an energetic conversation with the people around us. They start asking me questions about my work, and by the time I look up again to look for Annie, she’s gone.
ELEVEN
Annie
Can you send me the rental info I’m gonna catch a cab
I sendNico the text and slump down onto the pavement, leaning my back against the building. I take shelter in Nico’s sweatshirt, pulling it over my knees, pulling the hood over my head so that I likely resemble a soft boulder. I’m surrounded by fuzzy warmth and his smell, cozy and familiar after three days and hours and hours in a car, and it’s this feeling of safety that lets me think.
I was doing great until I wasn’t. Sister Annie held strong in the face of everything in the beginning—the people, the drinking. The flirting. But it was the one-two punch of the Mark and the coke that did me in.
Something I’ve learned about myself over the last ten years is that I give good party. I don’t know if it’s a scent I give off, like a bitch in heat, except a bitch in erratic, fun decisions orsomething, but it’s always been this way. People take one look at me and say,this girl can hang.
It really used to work for me. Now, Sister Annie hates this about herself. She’s been unable to find a balance.
Where are you
What I’m one hundred percent sure of, though, is that I don’t want to be an issue for Nico, because that would be the icing on the intricately frosted cake. Perfect Dr. Nico the Active Listener, swooping in to save the miserable fuckin’ hurricane of serious issues who causes fuckin’ problems for everyone around her. And he’s the type of person, I’m learning, who will drop everything, including a fun party and a beautiful woman who is clearly into him, to make sure I’m okay. And that’s not okay with me. So I’m not going to be a problem.
I ignore the odd thing chewing at my insides, but I suddenly find myself on the verge of crying again.
I need to get out of here.
Don’t worry about it just forward me the email
I text him from inside the soft cavern of the hoodie, the phone lighting up the small space. He texts back immediately.
Are you outside?
I mean, obviously. I can’t get anywhere else without the keys to the car or the information about the house. I’m in the middle of typing out another request for the house information when I hear the door to the restaurant swing open. Goddamnit.
“Hey, you,” I hear, and it’s not Nico. It’s Mark.
I groan.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I’m clearly thriving here, says the girl curled into an upright fetal position on the ground and hiding in a hoodie.
