She pulled away abruptly and spoke with a crispness in her tone that he’d never heard before. “Message received. I’ll steer clear if I see you around the office. Bye, Jake.”
She turned and walked out of his apartment without another word.
This is what he should want. It’s what the Jake of three months ago would’ve wanted. But it wasn’t what he wanted now, not that it mattered. Still, he’d respect her decision and go back to his solitary, work-focused life. He survived his last breakup. He’d survive this too.
She was gone, and he was alone, his sweat drying to a sticky film on his skin.
Twenty-One
Mabel’s eyes snapped open at four forty-five a.m. on Monday. She hadn’t set any alarms, but apparently her body no longer needed external stimulus to get her out of bed that early.
“This is a terrible superpower,” she grumbled to Tybalt, who lifted his furry head from the foot of the bed, cracked one eye open in a withering feline glare, and dropped right back to sleep. She groaned and mashed her pillow over her face, shouting into the goose down. “The only good thing about this situation is that I get to sleep in, and I can’t even do that right!”
Grumbling, she flopped and repositioned herself, but by five thirty, she admitted defeat and rolled out of bed, shuffling into the kitchen to dump a heap of coffee into a filter.
As the machine burbled to life, she plunked herself down at the kitchen island and propped her feet on the stool next to her, picking up her phone.
Mabel:Don’t you dare be too funny without me.
Ten seconds later, Dave’s reply zipped back:Weird in here without your hideous face.
She immediately pulled a cross-eyed grimace, snapped a pic, and hit Send. It was almost like being there with him.
Except that it wasn’t. Like, not at all.
With a self-pitying sigh, she filled her mug and hesitated in front of the radio in her kitchen. Listening was masochistic. Not listening was wallowing in denial.
“Go big or go home,” she announced to her empty kitchen as she pressed the power button.
She listened to every minute of Dave’s first solo show. It wasawful. Not the show, of course. It was solid enough. She thought he did better matching wits with another person, but then again, she was probably biased. But she and Dave had been a broadcasting duo since they’d been paired up on a group project their sophomore year. Not being in the studio with him that morning felt wrong. So she sipped her coffee and nurtured her loathing of Brandon, the cause of her misery. She moved from the kitchen to the living room couch, where she ate handfuls of dry cereal out of the box; to the bathroom so she could shower; then back to the living room, where she stared at the wall as Dave thanked the listeners for putting up with his first solo outing and signed off.
“Well, the world didn’t end after all,” she informed the cat snoozing on her lap as her phone buzzed.
Dave:Guess the world didn’t end.
She barked out a laugh. That Arrogant Asshole could separate them, but it didn’t mean they weren’t still psychically linked.
She arrived at the station around eleven and parked in one of the available slots on the shade-free side of the lot. Yet another grievance to add to Brandon’s pile: no longer having her choice of parking spots. Nerves propelled her through the parking lot and into the studio, where she’d left herself plenty of time to prep. A solo show was a whole different beast, and she’d be radically changing her usual presentation. She felt like she was standing at the edge of a cliff while her evil new boss stood behind her with a hand on her back, nudging her toward the edge.
She claimed the new desk in the greenroom and listlessly read through Google news while Skip ran his show on the other side of the glass. Until now, she hadn’t fully appreciated the talent it took to make talking to yourself for hours entertaining. Skip was a master, rattling away about the finer points of the weekend’s White Sox game. Lucky him; sports would be a disaster for her.
Frustrated, she slammed her laptop shut and opened the door to the booth as soon as theOn Airsign turned off. She dropped into the chair opposite Skip and wilted dramatically over the side. “I can’t do this.”
He glanced up from the computer screen where he was searching through songs. “You’re gonna have to, sister. They already sold the ad time.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, anything to make Lowell Consolidated a little richer.” Mabel shifted to drape her legs over the left arm of the chair, deciding that the early-afternoon sunlight slanting through the slats of the venetian blinds would bathe her in angelic light. Poor Mabel, martyred at the altar of profit to appease the gods of rock ’n’ roll. She tossed her head back dramatically.
“Why are you squirming? That chair’s wobbly, and you’re making it worse.”
“Fine.” She grudgingly straightened herself and watched Skip do his thing for the rest of his shift. With ten minutes to go before her afternoon debut, they switched places so she could take over the control board.
“You ready for this, kiddo?” he asked, caterpillar eyebrows arching upward.
She puffed her cheeks with air and exhaled. “Nope. But I don’t think I’ll ever be, you know?”
“I kept a bucket next to me so I could throw up between bits during my first solo show twenty years ago.”
Mabel leaned her elbows on the counter. “Wow, Skip. Thank you. That’s so… disgusting.”
