I don’t know what to say to this. I should have told him—if I’d been thinking about the job, if I hadn’t immersed myself so completely in my life back home, I probably could have seen that Jasper would try what he did. Getting out of the non-compete—before I left Houston, that would’ve been the most important thing to me too, but I’d barely thought about it once I’d started seeing Kit. Honestly, I’d barely thought about it even before I’d started seeing her—once I was home with Dad, everything about the job felt different. Everything aboutmefelt different.
“Ben,” Jasper says.“I fucked up. But I did think—I thought I was doing what was best for us. What we both wanted.”
I don’t know if I can forgive this, even if I do own my share—my negligence, my reticence to tell Jasper everything. Over a decade of friendship, but I wonder if for me, Jasper will always be the reason I lost Kit.
“Singh didn’t take the offer,” he says, and my eyes snap to his before I cast them back toward my shoes, feigning disinterest. But I am desperate to know something,anything, that is even related to Kit. And hearing this makes me realize that as unlikely I’d known it was, I’d been nursing some small hope that maybe, possibly, Kit would come to Houston. That she’d be here, and I could try and win her back. Here, she’d need me; she’d be on her own. It’s a terrible thing to think, and I know it—but I miss her so completely that in my darkest moments, I turn to this kind of selfishness.
“Did he say why?” I ask, embarrassed. I know I sound desperate.
“No.” I hear a little remorse in his voice. He feels fucking sorry for me. This is awful.
“You need to know something,” he says, as I’m headed out the door. I stop and turn back, see him take a deep breath.“Us going out on our own—I still want that. It’s going to take longer now, but we can do it. But I only want that if you do. And if you don’t…” he trails off, looks out the window.“If you don’t, that’s all right too. So—let me know where things stand, when you figure it out.” This is Jasper telling me, in his carefully neutral way, that for him, we’re still friends. That nothing that’s happened over the last month has to get in the way of that.
I give a brief nod, and leave his office. Then I walk straight to mine, grab my things, and leave for the day. It’s early, only four thirty, but I’m guessing after my stellar performance at the meeting, no one’s going to miss me anyways.
I go directly to the bar on the corner, fully intending to drink myself into a stupor. For the last two weeks, I’ve stayed stone-cold sober, thinking I ought to be sharp if she called, if I had to leave suddenly.
But she’s not going to call.
I’m nursing my second drink when I feel a hand on my shoulder.“Hey, stranger,” says a voice from beside me, and there’s Gina, leaning in for a quick kiss of my cheek. As she settles in on the barstool behind me, I can think of nothing else but the complete unfamiliarity I feel, the strangeness of Gina’s reddish brown hair, of my body in this suit, of the bluish light of this bar.“You’ve been goneforever,” she says, signaling the bartender.
I’d forgotten, I guess, that Gina comes here every other Friday, on the weeks when her kids are with her ex. It’s where we always used to meet for drinks and conversation about work—Gina does PR for one of the refineries—and then almost always a trip back to my place, where Gina never stayed, on the off chance her kids needed her at home. It had been, for the three or so months before I’d gone back to Barden, a fairly regular hookup, and though we’d never been anything but friends with benefits, I’d still called her to tell her I’d be away for a while, to wish her the best—to end it with her, which she’d been entirely indifferent about.
She orders a martini, three olives, takes off her jacket and drapes it over the back of her seat.
I could do this, tonight. I could drink enough to take the edge off. I could take Gina to my apartment and fuck her on every available surface in there. I could do the reckless, stupid thing and break another tie to Kit, the tie that makes her the last woman who I’ve touched, kissed, slept next to. But my leaning back from Gina—it’s automatic. I don’t even notice I’m doing it until I see a little the little wrinkle at the bridge of her nose.“Sorry,” I say, taking a sip of my drink. My standard in this bar: gin, no ice, a twist of lemon peel. It tastes horrible now. I miss the shitty beer my dad keeps at home.“Haven’t been out in a while.”
“How’s your dad?” she asks, when the bartender brings her drink.
“He’s all right. Thanks for asking.” I realize I have no interest in telling her anything at all about my dad, about my time at home, about anything. I’m so checked out, and it’s completely unfair to Gina, who’s doing nothing but being the polite friend she’s always been.“How’ve you been? Kids okay?” I ask this even though I’ve never met her kids, and we hardly ever talked about them. Gina wasn’t interested in anything that involved from me, and the feeling was mutual.
“Kids are good,” she says, keeping her eyes on me as she takes an olive from her martini and pops it into her mouth.
I feel nothing. I feel like I won’t feel anything ever again.
“Gina,” I say, and in her name I’m trying to tell her everything I don’t want from her.
She smiles over her drink at me before setting it down.“Ben. It’s fine.”
“I’m sorry.I’ve had a rough—I’m not at my best.”
“What happened?”
I shrug.“Got knocked on my ass by love. Fucked it up, of course. Now I’m back here, pretty much hating everything.”
“Been there,” she says.
Gina’s a good friend, a good person—she had a shitty divorce and an even shittier custody battle, and I’ll bet if I sat on this stool and got sloppy drunk and told her all about Kit, she’d listen. I’ll bet she’d give me cocktail napkins when I’d cry, and I’m not even ashamed to say, I could probably get a cry going without being sloppy drunk.
But I don’t want to tell anyone about Kit. It’s over and it’s awful, but somehow saying nothing about it is an effort at protecting the part of Kit that I’d failed to protect before. Somehow I tell myself that I can hang on to her longer if I keep her to myself.
I set a fifty on the table, for me and Gina, for the bartender I’d rudely barked my drink order at an hour ago and get off my stool. I lean down and brush a kiss on Gina’s cheek, a polite, friendly gesture that still makes my skin feel tight with wrongness.“You’re still gorgeous, G,” I tell her, pulling back and putting my suit jacket on.
“Ben,” she says, as I’m walking away,“take care, okay?”
I nod and head out, seeing nothing and no one around me as I make the long walk to my apartment, and there’s nothing and no one there, either.
* * * *
