But it doesn’t matter, because he keeps going. Gretchen brings back Reid’s card and receipt, but he doesn’t even seem to notice; he keeps his blue eyes so focused on me. When there’s a new round of shouts from somewhere in the rear of this swine-filled bar, he leans even closer.
“I don’t do that. Protect myself. I’m”—he swallows—“honest to a fault, that’s what Avery used to say. To my own detriment. To the detriment of people around me.”
I tense at this mention of Avery, of the past between me and Reid she brings up, of a shared criticism we’ve both, apparently, leveled at him. I feel a new spike of guilt, a desperate urge to run from this pain I caused him.
But I stay.
“Then I went out walking today,” Reid says. “I walked across the Bridge. I walked all around Brooklyn. And I realized something.”
No, wait, I want to say.Wait, I realized something, too.ButGod, it is so loud in here, and Reid is so close, and his voice sounds so good....
“I realized I’m not always honest with you.”
I lean back, enough so I can look in his eyes. It doesn’t sound like a good thing to say, thisI’m not always honest with you.But somehow, the way Reid says it—the letters take on a new meaning. As though if you drew them all out, you’d find something. Something you’d actually want to see.
“But you . . .” I say, my voice too quiet for this clamor, and Reid ducks his head, brings his ear closer to my lips so he can hear me. “You always say what you mean.”
He leans back again, his eyes tracing over my face—my eyes, my nose, my mouth.Please forget I’m wearing Hello Kitty faces, I think.
“I don’t. Because if I did—”
Somewhere down the bar a glass breaks and someone shouts an unintelligible expletive, but neither of us moves. I’m watching Reid’s mouth in case I have to lip-read what he says next.
“If I did, I would say that last week I watched every video you’ve got on your website so I could hear the sound of your voice again. I would say that a woman stood next to me on the subway and I think she used the same shampoo as you, and I could hardly breathe for how much I missed you. I would say that I walked around all day with a Meg-shaped shadow beside me, and I only came in here because of the signs outside, and so I wouldn’t call you up at nine o’clock on a Friday night and beg you to talk to me again—about Frisbee, the weather, the name for that piece of a letter you told me about—”
“A spur,” I whisper, becauseholy shit. This is the best fight of my wholelife.
He nods, his face so serious. “A spur,” he repeats.
Then he drops his eyes to the bar, to my card, and adds one more thing.
“I would say I like you so much, Meg.”
And then—right then, the real fight breaks out.
Chapter 12
“Acouple of stitches ought to do it.”
The doctor leaning in to take one final look at Reid’s eyebrow has the efficient, slightly impatient demeanor of a woman who has seen a whole lot worse, and who probably has a whole lot worse waiting for her out in the lobby of this urgent care. She reaches up a latex-gloved hand and touches her index finger to the lump forming around the cut on Reid’s brow, and I see his jaw clench tightly against the pressure she’s put there.
“Sorry, big guy,” she says, lowering her hand and leaning back, pulling off her gloves. “The good news is, I don’t think you’re concussed.”
“I told you I wasn’t,” Reid says, sullenly.
“Yes, that was helpful. To have your expert medical opinion.” She looks over at me and rolls her eyes.
I really love this doctor.
She moves over to the tablet on the pale-green laminate counter, tapping in a few notes from her exam, and I realize that it’s the first time in at least a couple of hours that I’ve taken a deep, relieved breath. All through the cab ride here, my big bag basically a clown car for the steady stream of tissues (clean! I’m not an animal, or your grandma) I’d handed over to Reid to press against his gushing cut, my body and brain had felt electrified, all my thoughts and actions a new, supercharged kind of Meg-Bot mechanical:
Noise, crowd, push, punch.
Blood, door, outside, cab, doctor.
Reid. Fight.Barfight.
Swine, as it turned out, had lived entirely up to its name when it came to the majority of its patrons, who rudely interrupted the most romantic confrontation of my life by starting a brawl over a game of air hockey. It’d started somewhere in the back, some mysterious place where the pastel-shirt guys and the beard guys apparently met, deadlocked in their angry, competitive feelings toward each other over various table games and probably also their relative success levels at late capitalism. Maybe if my eyeballs hadn’t been turning into giant red hearts I would’ve noticed how that rising tide of noise was being matched with a new press of people making their way to the front.
