"No," Allie said.
"Why are you being so mean to me?" He grabbed her hand. "I know you sleep with customers. Why are you acting so weird about us?"
She tugged her hand back. "We're through, Carter. No more. I'm not your dirty secret. I know your family hates me, and you paid me to make them hate me, and that's fine. But I don't belong in your world. You are on that side of the bar, and I'm on this side." She held out his card and ordered, "Go home."
Grant and Kate were waiting up for him.
"So how did it go?"
"Eh," Carter said.
"You didn’t screw it up, did you, Carter?" Kate said disapprovingly.
"Who knows?" he said, thinking of Allie. Liz was so sure he was in love with her.
"It will be okay," Grant told him. "You’re still trying to acclimate to civilian life. You just need to find a purpose, something to make everything clear."
Carter thought about Allie. That was what he had had, until he ruined it.
"How do you know?" he asked Grant. "How do you know you’ve found your purpose, the thing you’re looking for?"
"It feels right," Grant said. "It seems difficult, but it doesn't matter because it is as if you can’t do anything else. It feels inevitable."
33
Allie
Allie was so upset after she kicked Carter out of the bar. She cried on the way back to the studio apartment.
How could she have been so stupid? Carter didn't love her. He had taken Liz out on a date—a real one, something he would never do for her. She felt suffocated by the weight of growing up in a poor area, attending terrible schools, and scraping out a meager existence.
When she returned to Arnold's apartment, she deleted all the pictures of Carter off of her computer, cleared out her bookmarks, and deleted his text messages. She was making a fresh start.
She still had to contend with the collateral damage, however.
"So how was your date?" she asked Liz the next day.
"Is this some sort of a joke to you?" Liz snapped then ran off into the bathroom.
Allie followed her and knocked on the stall door. "What’s wrong, Liz? Let me in."
"No," Liz said.
Allie could hear her sobbing.
"What happened?"
"You know what happened. He’s in love with you, not me."
"That isn’t true at all!" Allie said, stunned. "We had sex. It meant nothing to him. We didn't even do it in a bed."
"Carter's such a sociopath," Liz said, opening up the stall door.
Allie handed her a tissue and hugged Liz.
"I feel like I've cried more since I came to New York than anywhere else," her coworker said, dabbing her eyes. "It's such a horrible city. Why is life so unfair? I just want a happily ever after."
"You already have it," Allie said, barely containing her annoyance. "You have a great apartment all to yourself, you have money, a nice family, siblings, people who care about you. I have none of that. You know where I live? On a couch in some creepy guy's apartment. I come back, and he’s playing porn and jacking off on the sofa, which is where I sleep, I might add. Everything I own is in my car, which I’m paying twenty percent of my income just to park in this horrible city. You already have a happily ever after. So what if something doesn’t go right for you for the first time in your life? Welcome to my world. Pick yourself up and be an adult and handle your business. You don’t like it? You change it. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, though. No one has time for that. And no one has the patience for it."
