CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Will giving me space doesn’t push him further back in my brain. It doesn’t transition him from the thing I want most—the person I spend all my spare time thinking of, hoping for, considering—to a memory I can call upononlywhen I want to.
I imagine myself at Will’s place the first night I saw it, when he whispered into my neckEverything I think about is in reference to you.
Cami wasn’t kidding about the forced time off. Derrick calls me the morning after Will leaves my house and says it’s nonnegotiable, that he’ll be staying in Austin all week to help smooth things over with the employees, the press, the customers.
“You stay home,” Derrick tells me over the phone, “or take a vacation or something. Just don’t come into work.”
I left my computer at the office, so I don’t really have another option.
The next day is Saturday. I wake up to the first blush of fall on the breeze, chilly and golden leaf scented. Gio and Leonie ride over to my house. I greet them at the front door in a slip of a nightgown, my hair piled in a bun, my thoughts groggy with sleep.
“Want to fuck around?” Gio asks. She smiles up at me, her face playful beneath her helmet. I smile back and nod, even though riding a bike will only make me think of Will. Of the two of us riding our bikes together past the sunbathing turtles on the Johnson Creek Greenbelt.
Everything I think about is in reference to you.
That’s the problem with loving someone. When it happens, that person comes out of their box, and they start to fill every crack and shadow in your life. The memories of them get slippery, ethereal enough to move silently and appear before you at any moment.
Still, I change clothes and pump air into my bike tires, then climb onto it and ride away from my house with my friends.
We find a sparkling, dewy glade and spread out a picnic, sipping on grapefruit sodas and passing around a single spliff. We talk about the studio space Leonie rented for her yoga business, Gio quitting her grocery delivery gig because she’s finally earning enough from social media on its own.
They’re both working, earning a wage from something they’re proud to do, and the difference between them and me is, it’s not quietly killing them.
Drop everything,my mind whispers,and change your mind.
What had Camila said?But now I have to do something else.
I’m high, and feeling existential, and terrified of these thoughts.
“What are you thinking about, J?” Giovanna asks.
I sigh out a deep exhale, staring at the clouds. “I’m thinking about what my life would be like if Revenant had never existed at all.”
The ground doesn’t crack open. Lightning doesn’t smite me.
Gio flips over and stares at me for a long time. “I can’t fathom it,” she says.
“I would have a softer, more anonymous life,” I say.
“Do you wish that would have happened?” Leonie asks.
“No,” I admit. “No, I wouldn’t change a thing about the past. Only, possibly, the future.”
I sleep soundly for a third night in a row, no alarm clock to rouse me in the morning. For hours, I stay in bed, hovering in a state of half consciousness, awake and then not, dreaming and then not. Around eleven I finally get up and make a carafe of coffee, and while I wait for the first mug to cool, I eat two raspberry muffins.
As I taste and chew and swallow, I imagine Will checking on me from the door of my bedroom while I slept that first day. I imagine him grabbing my car keys and heading to H-E-B, coming back with bags full of ingredients and unloading them on my counter. I imagine him pulling out a bowl, making a noise of exasperation when he fails to find a whisk.
Everything I think about—you.
I pull open my refrigerator door to see if I have any unexpired cream for the coffee.
It’s completely stocked.
Vegetables, fruits, coffee creamer, black bean burgers, cauliflower korma, a giant bowl of salad he made himself topped with chickpeas and pepitas. Seltzers and wine and bottled iced tea.
I collapse onto the floor in tears, overwhelmed beyond belief I get to be loved this way. We started off rocky, but Will has shown me again and again andagainhow much he cares, how far he’ll go.
