“You won’t,” she said, like she was correcting me.
We stared at each other.
“Why isn’t everything I can possibly give you good enough?” I said finally. Bitterly. “It’s everything I have. It’s all of me. Would you rather have nothing thansomething?”
She swallowed, and her lashes dipped low. They rested long and dark against her still-red cheeks as she thought.
And then she met my eyes again. “I’m no good at the martyr shit, Isaac. I can’t love someone who doesn’t love me back. And I know what everyone thinks of me—that I’m so bouncy and happy and laid-back and resilient and cool and all of these other words that basically add up toSunny will be fine no matter what. But I’m not always fine! I’m not always happy and resilient, and I’m tired of having to pretend to be. I’m tired of being treated like I don’t need the same things everyone else does just because I can slap a smile on my face when I have to.”
Instinctively, I reached for her, but she lifted a hand to ward me off.
“Sunny, I didn’t mean that you don’t need—”
“It’s fine,” she interrupted. “It’s fine. I think we’ve both got a pretty good sense of what’s going on, don’t we?”
“No,” I said softly, but when she raised her eyebrows, I couldn’t find the right words to explain—to make her see that I wanted to take care of her, that I didn’t want her to ever feel like she had to pretend or settle for less.
It was just that I was less. As a person.
Her face shifted as she realized I wasn’t going to speak, pain creasing around her eyes. Fuck. I didn’t know what to do to make this better, and I definitely didn’t know what to do to keep it from getting any worse.
“I don’t want you to feel like you living here is contingent on anything,” I attempted. “It might be easier if I go stay at the inn, and then you can have the mansion to yourself with Mr.Tumnus.”
“Fuck that noise. We have an engagement party to plan. You have an album to write and record demos for, and I have half a screenplay waiting for me. We’re goddamn grown-ups! We’re not going to trash our lives and our jobs just because we’re breaking up.”
Breaking up.
Christ, that hurt to think about. Especially because we’d never gotten a chance to be really together.
“So we’ll go back to being roommates,” I stated, a little dully.
“Justroommates,” Sunny clarified. She hadn’t cried once through this whole thing, but I could see how often she was swallowing, the tiny squeezes of her eyelids to keep the tears at bay.
Personally, I was planning on escaping this kitchen and bawling on my shower floor until the hot water ran out.
“Okay,” I said. My throat hurt, and there was a bitter taste in my mouth. The taste ofbreaking up. The taste of knowingthat my everything wasn’t good enough, no matter how much I wanted it to be. “Just roommates.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sunny
The next two days were quiet, at least on Isaac’s end. No one could ever say the man didn’t know how to suffer in silence. He was early to rise every morning, and other than a few lonely piano notes from the other side of the house, the only sign of him was the fact that Mr.Tumnus had been fed each morning before I was even awake. He would need a cat when we moved out. He had too much wasted cat dad potential.
Other than that, it was like living with a ghost, and it was... not fun. I had this bizarre craving to see that he was just as sad as me. Because I was pacing the house and lying on the floor and staring at my laptop and making little cat-size slippers out of tufts of shedded cat fur. Although I’d finished only one slipper because apparently I’m not a finisher, which is why my screenplay was dead in the water. If I couldn’t finish making cat slippers out of cat hair, then how could I be expected to even write a whole damn movie? Or be a real grown-up who went to board meetings and gracefully accepted her roommate’scrushing rejection and also took all those probiotics she bought on a whim?
Bee had made it home from her epic long honeymoon, and I’d avoided her FaceTime calls twice, because I wasn’t ready to admit I’d fallen in love with her husband’s weird, sad former bandmate. So we’d only traded texts, which mostly consisted of bikini thirst traps of her on the beach. I wasn’t complaining.
There were four texts from Charlie, but I hadn’t dared to open them. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of leaving him on read.
On the third day, I’d had enough. The script was stuck, and I had to find something I could actually do, and one thing I could do was plan Steph and Teddy’s engagement party. I started with a list and the hope that Isaac planned on footing the bill, because Hope Channel money wasn’t make-it-rain money.
Ginormous Christmas tree
