There’s a moment of silence after I’m done speaking. I suck the powdered sugar off the end of my thumb and stare down at the table, already regretting bringing up the Ely thing. It’s not relevant to my recovery, not really. Or maybe it is. Maybe that’s what my subconscious is trying to tell me—to tread carefully.
“Don’t do it, man,” says one of the newer guys. I lift my head; it’s one of the court-ordered attendees. “You got ten years. Don’t throw that away. Stay away from her, or you’ll both end up right back where you started.”
“No cross talk,” says Ji, but of course, it’s too late. The words have already settled into my brain and put down roots there.
New guy might not know much about recovery yet, but that doesn’t make him wrong.
Idoneed to stay away from Ely Cohen.
For both our sakes.
9
ELY
I’m not a patient person. I have friends who are—Shannon is like some kind of superhuman when it comes to waiting. She had a kid last spring and went two weeks past her due date and basically didn’t bat an eye. Meanwhile, I struggle to put up with a slightly long Starbucks line. Waiting for my meeting with Wyatt is the worst kind of waiting, because I’m way more invested in this than I am in my iced Americano.
By Monday night, I’m exhausted and annoyed with myself for procrastinating on my very serious deadlines by spending gross amounts of time scrolling through Reddit. I could ask Ophelia if she wants to hang out, but it’s crunch time for her on some project, and Diego has flown out to Minnesota to visit family and doesn’t get back until next Monday.
I want to text Wyatt and ask ifhewants to hang out. But that’s just asking for Wyatt to shoot me down, and I’m not sure my fragile ego could handle that.
As soon as my last class lets out on Tuesday, I head to the bathroom and spend two minutes trying to wrangle my hair intosomething resembling order. A useless effort because it hasn’t seen a brush in days.
Well, hey. At least this is nothing new. Wyatt saw me in my unfiltered morning state already, all drooly and covered in the previous night’s mascara. If anything, this is an improvement.
Plus, I’m notactivelytrying to get in his pants anymore. Obviously. Going after a guy who’s made it very clear he doesn’t want me going after him would be deeply uncool. This is just about theart.
I wrote the room number in my phone’s Notes app after Wyatt texted it to me last week, but apparently I have no problem remembering that detail on my own: 36C.
He’s already there when I arrive, leaning against a table and examining a set of photos scattered out across its surface. It takes a beat for me to recognize them as prints from my application portfolio.
Wyatt glances up when I close the door behind me. “Hey,” he says. “Leave that open, if you don’t mind.”
Right.I mumble an apology and open the door again, trying to fight the flush rising in my cheeks.Great—now he thinks I’m trying to come on to him again.
I clasp my sweaty hands behind my back and approach the table. He gestures for me to come around to stand at his side, and I comply, gazing down at the photos in front of me.
“What do you think of them?” Wyatt says.
I don’t know how to respond. I’ve spent hours—weeks, probably—staring at these images, between choosing them, cropping them, editing them, studying them for flaws long after I’d hit Send on my application to Parker. Looking at them now, trying to see them through Wyatt Cole’s eyes, is about as bad as you’d expect. All I can see are the mistakes.
“They’re…fine,” I say, hedging slightly. Nobody likes an overly enthusiastic self-critic. “My work is better now. But it wasgood enough to get me in here, so…they’re fine, I suppose. A solid foundation.”
“A solid foundation,” Wyatt echoes.
I nod. “Everyone starts somewhere.”
“Is that what you really believe? That these are only worth the price of admission to Parker? Nothing more?”
I steal a sidelong glance at him, but he isn’t watching me; he’s still looking at the photographs. I shrug one shoulder and wish I knew what he wanted me to say.
“They’re fine,” I tell him a second time. “But this one has tonality issues, see? And this one…the focus isn’t right. I should have cropped it a little smaller, cut out some of this negative space. They have flaws.”
“All art is flawed,” Wyatt says, sounding surprisingly sage for a guy with neck tats and a penchant for arguing about sparkling water. “You can’t chase perfection. You just have to figure out what you wanna say, and then say it.”
I keep looking down at my work, the portfolio I labored over for months back in California. Once upon a time, I thought these pictures said everything there was to say about me. Taking them had felt like opening a vein and bleeding out in public. Like everyone could look at these photos and know who I was down to the core, see every muddy, rotten-apple dark spot of my junkie self.
“What do these photos say, Ely?” Wyatt says softly.
