My body isn’t nearly the spindly thing it used to be, as the carbs have caught up to me over the years, and I now disdain the curves that I spent my teen years desiring. I guess that’s just how we’re wired as women—to always want to look different from the way we do right now.
I’ve gotten better, though, at hiding and disguising the parts I don’t like through spandex shapewear and tailored suits. Keratintreatments have smoothed and straightened my naturally frizzy hair, and I’ve dyed it a rich chocolatey shade to cover up the lackluster mousy brown. My bushy brows have been laminated, so they’re sleek and shapely, and expensive foundation covers up the acne scars from old breakouts, and some new ones too because apparently I haven’t yet outgrown the pimple-popping life stage.
In hopes of emanating a more sensual aura through the window, I spritz myself with my best Burberry perfume, which promptly makes me sneeze and coat my floral-scented wrists in snot.
I decide to blow dry my shoulder-length hair, something I haven’t actually done since moving here. Once I’m a CEO, I’ll have twice-a-week blowouts and a personal stylist, but for now, ponytails and dry shampoo get me through. Plugging my blow dryer into the adapter and then the outlet, I flip my head upside down. There’s a dramatic zapping sound, and a burning plastic odor fills the bathroom. Too late, I recall what I’ve heard about US blow dryers not taking kindly to UK adapters. The voltage is wacky, and a section of my hair is caught in back of the blow dryer, and I have to snip the charred strands free with scissors.
Doing my best not to extrapolate this as an omen for what’s to come, I spend a few minutes attempting to style my wet bangs before giving up and just pinning them back. (Note to self: Never ever let a hairdresser talk you into getting bangs again, no matter how inviting “just a wee fringe” sounds in her accent. You simply do not have the face shape to make it work or the patience for the maintenance. End of story.) The only benefit of the bangs is that they cover the forehead lines that are deepening every day, accelerated by work-related stress. I’ve always felt too young for Botox, but that’s starting to change. On the plus side, I don’t yet have crow’sfeet around my eyes, though perhaps that’s just a sign that I don’t laugh enough.
I clean up my desk a bit, hiding the Shreddies so Alexander won’t suspect that I’m one of those uncivilized people who reaches her hand straight into the box and shovels down cereal between meetings. He’ll find my little quirks adorable later on, but in these delicate early stages, it’s important to present a more polished image.
In the spirit of decorum, I eat my crumpet with a fork and knife and slowly sip chamomile tea, taking deep breaths to trick myself into believing that I’m calm as can be. My nervous system is too smart for those games, though, all keyed up as if I’ve been hooked up to a caffeine IV.
Yesterday, Alexander came by a few minutes before eight, so today I’m superglued to the window by seven forty-five.
Outside, the world is going about its business as if there’s nothing special whatsoever, completely oblivious to the emotional earthquake that broke the Richter scale. The queue is still winding out of Gail’s, the cyclists are still maniacally zigzagging through the cars, the church bell is still tolling from the limestone spire on the quarter hour. I want to give everyone a good shake, tip the snow globe and, watch the flakes flutter and fall in new places.
But the monotony reassures me as much as it riles me. It means Alexander, too, will be following his same routine as yesterday.
A number 4 bus rolls up to the St. Mary’s stop, halting to a standstill to let passengers on and off. My breath goes on strike as I scan and rescan the top deck for Alexander. He’s going to be there. He’s got to be.
But he’s not.
The same pattern persists for the next two 4 buses that pass by. My stomach jolts up to my pinched throat and plummets back down again like an amusement park ride, sans the amusement.
Eight o’clock comes and goes. The work emails surge in, one after another. I log onto my computer and jiggle the cursor so the “available” green dot appears by my name. It’s a useful hack to make my boss feel like I’m right there at his beck and call, even if my spirit is far, far away, floating through the heavens that aren’t seeming quite as lucky as they did yesterday.
As I keep staring out the window, my eyes become dry and itchy, and my faith starts to shake from Alexander’s sustained absence.
I do my best to formulate a reasonable explanation. Maybe Alexander doesn’t actually commute on the 4 bus at all—perhaps he had a special meeting yesterday that brought him this way. And he wanted to take the same route today so he could see me again, but he had to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity event in Notting Hill and didn’t feel right prioritizing his romantic pursuits over his philanthropic commitments.
I can respect that chain of events, even if I don’t agree with his decision.
But then the darker theories start clawing at me. Maybe he actuallywason one of the buses that passed by, but he was seated on the far side, or the bottom deck, so I couldn’t see him. Maybe he didn’t care enough to try to find me again.
This scenario scrapes as I try to swallow it. It would mean that he didn’t feel the same connection as I did. And one-sided connection isn’t really connection at all. It’s just obsession.
Maybe Jules was right to be a skeptic. Maybe I read our eye contact wrong. Maybe it was nothing but a one-time gift to helpme feel less alone in this overcrowded, isolated world. Something to help me believe that I wouldn’t always be numb. That I could and would feel again.
I try to make peace with it, the poetic arc of all that might have been. But turmoil churns inside of me, that frenzied longing to fill the blank pages, to scribble calligraphy love notes all over them with Alexander’s fountain pen.
Is there anything crueler than having such tantalizing beauty snatched away before having a fair chance to explore it? I wish I’d never gotten a glimpse at all.
Mateo’s accusations ring in my ears, the words he left me with when I left him: “You have such unrealistic expectations. Good fucking luck finding someone who lives up.”
Alexander was going to prove Mateo wrong. He was going to show that Icouldfind someone who lived up to my ideal. That I could have a fairy-tale beginning that also became a fairy-tale ending. That initial attraction could grow and strengthen over time, rather than just fade and fracture.
Losing Alexander before I ever even had him feels like a vortex of gravity yanking me back to the stone-cold earth, telling me to wake up and smell the urban dumpsters because I’ll never marry a prince or be a duchess. I’ll always just be Kat, a type-A overachiever who never fails to fail when it comes to true love.
CHAPTER FOUR
I invested so much time—wastedso much time, it feels like—in a relationship with Mateo that didn’t work out. I can’t get those good years of my life back, and now I have to start all over again with someone new. Someone who isn’t Alexander after all.
The prospect of being spit back out into the dismal dating pool and having to re-download the apps to keep swiping soullessly for my soulmate makes me physically nauseous.
By eight thirtyAM, I’m forced to accept defeat and join a Zoom catch-up with my boss to discuss phase one of our project, which we’re presenting to Turpi next week.
Turpi has refused to enter the twenty-first century, so they’re being left in the polluted dust by all their competitors who started investing in clean energy years ago. New environmental regulations across Europe are setting caps on emissions, and Turpi’s business model is under attack from policy makers and socially conscious investors alike. But rather than pivot or wake up to the inconvenienttruth that they’re part of a melting iceberg (and are quite literally melting the icebergs themselves with their contribution to global warming), Turpi has doubled down on fossil fuels. They’ve hired Leo & Sons to assess how they can “improve operational efficiency” (i.e., strip out costs through some combination of automating processes and firing people).
