He turns, dropping his chin to meet my eye. “Well, yeah.”
I hug my knees into my chest. “No one wants to get involved in the mess of my life, trust me.”
“No one wants to? Or you won’t let anyone?”
I give him a sidelong look. “I won’t let anyone because I know they won’t want to.”
Kei drops the stick and twists his torso to fully face me. “Don’t you think you should leave that to them to decide?”
My shoulders rise. “It’s easier to make the decision than to have it made for me.”
“Because it hurts less,” Kei says. It’s not a question.
“I guess so.” I swallow. I’ve never given this fear words before.
“What can be so bad?” Kei says, leaning into me. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But I hope you know you can trust me.”
I lean my head on his shoulder. Aside from my mom and Cori, I haven’t told anyone what Dylan did to me. I’m too ashamed. And sometimes it’s so heavy, like a stone threatening to pull me under.
And I’m tired of carrying it alone.
Maybe this arrangement with Kei actually gives me the freedom to be totally honest. I don’t expect anything from him, so maybe it’s my opportunity to lighten my load.
Without thinking, I start talking. And then, I tell him everything.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sometimes, when bad things happen, it’s tempting to look for signs and patterns to try to make sense of what happened, to assign some deeper meaning to what normally amounts to people just being shitty. But in my case, there weren’t just signs, there were giant red flags, flashing lights, and alarm bells, all of which I willfully ignored, because I made the catastrophic mistake of falling in love.
Red flag #1: Dylan wouldn’t answer his phone. It was my last night at work, and I’d been trying to call him and text him my entire shift. I was giddy with excitement—we were going to pursue our dreams, and we were doing it together. We had packed up the apartment we shared, rented a U-Haul, and booked a motel in West Hollywood to stay at until we found a place there. I already had a few auditions scheduled, and Dylan had set up some meetings with investors, and everything was rolling along exactly the way it needed to.
But I had questions! Did he want beer or bubbly to celebrate our last night in the apartment? Did he get the damage deposit back from the landlord? And what should I get for car snacks?
In hindsight, maybe not the most pressing questions, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that he didn’t answer my multiple calls or texts, and even as my annoyance turned to worry, I didn’t once think he could have possibly done what he did.
Red flag #2: After I left the bar for what I thought was the last time, I stopped into the Discount! Discount! Discount! Liquor store across the street to buy a bottle of eighteen-dollar Prosecco, but my debit card was declined due to insufficient funds, which was weird, because my entire savings was in that account. And then my credit card was also declined, which was weird, because I’d paid the whole thing off just the week before. I tried logging in to my bank app, but it kept giving me an error message that my username and password were incorrect, and then I got locked out. I was frustrated, but I thought it was just some weird thing with my bank that could be solved with a phone call.
Red flag #3: When I got home, the front door of our apartment was slightly ajar, which was creepy, because we werenotcasual about locking our door, not since our third week in the apartment, when a guy, clearly off his face on something, came in and relieved himself in our kitchen sink while I was watchingToo Hot to Handlein the living room eight feet away.
I opened the door a crack. “Dyl?” I called into the space between the door and its frame. “You there?”
I waited. Nothing.
I reached my hand in and flicked the light switch. I squinted against the cold glare of the overhead light, which illuminated the living/ dining/kitchen area, a 150-square-foot space which was advertised as open concept, but really just meant that we could watch TV while we made dinner.
It was empty. Completely empty. No couch, no coffee table, no piles of boxes. Red flag #4.
I could have sworn the plan was to pack the U-Haul in the morning, but maybe Dylan had got a head start on it. I called him again, but that time it didn’t even ring before it went straight to voicemail.
I heard yelling coming from the apartment next door, so I slipped inside, locking the door behind me.
“Dylan?” I called again, holding my breath as I waited for a response. But the silence was absolute. The most obvious scenario is usually theright scenario, and the most obvious scenario here was that I had an amazing boyfriend who had saved me the trouble of schlepping dozens of boxes down two flights of stairs. That’s one hundred percent what has happened, I told myself.
But something felt off.
I tiptoed to the bedroom door and stood outside for a moment, listening, before bursting in like I’d seen cops do on TV. But unlike those cops, I wasn’t armed and had no idea what I’d actually do if there were someone in the room.
Lucky for me, though, there wasn’t. It was also empty (red flag #5). No too-small bed, no dented IKEA dresser, no full-length mirror propped against the wall. There was, however, a framed photo of us on the floor. I crossed the room to pick it up, swiping a film of dust off the glass. We were cheek to cheek, faces flushed from red wine and happiness after signing the lease on that place, our first apartment together. “This is just the beginning,” Dylan had said to me that day.
