“Want to know the worst part? I still thought we were going together until an hour before. He had saidI guess I’ll see you there, and I thought he meant as my date. I had a dress and everything. And then I checked Facebook and saw him posing for pictures with a girl whose dress matched his tie.”
I’m laughing it off, but I can feel that familiar tendril of shame snaking through me. Telling me there must be somethingwrong with me if, at thirty years old, my high school heartbreak is still the only romantic wound I’ve ever received. That it should have been buried by now, by some more adult heartache. Getting cheated on by an accountant, for example. It’s not so much that the memory still hurts, but that it stands alone—waiting, like a fracture that has long since healed over but sometimes warns me when a storm is coming.
“I’m sorry,” Grant says, with as much sincerity as if this had all happened yesterday.
“I’m not,” I say. “If he hadn’t done something so egregiously douchey, who knows how long I would have stayed with him? I think that’s what still bothers me about the whole thing; I don’t want to get stuck again. It’s like my mom and dad—they’re incredible parents and I love them, but they’re so unhappy together and they won’t make a change. Sometimes I worry that it’s genetic, the instinct to stay even when you shouldn’t. That if I’m not careful, I’ll end up just like them—trapped and miserable and totally unable to find the nerve to leave.”
Grant’s gaze is unwavering. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “If there’s one thing I can always count on you to have, it’s the nerve.”
Always.What a word. I try to ignore the pang it sends through me. “Anyway, it’s not just me,” I say. “I’ve seen too many people get crushed by love. My friends. My parents. Everyone onThe Bachelor. People just get hurt in real life.” I angle to face him properly, pushing my hair out of my face. “You really think everyone here this weekend is happily ever after?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know about everybody. But … yeah, why not? Most of them seem pretty happy.”
“Even the Fiorellos?”
“Oh, no. I give them three months, tops.”
I snort at that, even as a pink glow settles over me with thememory of how Grant defended me in front of them. He said I have stories to tell. He said it would be an honor to be chosen by someone like me.
I wish I could choose him.
But that’s just an inside thought.
“I don’t think it has to last forever to be good,” Grant finally says. “I mean, sure, that’s the dream. But even if it doesn’t work out that way, the ending doesn’t have to negate the nice parts.” He looks at me, his head dipped just a little as if telling me a secret. “Even if you get your heart crapped, I still think it does more good than harm to give it to someone in the first place.”
I wish I could believe him. I’m so full of genuine wishes now. Where is the Gifter when you need them?
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m just not built for it. I mean, look at me.” He does. I feel it. “I’m thirty and I have the relationship experience of a sixteen-year-old, give or take some meaningless vacation flings. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Who would want to go out with someone like that?”
It’s rhetorical, I swear. That’s how I meant it, anyway, even if somewhere, a tiny part of me is desperate for a real answer.
But Grant says, “Me.”
He says it with conviction, as plainly as any simple fact that might slip from his mouth. “I’d go out with you. In fact, Ihavegone out with you, and it was wonderful.”
“No, no,” I say, deflating. “Not, like, to dinner. I meango outgo out. Like, boyfriend-girlfriend.”
“Oh, like in the tenth-grade definition of the phrase?”
“Exactly.”
He pauses, idly rubbing the back of his neck. “In that case, I guess I’d have to pass you a note that saysWill you go out with me?with a box to check yes or no.”
He’s drunk, I tell myself. But so am I.
“And I’d check yes,” I say. “But then I’d freak out and try to erase it. But it was in pen. So then I’d panic and eat the paper.”
His eyes crinkle at the edges, his mouth quirking up. “You,” he says softly, “are so weird.”
I scoff, my shoulders crumpling. “I’m a coward, is what I am.”
“A coward?” Grant turns to face me, the two of us cross-legged on the floor in front of each other. He looks me in the eye. “Roxie, I watched you drive a serial killer to suicide by fire. And I’m pretty sure you enjoyed it.”
I groan, burying my head in my hands. Grant doesn’t get it. And now he’s made me sound really deranged.
“Hey,” he says, pulling my wrists from my face. He looks at me solemnly. “I have to tell you something.”
Somewhere, trapped in my brain, Sober Roxie is screaming,RUN, RUN, RUN!But Drunk Roxie locks her in a broom closet. “Tell me what?” I whisper.
