“I just…loved her, I guess.”
The slithering was back. It coiled tight around her neck. “Who ended it?” she asked, her fingers spinning in Waffle’s fur.
He swallowed. “Me. I thought she might have cheated.”
She nodded. It made a sad sort of sense. Of course he had trouble believing in people if his most recent relationship ended with…
She replayed his words in her head.
“Wait. Did you say shemighthave?”
“I didn’t, like…collect evidence, but I had a feeling about it. She was growing distant—becoming secretive, hiding notifications—and then, one day, we were grilling pizzas on her balcony, and she ran inside to grab the basil and her phone wasjust pinging and pinging, and I heard this voice in my head telling me to search her text messages.”
Her stomach clenched. “What did you find?”
His hand drifted cautiously onto Waffle’s back. “I didn’t look. I’d never do that. I broke up with her on the spot.”
She reared her head back. “I’ve never heard a more anticlimactic breakup story. Did you at least confront her with your suspicions?”
“I told her what happened, or almost happened. She promised she’d never cheated—even offered to show me her phone and everything—but at that point it didn’t matter.”
“How could it not matter? What if the messages had been from a friend? Or push notifications from a crippling Candy Crush addiction?”
He shook his head. “I realized we didn’t trust each other. She felt the same about me, too. That’s all marriage is, I think: trusting someone with the tiny things. The insignificant things. Those unlovable parts of yourself. You can’t love someone you don’t trust. So even though my hunch was wrong, she still deserved better than a guy who didn’t believe in her.”
Lainey pressed her cheek deeper into her palm, squinting at him in the darkened cab. “Elliot Hodges,” she said. “I can’t tell if that’s the healthiest outlook I’ve ever heard or if it’s utterly deranged.”
He took a deep inhale of thick, warm air. “I tend to toe that line.”
He reached out and swept a strand of her hair off her shoulder, his eyes following the movement of his fingers with the intensity of a man disarming a bomb. It buzzed across her chest and low into her belly. She willed her shoulder not to twitch,despite the electric current flowing between them with the gentle movement of his finger. She didn’t want to spook him. Though it hadn’t mattered. His hand didn’t linger. It returned to Waffle’s fur in a slow, smooth gesture as though touching Lainey had been no different.
“You definitely wouldn’t approve of any of my past relationships.” She sighed, rolling her head onto the shoulder he’d just touched. Like they were simply the kinds of friends who touched each other. “Trust hasn’t exactly been a core tenet of mine.”
“Well, now youhaveto share,” he teased, pulling a tiny whine from her throat. “I gave you so much material to bully me with. You need to at least try to even the playing field.”
“Fine,” she said, an airy chuckle falling from her lips. Her eyes followed his fingers as they wandered to the tips of Waffle’s chocolatey fur. “So, the retreat used to allow children to stay in the summer. There was a barn where parents could drop off their kids for the day and the staff took them on hikes and led them in art projects…I worked there after I graduated high school. The money was good, and the director of the program, Hayden, was, like, this confident, older guy who made me feel…interesting. Special.”
She couldn’t bring herself to look over at Elliot when she said it. How pathetic she must’ve sounded—a twenty-year-old disaster with mommy issues who’d been beginning to second-guess whether shemattered. That maybe she was the reason people seemed to leave her behind.
All it had taken to win her over was one mediocre man to tell her she was “special.” She’d been so easy to pull into his orbit. It was honestly ridiculous to feel anything but shame and embarrassment for the relationship when the whole thing had been transparent from the start.
It was best to think about anything else until she grew tired or hungry or sleepy and forgot she ever had the impulse to feel something unpleasant at all.
This was how Lainey had always been. When Gordon Reeves in the sixth grade called her valentine “creepy,” or even when her mom had rented a U-Haul to empty their furniture storage pod into Gran’s house, only to never return, it hadn’t done Lainey any good to feel sad or angry or frustrated that she’d lost her blue butterfly papasan chair in the shuffle, because none of those emotions changed anything. What they made her feel was powerless. And she didn’t like to feel powerless.
She’d been powerless with Hayden, but she hadn’t known enough tofeelthat way.
“He was completely obsessed with me.” She laughed, trying to keep it light. “At first it felt good, to feel like someone wanted so much of me. I wasn’t used to that. But then it got dark. Fast.” The start had been this summer storm—natural, powerful, and impossible to deny. But it couldn’t stay that way. The winds picked up, and soon what had been so sustaining had turned isolating and dangerous.
He couldn’t stay away from her, he’d told her, like it was her fault that she’d caught the attention of her older boss. To hear him tell it, she’d been relentless in her pursuit. To this day, she couldn’t parse out if there was truth in that. She’d started to view her sexuality as a quality that wasn’t to be trusted. She hid in her clothes, in her house, behind the children at her work. She stopped going out with Bree or interacting with the guests. She slept most nights at his place. It was easier for him to believe she was loyal if she never left his side.
She couldn’t recall when the nitpicking started, but it grew its own life. Suddenly, she was messy. Lazy. She lacked ambition.When it suited him, she was too clingy, but space was also evidence that she was plotting to leave him. She was too much. She wasn’t enough. Nothing she did was exactly right.
“The migraines started around then, too, and I don’t know if it made our relationship worse or just made it harder for me to leave. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to lose yourself in someone else. I let him chip away at every bit of me, and even after, I was still so desperate to keep him. He was so convincing of his own victimhood. I truly think he believed I wasdoingsomething to him, just by existing. And I couldn’t see myself clearly anymore.”
Somehow, she’d convinced herself that his tormented love for her was agoodthing. He’d acted as though she were a weed, strangling him at the root, and still, he’d refused to excise her from his life. He’drefusedto leave her. His pain—his resentment—thatwas true commitment.Thatwas love. Because what else could it be?
She’d so badly wanted someone to care for her that she let herself get lost in someone who was just as careless with her as everyone else. And when all was said and done, the only person she had to rely on was herself. Just like always.
