“That was for you,” she says over her shoulder. “This time is for me. If I have to be around you like this, I deserve a beer.”
I push up from the chair. “I don’t get two weeks after a breakup?”
“Ash.” She turns back, expression borderline tired and fond. “I’m not saying get back together. I’m saying two weeks ago you thought you had something special. You owe it to yourself to talk to him. Not talking is what got you here in the first place.”
I groan, the sound bouncing around the garage.
“Have the decency to break up like adults,” she says.
“Ugh,” I repeat.
Dragging my feet, I follow Jenny into the kitchen, and a giant lizard jumps out from around the corner.
“Booo!”
I jolt backward into the hallway wall. Before my brain catches up, Wyatt and Jenny are high-fiving over my overreaction.
Wyatt rips off his lizard mask to point, laugh, and do a little victory dance. “Got you! Got you!”
“You got me,” I say, frazzled.
Jenny pops the top off a beer and hands it to me. “Told him he could try and scare the sad out of you.”
Wyatt looks up at me. “Did it work?”
My reply hitches in my throat. I’ve known Wyatt seven years, his whole life, and the memory of trading Jenny a balloon for a swaddled bundle at the hospital feels miles from this long-limbed kid trying to jump-scare my sad away.
I try to hide what I can’t explain behind a blank expression, but my lip keeps twitching.
“I wish,” I say, my voice wavering.
“Awww.” Wyatt looks at Jenny, and she takes one look at my face and shoos him away.
“No more. No more,” she says. “Homework time.”
“Aww!” Wyatt runs out of the kitchen.
Jenny perches on a stool at the island in the house her parents left her, where she lives with her husband and adorable son, living her life. I don’t want what she has, exactly, but I can’t help being jealous that she has what she wants.
“What was that?” she asks, dragging out the stool beside her for me. “You okay?”
“I don’t know what I want,” I admit, my gaze drifting to the blank white of the refrigerator door.
The magnets holding up Wyatt’s artwork suddenly seem incredibly significant, each one a little marker of a life I don’t share. What’s going to go on my fridge? Will my place be a messy bachelor pad forever?
“Please.” She waves a hand. “You’re acting like this is the end of the world.”
“Kael has his art. You have your amazing family. I have… what? A bank account?”
Jenny shifts, turning to face me fully. “You know I love you, right?”
“Uh-oh.”
TheI love youpreamble is Jenny’s equivalent of resting her case.
“You’re self-destructing,” she says, as a diagnosis, not an insult.
“It’s a breakup,” I protest, like that explains everything.
