When I get home, I throw my phone under my bed with a guttural scream of pure agony. If this isn’t the absolute worst day of my life, I don’t know what is, and the last thing I want are a bunch of texts from Suze or anyone else asking where the hell I ran off to. Then I go into the bathroom and scrub the makeup off my face, which almost involves taking it off with a cheese grater. Damn. Desiree seriously spackles it on. After that, I change into my comfiest, most ridiculous pajamas—hello, pink skeletons with pretty bows on top of your head—and pour myself a glass of wine.
That is, I pour almost the whole bottle of merlot into the jumbo plastic Avengers cup I got at the movies, but it’s been a hard day, dammit. I sit on the couch and flip on the TV, desperate for some mindless escapism. I will watch anything but The Big Bang Theory. That show has no respect for nerds.
The front door buzzer sounds. Instantly I flinch, and snuggle down deeper under my fleece blanket. I wait, hoping it’s just some drunk guy looking for his hookup’s number, but nope. There it is again. Groaning, I pause and go over to the speaker. “Who is it?” I say.
“Laurel. It’s me,” Flint says.
I could just ask him to go away, lose my number, hit himself with the neuralyzer from Men in Black and forget my address. But we don’t have enough high tech for this situation to work.
“So it is.” I stay there, waiting. He sighs.
“Please let me in. I need to talk to you.”
Go on, tell him to get the hell out of here. Start with some creative swearing; make fuck a verb, noun, adjective, hell, maybe an adverb if you can swing it. But I know, deep down, that I owe it to him to talk. I did just storm out on him and his fiancée and probably left them with a hell of a conversation. Heart thumping, I buzz him up and open my door. A minute later Flint enters, his tie undone, his jacket off.
“Well. What do you—” And then he covers my mouth with a kiss.
I should be mad—no, enraged. I should be punching him in the stomach—well, patting it maybe, since I know how rock solid he is—but my arms go up around his neck as if they have a mind of their own, and we stumble into my apartment and smack into the wall, just like the first time he came here. The first night we had sex.
I’m doing it again! Oh my God, what is wrong with my hormones?
“No,” I say, forcing myself to pull away from him after returning to unblissful sanity. “Didn’t you listen to anything I said? You’re with Charlotte. I saw her with the ring on her finger. And by the way, you are going to make a terrible fucking husband.”
“I’m not,” he says, panting. He closes the door behind him. Good idea, since Mrs. Hernandez from 1C was staring at us with her grocery bags in hand. “That is, I’m not with Charlotte, not the ‘I’ll make a terrible fucking husband’ part.”
It’s like the floor actually drops out from under me.
“Wait. What? You’re not with Charlotte?” I go still, trying to breathe. “What do you mean you’re not with Charlotte? She’s your fiancée!”
“No.” Flint is shaking his head slowly. “Charlotte showed up the day you left. We got some coffee, talked things over. We’re both still the same people, Laurel. And those people do not work together in a relationship. Afterward she went back to New York. Where she wants to be. Where she belongs.”
Flint’s eyes blaze as he takes my face in his hands. My heart is pounding, my head swimming as I try to make sense of the nonsense words coming out of his mouth.
“That ring you saw? She’s engaged to someone else now. I hear he’s a great guy. It took that trip to Mass for Charlotte to realize it, but what we had is over and done, and we can’t go back to what it was. That closure helped her take the next step in her life, and I guess that means marrying someone else. But I’m happy for her. And when she said she wanted to come out for the premiere, of course I said yes. I swear to God, I never connected the dots. I didn’t realize you’d left because of her until you said it last night. I was so shocked, I didn’t even think straight. I couldn’t get the words out before you left.”
Shocked. Not together. Charlotte has a fiancé that’s not him. My brain is finally starting to process the headlines, but my mouth doesn’t know what to do. Until Flint leans in again, his lips brushing against mine—
“It doesn’t matter!” I jerk back. “I can’t be around you, I told you that. I can’t be around you because this will never work—”