Maybe Once, Maybe Twice
Alison Rose Greenberg
To Mom and Dad
I’m incredibly lucky to have you both as my rocks. Thank you for always believing in me, and please don’t read the sex scenes.
Lightning strikes
Maybe once, maybe twice
—STEVIE NICKS
Prologue
THIRTY
I SHIFTED ON MY BARSTOOL, faraway eyes watching my best friend, Summer, float past the neon exit, her four-inch heels barely touching the ground, a mauve silk duster moving behind her model frame. She grazed the earth’s surface like a polished, gorgeous superhero on a casual mission to make heads turn.
It wasn’t until I etched my fingers into the bar counter with a full-body exhale that I realized I had been holding my breath all night. Thankfully, there was only one friend left to con tonight in this grungy Nolita dive bar. Garrett Scholl and I were the last two patrons, sitting side by side on creaky stools as the bartender restocked cheap vodka. Historically, Monday nights had been our thing, but today I was forced to share it with other people. This is what happens when you turn thirty: your friends want to celebrate you. Selfish assholes.
Garrett swiveled on his barstool, one eye on my distant expression, the other on the dart pinched in his large fingers.
“What’s my prize if I get the bull’s-eye?”
I glanced at the dartboard, which hung yards away on the other side of the bar. While I lost to Garrett every time we played darts, making this bull’s-eye was the equivalent of a kicker making a sixty-yard field goal. It was never going to happen.
Which is why I said, “You get…a truth.”
Garrett grinned at me, his square jaw, ocean-blue eyes, and clean-shaven face slicing me open. I sucked in my cheeks, resting my chin on the palm of my hand so that drool wouldn’t escape. He squinted at the dartboard, flexing his wrist back and forth.
“A truth, huh? I thought I had all of Maggie May’s truths.”
My heart blistered with the painful reminder: he did not. Tonight, I had gone the extra mile to pretend like I wanted to celebrate my existence. I effusively hugged one friend after another with a big smile until my cheeks matched my insides, until I hurt everywhere. Spending all night thinking about your age when your future has just been stolen from you will do that to a woman.
Garrett steadied his eyes on the dartboard, and with extreme precision, he let it fly. The dart moved across the bar like it was tied to a string, landing dead center: bull’s-eye.
“Goddamnit,” I said, shaking my head.
He spun back around to me with one fist frozen in the air, savoring every ounce of victory as his mouth found a coy smile, one that erased the ache in my chest. Garrett’s entire personality was a crisp ray of sunshine, wrapped around the heart of a music nerd, wrapped in the body of a Greek god. He lit up a dark night the way no one else could, with a smile that gave hope to my shattered heart.
His fingers performed a drumroll on the bar’s counter.
“Truth time, Maggie May.”
With my deep inhale, the smell of stale beer and cleaning solution ran through my lungs like a warm hug. I had spent the first part of my twenties playing music in tiny bars like this one, and even some nights working behind the counter.
“C’mon, tell me something good,” he said.
I chewed on my bottom lip—a nervous childhood habit. Growing up, according to the monsters in my fourth-grade class, my lips were “too aggressive” for my petite face, so naturally, they started calling me “fish face.” I didn’t stop resenting my pillowy lips until I was fourteen—until my face was reflected in the amber eyes of my first love, Asher Reyes—until he grazed my bottom lip with his thumb and whispered, “How is everything about you this perfect?”
There were a couple truths to spill out of these flawless lips of mine. One was truly horrible. The other was horrible only if Garrett didn’t feel the same way. The maybe horrible truth: I was in love with Garrett Scholl. I loved him in a way that kept me up at night. I loved him the way Johnny Cash loved June.
I exhaled and laid my head on the warmth of his broad shoulder, a place I felt both safe and uncertain. I let myself sit there for a while, just two unrealized soulmates closing down a dive bar the way soulmates do.
“You okay?” he asked brightly, because Garrett would only question pain if it was through an optimistic tone.
It was a question no one had asked all night. Not even Summer. My best friend usually sniffed out bullshit from a mile away, but tonight she was distracted. In Summer’s defense, she was in the middle of a fight with her wife, Valeria, who had “rescued” a goldendoodle from a pet store window without first asking Summer. It was occupying all of Summer’s emotional bandwidth, which, like the internet in the nineties, was limited. It struck me as odd that Garrett was even asking me about my feelings. Nine times out of ten, he sidestepped any hint of morose with a sparkly distraction. He could always tell when I wasn’t myself, but he knew how to make the corners of my mouth dance with a dirty joke or a guilty-pleasure nineties song.
“Hey…” I felt Garrett’s shoulder shifting under me as he swiveled his body on the barstool, now facing my lifeless profile. His eyes narrowed on me, and I weakly attempted my hundredth smile of the night.
“I’m fine.”
“If I’ve learned one thing from all my past girlfriends, it’s that no female has said she was fine and meant it.”
His one-sided smirk sent me to another planet, allowing me to feel the masculine version of fine: totes fine!
“I’m fine,” I said again, with my forehead tilted toward his gorgeous face.
“No, you’re not.” He pointed upward to the ceiling. “The song’s almost over, and I haven’t heard one ‘What’s going on?’”
My ears shifted, hearing Linda Perry’s low register croon through the speakers. I had never, in the history of ever, kept my mouth closed during 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” and Garrett knew it. He knew it because he knew how my heart beat out of my chest for anything I loved, making it impossible for me to cage my emotions—which is why it felt like I swallowed a sunrise whenever his eyes met mine.
“Maggie?”
He put a hand on my shoulder and craned his neck so I’d meet his scrunched-up face. Our eyes locked, and my heart beat faster. Taxi headlights beamed in through the glass window, lighting up his blue eyes in an unfair way. His face tightened on my lack of response.
I swallowed hard as the horrible truth battled its way toward the surface. He was the one person in my life who would make something treacherous feel less devastating. I should tell him. I opened my mouth, but the thought of reliving it strangled my throat.
Garrett’s eyes widened as he clasped his hand around my numb fingers.
“Maggie, you’re shaking.”
I studied his hand on mine, my heart pounding in my eardrums, my throat dry and tight. All at once, the only way to breathe was to crack open my mouth.
“Tonight…tonight when I blew out the candles, my birthday wish was for us to end up together.”
The maybe horrible truth fell out of me, and I couldn’t put it back in. Garrett studied me like he was dropped inside a play without knowing any of the lines. My lips stayed parted in the air—stunned by their own handiwork. There was a familiar blazing adrenaline coursing through my body, the kind of bravery I only felt when I sang under a spotlight. Which is why I kept going, even as all rationale screamed, STOP SAYING WORDS, MAGGIE.
“If we’re not married in five years, promise me you’ll show up at my door and marry me,” I heard myself say.
“You…you want me to marry you?” he asked slowly, as if he needed to say the sentence aloud to understand it.
I shook my head. “Scratch that.”
“You don’t want me to marry you?”