Somehow, I made it back to the table and forced a smile on my face all night. Every few minutes, Raini’s warm eyes studied mine with a tilt of the head and an arch of the eyebrows, as if to acknowledge that I didn’t have to pretend to be okay. I held my own, but the knowledge that I could break down and have someone catch me? Especially a woman? It was a comfort I could not put into words.
A few hours later, Asher tossed his wallet on the console as we entered his apartment, and his eyes narrowed on me as I held the side of my stomach. Just a couple hours ago, Raini and I had laughed off how I walked out to the paparazzi—how I mistook the darkened front door for the bathroom door—clearly the glasses of wine went to my head. I thought Asher had bought it, but his gaze told me he was calling bullshit. Historically, I was the person you wanted to bring to a dinner party. I could talk to a snail, I had amusing stories, I was a feisty ball of energy. This night, I had kept my mouth occupied with a plate of heavy pasta, a decision that I was starting to pay for, physically. I felt the red sauce burning in the back of my throat.
“What’s going on?” he finally asked.
“Nothing. I’m good,” I said enthusiastically. “I mean, I could use an IV of Pepto, but seriously: all good.”
Asher could see right through me. He always could. I knew it by the way his eyes had searched mine all night. I was rigid in places I was usually soft. I had been trying to stay engaged in each of the conversations tonight, but with Asher, I never had to try. Fortunately (and in this moment, unfortunately), Asher wasn’t like the average straight man: he picked up on a woman’s subtle hints.
“This is too much for you, isn’t it?”
He spun his Rolex around his wrist, pain softening his strong jawline. I stepped out of my heels, shaking my head at Asher.
“What are you talking about?”
“The paparazzi, the fame—it’s chaos. You accidentally opened the wrong door and a thousand flashes hit your eyes. I have a life where I can’t go to a restaurant without a circus meeting me. It’s a life you didn’t choose.”
He looked at me like I was pouring salt into his open wound. I walked over to Asher and clasped my fingers inside his hand, standing upright in front of him.
“Hey. Look at me,” I said as I gently nudged his face into my view. His eyes drifted from his fingers up to my face. “Ash, it had nothing to do with you.”
“Then what was it?”
I opened my mouth, with the truth sitting on the tip of my tongue. There was a wall up between one of the scariest moments of my life and the person I could picture spending the rest of my life with. In some ways, being around Asher made me feel like the girl I had been before—that girl with her palms outstretched to the world at summer camp. Before the trying was met with wall after wall. Before loving someone was bursting bright red and left me bleeding out. Before a man who promised to lift me up tore me apart with a wave of his hand. I didn’t know how Asher would look at me after I told him about Cole, but deep down, I knew it wouldn’t change how he saw me. That wasn’t why my feet were shifting—why my mouth was pressed shut. I was keeping this from him because I didn’t know how I would look at Asher after I told him. We weren’t teenagers anymore. We didn’t only exist inside the trappings of young love, but he brought me back to a place that was warm and safe and unspoiled. In Asher’s hold I felt innocent, and this truth would bring me into reality—into my complicated adulthood right in front of his eyes. It would be an admission that our lives had shifted when we fell apart, an admission that we weren’t the same people who’d held each other naked on that dock.
I chewed the insides of my cheeks and flickered a tiny smile his way.
“I…I honestly started to feel not so great. Major period cramps.” I smirked with a little exhale. “I have a very sensitive reproductive system, and I was trying to spare you the details.”
If you want to end a conversation with a male, the word “period” usually gets the job done. While Asher was completely above average in so many ways, he was also an average male when it came to discussing women bleeding out of their vaginas.
“Okay,” he said with a tiny smile, nodding and putting it to bed.
“Ash, I’m in this. You, me, the circus, the flashy lightbulbs, outrunning shitheads holding cameras—all of it. Yeah, I’m not super pumped that my every public move might be caught on camera. But hey, I plan on being more famous than you one day, so I may as well get used to this.”
His smile cracked wide, and he tugged me toward his body so my bare feet stood between his shoes.
“Oh, well, I’m glad I could be of assistance,” he said, his nose touching mine.
I grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him onto my lips, a silent reassurance that he had nothing to worry about, that I was all-in on all of Asher Reyes. But there was a mounting voice inside my head, a question that got louder and louder even as I kissed him harder and harder: if I was all-in on Asher, then why was I afraid to show him all my cards?
Even after all the extensive work I had done during therapy the last few years, there was still a thread of shame stitched around a moment where I carried no culpability. I hoped one day I’d be able to untangle it in front of the person I loved. Maybe it would come out in sobs, the way the truth about Asher’s brother’s death came out in guttural cries. I got it now. Asher holding on to that horrible truth wasn’t about me, any more than me holding on to this horrible truth was about Asher. My deflection was about my pain, and my need to release it to the universe when I was ready.
But sometimes, the universe gets its claws on you and shakes the truth from your bones before you’re ready.
45
THIRTY
“TONIGHT…TONIGHT when I blew out the candles, my birthday wish was for us to end up together.”
Garrett and I sat side by side in this tiny Nolita bar on my thirtieth birthday, as the maybe horrible truth fell out of me, and I couldn’t put it back in. He 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 white-hot 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?”
“I do. But I’ll show up at your door—you’re horrible with timing.”
Garrett opened his mouth, but no words followed. His brows pressed together for a long moment as my breathing became more rapid. I couldn’t feel my fingers, and there was a ringing in my ears.
Did I just spring a marriage pact on Garrett Scholl?
I knew I was in a bad place, but I didn’t know I was in a reckless one. I bent my neck forward with my hand around my throat, fighting the wave of humiliation rising up from my stomach. I turned toward the bar, staring hard at the freshly washed glasses as if they were a time machine. Garrett reached his hand down to my seat, twisting my barstool toward him and bringing us face-to-face. My heart thumped as his eyes scanned every line on my face. And then, he leaned forward, the heat of his mouth against mine.
“Why do we have to wait until we’re thirty-five?” he whispered against my lips.
I hadn’t seen Garrett since he got back from San Francisco. Two weeks ago, the idea of seeing him after ten months apart consumed me wholly. But then—Cole Wyan happened to me. But here I was, my lips just inches from Garrett Scholl’s mouth, a fantasy come to life.
“Maggie, all I’ve been able to think about the last few months is…us…this right here.” His thumb moved along my chin, like a question waiting to be answered.
His eyes didn’t leave mine, and there wasn’t a hint of playfulness anywhere in his jaw. I felt warmth envelop me. Here it was. Right person. Right time. All I wanted to do was lean into his lips and start the rest of our lives together, right fucking now, but his hand—his hand was on my thigh.
His hand.