Ryder smiles, crosses around the desk and stands in front me. “That was your plan the whole time, wasn’t it?” he says. “I’ll have sex with him and get him to like me and then he’ll just forget the whole debt like nothing ever happened.’”
I’m so angry I don’t think about my words before they’re out of my mouth. “I’m kind of starting to wish nothing had ever happened.” “Finally something we agree on,” he says as he opens the door and gestures for me to leave. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, and I notice the mermaid tattooed around his left forearm, her eyes closed and her arms raised, the way a regular person like me might look as she floats down into deep, dark waters, drowning even though she thought she knew how to swim.
I walk out.
***
Savannah calls on my way home from Altitude. She has a first date tomorrow and she left work early tonight to pick up a couple outfit options, so will I come over and help her choose?
My insides are still buzzing like a swarm of bees with razor-sharp stingers from my fight with Ryder, where I feel like I meant everything and nothing I said, and I can’t figure out which one is making me more pissed off. I warn her I’m agitated. “That’s okay,” she says. “At least I know you won’t sugarcoat your critiques of these clothes.”
True. At least there’s that.
I lounge on Savannah’s bedroom carpet as she tries on a coral bandage dress, pizza and wine on the little coffee table in front of her bay window, like we’re back in college and she’s just home for holiday break. “I think that’s the one,” I say. “That color looks so good with your hair.”
“You think?” she says, standing in front of her full-length mirror, holding up her blond curls. “It’s not too daytime, is it?”
I bite into a piece of pizza. “In the summer, I think you can get away with daytime all the time because it’s light out until, like, eight o’clock,” I say.
“Good point,” Savannah says, nodding. “With that kind of analytical brain, it’s not too late for you to go to law school, too.”
“But Savannah, I can work at a bar for free the rest of my life,” I say, a big, fake smile plastered on my face. “Why would I pass up that opportunity?”
Savannah unzips the dress and hangs it in her closet. She slips on a t-shirt and pair of shorts and refills our glasses of red wine. “You know, it’s not like Ryder can make you stay there. You can just leave, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”
“And never see him again?” My brain pushes the words out of my mouth before I have a chance to think about what I’m saying. I both want to take them back immediately and am relieved to be free of the burden of that truth.
“Is that something you’re afraid of?” Savannah says, sipping her wine.
I sigh. “Yes,” I say. “Maybe. I don’t know.” I lie down and fold my hands over my stomach. “It’s, like, Ryder was supposed to be this hot, sexy, nothing-serious, nothing-real kind of fling, you know? Just naked, no-commitment fun.”
“Mm-hmm,” Savannah commiserates.
I stretch out my arms beside me and rub the soft, cream-colored carpet, like an affectionate cat kneading its paws. “But it’s getting deeper than that. I was so mad at him today, and not just because of the debt stuff. It’s like, I was mad because the way we were talking to each other, like we didn’t care about the other one—it was kind of making me sad.”
“Your feelings can’t get hurt unless there are feelings there in the first place,” Savannah says gently.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice barely louder than the ceiling fan lazily turning above us.
“Have you told him about Sebastian?”
“No,” I say. “I could have. And I know I probably should have by now. But I don’t even want to be married to Sebastian anymore, much less have to admit that I am.”
Married. I hadn’t said the word in weeks, not since I’d gotten back to Atlanta. And I guess I’d lulled myself into believing that the absence of it from my vocabulary was somehow erasing it from my life, too.
My plan was to file formally for divorce from Sebastian later this summer, once I’d settled back into the house, found a job, gotten my legs under me a little. I don’t want any of his money or the apartment or anything I didn’t pack into my suitcases. I just want my life back.
I didn’t think it’d be too complicated, but that was when I didn’t know how close I was not to having a house at all and before I volunteered for what has to be the only job in Atlanta where it’s not about how many zeroes are on the paycheck—it’s that there are only zeroes on the paycheck. And the paycheck is imaginary anyway.
And, of course, before I met Ryder. And slept with him. And maybe fell for him.
“You don’t have to admit any fucking thing you don’t want to,” Savannah says. “When I represent a client, I only want to know exactly what I have to know to do the best job for her. No less. But definitely no more.”
I laugh. “Ryder isn’t my attorney, though.”
“I know,” she says. “But he’s not your boyfriend.”