“Hey, what about that guy from the lumber yard? What was his name?” I snap my fingers. “Jeremy! What about him?”
“He’s cute, and based on the errant thing he whispered in my ear that night at Crave a couple of weeks ago, I’m one-hundred percent positive he’d bend me over a chair. But I don’t even want to think about dating again.” She sighs. “Finding a good man is like … buying an avocado.”
“Ridiculously expensive?”
“No, but that’s true too.” She laughs, pointing at me. “I was thinking more like a terrifying gamble. You can’t just go for looks because that perfect skin and amazing tan that leads you to think it’s spent the entire season getting perfectly ripe just for you may be a lie. The inside might be rotten. So you give it a little squeeze—firm, gentle pressure to kind of test the waters.” Her brows waggle. “Is it hard enough for a good time but soft enough to watch a romcom? Maybe. Or maybe it took a little blue pill and has mommy issues.”
“Dude. Stop drinking,” I tell her.
She picks up her glass and downs whatever is left in it. A burp belts through the air. “Okay.”
I don’t dignify her belch with a response. Instead, I settle back in my chair and gaze into the night sky.
If there was a way I could blink and be as flippant about relationships as Emily, I would do it in half a heartbeat. She dates men, falls in love, practically moves in with them, and then casts them away when things don’t pan out like it’s the crust on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Why can’t I do that?
Why do I have to be cursed with feelings for one boy?
“What?” Emily asks.
I turn to look at her. “What what?”
“You just groaned.”
“I did?”
“You did. And if I were your best friend who knew all your groans and snarls, I’d label this one as being rooted in Machlan.”
My head hits the back of the chair with a loud thud. “Ouch!” I rub the spot, trying to distract both myself and Emily more than massage out a knot.
“I was right. Surprise, surprise.”
My emotions well up against the dam I built inside to keep them all back. I can feel them roaring against my lips like a hurricane lashing against the shores.
Since Machlan left the apartment, my brain hasn’t left me alone. My mind doesn’t even feel like mine anymore, and that’s a tough thing to reconcile. One minute, I’m reminiscing about sweet moments with him, and the next, I’m almost in tears over others. Then everything flips again and I’m ready to kill him, and then reality hits and I feel helpless.
Helpless is something I loathe. I call bullshit on it most times. You’re never helpless; you can always do something. I just wish I could figure out the something about this.
Wine sloshes against Emily’s glass as she fills it again. “Just thinking I might need this to get through this convo.” She takes in my reaction. “Or you might need it. Either way, I’m prepared.”
“A regular survivalist,” I joke.
She leans back in her chair again. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”
“I don’t know.” It’s almost a whine, but I’m too overwhelmed to care.
“No, you do know. And I know, and he knows, and the whole damn world knows.”
I groan again, louder this time. So loud, in fact, that my voice fills Emily’s entire backyard, and her neighbor’s dog starts to howl right along with me.
“Stop.” Emily laughs, shoving me in the arm. “I think you’ve officially lost it.”
Lost it. Her words send a shiver across my skin. The thought of losing Machlan knocks the wind out of me. How I thought I could do that—just distance myself from him forever—seems idiotic now.
It’s always this way once I’ve spent time with him. Five weeks, five days, five hours—it’s always the same. Maybe it ends badly or we drive each other crazy, but I always walk away knowing two things: one, I love him and, two, he’ll never commit to me.
“What if I lose him completely, Em?”
My friend doesn’t need a further explanation; the look on her face shows she gets it.
My chest shakes as I take a breath. It’s the kind of shake that happens when your body is full of adrenaline, prepping to keep you going through some perceived danger. There may not be a lion in the area, but I’m on the cusp of getting eaten alive anyway.
She lays her hand on my arm, giving it a gentle squeeze before removing it. “Isn’t that what you came here for?”
My entire body sags, pressing down in the wooden deck chair so hard I think I hear it crack.
“Yes. No. I don’t know anymore. When I’m away from him, he’s what I want, and I tell myself I have to make it stop. Then I’m with him, and it’s really apparent I can’t make it stop.” I cover my face with my hands. “I just want to be one of those women who is all confident and independent. One who calls a number and meets up at a hotel when she needs a man.”
Emily snorts.
“I mean it.” I look at her with every intention of being serious but end up laughing as soon as our eyes meet. “Stop making me laugh!”
“It’s my job.”
“Well, make it your job to help me figure out how to live my life. Just make all my decisions for me, will ya?”
“You need to relax,” she says. “Seriously.”
“I know.”
The temperature seems to drop. I run my hands up and down my arms as the crickets in the lowlands get louder. It makes me think of camping with Machlan—campfires and s’mores and the taste of bug spray. I close my eyes and imagine his red tent with the hole in the top from the summer night when Peck forgot to watch the fire and the top of the tent went up in flames.
What a fun time of my life that was—being with my favorite people, doing the simplest things. Making memories that are still some of my most precious possessions.
“How do people survive this?” I ask. “How do they love someone who doesn’t love them back and go on and have a happy life with someone else?”
“Maybe they don’t.”
“Oh, gee. Thanks.”
She laughs. “Maybe those people never get married because they refuse to see the big sea and all those other hunky fishes swimming around them. Or maybe they do get married and are never truly happy because they keep thinking about the fish from the reef back there.”
I struggle to keep a straight face. “You’re so super helpful.”
“Hear me out,” she says, waving a hand to shush me. “You know how you can go three days and not eat cake and as soon as you say you’re on a diet, all you can think about is cake?”
“Wait a minute. What happened to the reef?”
“They’re connected. I promise. Stick with me.”
“Okayyy …”
She shimmies in her seat. “Okay. So, all you can think about is cake, right? Well, it’s the same thing here. It’s the same thing as Fish Girl.”
I pretend to think. “Nope,” I say, shaking my head fervently. “I’m not following you.”
“Gah!”
“Cake and fish should never go together.”
“They go together in this way: you want cake on minute one of a diet because it’s what you can’t have. As soon as that luscious piece of heaven slathered with buttercream goodness is off-limits, you need it like you need air. Am I right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” she says, her eyes lit up with excitement. “And it’s the same for Fish Girl. She’s swimming in this vast ocean that comprises like three-quarters of the world and can’t see all these ah-mazing fish she encounters every day because she’s still all obsessed with Reef Boy.”
“Look, Em …”
She shakes her head. “You want what you can’t have. It’s basic human nature.”
My gaze drops to the glass of wine, and I contemplate guzzling it. It certainly couldn’t make me more confused or sick to my stomach.
Not everything she’s saying is resonating. I don’t want Mach just because I can’t have him. I want him because he’s so threaded in my life—in who I am and how I got to be this person—that I can’t imagine not having him. Or not wanting him.
“Maybe I have to accept I won’t have him like I want him,” I say, testing the idea out loud. “Maybe I need to …”
“Maybe you need to take the pressure off it. Stop ‘being on a diet’,” she says, using air quotes. “You stress constantly about your relationship with Machlan—how it’s defined. What it is. What it isn’t. Maybe you just need to let it be.”
“Let it be, huh?”
“Yes,” she says, grinning. “Let it be. Let it be whatever it is. Give it the organic room to just develop into a great friendship or an intense hatred or a friends with benefits or maybe just mutual acquaintances. You’ll never know what it can be if you don’t stop trying to shove it into one of the two boxes you’ve already decided it has to go in.”
I gulp, my mind processing this too quickly. Everything kind of jumbles together as if I did drink the wine, but at the same time, it seems clear. And possibly logical.
“I almost kissed him today,” I say. I toss it out there as though it’ll change her mind. She only laughs.
“I’m sure you did. The two of you together is like watching two people have sex without the sex.”
“That’s gross.” I stand, stretching my arms overhead. “I need to get going.”
“You got somewhere to be?”
“Yeah. Bed.”
She yawns, getting to her feet too. “I’m tired myself and that bottle of wine didn’t help.”
I pull her into a quick hug before heading toward the gate at the side of the house. I wave. I might even respond to something she says offhandedly as I walk away. I’m not sure. All I do know is that I have to figure out if I can just be friends with Machlan Gibson or if that’s a recipe for disaster.