AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Unless you’ve been particularly sneaky, you haven’t gotten laid since Cape Cod.”
“What do you know about Cape Cod?” I asked. It came out sounding squeakier than I’d intended.
“I know that the motel called me in a panic to apologize when they realized they’d forgotten to move the new mattress into your room. They refunded the cost of your stay and asked why you hadn’t said something about not having a mattress.”
There was a mischievous glint in her eye as she tucked her upper lip between her teeth. Pink light from a nearby theater sign turned her hair a vibrant color for a split second before we passed it.
“Mpfh,” I said, wondering how in the world I could have missed the fact my room hadn’t had a mattress. I had used the room to shower and dress for the wedding, after all.
“While you are very flexible, Oscar, and not likely to complain about minor inconveniences, I would have expected you to alert someone if you’d noticed your motel room didn’t have a usable bed.”
“Well, apparently, you were wrong. I’m more accommodating than you thought,” I said with a sniff.
“Sure.”
Silence descended between us for a few minutes. Just when I thought it was safe to return to my contract review, she opened her mouth again. “Who was it? And before you play that silly game with me where you ask, ‘Who was who?’ remember that time you made me fly Frank to Vancouver just so you could introduce him to another hedgehog and said you’d ‘owe me one’?”
“I was showing him off to a breeder, as you well know, and—never mind. Fine,” I gritted out. “In the interest of paying my debt to you, his name was—is—Hugh Linzee.”
Her eyes widened. “My sister’s wedding photographer?”
The mention of her sister reminded me of how my text conversation with Hugh began in the first place. Which reminded me of how close Hugh and I had grown… and how not close we currently were.
Lesya shifted next to me. “You’re rubbing your chest, and you look all…” She grimaced in demonstration. “Are you having some kind of heart… situation? Is it indigestion? Maybe the prawns at lunch?—?”
“The prawns were fine.” I gave her a fulminating look and made sure my hand was nowhere near my now-aching chest. “I’m fine.”
“Ohhhh,” she said with dawning understanding. “Not a heart attack, a Hugh Linzee attack.” Her voice was unbearably sympathetic, and she clutched her phone to her chest. “Oh, god. Oh, god, how did I miss this? You’re in the melancholy, aren’t you? You’ve been in it for months! I used to be so good at spotting your relationship stages, but I’m out of practice. I totally missed them with this guy?—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Hugh and I weren’t in a relationship. You know I’ve stopped… all that nonsense. He and I met at Conor and Wells’s wedding and are—were—friends. We texted daily. And, yes, we happened to spend the night together on Cape Cod, but only because?—”
“Two nights,” Lesya interrupted.
I sucked in a breath. “Pardon?”
“Two nights,” she repeated. “Two entire nights. With the same man. In the same bed. A man you liked, clearly, since you were friends for almost a freaking year.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again, like a very large fish. “So?”
“So… I must have ignored the signs. It’s usually impossible to miss the rush phase because you’re constantly having me send the guy flowers and arrange weekends in Paris, and you’re so consumed with everything he likes that you’re all, ‘Johan is a practicing Buddhist. Could you find me a fast-track course on meditation and the Eight-Fold Path?’ Or ‘Jack’s always wanted to live in a yurt in Mongolia. How complicated would a move to Ulaanbaatar be, just hypothetically?’ And it all seems so reasonable to you, because surely this excitement must be love.”
My face flamed. “I have never?—”
“Oh, you definitely have,” Lesya countered. “Because I know a shit-ton about Mongolian tax law, and it’s all your fault. And then comes the honeymoon phase, where you settle down for a couple weeks or maybe a couple months. You’re still having fun together, but you’re also getting to know each other deeper than surface level. You drop your Oscar Overton persona for a minute here and there. You learn more about him—not just the one or two really cool facts that got you interested in him, or his favorite sex positions, or the stuff you assumed he thought or felt, but the stuff that actually makes him tick. That’s where the trouble begins?—”
“We don’t need to rehash this,” I said a bit desperately, “since it’s in no way applicable here.”
“—because eventually, you come to the rocks,” she continued, shaking her head sadly. “You start to realize he’s not who you thought he was, or he wants something you don’t want, or he expects you to be someone else. You’re clinging to hope, going through the motions, but you’re afraid now. You’re annoyed, he’s annoyed. You stop smiling as much and start sending out company-wide memoranda explaining that use of the Oxford comma in professional communications should be a requirement?—”
“Well, shouldn’t it?” I insisted. “Lesya, if you care about me in any way, stop this?—”
“Then comes the melancholy, where one of you finally rips off the Band-Aid and decides you’re not compatible.” Lesya set her phone in her lap, stared into the middle distance, and sighed. “You’re heartbroken, even if the guy was a total asshole, because you’d gotten your hopes up, and you can’t help being disappointed. You contemplate all your past relationships and start to wonder why they didn’t work out. You throw yourself into work to distract yourself from your fear that you’ll never actually fall in love. I imagine your brain plays ‘Arms of the Angels’ as background music all day long. This is usually when you ask me to make Rassolnik. Which my sister now calls Melancholy Soup.”
I rolled my eyes to the darkened ceiling of the car and blew out a breath. “Are we almost done?”
“We’re done,” she agreed. She picked up her phone again and made a show of unlocking the screen. “After that, the cycle just repeats itself.”
I shot her a suspicious look. I distinctly remembered there being five stages the last time she’d talked about this. Wisdom said that I should keep my mouth shut, but wisdom was not one of my top five attributes.
