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“That was mentioned,” Angela tells me. “But apparently, he was acting weird all night.”
“Weird, how?” I whip around in my desk chair. Did anyone guess the truth? Better yet, did anyone eavesdrop on him before I did? Angela looks up at me in surprise, but before she can reply, the door to Erica Espinoza’s office swings open. Her salt-and-pepper hair elegantly pulled back in a high chignon highlights her sparkling brown eyes. Our managing librarian is kind, but in a cut-the-bullshit sort of way.
“Sounds like you two had an exciting weekend.” She smooths down her blue skirt. “But what I want to hear is plans for the book club launch. Has that been finalized?”
“Yes.” I nod. “The announcement is going live on all our social media accounts later today. We’ll also be hosting reading sprints online every week until the in-person event on the third Friday of the month.”
“We thought it’d be fun to create some social media polls too, so the teens can have a hand in choosing what book we read next,” Angela chimes in. “They chose our first book, and they’ll choose the second around the first week of the new month. Marcela and I have already lined up a couple titles for them to choose from.”
“Very good.” Erica smiles. “Angela, I believe you’re assigned to the circulation desk first this morning.”
“Right. It’s homework time.” She flashes our boss a winning smile as she raises herself from a wheelie desk chair.
Before she became a library assistant, Angela was in the teacher certification program at UTSA. It wasn’t until her last semester, deep in the throes of classroom management, that she realized she’d made a terrible mistake. I recommended her to Erica to replace me after I took my new position. Now she’s taking classes online to receive her master’s and become a youth services librarian. It pains me slightly that one day soon we won’t be working at the same library anymore.
My entire morning is spent in meetings until lunchtime rolls around, when Angela meets me outside my office and suggests we go out. The Whataburger drive-thru is packed, which leaves plenty of time for me to catch her up.
“Okay, lay it on me,” Angela says. “What were you and Theo doing if not hooking up?”
I hesitate for a moment before I tell her. This isn’t exactly my secret to tell, and I know how terrible I’d feel if Angela told mine. But she never has, which is how I know I can trust her to keep Theo’s secret. “I stopped him from breaking up Ben and Alice.”
Angela nearly drives into the car in front of us. I reach for the grab handle above the passenger window, eyes bugging out of my head as she slams on the brakes. I’m about to yell at her to be more careful, but when she turns to face me she doesn’t even have the decency to look fazed. She’s jumping up and down in her seat with a level of excitement that terrifies me when she has both our lives in her unsteady hands.
“You’re kidding!” she shouts. “Tell me everything!”
So I do. Angela gasps in all the right places, clutching at her chest like I’m the most interesting telenovela she’s watched in years. But it’s her eyes narrowing slightly in contemplation that I really take note of. I wonder what thoughts are churning in her head, even as I continue my story. After retrieving our food, she parks the car in a space off to the side so we can eat and go over all the facts without interruption.
“Wow. You know, I really don’t know much about the guy, but I never would’ve guessed he had feelings for Alice,” she says between bites of her chicken strips. “But then again, he doesn’t live here. Maybe it was good of him to keep his distance if he felt like that all along.”
“Yeah.” I sigh, my stomach sinking as I take in her words like a physical blow. “Maybe that’s what I should’ve been doing all along.”
She gives me a sympathetic look, placing her hand on my shoulder. “You tried, honey. It’s not as if you could just dump him as a friend.”
“Maybe.” But I’m not so convinced now. Maybe if I’d phased him out after we stopped dating like I’d originally wanted to, I would’ve gotten over him a long time ago. But if he proved anything, it’s that he wouldn’t let go of our friendship so easily. Not like the way Alice and I had drifted apart, neither one of us willing to fight to regain the easy friendship we had when we first met. Ben had made it clear he wanted both of us in his life.
“It’s partly Ben’s fault, too,” she tells me. “If my partner ever insisted on staying friends with one of their exes, I’d run out of there so fast there’d be a smoke outline of me floating in the air.”
“That’s the thing, though. I’m not sure we’re really exes.”
I can hardly call a handful of dates across three months a relationship. Never mind that we hung out together nearly every day between our simple dinner-and-a-movie dates. Never mind how thoughtful he was to buy my favorite snacks and coffee on campus when we met up to study. Never mind the “good morning” and “sweet dreams” texts that dinged my phone at the beginning and end of each day. Never mind the late-night phone calls that kept me up till two a.m. most nights. Something about the dark allowed me to be more honest than I would normally be, and he’d reward me with truths of his own. An exchanging of pasts. Perhaps an exchanging of futures, too.
Until he said he thought we’d be better off as friends, at least.
It threw me off, how suddenly and confidently he’d steered us into a different lane. It almost didn’t feel like a breakup, except of course for the pain in my chest cavity. There were times when I wanted to ask him why he thought we were better as friends, if he wasn’t ready for something real, or if it was something I did or said that made him change his mind. But if I’m being honest with myself, I wasn’t ready for the closure his answer would’ve provided.
“I just think he relies on you too much. He might not know how you feel but dangling that ring in front of you was just cruel.” She shakes her head, taking another bite of her chicken. “Anf da fa—”
“Swallow before you speak, please.”
She rolls her eyes but complies, taking a sip from her straw and swallowing. “And the fact that he always finds a way to get involved every time you date someone new—” She cuts herself off, so angry she can’t even finish the sentence. Her eyes shudder closed. “Don’t even get me started.”
“Please, please don’t.”
Angela found out about my feelings during the second semester of our sophomore year, when I started dating a guy named Chris. He and I never acted like we were dating because I constantly ditched him to hang out at Ben’s apartment with the rest of our friend group. Ben never helped the situation either, because he’d constantly talk shit about the poor guy to anyone who would listen. One night when we’d forgotten Angela was still in the bathroom, he told me I should dump him, arguing that Chris didn’t like any of my friends and I barely hung out with him anyway.
So I did.
Angela put two and two together faster than any of our other friends. When she confronted me about it, I thought she was going to tell me how horrible of a person I was. Instead, she let me cry on her lap for two hours and bought me enough pumpkin empanadas to drown us both. To Angela, my feelings aren’t entirely unwarranted, no matter how much I disagree with her. Ben has never crossed any physical boundaries, and he’s never once tried to.
