Page 104 of 13 Rules For Fantastic Phone Sex

I start to say I want to meet Kait, but that’s selfish. Instead, I tell her the truth. “Every single day, I wish for Kait’s unrelenting happiness and for her days to be overflowing with joy. That’s my wish, for Kait to be happy.”

Her eyes bore into me, watery again, before I look away. My gaze flits over the paintings and back to the painter. She sees too much. Her voice reminds me of everything I’ve lost. I miss her so much my brain makes women sound like her now. That’s a new level of suffering I didn’t anticipate.

“What if you had to wish for something for yourself, what would it be?”

I don’t have to think about this question. “I would wish to tell Kait I was wrong and how sorry I am. To give her the apology she deserves.” I rub the heel of my hand over my sternum, trying to ease the bony ache. Maybe my pain means there’s potential for love inside me. Or maybe I’m just afraid I’ll never be whole again.

Eóghann understands how important this is to me. Her eyes are shimmering with unshed tears. She makes a pained sound, the groan of a person doing something they don’t want to do, then mumbles something under her breath, but all I catch is a grumbled f-bomb.

Eóghann MacGregor would be a handful of the best sort if I were heart-whole. She frowns, and I flinch, expecting to hear that I’ve failed her test. “Your wish is granted. The second one, not the first. We’re all responsible for our own happiness and joy. I’m incapable of making another person happy. God knows I’ve tried and failed spectacularly.” There’s resignation in her voice.

She’s shaking her head and pinching the bridge of her nose. Her tone says she’s enduring my presence. Before today, she looked at me with amusement, and sometimes sympathy, but always with underlying kindness.

“Consider her told.” Her voice is a balm for my anxiety, but her expression is the strangest combination of contempt, fear, kindness, and, oddly, understanding. She seems so familiar, but it’s wishful thinking. The woman I lost—threw away—would never look at me with kindness after the things I said.

My wish is granted?

Did I ask to be in a tiny sliver of Kait’s life, or did I ask to apologize? Our interaction has lasted maybe thirty seconds, but there’s a lifetime happening between the words. Tom and Stevie’s battle of the bands still rages in my brain, and it’s hard to think clearly with her near. My skull may splinter at any moment, but I can’t let this opportunity slip away.

“You’ll tell Kait what I said?”

She lifts one delicate brow in an unasked question, arms crossed. She looks pointedly at the paintings I bought, still on the wall, with a wry tilt to her lips. I’m the only one not in on the joke.

I follow her gaze. Every single painting is named for a song that takes me back to Kait as though someone took the last few years of my life and distilled it into acrylic paints. It mirrors the ups and downs of my life.

Friendship.

Joy.

Regret.

Sorrow.

Self-loathing.

Loneliness.

The pain of ending my… relationship. I’m finally calling it one. If you mourn a breakup, it’s a relationship, as far as I’m concerned, phone or no phone.

She looks at me, expectant, but says nothing, waiting for me to answer a question she didn’t ask. I sweep the room and collect evidence. Lucky Man. The Drugs Don’t Work. Gray pain on canvases after pure joy and color have vanished. It’s like my life, a before-Kait and after-Kait timeline. Bold pigments and joy morph into darkness, grays and blacks, and then a slow climb with some faint hints of color. I absently wonder what happened to Eóghann to so profoundly change her art, down to the color palette she uses.

She’s patient, giving me space to catch up in the face of overwhelm. “Silver Springs” gets louder, but this time, it’s for everyone to hear. I’m struggling to make sense of too much stimuli crashing in at once. Colors and lyrics, music and the chatter of staff and partygoers arriving swirl in my brain.

I move to the hearts I bought, Eóghann trailing slowly behind, where my past and hopeful future hang on the wall of a coffee shop. Happy, then broken. Falling apart. Shattered. Back together again. I’m not back together, but I keep trying.

I move down the long wall of smaller hearts. Hurt. Say Something (I’m Giving Up on You). When You Come Back to Me by World Party. One particularly bleak-appearing heart is What If This Is All the Love You Ever Get? by Snow Patrol, and the lyrics sting. These songs, every single one of them is on my Spotify playlists or on the playlist she left behind. Every single one of these hearts is meaningful to me. Statistical anomaly? Coincidence?

Kait would never spend two thousand five hundred on a painting for my birthday. Or would she?

I turn to another wall, one without hearts, and a whisper is dragged out of me, shards of stabbing pain in my chest.

“Oh, Kait.”

It’s a still life of the teacup and saucer I sent. I slide my hand inside my coat and tap over my heart to try to ease the ache. I want to double over from the hurt of it all. Eóghann walks away like flames are nipping at her heels.

I gasp, loud enough to be heard over the music, and I know.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE