39. Oliver

THIRTY-NINE

Oliver

I gave her a week.

A week of space. Then I would go and apologize.

Towards the end of that week, I went to Tim’s super late, to ensure there were no teachers left. But of course she was fucking there. I saw her with fucking Elias, of all people, the full radiant force of her laugh directed at him. He looked a bit shell-shocked, honestly. I wondered if that’s how I look around her.

Seeing her like that, so effortlessly happy and drunk and oblivious to the world around her, fuck. Happy with someone it was okay to be happy with. In public. Without fear of retribution for losing her job. I stood there, frozen, every fiber of my being screaming at me to leave, but I couldn’t move. The sight of her, so familiar yet so distant, tore me apart.

Get out. I kept hearing this in my head, in Georgia’s broken voice.

So I then gave myself a week.

To think things through. To make some new lists. Set some new goals .

At the end of that week, all my lists led to one common goal.

And I’m standing outside her apartment. I buzz.

Her voice sounds tinny over the intercom. “Who is it?”

I clear my throat. “Georgia? It’s Oliver.”

Silence.

Then she buzzes me up.

I take the steps with a confidence born of conviction, replaying my lists, my apologies in my head. Ready to work, ready to mend this and move on. Ready to tell her I love her. Georgia is mine, and we’re going to get through this together.

She opens the door before I can even knock, and I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe the same devastation I see when I look at myself in the mirror, with the huge bags under my eyes and sallow skin, but that’s not what I get.

She looks… fine. And this makes me feel… fucking awful.

I blink at her, frozen in the hallway.

She gives me a small smile, eyes roaming across my face. “Come in.”

As I walk behind her through her open door, I take a huge inhale of the airstream she leaves behind her, drinking it in. I miss the way she smells.

She closes the door behind her, and we stand there awkwardly for half a second before I hold my arms out. She walks forward at the same time and mashes her face into my chest.

Relief flows through me as I wrap my arms around her slender body, squeezing a little too tight, kissing the top of her head. Breathing her in. “I’m so sorry, baby. I missed you,” I say into her hair.

“I’m sorry, too,” she says against my shirt, but that’s all I get. She pulls back, gesturing to her living room. “This is a couch conversation, I think.”

I move to the Porn Couch, trying like hell not to think about everything that’s happened on it. She takes a seat next to me, putting a few inches of space between us.

“You look…” I start, drinking in her face, “so pretty,” I say lamely.

She smiles, a small one. “I’m beautiful, actually,” she scoffs.

I blow out a laugh. “Why does this feel like it’s going to be a bad couch conversation?”

Georgia looks at the floor, and I miss the color of her eyes. “This is going to be a couch conversation we should have had a long time ago?—”

I cut her off in desperation. “Georgia, I want you to know?—”

“Stop,” she whispers. “Please let me say this. I promise I won’t lash at you this time.”

“I deserved it last time.”

She shakes her head. “Just let me say this.” She takes a deep breath, gathering herself, the strength I know she has deep in her bones. “I’ve been working with my therapist. She’s making me realize some things.”

“I’m glad you’re talking to her,” I say, weakly, fighting the urge to pull her into my lap.

She nods. “What we’ve been doing… our relationship… it’s always been inherently unfair. Please listen to me,” she says, when she sees me start.

I shut my mouth.

“That incident, that series of incidents, with the third letter and the Superintendent and the charges that still might be brought against me…” She laughs, shaking her head, but there’s no humor in it. “It brought all that stuff up with Jake, I think. He held power over me, and I realized that you also hold power over me. And I hadn’t addressed it before, and I shoved it down, and it came out… the way it did. I’m sorry about that again. ”

It takes everything in me to keep my mouth shut, but inside I am raging to prove that I am nothing like that asshole. But I don’t have to, thankfully.

“When I say you hold power over me, I don’t think it’s like… intentionally or maliciously. But it’s just because of the nature of our relationship. You are literally my boss. Everything lies in your hands.”

I blow out a breath, sitting back on the couch.

“But there’s something you did that I wasn’t okay with. It was my fault for not communicating that I felt this way with you, but…” I know what she’s going to say, and it makes me want to claw my eyes out. “…you went ahead and fixed everything, anyway. You wanted to fix this horrible thing, but you ended up controlling the situation instead, so that it suited your needs, with no regard for my feelings or opinions or choices, or whatever. And I know you did it because you…” she falters here, “but I can’t…” Her voice breaks here.

I become very, very still, the blood pounding in my ears.

She takes a long, measured breath. “Oliver, I need to learn to make my own choices. Not have them made for me. I need to learn to be my own rock. But I can’t…”

I subconsciously take this moment to start mapping every inch of her face, her body. The individual strands of her hair. The freckles across her face. The slope of her nose. The curve of her waist.

“I can’t do that while you’re my boss. I can’t be with you while you’re my boss. I just… can’t,” she says, tears rolling down the soft angles of her cheeks.

The urge to fix this, to fight back, is all-consuming. But I run through what she’s said, and somehow, I manage to swallow it down.

I feel something through the pain currently crushing my chest, through the self-loathing currently coursing through my body, but I don’t know what it is, can’t identify it right now .

I swallow, picking up her hand, running my fingers across the soft skin of her palms. I lift her hand to my mouth and kiss every single finger. “Okay,” I manage.

We spend another minute looking at one another, eyes damp and roaming. “Okay,” I say again, after I can’t bear it anymore. I nod, stand up, and leave without looking back.

I identify the feeling as I walk down her stoop. It’s pride. I’m proud of her.

I call my mother, of all people.

“Hi, anak ,” she says, picking up on the first ring.

“Ma, do you remember how I got the PS 2 job?” I ask.

She scoffs. “You mean that time you steamrolled all of us during your father’s cancer? Of course, I remember how you got that job.”

My heart drops. “What?”

“You left the job that you loved because you thought we needed you to.”

“Of course you needed me to. Dad had cancer, for fuck’s sake?—”

“LANGUAGE, Oliver. And no, we did not need you to. But of course you didn’t know that. You never asked us!”

Fuck . I run my hands through my hair. “But?—”

“We didn’t need you to move closer to us to take him to his appointments. I was fine taking him. Your sisters were fine taking him. We could’ve come up with a schedule. But instead, you just did it, you brushed what we wanted aside and steamrolled us, because you thought it was the right thing to do. You felt out of control, so you needed to control the situation, so it was okay for you .”

I digest this. The parallels are astounding. I’m such a dick.

“I’m sorry, Ma,” I tell her .

“I know.”

“I’ve always done this,” I say, and I’m not sure if it’s a statement or a question.

“From the womb,” she says, answering it as a question.

I sigh. “I fucked up.”

“I know,” she says again, without judgement. “Want to talk it through?” she asks, the consummate teacher.

I scrub my face with hands. “I have to stop.”

“Stop what, exactly?” I know what she’s doing.

“Fixing things.”

She hums. “I disagree. I think it’s okay to fix some things,” she says. “But it’s the way you go about it that matters. What should you change?”

I’m silent for several moments. “Give people the chance to make their own choices,” I say, remembering what Georgia said.

I find myself reviewing my goals again. My lists. I think about my promotion, the way I completely disregarded Georgia’s feelings in an attempt to smooth my path, her path forward. I divide my goals into short term and long term. Professional and personal.

Are my professional goals really more important than my personal ones?

I run through every single word Georgia uttered to me on the Porn Couch.

I make a new list.

1. Fix one last thing