Chapter Fourteen

FOURTEEN

We choose a casual place that's not catering to the date-night crowd and sit at the bar, watching the Kansas–West Virginia game. The lively restaurant makes it easy for me to brush off what I felt at the office. It's not too dim, it smells like burgers, and a rowdy group of senior citizens are throwing back margaritas at the table behind us.

During a time-out, I notice that one of the other televisions is showing a preview of the next episode of The Beach House. I tap Ben's arm. "Look."

Next week, Brianne wins a sandcastle contest, earning her a visit from her loved ones. Somehow this leads to Logan being grilled by her father while hooked up to a polygraph machine.

"What makes you think you'll know which of these girls is right for you in the next two weeks?" the father asks Logan, his mouth a stern line beneath his thick mustache.

I throw up my hands. "Finally, a voice of reason."

Ben's mouth curves up at the corner indulgently and he shakes his head. "You're lucky Cassie isn't here to eviscerate your favorite crappy sports team when you talk like that."

"I'm a bandwagon fan, remember? I only cheer for winners." I pop a fry into my mouth and chew, enjoying the look of suffering on his face as he forces himself to absorb the jab. "Seriously, though, do you think any of these people will stay together?"

"Stay together? Who knows. Do I think they can fall in love? Yeah, maybe."

"Logan's told four of the women he's falling in love with them. Four. " I slap the bar with my hand four times. "I don't even love four pizza places in the entire state of New Jersey, and I love pizza. He loves more women than I love pizzas. That's not love, it's bullshit."

"I love more than four pizza places."

"You're from Pennsylvania. Stay in your own lane."

"You're missing a key nuance here," Ben says, shaking his head. "I'll excuse it since this is the first time you've watched the show."

"What's that?"

"He's told them all he's falling for them. Not that he's falling in love, or that he loves them. Huge difference on this show."

He grabs a napkin and a pen from his bag and begins to outline.

"There's a prescribed path of escalation in feelings that everyone on this show follows. It's crucial that the contestants confess which step they're at as we get closer to the end."

He slides the napkin toward me, and his elbow presses against mine. I could see myself falling for her, I read.

"That's step one. Followed by ‘I'm starting to fall,' then ‘I'm falling,' then ‘I've fallen.' Only after that does the L-word come into play. ‘I'm falling in love,' ‘I'm in love.' We usually don't see a straight-up ‘I love you' until the finale."

I must care about this show even less than I thought, because I'm paying more attention to Ben's elbow than to his explanation. There's something distracting about the warmth of it, the pressure of it against mine. The slight tickle from the hair on his arm and the firmness of the muscles, the way he doesn't seem inclined to move away.

I try to sneak a look at him, but he's looking at me too. His dark eyes glitter intimately, like we're sharing a secret. Maybe he can tell I'm flustered.

I swallow hard. "This show is bizarre."

"You don't believe they can fall in love in eight weeks?"

"I absolutely believe they can fall in some version of love in eight weeks. But it doesn't matter."

"What do you mean?"

"It's fantasy-land love. It's too tied in to the experience they're having with the island and all the filming and over-the-top romantic dates for anybody to know if it can last. That's why the proposal is bullshit. They won't have a clue whether it can really work out until after the show is over."

"That's actually less cynical of an argument than I was expecting from you."

"From me?" I rake my fork through my Caesar salad and cut a piece of chicken into a careful square. The word stings, cynical. It's rooted in a perception of me that I intentionally perpetuate. It's the same one that led to Donna's comment earlier, which didn't bug me at all, but it bothers me coming from Ben. "I consider myself an expert on this topic. Remember senior year?"

He looks at me blankly. He must remember. It was the most obvious thing in the world. I disappeared to the bathroom for long periods to cry. I sat at my computer ignoring my work, typing long messages and ignoring everyone around me. I missed deadlines and came in late. I felt like I was walking around with a sign stuck to my back that read, warning: emotional meltdown in progress .

But it's clear he's being honest. He doesn't remember, he's not pretending for my sake. I exhale. "That's a good thing, I guess. I thought everyone knew about my hot mess of a love life then."

He goes still. "What happened?"

"Nothing. Don't worry about it."

"Radford, tell me," he wheedles.

"No," I say, failing to suppress a nervous smile.

He smiles back. "Come on, it's Valentine's Day. In the grand spirit of the holiday, tell me about your hot mess of a love life."

I let out a theatrical groan. This is dangerous territory, senior year. It's all mixed up in other subjects I can't discuss with him. But I need to prove him wrong about me being a stone-cold cynic. How close can I get? How close, to the touchiest subject, without someone getting hurt?

I drain my water glass and order a beer. After the bartender sets it in front of me on a cardboard coaster, I begin. "The summer after junior year, after my Sixers internship ended, I did a summer session in Italy. I had always wanted to go there, and I was so jealous of my friends who did full semesters abroad."

He nods. He couldn't study abroad either. Given its status as a winter sport, basketball monopolized the entire school year.

"I'd never had any sort of emotionally intense relationship before." I make a self-mocking face. "But my first week there, I met a guy."

"Name?"

"Oliver." It's weird to say his name out loud. I haven't, in the longest time. I don't miss him, but I used to spend a lot of time dwelling on our history. Before I came back to Ardwyn and this job consumed so much space in my mind.

"He wasn't Italian. He was British, living in Florence. We met at a park where I was taking pictures. Imagine a movie montage and you're pretty much there. We clicked right away. We'd take these long walks on cobblestone streets and talk for hours. It was Florence. You don't have to try to make it romantic; it just is. We found a twenty-five-dollar flight to Paris on a weird budget airline with hot pink planes and spent a weekend there. Eating pastries in the Tuileries and talking about our hopes and dreams."

I stir the ice in my empty water glass with the straw and sneak a look at him. He's watching me, listening, with a careful expression.

"I wasn't na?ve," I continue. "I knew it couldn't be a long-term thing, and I was fine with that. But then he told me he loved me. And he asked me to be his girlfriend. He said we would find a way to make it work."

Ben chews his lip.

"At that point I let myself fall pretty hard. He said those things even though he didn't need to, so I trusted that he meant them. I imagined a future with him. He Skyped my sister with me. We were talking about him visiting me at Ardwyn around Halloween. I even started looking into whether I could get a job working for a pro team in Europe after graduation."

I shake my head. "I'm sure you can see where this is going."

His voice is gentle. "Tell me."

"A week after I got home in August, he broke up with me. Via video chat. I remember the connection was bad so the screen kept freezing and catching my ugly-cry face."

"He's the worst," Ben says.

I feel a smile unfurl on my face. "I don't think he meant to hurt me. He was just reckless with my feelings. He got caught up in it like I did. It wasn't until the fantasy was over that reality hit and he realized it would never work. And he was right; I understood that eventually. But it was my first heartbreak—my only heartbreak—and I didn't cope well. I didn't sleep, I drank a lot. Slacked off in my classes, couldn't focus at work. So, yeah. I don't doubt that they fall into something on this show. Maybe even love. But I think that's the easy part."

He's quiet for a moment, spinning his pint glass in his hand.

"I never noticed," he finally says. "That you were having a hard time."

I shrug. "You and I weren't close outside work. I'm glad you didn't notice."

"I'm not." He presses his mouth shut, a contemplative half smile. "Maybe we weren't best friends, but I wish—" He runs a hand through his hair. "I don't know."

There was one night, a random sweaty Wednesday at one of the bars near campus. I was in the bathroom with Cassie, blubbering over Oliver and rubbing the melted mascara from under my eyes, when I got a text message from Maynard that made me leave my phone next to the sink and make a beeline for the bar. I took three shots in a row, bam, bam, bam. Then I tried to convince the band to play "Since U Been Gone," waving my middle finger at them when they politely declined. Finally, I grabbed a baseball cap off the head of a complete stranger and kissed him next to the old arcade game in the back.

"You never went to the bars," I say. "Believe me, you would've noticed if you'd seen me out."

His face is serious. He traces a line in the condensation on his glass with his finger. "I had my own stuff going on that year."

"Like what?"

He hesitates in a way that makes me shift on my barstool, turning toward him. "Do you remember Hailey?"

Hailey. His high school sweetheart. A perfect heart-shaped face and shiny hair, those big luminous pearl earrings. She went to some other college—in Baltimore, maybe? She came to a lot of games and smiled at everyone, wearing little jeans and neat button-down shirts. She was lovely.

I give a casual shrug. "I think so. Vaguely."

"That fall she told me she wasn't sure if she wanted to be in a relationship anymore."

"What do you mean? She dumped you?"

"Not exactly," he says. "I wish she had. I think she wanted to, but she felt guilty about it. I was there a lot when her dad was sick a few years before. We spent all of senior year in a cycle where she'd tell me she didn't know what she wanted, and I'd try to convince her we could make things better, and she'd go along with it for a while. Then the whole thing would start again. But it got uglier every time."

It's hard to imagine. "You guys seemed…perfect." There is a one hundred percent chance they were voted Cutest Couple for their high school yearbook superlatives.

He shrugs. "We both grew up in college. But we grew up differently."

"When did it end?"

"Not until right before graduation. She drove up here from Ocean City in the middle of the night during her Senior Week. She showed up at my apartment crying. Told me she'd hooked up with some guy from her marketing class. She left his hotel room and came straight home to tell me."

Sweet young Ben, the boy with the flock of chirping birdies, betrayed and heartbroken. My chest almost collapses from the pressure at the thought of it. "Oh, Callahan. Fuck that."

"At least she told me."

"So that was it, then?"

"That was it. I had been desperate to make it work before that, but not after she cheated. I think she did it so I'd have to break up with her. Subconsciously. She'd spent an entire year trying to end things. I just wouldn't listen."

"She could've ended things herself instead of making you do it."

"Yeah. She could have."

We fall silent. The door to the kitchen opens and a server appears with a tray, the sound of the sizzling grill filtering in until it swings shut again.

"Whatever happened to her?"

"She married the guy she cheated with. She sends me Christmas cards. I have no hard feelings."

I flick my straw wrapper at him. "Of course you don't. That's so you. You were together for, what, five years?"

"Seven."

"Jeez. So that's why you never fell in love with me." Flippantly, for the record. I say it flippantly.

From the corner of my eye I see his head jerk toward me. A curious look passes over his face. I glue my eyes to the bartender as he mixes a drink. Gin and tonic, fascinating.

"I never had a problem staying faithful," he says slowly. "That doesn't mean I never noticed when someone was objectively beautiful. I have eyes. "

"Ah," I manage to get out, trying to ignore the flicker of heat in my belly as the bartender adds a lime wedge. "Someone beautiful, like…Jasmine." I gesture at the television that played the Beach House commercial. To say anything more would be fishing for something dangerous.

A beat passes. The bartender drops a cocktail straw into the glass and takes it to a customer at the other end of the bar. "Sure," Ben says. "Like Jasmine." He turns back to his chicken sandwich. "What about Oliver? Please tell me he showed up at your door months later and you slammed it in his face?"

My shoulders relax. "Well," I say. "This is where the story gets funny, I think." I press my palms against my cheeks.

"Oh, god," he says, and steals one of my french fries. "Hit me."

"He called me months later, after graduation. And I picked up so I could hang up on him, which felt good."

"Nice."

"But then he emailed me to tell me he had moved to Boston and he wanted me to move there too."

Ben's eyes pop out in horror. "Radford, no."

"Oh, yes. I did it. It was after I—after I left here. I got an internship up there and used it as an excuse to go, and then once I got there we were on and off for a couple months and then he freaked out and told me he didn't want to get married—"

"You wanted to get married?"

"Hell, no. I said fuck-all about getting married. I was, what, twenty-two? It was all in his head. But naturally I had to stay in Boston for three more freaking months to prove a point."

"Naturally. And that was it?"

The coaster under my beer is getting soggy. I fold the corner over with my thumb and press it down. "Well."

His head falls back and he groans. "Damn you, Oliver." He breathes in sharply. "Wait, tell me it's over now? I can't handle it if it's not."

"No spoilers," I chide. "A year after that, he moved to New York and asked if we could be friends, and of course he started telling me I was the one that got away."

"And then you told him off?" At this point he looks distraught.

I could cut to the end of the story, but now that he's emotionally invested it's more fun to draw it out. It would be more effective if I could keep a straight face, but I can't.

Mom used to tell me: You'll laugh about this someday. Also: Please, no more Geminis for you. I couldn't fathom laughing about it then. But now, with all the feelings long since vacuumed out, the bitterness swept from the corners, all that's left are the bones of the story and people that seem like characters written by someone else, even me. So yeah, now it's funny.

"No." It comes out on a laugh like the tiny shriek of air being let out of a balloon. "We got back together for a few more months, and then he decided he was homesick and wanted to go back to England. He asked me to go with him."

He looks ready to fall off his barstool. "Please, please tell me you didn't move to England."

I settle down and sip my beer, allowing the dramatic tension to build. After dabbing the corners of my eyes with a napkin, I shake my head. "I didn't move to England. He'd already decided he was going, and I was tired of all the emotional turmoil. We didn't know how to be in a relationship with each other. We fell in love the first time because we were running around drinking wine in the fucking hills of Tuscany. But that was all we had, and we spent the rest of the time trying to get that feeling back. Finally I ended it, and he left."

"For good?"

"For good. And I'm not a morally superior human like you. We don't talk, and we certainly don't exchange Christmas cards."

"Never send him a Christmas card," Ben implores me. "If he sees the return address he'll show up at your door."

"To bring this back to The Beach House —"

"Oh, I forgot there was an actual point to this story."

I backhand his arm lightly. "The point is I think it's a mistake to ascribe grand emotional significance to a relationship that develops in a fantasy world. But also, no judgment if you have to make the mistake three times before learning your lesson."

After dinner, he drives me back to campus. My car is the last one in the parking lot. After I unbuckle my seat belt, he leans over to give me a hug. It's long enough that I take in his clean soapy smell for two full breaths. Long enough that he drags his thumb down the side of my neck in a way that feels deliberate. His stubble grazes my cheekbone as he pulls away.

This is now the second time we've hugged. It's apparently a thing we do now. I'm not sure of the parameters.

"Before you go," he says, his voice a little rough. I stop with my fingers wrapped around the door handle. "I'm sorry your dad's friends didn't make it tonight. They missed out."

He's looking at me in a soft way that makes the car feel too small, like I'm sitting too still, like I need to get out and start moving. I look back at him. How close can I get? I pull the door handle. "Thanks," I say. "And Happy Valentine's Day. Technically."