“What’s your point, Chuckles?”
“We start with six episodes. Just Josh Chester being Josh Chester, giving a glamorous insider look at some of the most gorgeous locations in the world. You get your travel budget, and we get the stuff that’s actually been working for this show.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“Am I?” He raises his eyebrows.
“Yes. You are.”
But I don’t walk away.
And neither does he.
And despite myself, I grin.
And so does he.
And I wonder which of us just made a deal with the devil.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Vanessa
I clean up as much as I can while I wait for Bri to show up, but the truth is, there isn’t much there. I hate how unsettled my apartment looks. When I walked Ally around it on FaceTime, she said it looked a little serial-killer-y, and now that’s all I can think. The only décor is a couple of framed pictures on the end tables and a couple of my favorite detective novels on the lone bookshelf. I couldn’t fit much into my little car, so I let clothes take top priority, but now I wish there was some semblance of personality here.
Something to make Bri wanna stay.
I don’t even have any food to offer; there’s nothing in my fridge but mustard. But after half an hour, I start to think I’m worrying over nothing; she’s not going to show up. Somewhere in between when we left yoga and now, she changed her mind and realized my mess of a life and immature, inexperienced ass aren’t worth it, and—
Buzz.
I wipe my palms on my denim mini and answer the door, my insecurity about my apartment increasing by about a billion. But when she walks in without saying anything and drops onto the ugly beige couch that came with the place, I realize even when she looks around, she isn’t really seeing anything at all. I take a seat opposite her, on the overstuffed armchair that’s become my only happy place in the apartment, and curl my legs up underneath me.
“Do you want a drink or anything?”
She lifts her water bottle. “I’m good, thanks.” She doesn’t drink from it, though. She just picks at the label, her eyes on the threadbare rug, her lips pressed together. “You never asked about when or how I came out.”
“I figured you’d tell me when you wanted to. It seems like the kind of thing that should come out in its own time.”
“I guess it’s time,” Bri says wryly, the corner of those lips that haunt my brain curling up just a little. She catches herself picking at the label and stops, lifting her eyes to meet mine. “I was a sophomore. I was dating a guy, and we were fooling around a lot, and I liked him okay. But the truth was that given the choice between hanging out with him and hanging out with my best friend, Candice, I chose Candice every time.
“At first I thought I was just being considerate, making sure not to choose a guy over my best friend or whatever. But then we’d be watching a movie, and all I could think about was how badly I wanted to slip my arm around her. When we were walking around, I’d just find myself staring at her hand, wishing I could take it, wanting us to be some sort of…unit or something. I just wanted more.”
I know those feelings. God, I know them. Even now, I look at all the empty space on the couch next to Bri and wish I were filling it, lying in her lap while she tells me this. To hear her talk about having these feelings for another girl burns me with jealousy, but I also know Bri’s never mentioned Candice, even casually, which suggests this story doesn’t have a happy ending.
Her fingers return to the label on her water bottle, absently picking. She obviously doesn’t like reliving this, but it seems important, so I try to help it along. “So you tried something?” I ask gently. “And she rejected you?”
Her responding laugh is filled with so much pain that I want to hunt Candice down and destroy her. “Nope,” she says with an edge to her voice that could shred that label into ribbons. “She did not reject me. She kissed me back that day, and the next day, and the next. And after every time, she would have some sort of crazy freakout about it—oh my God! What are we doing? I’m not gay! — and then it would just be more of the same. I’d promise myself that I’d stop hanging out alone with her, stop putting myself in these positions, but I couldn’t help it. She’d get drunk and leave me these voicemails begging me to come over, and I would. Every damn time.”
“All while you were dating that guy?”
“I broke up with him when I realized he was no longer the one I was constantly thinking about kissing. But as far as Candice goes, that was somehow the worst thing I could’ve done. She thought that was psycho-extreme, and that it meant I was a lesbian and obsessed with her. For some reason, everything was okay as long as I liked guys and she was my one random exception, but when she thought I didn’t like them at all anymore, somehow that changed everything.”
“But aren’t you bi? I mean, don’t you like guys?”
“I am, and I do, and the fact that she fucking erased that — that she acted like I’d been living some lie with exes I’d genuinely liked — didn’t exactly endear her to me, either. But she flat-out hated that I liked girls, and I didn’t want the fact that I also like guys to make it better. I wanted her to understand that I wanted her, but she was so hung up on what it all meant instead of how it all felt and…” She exhales deeply. “Anyway. We had a big blow-up and stopped talking. She told our friends that I was gay and had come on to her and…” She waves her hand. “I mean, you can imagine.”
“And you didn’t tell them the truth?”
She shrugs. “I guess I could have, but the shit that went down between me and her seemed so secondary to what I’d figured out about myself. And I do like girls. I didn’t want to take that back. I didn’t wanna be all confused and freaked out like she was. I wasn’t gonna pretend about anything like she did. And I haven’t.” She takes a deep breath.
“But I can’t be with pretenders, either. I can’t be with girls who are confused and freaked out. I get that you are and why you are, and I swear I’m not judging you. But I can’t step backward into that life. Not even for you.”
“I understand,” I say softly, and I really, really do. I don’t want to be that confused girl. I don’t wanna be freaked out. Hearing this only makes me crazier about Bri, for being out and proud about who she is. I want to be that girl, too, and I hate that this is a thing about me no one except Josh knows. “I haven’t told Ally,” I admit. “But I will. Whether I come out publicly or not, I’m going to tell her.”
Bri puts down the bottle and wraps her arms around herself, looking more fragile than I’ve ever seen her. “The thing is, Van, if you do, you’ll never be able to pretend this never happened. She’ll always know you’re faking it whenever you’re out with Zander or whoever. You can’t go back with an ‘oops, never mind.’ That’s how it is.”
“I know. That’s sort of the point.” I run my finger over the bumpy seam of the armchair, following the path with my gaze. There’s no way I can look Bri in the eye for this. “But Ally and I have a thing about our, um… our firsts. We weren’t even speaking last year when she lost her virginity to Liam, and she still told me immediately. And I know I’m screwing everything up, and that I have no idea where to go from here, but the fact that I’ve found someone I’d want to be my first… that’s the kind of thing we tell each other.” I snort a little as I dig a nail under a loose stitch. “Guess I really don’t believe in the whole ‘purity before marriage’ concept. For me, I mean.”