“Which is all well and good until you meet someone you actually like.”
I thought back to Danielle. We were supposed to just be casual, but then she said she’d fallen for me. It was a fine line, I was realizing, one that up until this point I’d always done a good job of navigating, but now I seemed to have found myself on the other side.
“It just seems like you’re denying yourself something that you actually want,” Tara said. “I mean, I can tell you like Chloe. Pretty much anyone can—all they have to do is see you guys together. So, maybe just stop being afraid and go for it. You don’t really strike me as the type of guy that would let fear hold him back from anything.”
“I’m usually not. Which is why this is kind of throwing me for a loop.”
“Listen,” Tara said. “You should just talk to her, okay? Just go over there. You probably don’t know where she lives, do you? Here, I’ll tell you. It’s not that difficult to find.”
She grabbed one of the napkins from the holder and pulled a pen from her purse. She wrote down the address and then slid the napkin across the table. I took it and looked down at her bubble print.
“Just use Google maps if you don’t know where it is,” she said. “Well! I’m glad we got that out of the way. Now, there’s one more thing that I wanted to talk to you about.”
“I really should get back to the shop.”
“Okay, okay. This will only take a minute. I don’t know if Chloe mentioned this to you, but I had ... I had posted a picture of you on Facebook.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I took it down. It was only up for like a day. Maybe two. I didn’t put your name or anything, and you could barely even see your face anyway. So you don’t have to feel too violated or anything. But, I am sorry.”
I shrugged. “It’s fine. I actually do have a Facebook page. Well, it’s for the shop, but I log on there sometimes. Customers like to post pictures of their tattoos, and Helena says it would look bad if we didn’t at least ‘like’ the post. I’m not one of those people who’s completely paranoid about social media.”
“Oh.” She brightened. “So would you care if I reposted those pictures?”
“Why do you want to post a picture of me?”
“Because you’re hot. And because I’m trying to make someone else jealous.”
“I see. You think that’s a smart idea?”
“Seeing as he left me for someone else, hell yeah, I do. Especially because I was actually considering spending the rest of my life with this person. Not to mention that we’d talked about this, like, had many conversations. All the while he’s planning on leaving me. I mean, who would do something like that?”
“You’re a little young to be settling down with someone, aren’t you?”
“People settle down all the time. I know some girls my age are having babies and shit.”
“Yeah, but not you. You don’t seem the type. At least not for a long time, anyway. And let me tell you this: I might not know a lot about being in a relationship with someone, but I have seen what jealousy can do to a person, and it ain’t pretty. If your ex is out there having a good time, I’d let it go if I were you.”
She gave me a patient smile, as though I had no clue what I was talking about. “Right, but Michael always comes out on top, you see. He thinks he can get away with anything.”
“Then maybe you should just let him keep on thinking that.”
“If I was a nice girl, maybe I would—but I’m not. Or if he had actually been up front with how he felt, I’d probably be a little more gracious about the whole thing, but I really can’t stand that shit. Especially considering we were together for almost two and a half years. That’s a long time to spend with someone just to have them decide one day that they’re completely over you, despite having just told you recently that you were going to spend the rest of your lives together.”
“Fair enough.”
“Anyway, enough about that whole situation. Take a day or two to think about it if you want, but talk to Chloe. Okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chloe
I tried not to think about him. I tried to keep myself preoccupied. Down at the art center, I worked on my sculpture, but now, everything seemed all wrong. I sat on the stool and remembered him there, next to me. I remembered the day after we’d had sex, how emboldened I’d felt when he’d shown up here, how I’d just decided to give him a blow job, even though I’d never done something like that before. And yes, a part of me had been nervous, had been afraid that it would be obvious I had no clue what I was doing, or he’d tell me to stop or that I wasn’t doing it right. But then I started doing it and it hadn’t seemed that difficult, and I could tell he liked it—a lot. And I wanted to keep doing those sorts of things with him, but now it seemed like that might’ve been the last time, and I didn’t even really know what had happened.
I rested my forearms on the work table and then put my head down on my arms. There was a tightness in my chest and an ache in my throat and I felt like I needed to do something but I didn’t know what. It was an awful feeling, actually, wanting to go back in time and do something differently to make the current situation somehow different. But I’d gone down there and tried to talk to him, and he hadn’t wanted anything to do with me. And then that woman had walked in, who was about a thousand times hotter than I could ever hope to be. Neither of them had to say anything—it was pretty obvious what was going to happen. Was this what dating people was all about? All this fucking drama and turmoil and shitty feelings?