JESSA
At the door to my building, I turn back and watch as his Ferrari disappears up the sloped hill.
“What is happening to me?” I whisper.
No answers are forthcoming from the night. I sigh and walk inside.
The stairwell is dark, and I don’t reach out to flip the light switch. There’s something comforting about the darkness. Turning on the lights would just shatter the moment. Would reveal that I’m back in my depressingly normal life instead of in the lush fantasy world Anton calls reality.
Do I want to live in that fantasy? One night with him and I’m already completely immersed. He makes it seem possible for me to live that kind of life, too.
Even when my head knows that my heart is being stupid.
My phone rings, slicing through the silence. I jump about ten feet in the air with a stifled shriek, and when I land clumsily, I come within a fingertip’s grip on the railing of tumbling two flights of stairs to my death.
When my heartbeat finally gets back below two hundred, I pull it out of my purse and see Chris’s name on the screen.
“Hi.” I know I can’t avoid having this conversation with him, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.
“Jessa?” He’s trying and failing to hide his worry. “Where are you?”
“I’m out. Or, that is… I just got back home.”
He hesitates for a second. Suspicion suffuses the pregnant silence. “Well, which is it?”
“The second one.”
“Is that supposed to be convincing?”
“Sorry,” I say with a sigh. “It’s just been a long day. I really did just get home. I’m in the stairwell of my building right now.”
“You really are home?”
“Yes, why?”
“I just wanted to know if you’ve gotten rid of the phone yet,” he says. “You’ve been so quiet and you didn’t text me back.”
I frown. I didn’t even realize he’d texted me. “Where are you?”
“What do you mean? It’s past eleven. I’m home.”
“Wanna come over?”
He hesitates. “Now?”
“Yeah. Just to talk.”
I don’t know why I think it’s a good idea to have him come over to explain this. It would be so much easier to tell him over the phone. That way, I could hang up when things got too heated. Which I have every expectation they will.
But I want to try and be a better friend to Chris than I have been in the past. He deserves to be looked in the eye when I tell him what’s going on now. And if he disapproves—which of course he will because he has sense in spades and apparently I have less than none—I’ll just have to take it like a big girl.
“This sounds serious,” he says nervously.
“I think that depends on how you look at it.”
“I’ll be there in ten.” He hangs up before I can say anything else.
Sighing, I climb up to my apartment and almost run into Freya. She’s on her way down with a bag of trash in hand.