MY PATTERN BOOK WAS GONE. It wasn’t in my purse, or on Connor’s rolling cart. It wasn’t buried in the futon’s perpetually messy blanket pile. I scrounged through the bottom of my messenger bag, fingers fumbling over the disarray of useless pens and knitting needles and a goddamn ball of yarn, all tangled up with a king’s ransom of tampons, which were finally being put to use after a three-day stress delay that had me frantic over every possible outcome. Try keeping your eyes open around the clock after a dozen hours spent vomiting up chunks of your own soul. Then try doing that while still embracing the acid bath misery as preferable to the bloodless, ominous alternative. Girl power.
“It’s not here. I can’t find it. Every day of my life is a collection of things I need that I can’t. Goddamn. Find.” I upended the bag, spilled its contents onto the futon. Nothing. No pattern book, no scrap paper, no motherfucking phone charger, and why. Why was everything always so lost. “Goddamn it.”
Connor paused in his sketching, concern tweaking the corners of his mouth.
“Hey. Everything okay?”
“No, everything is not okay. My notebook isn’t in here, and my piece-of-shit phone is dead, and I can’t. I can’t make a supply list, Connor, and I need to make a fucking supply list.”
“Jesus, calm down. There’s a notebook in the metal room. Or, here—go ahead and use this.”
I glared at the sketchbook he offered me, then redirected the glare his way, stuffing my things haphazardly back into the bag.
“I’ll wait. Wouldn’t want to stumble upon my sideboob. Or Sybil’s sideboob, or whoever else’s sideboob is in there.”
That one soared out with unexpected wrath, freeing itself from a nest I’d tried so fucking hard not to build. I tossed my head and stared him down, ignoring the spread of heat across my chest—it wasn’t my business. It never had been, and the number of fucks I had the right to give sat solidly in the negatives. Still, that the issue hadn’t long ago burst into bitter flight was nothing short of miraculous.
“Pardon?” Connor withdrew, eyeing me carefully. “Lane, are you okay? Who’s Sybil?”
“You know who Sybil is. You know.”
“I actually don’t. Paul.” His voice was calm and unhurried, yet wary, pitched neutral in the way you’d communicate a plan of action when staring down a poised and rabid dog. “Do you know a Sybil?”
“I do not.” Paul’s head did the slow lean out from its usual place behind the sculpture-in-progress. “Can we back up to the sideboob part?”
“You’ll have to ask your boy about that,” I sneered. “Sadie told me he drew mine in his little book. Why he drew it is anybody’s guess.”
“What the fuck?” Connor blinked at me, genuinely bewildered. “I never did that. I drew you, but not your—here, take a look.”
I took the book from his outstretched hand and flipped through it. Experimental sketches and lists of ideas. A series of steampunk animals, composed of gears and bolts and clockfaces. Strange furniture. Dozens of pages of jewelry designs, some marked with names and measurements and price quotes, some no more than half-formed ideas. Grey and Sadie’s wedding ring extravaganza. And me.
Me in profile, me sleeping, me laughing, me knitting. Me gazing out the Forester window at a starry sky. Most clothed, some hinting at the lack of them—a bare shoulder; the line of my spine; the dip of my waist, smoothed into an exposed hip. The closest thing to a nude study was a profile sketch of me in his bed, propped on my elbows, smirking over my shoulder at him. I was naked but covered, swathed in a blanket from the hips down, everything above my rib cage hidden by the swoop of my hair and the angle of my arm. No sign of my breast. Not a hint of anything.
“I’m not finding sideboobs in here,” I muttered, eyes darting to Connor, then Paul, then back again.
“Because there aren’t any. Apparently, the word means something different to my sister.”
“Oh. Well. I’m sorry I yelled about it, then. I’m not feeling very—” I swallowed hard against a surge of nausea. Tiny lights skittered along the edges of my vision. “Sorry about the Sybil thing too, I guess.”
“Lane, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never met a Sybil in my—” Comprehension and fatigue drifted together over his face, blending into a sigh. “Sabine. You mean Sabine.”
“I do in fact mean that name, thank you very much.” Way to make your outburst matter, Lane. Fuck, I was tired.
“Yeah. Thanks, Sadie.” Connor left his stool and sat next to me, feet on the floor, leaning backward on his hands. A casual pose that contradicted every facet of his face. “It’s no secret, okay? I’ll tell you all about her, but I’m not sure why you care.”
“I don’t.” The lie leaked out on the heels of an uneven breath. I swallowed and rubbed my eyes, redirected my words so they veered closer to the truth. “I mean, I don’t need to hear about her. It’s not an issue.”
“Good, then we can drop it. Or if you’re still dying to make your little list, I’ll go get that paper, and you make me one of all the guys you used to fuck. How many sheets do you need?”
The words prickled over my scalp, ate a trail straight to the base of my spine as I swiveled to meet his glare. Paul melted silently out of sight.
“Really? Really, Connor? I can’t even express how little that has to do with you.”
“I’m aware. Just like Sabine has nothing to do with you.” His eyes darkened. “But as long as we’re on the subject, at least Sabine no longer lives with me.”
“That’s not the same thing.” I floundered over the words, which only deepened his glare.
“You’re right, it’s a very different thing.” His silence was pure restraint, lasting all of a breath before exploding into anger. “I hate it, Lane. I hate that he’s all over your space, and I hate the way you look at him, and I fucking hate how he has a special name for you.”
“What, ‘Elaine’? It’s my name, Connor. My dad calls me that.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve never met your dad, aside from that two seconds on Halloween. You’ve never bothered to introduce us.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to be introduced. We agreed this wasn’t that kind of relationship.”
“It’s not.”
“Then why would you say what you said to me?”
The words burst out of me—poisoned marbles, spilling across the floor. We’d been dancing around that moment since it happened; it hung between us like smoke, stubborn and dark and hard to breathe.
“Okay, time to stretch my legs.” Paul emerged once more from behind the sculpture, grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. “This is out of my jurisdiction.”
“Fuck. I’m sorry.” I stood and caught his arm as he passed on his way to the door. “This is my fault. I’ll go. You can—”
“Shut up, Laney. Go on, work it out.” His giant arms tugged me in, squeezed the fight from my bones as his head ducked to my ear. “He’s a mess, but he’s your mess if you want him. If you don’t, you need to tell him. Now.”
He left me standing there, afraid to turn and face the silence at my back. The headache spread from my temples, stampeded inward behind eyes that burned and itched and pleaded to close. I turned, braced for the glare, or the stonewall, or any variation of ocular weaponry native to Connor’s arsenal.
Instead, I found him downcast. A vulnerability I’d never seen bloomed bright across his face, working its way into my bones.
“Why,” I said, softer. “Why that moment, of all the moments in the world?”
“I know. I was never going to—but, Lane, it was all I knew to say.” He raised his head, hesitant and hopeful, shredding me. “Loving you was the only thing that made sense.”
“Oh.” There it was again—that same warm thrill spinning through me, slipping along the current of his words. “What happened to keeping it casual?”
His eyes fell closed at the reminder of how we’d begun—the morning after, at the market, when we’d stood together and proclaimed ourselves nothing more complicated than friends.
“Is that still all this is for you?”
“No,” I said, quiet. “It’s more.”
“Come here.” He opened his arms, and I fell to my knees in front of him, leaned against the familiar angles of his chest. He hunched around me, cheekbone a hard ridge against my scalp, hands smoothing down the length of my hair. My fingers clenched his shirt reflexively; I forced them back to neutral. “Tell me what you want. Total honesty.”
“I don’t know what to say.” I pulled back and searched his face, felt a burst of panic as I watched his walls go up, incrementally, at the sound of my guarded voice. Felt him fall away from me with every short, barely controlled breath. “Don’t look at me like that, Connor. I wasn’t expecting any of this.”
“Neither was I—and I know I fucked up, letting myself feel these things. It’s my problem, not yours.” His jaw clenched, biting off the ends of the words. “Yet here we are.”
“Hey. I’m only saying that—”
“No, you’re right. You made your intentions clear from the first. And that’s fine—that’s fair. But it’s too much.”
He leaned back, unwound my arms from his body and stood, pulling away. Time slowed; I faltered, blinked through a disorienting glow as he crossed to his drafting table, as if about to start a fresh sketch. Instead, he leaned over, pressed his hands to the table surface, braced his shoulders against a sudden tremor.
I shifted to face him, gasping at the sudden dig of metal against my shin—one of his X-Acto knives, peeking from under the futon. I’d knelt on the handle. I scooped it up and stood, fiddling it absently between my fingers. A string of words fought its way to the surface, only to knot around itself and emerge backward and sideways and utterly wrong.
“Connor, when we first started this, I wasn’t looking for anything real. You know that. You said you were fine with it, you didn’t care about the whole thing with Grey, but—”
“Don’t you say his name. Don’t you dare fucking say anything about him to me. Ever. Are we understood?”
“Excuse me? ‘Are we understood?’ ” His words lit the fuse of my fury and blew it back across the room. “Should I tell you in person to fuck yourself, or do you prefer a text?”
“Goddamn it. Lane—”
“Stop. You do not get to say you love me, then speak to me like that. Do it again, and it’ll be the last time you see my face. How’s that for total honesty?”
I saw rather than heard him sigh, and even the soft rise and fall of his shoulders made me ache, nudging my anger downstream. Everything was so fucked up—if he turned around, we could at least try to dig our way through to something better. I’d tell him every thought I’d ever had, then I’d kiss him until the stars went dark. He’d never have reason to doubt me again, if he would simply turn and look at me.
Instead, he spoke, and ripped the world from beneath my feet.
“You should leave now.”
“Connor, don’t do this. Look at me. Please.”
“Go.”
And so I did. I grabbed my bag, turned and left, and that was it. Connor and Lane, barely a thing, ended before we’d really begun. The fallout of total honesty.
I was outside before I knew it, was halfway to the road when the car swerved in, lunging into a parking spot like a dying beast collapsing in its burrow. It ejected a bitter, furious mystery of wild hair and wilder eyes, and I almost didn’t know her until we were toe-to-toe.
Sadie and I hadn’t really talked since the morning after the party, when she’d woken, hungover, wrapped in my sheets. Neither she nor Grey had mentioned any change in their relationship status, and I’d figured she’d swept my part in that whole mess of a night briskly beneath her already lumpy rug. Now she stood before me in pieces, and I could barely think of a reason not to crumble right alongside her.
“Sadie? Are you okay?”
“Am I okay? Well, Lane Jamison, that is a very good question. Tell you what—why don’t you go ahead and ask your fucking brother if I’m okay?”
Her eyes spit fire; her voice tore holes in my already threadbare facade.
“What the hell is your problem?”
“Lord Jesus, give me strength. Where should I even begin?” She gave me the once-over, took in my swollen eyes and clenched jaw, the stiff, cross-armed reticence of my stance. “What’s your problem?”
I raised my chin and met her gaze, pain and anger clashing between us. “Why don’t you go ahead and ask your fucking brother?”
I stormed past her, boots determined on the gravel, then the grass, then the road. To hell with it—the city wasn’t that big. The warehouse lay square in one of the shittier parts, of course, but who even gave a fuck.
I was halfway to West Asheville before I realized I still had the X-Acto clenched in my sweaty hand. I shoved it in a side pocket of my bag, shook away another surge of tears, kept on walking over the road’s uneven shoulder. Ignored the pebble that had somehow worked its way into my boot. I was so tired. So very, very tired. But if I could keep myself going, keep my blood pumping and my feet moving, I’d be fine. I’d be stellar.
If I could hold on long enough to make it home, everything would be okay.