When Drew woke up the next morning, she was gone. He turned over in bed and reached for her, but her side of the bed was empty and cold. He sat up and looked around the room. The floor was bare in that corner where he’d been tripping over her suitcase all weekend.
“Goddamn it!” He got out of bed and looked around the apartment, but all evidence of her was gone. He looked for his phone and found it sitting in the middle of the coffee table. Waiting for him.
I’m sorry about how I acted at the party. You and I both know this is over. I had a great time with you, Drew.
That was it? That was motherfucking it? “I had a great time with you”??? He’d told her how he felt last night, and then she fucking disappeared in the morning like he was some one-night stand she couldn’t wait to get away from?
He lay flat on his back on the sofa, still naked.
How fucking perfect that the first time he’d really cared about a woman in years she’d fled the scene without even saying good-bye. He should tell Molly about this; she’d get a good laugh out of it.
He sat up and grabbed his phone. He was going to text Alexa back, tell her to get back here, that he wanted to talk to her, this was more than just a great time, why the fuck had she left before they had a chance to talk? He typed out the text to her in a flurry.
Right before he was about to hit send, he dropped the phone. He tucked it under the couch cushions and sat on it for good measure.
He flopped onto his back again and covered his head with a couch cushion. Why was he being so fucking emotional? He’d ended things with girls lots of times. Was this how they all felt when he did it?
He hoped not, otherwise he would feel like an asshole.
He felt his ass vibrate, sat bolt upright, and fished the phone from underneath it. Maybe she was at the airport and had second thoughts and was texting him to say that she was on her way back. Maybe she was right outside and was texting him to say she was about to knock on the door.
It was Carlos. Not Alexa.
Hey man, everything cool with you and Alexa? You disappeared from Heather’s last night.
Oh, fuck. On top of everything else, he had to apologize to Carlos.
Hey. Sorry I was an asshole last night.
He stood up to go flick the switch on the coffeepot, glad that he’d set it up yesterday afternoon.
We’re cool. I don’t think I’m the one you have to worry about, though.
He stared at his coffeepot, now brewing twice as much coffee as he would need.
Tell me about it.
He shook his head. Fuck Alexa. She wasn’t worth all of this. Fuck this emotional bullshit. He was going for a run. Maybe he’d run into Kat.
• • •
Alexa sat on the airplane at LAX and buckled her seat belt. She hoped this damn plane would take off soon so she wouldn’t grab her bag and run back to Drew’s. She’d been sitting at the airport for the past two hours, unshowered, her hair in a messy topknot, no makeup on. And the whole time she’d resisted the temptation to turn around and jump back under his covers and next to his warm, sleeping body before he even realized she was gone.
Last night before she’d gone to sleep, she’d planned on having an adult conversation with Drew. She wasn’t going to tell him how strong her feelings were for him, because he didn’t need to know that. The last thing she wanted was his pity.
She’d planned to tell him it was nothing against him, but she knew how he felt about relationships, and she couldn’t do this anymore. She would have just blamed the distance making it tough, and how she couldn’t keep flying up and down the state anymore, how this had been fun for a couple of months, but they both knew it couldn’t last much longer.
All of that had the benefit of being the truth. It just wasn’t the whole truth.
But then he’d crawled into bed with her in the middle of the night and put his arms around her and she’d broken down. All she’d wanted in that moment was to stay right there in his arms forever, to ignore everything in her head telling her this was never going to work and they were too different and wanted different things, and just give in to the warmth and security of his arms.
The impossibility of that had made her burst into tears. Her, Alexa Monroe, who never cried.
And when he said sweet things about making it work, she’d lost it completely and sobbed so hard she’d hiccupped. She knew what his version of “making things work” was—they’d just keep going the same way they’d been going for a while longer, a few more weeks, a month even, before she’d get his breakup speech and he’d disappear.
But she wanted so much for it to be true, that he did want to make it work for real. She wanted him to love her and for them to push through all of their problems together because they loved each other enough to be able to do it.
So she cried to mourn what could have been, how good his arms felt around her and his chest felt against her face, and how she would never get to feel that again. Her tears had revealed her feelings for him even more than words could have.
How humiliating. She’d cultivated her poker face for years, and in the most important moment she’d had in years, it had betrayed her in the worst possible way.
She’d woken up this morning with his arms still around her. She’d been too scared and ashamed to face him and have to see the look of pity on his face, or listen to his platitudes about how it wasn’t her, it was him, and how he hoped they could stay friends. So instead, she’d tiptoed out of his apartment early this morning and dragged her suitcase blocks away so she could get a cab to the airport.
Was that cowardly of her? Probably, but she’d rather be a coward than break down in front of him again, and in broad daylight this time, so he could see how bad she looked when she cried.
And then once she actually got to the airport, she had to pay way too much money to get her flight changed from her original one. Maddie, God bless her, had asked no questions when she’d texted her to pick her up from the airport.
Maddie was waiting at the curb when Alexa walked out of the airport. Maddie took a long look at her face when she got in the passenger seat.
“First: are we going to your house or my house?”
Alexa considered as Maddie drove out of the airport.
“Do you still need my car until you can pick yours up tomorrow? If so, my house.”
“Okay.” There was silence as Maddie got on the freeway toward Berkeley. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Alexa dropped her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
“I don’t know. I just want to be somewhere and not not cry.” She sighed. “I’ve spent the past five hours doing everything in my power to not cry. At his house, at the airport, on the plane.” She checked her phone again to see if he’d called. He hadn’t. “Now I can at least stop fighting it.”
Maddie reached for her hand and squeezed it.
“You want me to drive through In-N-Out on the way?”
Alexa shrugged.
“I’m not really hungry.”
Maddie shook her head.
“Now I know you’re in a bad place. I’m getting you In-N-Out whether you like it or not.”
When they walked through Alexa’s front door, everything in her house reminded her of Drew. The couch where he’d cried on her shoulder. The towel he’d stolen from the hotel for them to lie on in Dolores Park, now hanging up in her bathroom. The coffee table where he’d set her coffee while she was working. The hoodie that he’d left here on his impromptu trip and that she’d “forgotten” to bring back to him this weekend.
She lowered herself down on the couch and put her head in her hands.
“Lex.” She felt Maddie’s hand on her shoulder and leaned into it. Maddie wrapped her arms around her. They sat there like that on the couch for a while, not talking. Eventually, Alexa sighed.
“You were right—I want some French fries. You got us ketchup, right?”
“Of course.” Maddie ripped the bags open and unpacked the food on top of the makeshift place mats. “Now. Talk to me.”
Alexa dropped her head into her hands.
“Oh, Mad. I fucked it all up.”
Maddie pulled her head onto her shoulder.
“What happened?”
“It was all going okay. I mean, we hadn’t talked about anything, but the weekend was fine. Great. And then we went to the 4th of July party.” She thought about the party, and the humiliation hit her all over again. “And all of these other women . . . They were so nice . . . but they said . . . and he didn’t . . . I’d had too much sangria but . . .” Oh, look, she was sobbing again. Maddie folded her into her arms and let her cry on her shoulder until she was too tired to cry anymore.
She sat up and took a sip of her drink and ate a handful of cold fries.
“I guess I should start over again.” She told Maddie the whole story, except for the part about the sex they’d had when she was weeping. That seemed too intimate, too personal, even to tell Maddie. She managed to get through the whole thing without crying, but she’d probably cried out all of her tears.
“Honey.” Maddie stroked her hair. “Alexa, I love you. I would do anything for you. You know that, right?”
She sighed and nodded. She’d heard this before from Maddie. Enough to know to worry about what was coming next.
“Okay. Why didn’t you just tell him how you felt about him? And tell him what you wanted? Why did you just disappear this morning?”
She pushed herself to the other side of the couch.
“I knew what he was going to say, okay? I didn’t need to hear it.”
Maddie looked at her. She didn’t smile, or raise her eyebrows, or tilt her head. She just looked at her and wouldn’t let her look away.
“I was scared! Is that what you want to hear? Okay, fine: I was scared to talk to him! I was scared I would pour out my heart and he would tell me he hoped we could stay friends, I was scared I would see in his face when I started talking that he felt sorry for me, I was scared I’d lay myself bare for nothing, and I was scared I would reveal my whole self to him and he would avert his eyes.” She sighed. “I was scared.”
Maddie wrapped her back up in a hug.
“Oh, honey.”
Alexa rested her head on Maddie’s shoulder. Oh, look, she did have more tears in there.
Maddie sat up.
“Does cookie dough ice cream go better with red or white wine?”
Alexa half laughed, half sobbed.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
• • •
Drew saw Kat on his run, but he dodged behind a truck at the last minute to avoid her. He got home in as shitty a mood as when he’d left. He ordered an enormous Hawaiian pizza and opened a bottle of rum, mostly because Alexa hated both. By seven p.m. he never wanted to see another pineapple, but he finished the pizza just to spite her.
Not that she would ever know, but maybe somewhere she had a terrible taste in her mouth and it was thanks to him.
He dragged himself into the hospital on Tuesday morning and managed to avoid having a conversation with anyone but his patients and their parents until almost one o’clock. Of course that’s when Carlos burst into his office.
Fuck. He was grumpy and hungover. He didn’t need to deal with Carlos.
“Never learned to knock, huh?” He kept his head buried in his stack of files.
“How was the rest of your weekend? Everything cool with you and—”
Drew didn’t even want to hear her name.
“Leave it alone, Carlos.”
Carlos moved the stack of books Drew had put on the guest office chair to the floor and plopped down in the chair. Drew scowled. He’d left those books on the chair to keep anyone from sitting there. He should have known that that wouldn’t stop Carlos for a second.
“No, really, what happened? She looked pissed at the party even before you said—”
Drew looked up from the stupid files.
“I said leave it alone, Carlos.”
Did that stop him? No, of course not.
“Come on, man. You have a fight? It was bound to happen eventually. Tell Dr. Carlos about it. I’ll get you all fixed up.”
Drew couldn’t take it anymore. He’d slept like shit, because of the rum and the pizza and the absence of Alexa’s soft, welcoming body next to him, his stomach was full of nothing but strong coffee, he had the worst possible taste in his mouth, and Carlos apparently wasn’t getting the message that he didn’t fucking want to talk about it. He pushed himself up from his desk, and his chair slammed back against the wall behind him.
“I SAID, leave it alone.”
He threw open his office door, ignored the stunned look on Carlos’s face, and walked out of the hospital to his car. He had thirty minutes before his next patient; that was enough time to eat something disgusting and terrible for him.
• • •
Alexa walked into City Hall bright and early Tuesday morning. She’d been up since four, so at five thirty she’d given up on more sleep and had gotten ready for work.
At least she hadn’t dreamed about Drew, though her anxiety dreams all had very loud Drew subtext. Awake, he was never far from her thoughts. She kept thinking of what he would say about her presentation, if he’d thought about her at all, the look on his face when they’d made love that last time, the way he always held her as they slept. It was a lot easier to think about work.
She brought a carafe of coffee and a box of doughnuts into the office, along with a bag of doughnut holes. She ate the doughnut holes all morning while catching up on email and expense reports, and got so absorbed in the mindlessness of it that she jumped when Sloane exclaimed from her office doorway. “You brought doughnuts, thank GOD.” Sloane walked in and popped open the box. “Wait, all dozen are still here? You haven’t had one yet?”
If she hadn’t bought herself the bag of doughnut holes, she would have demolished the entire box of doughnuts before anyone else had gotten there.
Theo walked in right behind Sloane and dove into the doughnut box. He came up with the maple bar that she’d gotten for him.
“You’re a queen among women, Lex.”
“She is, isn’t she?” Sloane picked up the box. “Want me to bring this out to my desk? Need more coffee?” Alexa nodded to both questions. Theo dropped into her office chair as soon as Sloane left.
“Got your email last night. Did you see mine?”
She nodded. She’d seen it at four this morning when she’d woken up and checked her phone. They talked city council strategy as they drank coffee and ate their doughnuts, and argued about whether they could count on Councilman Goode to be on their side or not. The conversation soothed her. This she knew how to do. This she was good at.
Theo reached for her bag of doughnut holes.
“Hey, how was your weekend in L.A.?”
She shook her head. If she said anything to Theo, she might break down again, and work was the last place she wanted to do that.
Well, the last place was probably Drew’s bed at one in the morning with him there to witness it, but work was second to that.
“Oh no, what happened?” Theo asked.
She shook her head again before he could finish his sentence. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back and let go.
“I can’t, Teddy. Maybe later.”
He nodded.
“Okay. But you know that if you ever want to talk . . .”
She nodded down into her coffee. Yes, she did know.
Theo took a deep breath. “Okay, onto another topic that may also be sensitive: have you talked to Olivia about any of the TARP stuff yet?”
Alexa looked up from her coffee. Theo was one of the only other people who knew about the history with Olivia. She’d told him all about it on a drunken night last year, right after they’d both had a terrible day at work and when she was already anxious about Olivia coming to visit that weekend.
“What? No, why?”
He sat back in the chair, crossed his legs and uncrossed them, and sat up again.
“You don’t have to, of course. But I know we talked a while ago about how she might have some ideas that we hadn’t thought of.”
She started to interrupt, but he kept going.
“And also . . . we have all of those personal stories from people who went through programs like this and turned their lives around, and I thought maybe Olivia might be willing to write something up for us, or . . .”
Alexa looked down into her coffee again, gazing into the dark brown liquid like it was Dumbledore’s Pensieve. She knew Theo too well to be fooled by this. He was just making up reasons for her to talk to Olivia about TARP. But maybe he was right?
“I never thought of that,” she said, not looking up at Theo.
He stood up and walked toward her office door.
“You don’t have to, of course. But . . . maybe you want to? I think she’d be pleased to hear you’re doing this. I bet she’d be pretty touched.”
Alexa looked up at him, the tears threatening again.
“Somebody . . . somebody else said that, too. Maybe I will.”
Theo’s eyebrows went up.
“You told . . .” She looked down at her desk, and his voice trailed away. After a minute, he said, “Think about it. It might be good for you to talk to her about it.”
She’d think about it. Maybe Drew had been right about this. Damn him.
Theo was halfway through her office door before she stopped him.
“Teddy.”
He turned around.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. For . . . everything.”
“Anytime.”