It was nice, though.
Still, it was nothing, and he was drunk anyway, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what’s on his mind right now anyway.
“You’re staring at me,” I say to Nate, not even looking up.
I glance up just as he turns his attention back to his phone, but his cheeks flush a faint shade of pink. He glances back, eyes lingering on the iPad, my lesson plan open on the screen.
“Sorry. It’s just . . . you really don’t strike me as the teacher-y type, you know?”
I know, because it’s what Lucy tells me on a frequent basis, and it’s nothing I haven’t heard before from my family. My little brothers still think I’m scamming everybody, and that my real job is something bonkers and scandalous that I could never tell my family about.
But because he’s blushing, and he’s way too easy to tease, I cock my head and frown curiously at him and say, “No? What do you mean, Nate-Nathan-Nate?”
Nate almost seems to steel himself for a minute, stalling by reaching for his mug of tea, taking a long, long sip. He sets it back down and then says to me, not quite able to look at me, “I don’t know, you just seem a little . . . chaotic, I guess.”
Oh.
Oh wow.
WOW.
Free-spirited, absolutely. Fun and fancy-free, you know it. A zest for life, 100 percent. Immature, even, I’ve heard that plenty.
But straight-up chaotic?
Ouch.
“You know,” he goes on, not noticing that I’m sat here like a slack-jawed idiot, “just your whole attitude. The whole persona you’ve got going, the party girl thing, like you don’t care about anything. It’s just . . . not what you’d expect from someone who teaches little kids, I guess.”
He’s right, my whole persona is major party girl vibes. Wine Aunt, like that one guy told me on a date. But the way Nate says it . . .
It’s not with that sort of long-suffering “we love you anyway” sigh I’m used to getting from my parents, or my housemates, or Lucy and her family. It’s not reverent and jealous, like a few of my friends who feel like they settled down too quickly.
It’s not particularly judgemental either. If anything, it’s very matter of fact, the way Nate says it.
And it doesn’t sound like such a good thing.
I’m thrown back to Lucy answering the phone last Sunday and immediately assuming I was in trouble and needed to borrow money.
It’s a funny, sweet little in-joke.
But it’s also totally, almost painfully true.
And I get the feeling if I were to joke about it out loud—not just to Nate, but to—well, anyone—it would sound kind of sad.
Well, what does he know?
Who does he think he’s calling chaotic?
Anybody would seem chaotic to him. With his meticulously structured day and his carefully ironed T-shirts and his hair-free shower drain and crumb-free butter and yeah, no shit, Nate, of course I seem a little wild, compared to you. We can’t all be a stick in the mud. He’s not even a stick in the mud, I think, he’s—he’s Weetabix. He’s plain, nasty, Weetabix, and I am porridge with fresh fruit and syrup and all the trimmings, and he’s just jealous.
I’m jealous.
I chew on my response for a little too long; Nate cringes, his shoulders hunching and he twists toward me, cradling his tea in his hands.
“I just meant—”
“I know what you meant,” I say, my voice sounding unusually cold and curt. I would love to stand up, toss my hair, tell him where he can stick his stupid opinions and what a fantastic fucking human being I am, that what he thinks of as chaos is just pure enthusiasm and I’m so sorry his life is so mundane, and storm on out of here with my head held high, ready to tell my friends about what a prick Honeypot Guy is.
Except, I can’t.
(And he’s not that much of a prick.) Nate begins to stammer out an apology, and I think of all the brilliant stories I have that could prove him wrong. The all-night bender the night before the school nativity last Christmas, and showing up to school in the same outfit, wrapped in tinsel and with glitter on my face, and everyone thinking I was just in a particularly festive mood. The massive party I threw for my friend Jaz when she officially qualified as a doctor, which she claimed made all the years of studying and training worth it. The Beanie Baby I tracked down for my mum for her sixtieth birthday, because she loves collectables like that, and I had to go all the way to Edinburgh to collect it, and it cost me one hundred pounds plus a signed McFly CD, and my tire blew out halfway home and I didn’t have roadside assistance so got my dad to come and pick me up and help fix it, in the middle of the night.
My life is a myriad of adventures.
It’s goddamn delightful.
My bank balance, not so much. The constant leak in the kitchen sink and the permanent weird musty smell lingering in our lounge, not so much. But what do those things matter?
But anyway, I tell myself, I don’t need to prove myself to Nate.
Nate-Nathan-Nate, the one-night stand I’d talked to for a week or so before coming here, who doesn’t even have a single chocolate bar in his kitchen cupboards, he’s so boring.
“It’s fine,” I tell him, to shut him up.
Nate falls quiet quickly, but is clearly uncomfortable. And I can’t say I blame him. I’m scowling and clenching my jaw so hard I can practically see the storm clouds clustering around me.
I give my teeth one last grind and pry my jaw apart, doing my best to smile at him instead.
“Do you want to watch Tiger King?”
apartment #17 – serena
Chapter Twenty-six
My final meeting of the day is a drag, and one that is too easy to tune out when I’m not in the room with everybody.
Distracted, I do the only rational thing I can think of to try to resolve this whole situation.
I make a list.
There are a lot of reasons it’s not going to work out between me and Zach. So many reasons.
Here are a few of them:
1) He’s easygoing to the point of simply not giving a damn about things, which honestly, at this point, is just infuriating. I don’t want someone agreeing to get married to me because “whatever, I don’t care,” just to appease me. I want someone who wants to marry me. Is that really so much, so impossible, to ask? And is it really so absurd of me to be bothered by how not bothered he is about it, how much he doesn’t have an opinion past: “Well, it’s just a lot of money, isn’t it? Look at what some of our friends have spent. But, like, yeah, I’m sure they always have a nice day and everything.”
2) And on that note—it’s impossible to have an argument with him sometimes. Which is nice, sure, I guess, because the most I get is a snarky retort. But isn’t that part of what got us into this mess? Because we can’t talk about the important things? Sure, I get that whose turn it is to take the bins out might not be life or death, but I have a thousand and one examples of things like that, and Zach’s usual eye roll and the fact he gives in if I’m belligerent enough (or, I get sick of bickering and I’m the one who gives in) means the disagreement ends there, but it’s never really solved.