“Considering you walked back into my life out of nowhere yesterday, yes, it is going to be like this for a little while.”
Except even I wanted to let it go and just let us start all over again. Not only did I lose the romantic relationship I’d had with Angel over the last several months, but I’d lost our friendship too, which had always felt easy and casual and refreshing, if subject to ebbs and flows. But it was always there. Until it wasn’t. There were no more cheeky comments on my Instagram posts or funny little random TikToks waiting for me in my DMs.
And I was all too aware of my inability to let things go. Just like a moment ago, I constantly said the kind of things I always wanted to chomp back in my mouth like a Hungry Hungry Hippo. But I’d always had a sharp tongue, and after leaving my life behind as Jeffrey in my itty-bitty small town, I swore to never again make myself smaller or more palatable for anyone else.
Angel had hurt me, and as much as I wanted to forgive him, I didn’t know if I could ever let go of how insignificant he’d made me feel.
“I thought we were just a fling, and I thought we were that way because that’s how you wanted it,” Angel finally said as he finished off the last of the bandages. He straightened up and met my eyes. “Luca, you’re this impossible to impress person. Do you know that? You can come across as cold—or indifferent even—yet somehow, you’re this sort of . . . light, I guess. And you draw people in like moths to a flame.”
I both hated and loved his description of me, because yes, my younger self would feel so vindicated. All I’d ever wanted was to be as coolly magnetic as Marlene Dietrich in the first forty minutes of a black-and-white movie.
And yet, I was so disappointed that Angel couldn’t see through that facade to me.
“I thought you wouldn’t even care that I left,” he finished. I could hear the honesty in his voice, see it shining in his eyes. And it fucking baffled me. How, how, how, could he think I wouldn’t care?
I pulled my hands back from him and stood. “Angel, I invited you to Vanya’s birthday party! I was trying to make plans with you. How could I not care?”
“I thought you were being nice! A party invite at some artist’s house—that’s basically how art students say hello, you know.”
“I’m never nice!” I began to shout, but then whispered that last word as I realized they were filming an epic threesome in the next room over.
“I’m sorry I can’t read your mind,” he said, beginning to lose his patience with me.
I could have sat down. I could have talked through this with him and truly tried to understand how he could possibly think I wouldn’t care where he went and what he did after spending the best month of my life with him.
But I could feel the tears brimming already, and I hated myself for it, so instead, I threw up my arms, and said, “Big mistake, Angel. Big. Huge.”
Chapter Six
I stayed on set for the rest of the day brooding until flaking out and telling Sunny I needed to go home. It didn’t matter, because apparently Angel was just so damn good at my job. He was a natural! A savant! A prodigy!
Okay, no one actually said those things, but if I wasn’t already pissed at him, I would have become pissed at him for being so good at my job.
So I went home. And I wallowed.
I nearly called the emergency number Vanya left behind, but sadly the only person my emotional meltdown was an emergency for was me.
I knew how people perceived me. That wasn’t news. The problem with people thinking I was untouchable was that no one bothered to think twice about hurting me. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that I cared too much.
And for Angel not to see that . . . for him not to recognize that in me made me wonder if he’d ever taken the time to understand me in the way I thought I had understood him.
That night I fell asleep with my phone in my hand, clumsily scrolling through photos of us in a bathtub back in Christmas Notch. Each photo was blurrier than the last, with suds smeared across the lens and our cute selfies turning steamy as he nibbled up my neck, his teeth nipping at my jawline.
When I woke up, I was throbbingly hard and made the immediate decision to text Sunny and let her know I wouldn’t be coming in today.
She asked if I was okay, and I simply replied: I am unwell.
I felt that covered a whole host of reasons to play hooky. My unresolvable boner. My broken heart. My bruised ego.
I was unwell, indeed.
The next day I called in sick too. Sunny had texted to let me know what a great job Angel did in my place, and even though it was meant to comfort me, it made me feel even shittier.
I spent the morning curled up on my couch in my favorite caftan and rewatching my favorite episodes of The Great British Bake Off, flipping through old bridal magazines as I did. My hands were starting to feel usable again, so I opted to make peanut butter ramen, my favorite comfort food, rather than order out.
Just as I was settling in for an afternoon of Love Island, there was a knock at my door.
I lived in a Silver Lake pool house apartment behind the home of a retired voice-over actress who made a small fortune as the voice of CVS. She was rarely home and hadn’t raised my rent since I’d moved in three years ago. I had access to her pool and I also had air-conditioning. It was pretty much perfect. But in order to find me, you had to know I was back here.
When I opened the door, I found Angel standing on my doormat that read, “Where the hell have you been, loca?” (My favorite quote from the Twilight franchise.)
“Sunny said you were sick,” he blurted as I stood there with my arms crossed over my chest.
His eyes trailed over my body, hovering on my hands for a moment.
I held a fist to my mouth and let out a pathetic cough, cough. “So sick.”
Angel studied me for a moment longer, and with each passing second, I could feel the invisible armor I always seem to have beginning to crack. If only he could see it too.
“I guess you might as well come in,” I told him.
He shoved his fists into his pockets and shook his head. “Nope. If I go in there . . . I can’t trust myself in there with you alone, and I’m pretty sure you can’t either. Besides . . .” He peered past me to the nest of blankets and bridal magazines on my chartreuse and pink plaid sofa. “You could probably use some air.”
I squinted at the bright blue sky behind him. He wasn’t wrong. “Give me ten,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in?”
He shifted a moment before nodding.
After a quick-ish change into some platformed Converse, black jeans, and a white shirt that said feral in very small letters, I reappeared at the door, donning my sunglasses with as much dignity as I could muster. “I’m ready.”
Outside, Angel led me to his old Bronco, a Teddy Ray Fletcher hand-me-down, parked out front. “Can you swim?”
“Um, I am not wearing water appropriate attire. These are Marc Jacobs Converse.”
He glanced down at my feet. “I didn’t say we were actually going swimming.”
We stood at the entrance of the Echo Park boathouse under a sign for swan pedal boat rentals as the employee handed us each a musty old life jacket. “And these are required?” I asked, holding mine away from my body so I didn’t inhale any rare and deadly must-germs.