Not to mention, I’d defaulted on my loans.
I hated him.
Though I really had no right to. He’d been honest with me about everything—who he was, where he came from, what he wanted, why he stayed. Deep down, I knew he was wrong for me, but in my desperation to be coupled up, I ignored all my misgivings. Instead, I imagined we were something that we weren’t.
And where did that leave me? Standing on a street corner, scrolling through Rob’s new-and-improved Instagram account, wondering if an ayahuasca trip through the Amazon might help me turn my sinking ship around, too.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a stipend to pay for a flight to Peru. So I tucked my phone away and walked home through a fog of frustration. Because it figured: just when I thought I’d finally gotten over Rob, declared him irrelevant and placed him firmly in my past, he came bounding back into the present day, stunting my progress with memories of his inertia.
When I reached the blue bungalow, I stopped, resting my hands on the white picket fence out of habit. On a normal day, I’d try to daydream away all my bad feelings by pretending this house was mine. But this wasn’t a normal day. And I didn’t want to pretend anymore.
Trey’s wet suit hung from the eaves, swaying ever so slightly in the breeze. Through the sheer curtains hanging in the windows, I could see there was a light on, not in the front room, but somewhere in the back. Maybe the kitchen? I wasn’t sure of the floor plan, since I’d never actually been inside the house. The tours I’d taken had all been imaginary.
In that moment, more than anything, I wanted something real.
My body moved so fast, my brain could hardly keep up. Before I could register what was happening, I opened the gate, walked down the front path, and pressed my fingertip to the doorbell.
Trey opened the door, and his smile flooded the front porch with light. “Hey there.”
“Hey there.” Now that I was here, I had no idea why, or what to say. This was awkward, wasn’t it? Me, showing up unannounced and with no good reason.
Trey didn’t seem to think it was awkward, though. He simply invited me in with a casual sweep of his arm. “Come on in.”
This was it. My chance to see the inside of the home I’d lusted after for so many years. How many times had I refreshed the Airbnb page to study the photographs, or stood at the curb creating a fictional life for myself within these walls? In my fantasies, I’d crossed the threshold a thousand times. I didn’t think it would ever happen in the real world.
And now it was.
In a way, I’d manifested my dreams.
I stepped into the foyer, and Trey closed the door behind me, asking simple questions I couldn’t properly comprehend. Not because he wasn’t being clear, but because I was too distracted. This foyer...it hadn’t been part of the photo gallery. I didn’t even know it was here. Cute hall tree, though.
“You okay?” Trey’s look of concern snapped me back to reality.
“Yeah, totally fine. Sorry, I was just...” I waved my hand in the air, gesturing to the ceiling, the walls, the floor. “Taking it all in. I’ve only ever seen the inside of this place on Airbnb.”
“Oh. Well, let me show you around.” He stepped into the living room and I followed close behind. “It’s nothing special, really. It’s actually pretty small.”
“It’s lovely,” I said.
But he wasn’t lying. It was pretty small. A lot smaller than it looked in the photos. All the furnishings were there as I remembered them, but they were closer together than I had envisioned. The whole place was cramped.
Lovely, but cramped.
And now that I took a closer look, perhaps not quite as lovely as I initially thought. The couches were flat, not fluffy, and one of the cushions was stained with something that looked kind of like guacamole. The ash-wood floors were scuffed and scratched. There was a huge dust bunny under the coffee table, the top of which was covered in boxes of surf wax and what appeared to be a broken longboard fin.
“Ah, it’s a bit of a mess right now.” Trey followed my gaze and his cheeks went red. If he considered this messy, I was never letting him see my apartment. He might have had it condemned.
“Not at all,” I said. “It looks a little different from the pictures on the website, though.”
“Yeah, I hired a real estate photographer, some friend of a friend who knew how to angle the shots so the rooms looked nice and big.” He shrugged. “I guess it’s kind of deceptive, but no one ever complained the place was too small or anything.”
“It’s not too small, it’s perfect. It’s a hell of a lot bigger than my apartment, that’s for sure.” Of course, that wasn’t saying much.
I crossed the room, peeking across the breakfast bar into the kitchen, checking out the stainless steel appliances, the rustic wood dining nook. All the details I’d seen online were accounted for.
So why did I feel like something was missing? It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on, either. It was abstract and indiscernible, like a coat of shellac had been peeled away from every surface, every cabinet, every piece of furniture.
“Did you go swimming again?” Trey asked, eyes glinting. He remained lustrous, despite it all.
“No, why?”
He pointed to my legs, where grains of sand clung to my skin. “Looks like you came from the beach.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t go swimming.” No way was I going to tell him what I’d really been doing: standing on a rock in fugly shoes, posing with a bottle of kombucha, picking a stupid fight with my best friend over buying fake followers. How ridiculous. I was embarrassed to even admit it to myself.
You know what my problem was? I spent too much time in my head. Wanting, wishing, dreaming, visualizing. I lived in worlds that didn’t really exist, worlds I’d crafted from Instagram feeds or Airbnb listings or articles I read on SurfBuzz.com. I needed to spend more time in the real world, having real conversations with real people.
“I googled you.”
Oh, shit. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.
There was no unsaying it, though, and now I had to elaborate, since Trey was giving me major side-eye.
“Don’t look at me that way,” I said. “I told you, this is a normal part of human interaction.”
Trey breathed deeply, blew it out slowly. “Okay, then. What did you find?”
“Lots of pictures of you and Shayla.”
He cocked a brow, as if to say, What else did you expect?
“I also found an article. About what happened in Sydney.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed on a swallow. “‘Cantu Can’t Do.’ That the one you’re talking about?”