I keep waiting for the familiarity to strike me, but it doesn’t. I’ve thought about that night a hundred times, maybe a thousand, but right now I’m back in the place where it happened and it just seems far away.
“It’s different in here,” I tell Levi, looking around as we walk to the pool tables in the back.
“Interesting,” he says. “I guess things change.”
It’s busy, but not crazy. We get a pool table with no problem. Eli immediately organizes some sort of tournament, the structure of which I don’t bother to follow, and informs Daniel and Levi that they’ll be playing each other while he, Caleb, and I drink beers and watch.
“How’s Thalia?” I ask, since I haven’t yet today.
“Good,” he says, and smiles like he can’t help it. “I mean, she’s going a little crazy, finishing her thesis and waiting to hear back from graduate programs, but she’s good.”
I still find it strange that he’s dating someone still in college, but I keep my mouth shut.
“And you?”
“I’m actually okay,” he says, taking a sip of beer, then putting it down on the table. “I’m getting a couple of recruiting calls a day from people who want to pay me way more than academia ever did.”
“Cyber security stuff?” Eli asks.
“Some of it,” Caleb says. “Apparently there’s more demand for mathematicians than just teaching other people how to be mathematicians.”
“So you’re really okay?” I ask, and he laughs.
“I really am,” he says. “I mean, I don’t have a job yet, and it won’t be the same, but my life didn’t implode the way I was afraid it might.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I jumped and didn’t know where I would land,” he admits, watching Daniel miss a shot by about six inches. “There were times when I was afraid I gave up too much, but now that I’m on the other side it feels kind of good. Whatever happens, it was the right thing.”
We all drink. Levi lines up a shot, takes it. Balls click together, but from his frown, I suspect that whatever he was hoping for didn’t happen.
“Relationships always have an element of diving into the unknown and praying for the best,” Caleb says, and gives me a look. It’s pretty similar to the look Levi gave me ten minutes ago. Almost as if they’re related or something.
I’m tempted to tell him that I know what happens. The same thing always happens and I wind up here, drinking with my brothers, wishing it hadn’t.
Except the bar’s changed. My brothers have changed. Daniel’s got two kids. Eli’s happily married to his old nemesis, Levi’s engaged to his best friend’s sister, and even Caleb has a girlfriend. It’s me who’s still stuck, holding onto old hurts like they’re a lifeline.
I’m not going to look over and see her with another man, his ring on her finger. That was a different bar, a different Delilah, a different time.
It’s a strange, slow shock when I realize the last thing: that was a different me.
Pool balls click. Daniel whoops and Levi laughs. Eli makes some sort of notation, and then grabs my shoulder.
“You,” he says, and points at the pool table.
We play. I don’t excel and I don’t embarrass myself, but I’m glad to have something to do with my hands, something to think about besides how time moves and we bend to it. Besides how the past echoes through everything but doesn’t have to shape it.
“Seth,” Eli says. I’m bending over the table, trying to line up a complicated shot that’s almost certainly going to fail.
“Eli,” I say back. I wonder if I need more of that blue chalk stuff. It always helps, right?
“She your soulmate?”
I take a deep breath, ignore his attempt at a psych-out, and take the shot. It doesn’t work the way it did in my head.
“What kind of question is that?” I ask. I gesture at the table, waiting for him to take his turn.
He doesn’t. He leans against it, the end of his pool cue on the floor, and spins it between his fingers.
“A yes-or-no one,” he says.
“Fine. Yes,” I say, mimicking his stance.
Eli grins.
“I lied. It was a trick question,” he says. “There’s no such thing as soulmates.”
“Then why —”
“I wanted to see what you’d say,” he says. “Because if you said no, then fuck it, have another beer and forget the whole thing. But you’ve got a whole different problem.”
I just wait. Eli’s clearly winding himself up to something, and it can be best not to get in his way.
“There’s no such thing as soulmates,” he repeats. “And that means nothing is going to save you. Not fate, not true love, not your destiny being written in the stars or some nebulous concept of she’s the one. The only thing that matters is whether you want to be with her enough to work for it.”
He grabs his beer from a side table and drinks, watching me.
“So romantic,” I finally say.
“Effort is romantic,” he says. “Putting in the work is romantic. Talking through it is fucking romantic, Seth.”
“Take your turn,” I say.
Eli shrugs, puts his beer down, and plays pool.
He kicks my ass. I have another beer, and keep looking over at the spot where she was sitting all those years ago.
Only I can’t remember where, exactly, she was. I can’t remember what it looked like when I first saw her, whether she was standing or sitting. The tables have changed, the layout has changed, the decor has changed.
I want to be angry, but I can’t even remember how. All I can do is wish she were here.
“Okay,” I say, coming up to Levi and Caleb at a table.
They halt their conversation — probably about trees or tents or advanced degrees, I don’t know — and look at me.
“I need your help,” I tell them.
“Sure,” Caleb says.
“Building something.”
“What do you need built?” Levi asks.
I tell them.
They look at each other. Levi frowns. Caleb shrugs.
“It’s not a good idea,” Levi says. “It’s pretty irresponsible.”
“You agreed to build a nine-year-old a trebuchet,” I point out.
“I’ll do it,” Caleb says. “It’ll be fun.”
Levi sighs. He takes another drink of his beer.
“All right, I’m in,” he says.
Chapter Fifty
Delilah
“This feels kind of cutesy,” I say, examining a sticker pack that says Way to go! In big pink letters.
“Then don’t use that sticker,” Ava explains, patiently.
“You never know, he might like it,” Lainey points out.
I look down at what I’ve got in my cart: an overpriced, flat-bound journal with a classy black cover, glue, corner stickers, watercolor pens, washi tape, decorative paper, and a multipack of glitter.
The glitter was Ava’s doing. She seems to think I’m going to need it at some point, and frankly, I don’t know that she’s wrong. Glitter’s a pain in the ass, but I like it.