Under the Lights

It feels like being punched in the gut, hearing her say that, all but confirming my suspicions. “I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make things weird. It’s just that I feel like I’m disappointing everyone on earth lately, and it sucks, but you…it’s the one that really kills me. I hate that I hurt you. I hate that I ruined any chance of anything happening with us. I mean, I still don’t have everything figured out yet, but I guess I was holding on to the thought that it was still a possibility. If you’re back with her—”

“I’m not.” She sighs, fiddling with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “I mean, I guess she’s still interested or whatever, but it isn’t mutual. I didn’t come to this class to see Amanda. I came because I didn’t care about seeing her anymore.” She laughs bitterly. “I started going to the late class to avoid her, and now I’m back here to avoid you. Maybe I just need to take up a new hobby.”

My relief at the knowledge I haven’t lost her completely is so strong that I almost lean over and kiss her right then and there. I know I can’t do that, but I need to acknowledge the fact that there’s still something between us. That I still feel it, too.

And so, without even thinking about it, I place my hand on that tiny little curve of belly.

She winces. “God, I hate when you do that. Do you just enjoy pointing out the squishiness?”

“I love your body,” I rasp, admitting what I couldn’t the first time I did this. “I think it’s so sexy. I wish you saw it the way I do.”

“You don’t think that,” she mumbles, casting her eyes downward.

“Of course I do.” Now it’s my turn for a humorless laugh. “I think that way, way more often than I should. Trust me.” I drop my voice, and I don’t realize just how honest I’m going to be until the words push themselves out of my mouth. “I wonder what it would be like to be with that body — with you — every freaking day.”

She just shakes her head, but I can see tears forming in her eyes, and I feel them forming in mine, too. Because it doesn’t matter that I feel this way. It doesn’t matter if she feels the same. These are just words; I’ve already given up any opportunity I had to put anything behind them.

“You can’t say things like that to me,” she says, her voice faltering as a tear falls onto her shirt, and I know she’s right.

“I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.” I take my hand back, wishing I had a pocket to stuff it in or something. “I just moved in to a new place, and I think I’m a little stir-crazy, and being dumb, and…I should go. I’m sorry.”

I don’t give her a chance to respond before I rush out of the studio and to my car. But I can’t drive away just yet. Not until I give my breathing a chance to calm down and my tears a chance to dry up. Which is gross, because I’m just sitting in my own sweat, but I don’t even care. I don’t care about anything right now except—

“Hey!” I look out the window and see Bri jogging up to the window, which I immediately roll down. “You’re still here.”

“I’m still here.”

“I was thinking…” She nibbles on her lip for a few seconds, and I can’t help watching her do it. Which I’m pretty sure she notices. “I mean, you had me all curious about your new place.” She squeezes the back of her neck. “I’d love to see it. And maybe we can talk. There are some things I probably…we should talk.”

There is so much I don’t know about what’s happening with everything right now, but if there’s one thing about which I’m absolutely, positively certain, it’s that I want to be alone in my apartment with Bri. “I’d love that,” I say softly.

“Just let me shower and change, and I’ll be there soon. Text me where to go?”

“I will.”

I watch in the rearview mirror as she gets behind the wheel of her Jeep and pulls out of the lot, and then I text her the address with shaking fingers. As I start off toward my new home — imagining her in it — butterflies take flight in my stomach.

I might be leading the way, but I have no clue where we’re about to end up.

Chapter Twenty-Three Josh

The only place I hate being more than my parents’ house is at one of my mother’s stupid friends’ houses. But that’s exactly where I am tonight, wasting an Yves Saint Laurent tux on a bunch of walking Botox injections, with cameras at my back. Unsurprisingly, Marsha’s old costars are every bit as vapid and fame-whore-y as she is, and Lisa Torres had no problem inviting Chuck and the dick-replacements he calls cameras into her home for her bullshit “Save the Children” charity ball thing.

“I saw your interview with Gavin Lawrence the other day,” Lisa’s daughter Clarabel says, cornering me by the hideous modern sculpture in the living room I’m hiding behind to browse porn on my phone. “You were funny.”

“I wasn’t joking about anything,” I reply without looking up.

She giggles. “There you go again.”