Page 10 of Here for a Good Time
He holds my gaze in a cowboy stare-off. Finally, still not breaking eye contact: “I’ve… been texting someone.”
I move backward in my seat, clutching the sides for exaggerated effect. “And I’m hearing about thisnow? Who is she? Oooh, is it that Brazilian video producer you brought back the other week? She wasreallypretty. Like, out of your league pretty.”
“Okay, first off, that felt unnecessary,” he says, face scrunching up with offendedness. “And second, no, she left town the next day.”
“So who is it?” I ask in a singsong voice, only jokingly prying—until his features shift, millimeter by millimeter. He begins to look… uncomfortable. I sit up, tucking my feet tighter under me. “Oh my god, who is it? Is it, like, a second cousin? I don’t care what some people say, I still consider that incest.”
“No, it’s…”
For an inexplicable reason, my gut gets queasy, the five consecutive mini tuna sandwiches I had threatening to come back up. “Yes?” I prompt.
He turns his head away, toward the glass walls with the view of the runway where a plane is currently taking off, another already lined up behind it. “Julia.”
Stunned, I watch him watching the second plane. “Julia,” I echo at last.
“Julia,” he says.
“Zwe.”
“What?”
“Is this a… different Julia?”
He inhales,one, two, three,then exhales,one, two, three. When he looks at me once more, his jaw is set, and I know two things: one, it’snota different Julia, and two, he’s not asking for my opinion.
“Zwe,” I say, more softly.
In return, his own tone hardens, like our voices are seesawing. “What?” he repeats.
“Why didn’t you tell me you two were back together?”
He shakes his head. “We’re not. We’re… texting.”
“Who…” I try to pick my words delicately, searching my mental dictionary for the softest, most innocuous ones. “… initiated it?”
“Her.”
Of course she did,I think, and guilt immediately stabs me right in my carotid. This is why Zwe had been keeping this from me, because he knew this was how I’d react.You’re going on this trip to be abetterfriend,I scold myself. Besides, what right do I have to be passing judgment on Julia when I haven’t talked to her in months?
“What… have you been texting about?” I ask. I want him to know that I care and I’m not just being nosy.
He shrugs as he takes a drink of water. “Just stuff. Memes. The news. When we ended, things had been off for a long time. Bad, even. But now it’s like we’re starting with a blank slate, and I… like it. Ireallylike it. It’s like I’m texting the woman I first fell in love with.”
It’s not that I hate Julia, or even actively dislike her. Or at least, I didn’t until Zwe refused to tell me why they broke up, which is how I know that she did something really shitty. Zwe generally keeps private things private, but if he’s keeping something fromme,then I’m certain whatever happened between them was nothing short of catastrophic. He’s not a petty or hateful person, and he won’t tell me what went down because he doesn’t want me to hate Julia for whatever it is that she did to him, even if (as I said to him at the time) that’s Best Friend Code 101.Thou shalt inherit each other’s nemeses and wrongdoing exes.It still gnaws at me from time to time, though, the fact that I still don’t know why they broke up.
“Doesshewant to get back together?” I venture, unsure if this is going to turn out to be a “curiosity killed the cat” situation.
He shrugs again. “We agreed that we’d see how we felt when I got back.”
“How long have you two been texting?”
“I dunno, a couple of weeks or so.”
I gasp, although inside, I feel more hurt than shocked. Thisisn’t who we are. We don’t keep it from each other that we’ve gotten back in touch with an ex. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He opens his mouth, but then waits for a family with three screaming toddlers—triplets, by the looks of it—who are being shepherded by their frazzled parents as the latter try to frantically divide six tiny hands and two carry-on suitcase handles between the two of them, to pass.
“Because,” Zwe says, chuckling to himself as the children’s throat-scraping screeches continue down the hall, well away from the lounge’s doors. “Like I said, it’s just been texting.”
