Page 117 of One Night Only
“That doesn’t mean you have to.”
“I know,” I say. “But priorities change. Mine could too.” I pause, looking up at the night sky tinted with the lights from below. I’d loved it when I first came here. Working what I thought would be my dream job in my dream city. I took full advantage of New York’s energy when I first came here, I threw myself into it, feeling like I sometimes survived purely on its adrenaline. I liked the anonymity of it. I liked how easy it was not to have to think about the day before, thenightbefore, how I could just wake up and move on because that’s what people did here. It always felt to me like there was no time to stop and dig deeper, no time to do so much as scratch the surface of another person. And that suited me just fine.
Until recently.
“The truth is I have no idea what I want,” I say quietly. “Not really. Nor do I have the first inkling of where to start figuring it out. I’m hoping one day the answer will just fall into my lap.”
Neither of us says anything for a few minutes, the silence bordering on comfortable, if only I wasn’t so aware of him and, by extension, myself. I’m suddenly desperate to know how he sees me. If I look stupid in my dress and Claire’s shoes. If my makeup has smudged or if there’s fast-food grease on my chin. I reach back to adjust my hair and knock a string of lights off in the process.
As they clatter to the ground, I risk a glance at Declan to find him staring at the sky. “Smooth.”
“Oh, whatever,” I snap.
“It’s okay to be nervous. Second dates make me nervous too.”
“This is not a second date.”
“How would you know? When’s the last time you even had one?”
“None of your business.”
“That’s what I thought,” he says, sounding smug.
I don’t say anything, tugging the lights back up. All I can suddenly think about are the words he spoke to me back in O’Shea’s.I’m not going to hurt you.I’d stopped his promises then. I had to. He didn’t realize what they meant.
But that’s not his fault.
“Josh Lawson.”
“What?”
“The last time I had a second date,” I say, sitting back against the chair. “Josh Lawson. And it was a lot more than two dates. We were together for over a year.”
Declan’s quiet, his brow furrowed, and I know this is not where he expected this conversation to go.
“What happened?” he asks eventually, less curious and more…resigned.
What happened.
I can picture the scene like he’s sitting right in front of me. We’d been together for fifteen months and four days (I’d counted) and were sitting on the floor of his apartment, eating pasta and watching old movies and I thought that I had never felt so at home with another person. By that stage we’d stopped going out as much, trading bars and clubs for lazy nights in. I took it as a good sign. A “we don’t need to impress each other anymore” sign. A “we are fine just being together” sign. Being who we were.
I swallow. “I told him I loved him and he…he broke up with me.”
“Christ,” Declan mutters.
“Yeah.”
“That’s…”
“Yeah.”
I hadn’t been nervous at all. I hadn’t even planned it. It had just occurred to me sitting there that night that we’d never said it to each other. At least not out loud. I thought he told me he loved me in other ways. In how he played with my hair while we watched TV, in how he smiled at me when I walked into the room, in the silences that had grown so comfortable between us.
And that night sitting there, halfway through my bowl of fettucine I told him how I felt.
I can still remember the look on his face. The tender pity. The gentle letdown that somehow made it so much worse. Worse that he cared. But just didn’t care enough.
I blink away the stinging in my eyes, the embarrassment almost cruel in how it still makes me feel ill after all this time.
