Page 6 of Snowed In
“But you’re a lonely boy.”
“I’m not a—” I break off when she smiles. “You’re single,” I point out. “And you’re not lonely.”
“I never said it was about being single. You can be with someone and be lonely. And you can be alone and not feel lonely at all. It took me ten years of dating and thinking something was wrong with me before I realized I was happier by myself. And now look at me. I’m so well-adjusted it’s unfair on everyone else.”
“Well, maybe that’s me,” I say. “Maybe I’m better single.”
“Aw. Buddy.” Zoe pouts. “No. You definitely need a girlfriend. Other half, two-become-one, that kind of thing.”
“But you don’t.”
“No.”
“Never? Never ever?”
“Nah.” She shrugs. “I’d be open to it if it happened, but I’m good. Plus, I don’t want to tie myself down too much.”
“You literally have a child.”
“I have awhat?”
“Okay.” I finish the last of my pint and stand as Zoe turns to Tiernan with a shocked expression. “That’s officially old now.”
“It’s a classic,” she says, wiping some chocolate spread from his chin. “Classics don’t get old.”
I beg to disagree. “Do you want another Diet Coke?”
“If you’re buying.”
“I bought the last round.”
“And you’re a true gentleman,” she says sweetly.
“Tiernan?” I bend to meet his eye. We got along great when he was a baby, but now that he’s developing into an actual human, he alternates between thinking I’m the best person ever and completely ignoring me. Tonight, it’s the latter. “Are you thirsty? You want juice?”
“Juice?” Zoe repeats, and he manages a distracted nod before focusing back on the screen. “He’ll have a whiskey sour,” she says to me.
“On it.”
I turn, only to dodge a waitress who flashes me a smile as she balances a tower of empty glasses in her hands. She looks back with obvious interest, and I pause, considering, but Zoe’s pointed throat-clear ruins that little plan.
Fine.
Gearing myself up for the inevitable wait, I leave the safety of our table and join the masses at the bar. You’d swear it’s the only open pub in Dublin given how busy it is, a consequence of being at the epicenter of tourist hotspots and office blocks. The smell of gym only gets worse as I approach, but it’s not lost on me that I’m like those people stuck in traffic complaining about other cars, so I try to ignore it, and squash in behind a woman shouting her order over the chaos.
She looks as bedraggled as everyone else, with her brown hair settling into almost-dry waves along her shoulders while her blouse is soaked through, revealing the outline of a bra strap. I look away, but that only brings my attention to the man next to me, who’s huffing and glaring every five seconds as if that will make the overworked staff move faster.
The whole thing is giving me a headache, and not for the first time do I question the life choices that brought me here.
I thought I’d be working in some skyscraper right now. In some glass-walled office with a glorious view and my future secured ahead of me. And I was there. For a while at least. And in that office, I watched the sun rise and I watched the sun set, and I sat in my ergonomic chair and I worked. I worked and I worked and I worked because that was what I was supposed to do. Because that was supposed to be the solution to everything.
I was, to everyone’s surprise, the smart one in the family. I didn’t want to be. I didn’t try to be. I just was. School was easy. College was easy. I aced my tests, charmed my way through interviews, got a scholarship to business school, and off I went.
It didn’t change anything.
I mean, on the outside, sure. I got the grades and the graduate programs, and the jobs. I made friends with people who went skiing and dated women with names like Venetia who always seemed to have a lot of money despite working at tiny publishing houses that only put out experimental poetry twice a year. I wore nice things and ate nice things and bought nice things. I invested my bonuses and donated to charity, and did everything a social climber was supposed to do, and still, I felt restless. Incomplete.
Everyone else seemed to know their place in the world but me. Like they’d all been let in on some big secret. And no matter how many things I did right, everything always felt wrong.
