Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (37 page)

Ha.

One more fantasy. May’s disease. Every time life presented her with an obstacle, her mind took flight and soared over it on a magical path of twinkling stars.
Ben doesn’t have to leave! He’ll stay forever and live in your house! He’ll start a little restaurant downtown, and it will be a smashing success! Your parents will forgive him for lying to them and embrace him as their own! He’ll never be angry again, the sex will always be fantastic, and everything will be woooonderful!

Last night, she’d pressed her palms against her ears and whispered, “
Shut up shut up shut up shut up
,” over and over into the darkness until all that hopeful nonsense suffocated, because it was a cheat. It cheated her of the enjoyment, the anger, the frustration that came with really being alive.

She’d sworn an oath.
When it comes, you’re not going to fall to pieces, and you’re not going to try to pin him in place with crazy dreams. You’re going to be honest and real, and you’re going to tell him how you feel
.

But it was easy to make promises to yourself in the night. The trick was figuring out how to keep them. What was she supposed to do, tell him she loved him? Now, in the reception hall of the train museum, when he was pissed at her and Allie was two degrees away from losing it
and Dan was on his way? What good could it possibly do?

“I’m worried about Allie,” she blurted.

Ben rubbed a fake daisy petal absently between his fingers, frowning at her radical change of subject.

May raced ahead. “I think she doesn’t want to go through with this. I keep waiting for her to say something, but she hasn’t said boo to me since I’ve been home. It’s going to be too late if I don’t ask her soon.”

She’d allowed this to happen. Yesterday had been so hectic. She’d spent most of the morning trying to recover from losing her purse—visiting the DMV to get a new license, changing her online passwords—and what time was left she’d wasted running all over town on her mother’s errands.

She’d let it be hectic. She’d broken her promises to call Dan, talk to her mother, be honest with Ben. She’d lost her courage, left it behind in Manhattan, and life without it was even more suffocating than she’d remembered.

“It’s her wedding day. Maybe the last thing she needs is you telling her she doesn’t want to get married.”

May snuck another peek at her sister. Allie still had the staple gun in her hand, and she looked homicidal. It seemed possible that if May walked over there and suggested Allie consider calling off her wedding, her sister would staple her to the wall and leave her hanging.

“She won’t be mad at me for asking,” May said.

“If you’re sure.”

She wasn’t, though. May felt like one of those cartoon characters who ran off a ledge and then windmilled her legs in space, unaware that the earth had dropped out beneath her.

Those cartoon characters always kept running. As long as their legs were moving and they didn’t look down, they wouldn’t fall.

“Go on,” he said. “When you get back, we can go to lunch or something. Take a walk.”

Say goodbye
. That was what he meant.

“Okay.”
Now or never. Keep windmilling
. “I’m going in. Stick the buckets wherever. It doesn’t actually matter all that much.”

“Good luck.”

Allie didn’t look up when she approached.

“You need help?” May asked.

“No.”

Bang
went the stapler.

“You’re mad at me,” May said.

“No, I’m not. Why would I be mad at you? You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re perfect. You’re always perfect.”

Ah. The accusation Allie had been flinging in May’s direction since they were eight and ten years old, respectively. It seemed particularly unfair at the moment.

“What are you talking about? I’m a national joke. Mom is one conversation away from realizing she hates me for ending things with Dan. Ben is leaving any minute, and I’m wigging out. I’m not perfect. I’m a catastrophe.”

“You love him.” Allie said it with a sneer on her lips. “You broke up with Dan and
fell in love
.”

Uncomfortably aware of her sister’s rising volume, May looked toward Ben, but if he was listening, he gave no sign. “What makes you say that?”

“Are you kidding? It’s so obvious. You’re like a goopy toasted marshmallow for this guy.” She made her voice dopey. “ ‘Stick a fork in ’er, folks. She’s done!’ Except I guess it’s not a fork, it’s a dick.”

May crossed her arms to tamp down a rush of incoherent fury. Allie only ever got this offensive when she was madly deflecting. “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you.”

Another
bang
from the stapler. “You were never this pathetic about Dan.”

“Would you put that thing down?”

Bang
. Allie’s answer.
Bang Bang Bang
. The staples went through the table linens and right into the tabletop. No decorations anywhere nearby.

“I’m trying to talk to you.”

“You want to ask me about Matt.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Don’t.”

“Allie—”

“You think I’m not excited enough, and you’d
so
hate for me to make a mistake on something important like this.”
Bang
.

“Look—”

“You’re worried I’m not thinking of Matt. That I’m not thinking at all. You’re so
concerned
, you just have no choice but to say something.”
Bang. Bang
.

“Come on, Allie. Don’t—”

Allie spun around, and whatever words May had planned to say, she lost them. She had expected to see anger in her sister’s expression—her lips white around the outside the way they got when she was too furious to speak. Instead, she saw the same naked fear that was in her own body. The windmilling legs. The shoulders hunched in defense against such dangerous exposure.

“I already got the lecture from Mom a month ago, okay?” Allie said. “Do me a favor and consider me forewarned. Your big-sister duty is done. You can go back to Ben now.”

May wrapped one arm across her stomach, needing to bolster herself against the swimmy untrustworthiness of her knees. “If that’s what you want,” she croaked.

“It doesn’t matter what I want.”

“It always matters.”

But her sister had already turned away again. May couldn’t reach her.

When she scanned the room, seeking reassurance in the shape of Ben’s inept arrangement of daisy buckets on tables, she found her mother and Matt in the doorway.

“May?” her mother called. “Dan wants to speak to you.” She held up Matt’s cell phone.

May’s eyes found Ben. He was wearing the same aloof, uninterested expression he’d had that first afternoon at Pulvermacher’s, when she’d asked him his name at the bar and he’d tried to brush her off.

Not the kind of guy a woman wants to pin her hopes and dreams on
.

Fear bloomed in the pit of her stomach.

Her mother pushed the phone into her hand. “Take it somewhere else,” she whispered. “Somewhere private.”

May pressed it to her ear.

“Hello?”

The vast hall swallowed her voice, and Ben watched her with eyes that said
I don’t even know you
.

I can’t trust you
.

She’d forgotten that wary look. The man she’d met that day—the feral creature she’d
shared tacos with—that wasn’t who he’d been this past week. She hadn’t realized that Ben had lost so much of his armor until he put it back on.

You waited too long. You had a chance, and you missed it
.

Her mother shoved at her shoulder. “Take it in the corridor.”

“Hi,” Dan said.

May let herself be pushed. Out of the room. Away from Ben’s accusing eyes, her sister’s anger, Matt’s bewildered posture in the doorway. Her mother closed the propped-open door to the reception area so that May was alone with the water fountain and the oil portrait of a woman in pearls.

Alone with her cowardice. And Dan.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Dan said again, and then he chuckled, embarrassed.

“Where are you?”

“At home.”

“Oh. You’re not coming?”

“I … no. I can’t leave town. The GM basically ordered me to stay put. I feel bad, though. I want to see you.”

“Don’t feel bad. We broke up.”

“You broke up with me, May. I didn’t break up with you.”

It actually only takes one person
.

Cold air blasted onto her shins from a vent, and cold shame made her wrap her arms around herself. She pushed her way into the women’s bathroom, seeking enclosure. Warmth.

“You played a good game on Thursday.”

He made a noise, blowing air out through his nose. “Nah. I didn’t have my head in it.”

“Sorry.”

“S’okay. It’s my fault, May. I know I already told you I’m sorry about the charity lunch thing, but maybe I didn’t tell you
right
. I botched that proposal, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s all on me, what happened. But I don’t care about what you did and all the stuff people are saying about you and me. I’m not sure what else you need me to say, but just tell me, and I’ll say it.”

“There isn’t anything you can say.”

“There has to be.”

“No. There doesn’t.”

The bathroom was white-tiled, empty, the beige stall doors all partially or completely open. There was no comfort in this room. No easy way to say what she needed to say.

The problem, Dan, is that you don’t know what you said wrong. You
can’t
know, because I’ve only ever shown you one version of me, and it’s the wrong one
.

The problem is that he sees me—the person I truly am—and you don’t. Because I
let
him see. I never let you
.

And even if he leaves for good, I have to learn to be that person he sees. I have to decide whether I’m going to be her all the time, or whether I’m going to settle for less, even knowing I could have had more
.

That’s the lesson of New York. That I get to choose. Not whether to walk off the cliff, but whether to fall. Whether to believe I can hold myself up
.

“I met someone,” she said, and it felt terrible to say it. Scary in a way that nothing had ever been. “Someone important.”

“What do you mean? Who?”

“His name is Ben.”

“How’d this—what are you saying?”

“I met him at a bar. After I left the apartment. I got mugged, and he bought me a drink.”

“You got mugged? You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“Jeez, May, are you okay?”

“Yeah. That’s not important. But Ben and I—actually, I’m not sure what we are, to be honest. The thing is, Dan …”

The thing was, it was hard, telling someone how you really felt. Hurting someone who cared about you.

The thing was, she’d been unfair to him when he proposed. Maybe understandably, because the words he’d said reflected back all the truths she hadn’t been admitting to herself—every fear about how he saw her and what she had made herself become in order to keep him.

He’d put his heart on his sleeve for her in a room full of people, and she’d stabbed him in it.

Sometimes, she fell into the habit of thinking Dan wasn’t smart, when, in fact, he just
wasn’t particularly good at people. Emotions confused him, but he could memorize all the endless variations in a playbook without apparent effort.

Even if his proposal had sucked, he’d given her four years of his free time, his confidence, his hopes, his body. He’d patiently waited a year while she dithered about moving away from Wisconsin, then paid off her mortgage so she’d always have a place to go home to. He’d rented an apartment in Manhattan so they could have a getaway of their own, separate from the team.

Dan had deserved more from her than a three-sentence note. He’d deserved an explanation. A phone call. Ten phone calls, if that was what it took.

She didn’t understand how she could have thought otherwise, even temporarily.

“The thing is, I wasn’t happy,” she said softly.

He sighed. “I guess I knew that.”

“You did?”

“Well, you didn’t seem like you were in a big hurry to move with me.”

“You told me to wait a year.”

“But that was because I could tell you weren’t excited about it. And then when you got to Jersey, you didn’t seem all that psyched, either.”

May hadn’t thought he’d noticed. She’d thought she was doing a good job of keeping her spirits up, protecting him from the knowledge that her adjustment to their new life wasn’t going according to plan.

Though maybe when you loved someone, you didn’t try to protect them from the truth. You didn’t blunt the hard edges of your personality and conceal the parts of yourself that you thought were most difficult to cope with.

Maybe when you loved someone, you just let yourself be you. You let them see you. And you saw them.

Maybe that was all there was to it.

“I’m sorry, Dan,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Nancy shut the door behind May and smiled at Matt, wiping a knuckle beneath her eye. She looked anxious and hopeful.

The glorious reunion of May and Dan, at last.

For a second, Ben almost believed it. May had been so different since she came home. What if this was what she wanted? What if Einarsson liked her this way, made her feel safe, fit her family and her life as Ben never could?

Jealousy winked to life, a bright white star knocked off the flint in his heart. But the spark found no fuel when it landed.

He’d been sharing her bed. Last night, they’d practically attacked each other on her front doorstep, her hand down the front of his pants as they pushed over the threshold, his eyes rolling back as she fisted him with long, tight strokes.

He couldn’t believe May felt anything for Einarsson. She wouldn’t be able to fuck Ben that way if her heart belonged to her ex—not with everything raw out in the open, every bit of her heart, her soul there in her eyes, where he could see it.

The spark went out, leaving him cold. Sliced open. Waiting.

Allie suddenly put down her staple gun and walked off down an aisle of engines. Ben heard her footfalls on a set of steps. She must have decided to disappear into an engine, alone.