We look back at each other at the same time. “Do you think we should talk about . . . ?” I ask, trailing off.
“Um, no,” she says, horrified. “I had a moment of weakness, it won’t happen again.”
A moment of weakness? As in, she sort of wants this? “But what if I want to talk?”
“What’s there to say?” she says, shrugging helplessly.
“Just . . .” I pull my thoughts together, sitting down on the couch. “Okay, look. Even when we’re just friends, the fact that we’ve slept together is always hanging between us. I feel it in every second we’re together, and I’m lying if I say I don’t.”
“I figured of anyone you’d be good at pretending it didn’t happen,” she jokes, but it falls flat.
This totally fucking stings, and I let her see it on my face. “Well, I’m not.”
Nodding, she says, “Okay. Sorry.”
“And I know you think I’m a total player—and maybe I deserve that—but I’ve only been with one person since you and—”
“That’s, like, one month, Luke.”
I laugh. “I know, but someday maybe I’ll tell you about how comically horrible it was.” She starts to ask, but I cut her off. “The point is, I’m trying to turn over a new leaf. And it requires reflection, which is sort of new for me . . .” I trail off, feeling like I owe her the chance to make a smart remark, but I’m actually relieved when she doesn’t.
She sits down next to me on the couch, listening.
“But here’s the thing,” I continue, “four years ago, I was really in love with Mia. I thought we were going to be together forever, and I know now that I was young, and it was unrealistic, but when it ended it was hard. I mean, we had been calling each other boyfriend-girlfriend since middle school. I didn’t want to give that kind of energy to just anyone. At first it felt like I’d be”—I look around, searching for words—“I don’t know, cheating, or something, to let myself feel things for someone else, even though Mia and I weren’t together. And then, being with girls in a more casual way was just such a relief. It meant that endings would be easier. It became how I operated. It was an evolution, okay, and I’m not saying that I hate myself for it, because I would be lying, but I have a little bit of hindsight now, and it isn’t how I want to do things anymore.”
She nods, listening with her wide, blue eyes trained on my face. “Okay.”
“So I just wanted you to know.” I lean back, lacing my hands behind my head and staring at the ceiling. “I know your last boyfriend hurt you, and I don’t want you to think all guys are like that. I don’t want you to think I’m like that.”
She nods again, faster now, leaning forward and rubbing her palms together between her knees. She seems a little agitated. I’m inclined to tell her she doesn’t have to talk to me if she doesn’t want to, but the truth is that I don’t really want to let her off the hook if we’re doing the sharing thing right now. London is one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever met, but there’s a shell there and I don’t have the sense that she talks to people very often about what’s going on in her head.
The silence feels like it extends for miles, and in a surreal way it seems like the couch elongates between us, making me feel farther away from her the longer she’s quiet. I close my eyes, pushing through it. At some point one of us has to speak, and I swear it will not be me.
Finally, she takes a deep breath and lets it out, slowly. “My dad’s been cheating on my mom since I was sixteen. It’s sort of an unspoken rule in my house that we never talk about it—even though everyone knows.”
I’m initially horrified, but then . . . another piece of the London puzzle falls into place, and it feels like a tiny bomb has just gone off inside my chest. I think of my parents, the way they look at each other, and try to imagine how I would deal with it if I thought all of it was a lie. I can’t. “That’s . . . I’m sorry, Logan.”
“I always told myself—and my mom when we’d argue—that I’d never put up with being treated like that.” A few beats of silence pass before she lets out a long breath and continues. “I’ve known Justin my whole life,” she says. “His mom and my mom are best friends, and we were always close . . . but we didn’t start dating until the summer before our senior year. He moved here with me from Colorado. I went to UCSD and he was at SDSU, even though his first choice was to go to Boulder. But I mean, San Diego has been my second home. I always knew I wanted to go to college out here, and I couldn’t wait to leave Denver.” She goes quiet for a few seconds, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I think it was sort of like how things were with you and Mia, where you just assumed that you’d be together forever.” Looking over at me, she says, “Apparently, he met someone at the beginning of sophomore year and they were all but living together during the week. I found out because I walked in on them.” She pauses, then adds quietly, “Senior year. Right after my grandmother’s funeral. He said he had to work, but . . .”
My stomach bottoms out and I let out a long exhale. “Holy fuck. Your senior year?”
“Yeah. Almost three years he was cheating . . .” She trails off, shaking her head. I can’t even school my expression right now. My mouth is just gaping open. The fucking nerve of this prick.
“And apparently they’re still together,” she says quietly. “Getting married, actually . . . so there’s that.”
My reaction to all of this is to want to punch something. “What a bag of dicks.”
She nods. “It’s taken me a really, really long time to stop feeling pissed off. Actually, I still feel pissed off about it. I think when I give my heart, I want to give everything. You make that decision, and it’s all or nothing, you know?”
She winces when she says this, as if the admission is somehow embarrassing, and my chest is so tight that I’m not even sure how to respond. I want her everything. I want to pummel the asshole who made her feel her love was wasted.
When she realizes I’m struggling to reply, she continues, voice brighter, “Anyway, after I came out of the initial miserable fog of humiliation and heartbreak, the only thing I felt I’d gained was a certainty that I’m a terrible judge of character.”
“London,” I say. “You’re not.”
“Oh, I am.” She smiles at me, and it’s so sweetly fragile that it cracks something in me. Pulling her hair up into a bun on top of her head, she holds it there in both hands. Fuck, it feels so good to talk to her about this. For as much as I’m enraged on her behalf, I’m elated to have her here, and just . . . talking to me in a way I feel she doesn’t with very many people, if anyone.
“I mean,” she says, “I can pick out the obvious assholes. That’s what bartenders learn to do. But the smarter ones just might be better at hiding it. That’s what sucks the most, what I’m actually the angriest about: even if I like someone, I will never trust my judgment. Do you know how that feels? To have been so wrong that it feels like your people meter is just broken?”
The weight of this entire conversation seems to hit me at once, and I slump back against the couch. “That’s significantly depressing,” I agree.