His eyes followed me with begrudging curious enjoyment, but he didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like odd behavior was out of the ordinary for me.
“Wanna see my column for this week?” I asked as I shuffled back over and sat down beside him.
“I don’t need to,” he responded, and my eyebrows rose on their own accord.
That was definitely not the reaction I had expected.
“Huh?” I searched his neutral expression for a clue. “I figured you’d want to see my column for this week so you could get a head start on yours…”
He patted my knee. “Like I said, I don’t need to.”
My spidey sense kicked into high alert. Something wasn’t right about his lackluster tone. “What’s going on?”
“I got fired,” he answered without pause or preamble, and with the apathetic way the words fell from his lips, he might as well have just told me he got new car insurance.
But even his indifference, as cool and seemingly calculated as it felt, couldn’t mellow my shock. My spine stiffened with the effort to stay calm enough to seek out an explanation. “What? What happened?”
He shrugged. “They didn’t appreciate that I’d started to agree with your columns.”
“Oh, my God.” I covered my mouth with my hand. “Are you serious?”
An array of emotions rained down on me all at once, but guilt was the most prominent by far. It started in my belly, filling it up until it had no choice but to filter up my body and reached my face—scrunching my brow and pinching at my cheeks.
I couldn’t stomach the fact that I’d played a part in him losing his job. Sure, several months ago, I would’ve been cheering over this news from the sidelines, but things were different now. I didn’t hate Reed—I didn’t even dislike him. I fucking loved him, and when you loved someone, you always wanted the best for them.
And this, well, it didn’t feel like the best. It felt like the absolute worst. He and I were matched, and our columns together had purpose. I hadn’t been able to see the merit in any of it in the beginning, but I was suffocating under the weight of it now. Not having his counter to my point felt like losing a part of myself and a part of me and Reed—a part of us. We’d turned into something together, and now it felt like the world had tipped off its axis and was spinning erratically without direction or purpose.
“Relax, LoLo. It’s not a big deal,” he reassured, and even that felt completely off. Maybe I was overreacting—it wasn’t like that would be new for me—but this didn’t feel like that. It felt like I’d been sleeping for months, and I’d finally reached my awakening.
Why was he reassuring me? I wasn’t the one who lost my job.
“It feels like a big deal,” I argued. “I mean, what are you going to do?”
He tilted his head to the side in confusion and reached to the table beside the coffee table to grab his pack of cigarettes. “What do you mean, what am I going to do?”
“I mean, what are you going to do now for work? How are you going to pay your bills if you’re no longer employed at the Journal?” What is this going to mean for us? The unspoken question was perhaps the most important, but years of stunting my emotional growth refused to die an easy death.
“I’ll figure it out. I always do.” He shrugged again, slapping the pack against his hand and slowly fingering a lone smoke out, and just like that, the last eggshell beneath my foot snapped. I was angry—perhaps irrationally so—over that recurrent shrug and his overall nonchalance to the situation.
Why wasn’t he freaking out about this?
He lost his fucking job. If the roles were reversed, I knew with certainty I wouldn’t be chilling on the couch and shrugging like a fool. I’d be a fucking basket case and would already be scouring job ads and calling in favors like a mafia boss trying to evade the FBI.
But not Reed. The loss of employment seemed to make him even more relaxed.
This so isn’t about his job, my mind taunted, but I told it to shut up. I had an argument to wage.
“So…you don’t have any plans?” I questioned and prayed to every god out there he would dispute it—that he would give my anxious soul something to tether itself to in order to weather the storm. “There’s not any other jobs you’re already considering?”
“I’m not a traditional, nine-to-five kind of guy,” he stated, flicking the wheel of his lighter and putting flame to paper. His face never changed from the blasé expression he had put on since this discussion began. “I’ll eventually figure something else out. I always do.”