I shook my head at her obvious excitement in the face of my misery. Still, I admitted it. Don’t they always say that’s the first step? “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Why’d they fire you?” Detective Laura was hot on the case, and her questions came at rapid speed now.
“Because I was agreeing with her.”
“Her who?”
“Lola.” I corrected myself. “Sex Says.” Lola’s column was only a small sliver of what she was as a person. Laura waited patiently as the details flowed out of me one by one. “I was agreeing with her column because…well, I honestly thought she was right. And I wasn’t willing to compromise that for the gain of some stupid paper.”
She smiled. “So you’re blaming Lola.”
What? “No, I’m not. This isn’t her fault at all.”
“Sure,” Laura pseudoagreed, and I started to get frustrated.
“It’s not. This is not her fault. Not the fact that she was right, and not the fact that I’m not willing to pretend she isn’t.”
“Then why are you blaming her?”
“Laura, would you listen? I told you. I’m not.”
“Reed, baby brother…I hate to break this to you, but you are. You are blaming her so hard. It’s like this twisted thing. She’s the thing you want, but she’s the reason you can’t have it. The girl, the perfect brain-buzz of building your lives and battling it out in columns.”
No. “That’s not it.”
Fuck. Was it?
Was I blaming Lola for completely immersing herself in me and our relationship, for saying what she felt?
Was I my own fucking worst nightmare?
“If it’s not that, it’s something else. Because the guy I had coffee with a couple of weeks ago would have jumped at the chance to go to fucking Santa Cruz with Lola Sexton. He would have jumped at the chance to go to the moon.”
A sarcastic retort about how cool a trip to the moon would be regardless was on the tip of my tongue, but for perhaps the first time in my life, sarcasm didn’t seem like the right place to focus.
“We just fought.” I knew immediately that even that was a lie. Lola had fought. I’d done nothing but sit there.
“Reed—”
“You remember Brandon?” I asked, and her head jerked with what she figured was an abrupt subject change, apropos of nothing. “My friend from college?”
“Sure, I remember him. But why the hell are you talking about him? I thought you guys weren’t in touch anymore.”
“We weren’t,” I agreed. “But I ran into him. The day of the firing. The day of the…fight.”
The skin between her eyebrows pinched as she tried to decode my secret meaning.
“He’s getting a divorce, and—”
“Ooh.”
“Ooh, what?”
“You see this guy who’s everything you’re not, everything you’ve done your best not to be, and all of his shit is falling apart. It reinforces your ideals, and boom. Lola’s as scary as a fucking crocodile in your bed,” she proclaimed as though solving some scientific equation.
“No, I don’t think it’s like that. My mood was just shitty. I wasn’t in the right headspace to have a serious conversation about—”
“Reed!” she snapped, cutting me off. I pushed back off the counter and scowled.
“What?”
“You better wake up, baby brother. Because you’re sitting on the edge of having everything you’ve ever wanted or having nothing at all, and if you don’t get your head on straight, it’s going to be the latter.”
My heart squeezed. Nothing at all meant no Lola, and even imagining a future without my unicorn felt painful.
Day after day, I watched people wade through their lives like it was a race to the finish—not reaching out and grasping the things they wanted most, not soaking up all of the things and experiences they could, and not giving change an ounce of a chance because of their fear of the danger.
It’d never felt much like me, but right now, it sounded more like me than ever.
I was a coward and a cad, and I’d been too stupid to goddamn say something when Lola had been pouring her heart out right in front of me.
A bunch of rodents all scurrying to monotony and back again, I’d thought.
As it turned out, maybe I was the rat leading the pack, after all.
Nearly a week had passed since Reed let me know how he felt about expectations. Fucking expectations. I understood that I’d thrown the whole family trip on him last minute, but didn’t he get that I wanted him to go because I wanted to spend time with him, not because my family expected him to be there?