Yeah, I know, tell you another one. I thought about Asher the whole damn time.
Even as I was smiling and gushing over a prospective customer’s purse, I could see his face in my mind’s eye. His smile, the way it could be sweet and trusting, or wicked and devil-may-care. His hair, tumbling forward like an outward sign of that exuberance that he couldn’t restrain. His eyes, a green like an enchanted forest.
His eyes, filled with passion as he thrust into me.
His eyes, filled with panic as he realized I knew what he’d done.
“My dear, where is that charming partner of yours?” It was my mother, teetering just enough on her sensible ivory heels to let me know that she’d had a second glass of celebratory champagne. “I was so hoping to continue our conversation earlier about his long-term business plan…perhaps drop some hints about other plans he might make with you…”
She winked, and I tried to smile as though her words hadn’t been the final punch to my already shattered heart, crumbling the remaining shards into dust.
“Asher finished checking out the receipt problem, but another business demanded his attention,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster. It might have been too much, because I saw my mother’s eyebrows raise, and I quickly cast around for a way to distract her. “Have you seen Brian? I haven’t spotted him since I introduced him to Grant’s vice-president—”
“Your brother’s making contacts at Devlin Media Corp!?” My mother’s eyes grew as wide as saucers, and she wrapped me up in a hug. “Oh, Katie, this is all thanks to you! I must go see if I can find him!”
And she was off before you could say ‘parental favoritism,’ just another happy lady in a sea of customers. Mission fucking accomplished.
So why did I feel so terrible?
I really needed to stop asking questions when I already knew the answers.
I felt strangely removed from my body as I circulated through the jubilant crowd, as if I were watching it all from a distance. I laughed and smiled at the appropriate times at the appropriate people, but I didn’t really hear anything that was said to me. All I could hear were my own doubts, couched in the voices of the people who had doubted me all my life: my parents, my teachers, my bosses and coworkers.
Give it up, Kate. It won’t last. It never lasts. Everything you touch turns to shit, everything you think you know is a lie. Everything you touch is ruined, give it up, give it up, admit that you can’t make it.
Asher lied.
This dream is a lie too.
You’ll wake up tomorrow and it will all be gone, like fairy gold.
This should have been the best day of my life, but all I could feel was heartache, a searing pain that felt as though it might go on forever, until the sun burned out and collapsed into a black hole.
How could Asher do this to me?
How could he treat me as if I were amazing, as if I mattered, as if we had any kind of future together, if I really mean nothing to him all along?
TWO
The phone buzzed again, but I refused to answer it. I already knew who it would be.
I was wearing a ratty college hoodie and a pair of oversized yoga pants, sitting on my couch with a half dozen well-worn copies of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, a box of tissues, and my childhood blanket pulled up almost over my face. Used tissues formed a disgusting nest near the foot of the couch, with candy bar wrappers offering a decorative silver element.
Getting up off the couch for anything other than the shifts I forced myself to work at my lingerie store was just too much work, and I hadn’t vacuumed or even picked up the place in over a week.
Yeah, I was definitely not going to be invited to contribute to a San Francisco apartment blog anytime soon. I was wallowing in my misery like a pig in mud, and the thing about wallowing in mud is that it’s awfully easy to get stuck.
The phone buzzed a second time. I shoved it off the couch, and listened to the clatter on the floor with a certain amount of sadism, wishing I’d shoved the caller himself instead of just a hunk of plastic and metal.
I was still managing to pull myself together for the things that really mattered—going to work and running my business, meeting with Lacey to discuss her trousseau—but doing so seemed to take more energy than General Electric produced in a year, and by the time I got home, I would barely make it to the couch before my façade of cheerful competence would collapse, and I would burst into tears, binge on junk food and mysteries, or fall into a sleep so deep it was probably technically a coma. On the days when I didn’t have anything I absolutely had to do, the whole world took on a grayish ashen cast and my limbs felt as heavy as if they were made of lead.