“Tonight was actually a lot of fun, wasn’t it? I loved the crowd. There was a lot of…”
She kept speaking, but I stopped listening. The guilt started coming back to me as I read Maggie’s notes. I shouldn’t have felt the way I did. I shouldn’t have missed her. I shouldn’t have been pulled back to her every time I opened one of the old novels she sent.
“Did you order?” Sasha asked, walking my way. I opened the drawer on the nightstand and shoved the book in, closing it fast.
“Hm?”
“Did you order the food?”
“Oh, yeah, not yet.”
She raised a questioning eyebrow. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
No. “Come here,” I said, sitting on the king-sized bed. She sat down on the bed, facing me. I took her hands into mine. “Can we try something?”
“You’re scaring me…”
“Sorry, I just want to try five minutes.”
“What does that mean?”
“I want us to stare at each other for five minutes.”
She grimaced. “Why?”
“Please, Sasha? I just…I need you to try.”
She nodded. “Okay.” During the first minute, we struggled to make eye contact. During the second minute, she commented on how weird being quiet was. At minute three, she dropped my hands. “I don’t get it, Brooks. I don’t get what’s going on with you. I mean, we had such a good night, and then we get back to the hotel, and you’re all weird.”
“I know, sorry.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Is this about the book girl?”
“Who?”
She bit her bottom lip. “You know, the book girl. You think I don’t notice your hands are always either on your guitar or in a book leaving notes you never leave me? Sometimes when you’re reading, I could be naked in front of you doing the hula and you wouldn’t even notice.”
She took a deep breath. “I love you, Brooks,” she said, her eyes filled with hope and a bit of worry.
My lips parted, and as I was about to speak, no words came out. All I could think of was, “Thank you.”
Sasha shifted her body and stood up from the bed. “Wow. Okay. I’m gonna go.”
“Sasha, wait!”
“Wait? Wait for what? Brooks, I just told you I loved you for the first time, and you said thank you. Jesus! You’re such an asshole!” she hollered. “It’s really hard being third, but I did it because I thought maybe somewhere along the line you’d bump me up.”
“Third?”
“Third in your life. You’ve got your music, your book girl, and then the rest of the world, and no matter how hard the rest of the world tries to keep up with your attention, you’re never fully there.”
I was an asshole. A true asshole. “I’m sorry, Sasha.”
“We’re good together. Everyone can see it. We’re good. We make sense.”
I nodded. She wasn’t wrong. She and I made sense to the whole world. I only wished we made sense to my heart, too.
She bit her bottom lip. “We’re breaking up, aren’t we?”