Scandalized

I tried to do the right thing, tried to protect everyone, and ended up losing my job and my new boyfriend in a single afternoon.

My life has emptied of meaning so suddenly that it almost feels like I’m closing in on myself, collapsing inward. Sitting at the curb, I stare at a line of ants moving past the round toe of my shoe. Slowly my eyes lose focus until the ants turn into a blurred black line, waving on the concrete, doing nothing but moving forward one step at a time.

I return to my parents’ place at least two hours later than I’d planned, to find my mother on the porch with her phone in her hand, Eden standing next to her. They march toward me, lectures ready, words overlapping.

I let them have this. I didn’t take my phone. I was just dumped and fired. I didn’t notice how much time had passed on the curb until the sun was gone and I realized my old iPod had played the playlist at least three times through.

They gather me inside, depositing me on the couch. Some food materializes. Eden is on one side of me, Mom on the other, and I hate this familiar comfort.

Even though we did this exact same thing only six months ago, this time it feels infinitely worse.

Twenty

I spend five minutes in my car at the curb outside my apartment on Sunday morning. Just working up the energy to climb the steps, to go inside and face a laptop with a résumé that needs to be updated, face a suitcase full of things I had at the hotel, face a bed that I last slept in with Alec beside me.

The optimism and elation of Friday morning feel like they happened a decade ago. My parents wanted me to stay a few more days but I honestly could not handle the weight of their concern on top of my own terror about the future.

Under normal circumstances, I would have immediately recognized the shadow on my doorstep. If my brain wasn’t full of heartbreak and insomnia, I would know the broad expanse of those shoulders, the narrow taper of the waist. I would recognize the baseball hat, the black T-shirt, black jeans. And in particular, I would see the hand carefully lowering a royal-blue shopping bag to my apartment doormat and remember that I claimed that hand as mine just over a week ago.

But it takes a beat for my conscious brain to turn on—long enough for me to instinctively say, “Um, hello?”—and as soon as the words are out, awareness hits, and my heart splinters into a thousand pieces.

I would bolt back to my car if my feet weren’t cemented to the ground. I never expected to see Alec again. Thirty-six hours ago, he told me he was flying home to London and made no indication that we would ever speak again. I spent the weekend running until I had bloody blisters on my heels and strict orders from my mother to sit my ass down. But every time I did, I immediately wanted to get up and drive home to pull my Batphone out of the trash and see if he’d called, already knowing he hadn’t.

Alec freezes with his back to me and then slowly turns. He fumbles to pull off his sunglasses, and the moment his eyes are visible, I feel the reaction to his appearance like a fist to my solar plexus. He looks terrible. His skin is sallow; stubble shadows his chin. His eyes are red-rimmed and glassy, perfect lips cracked.

I’m unable to easily describe what this does to my heart. The only way to blunt the instinct to move to him and hold him is to tear my eyes away from his face.

He clearly didn’t expect to see me, either. “Gigi.” His eyes do a quick scan of my body. I bet I look a lot like I did in the hotel lobby in Seattle, but this time I want to shove the truth of it in his face. My hair is wrapped up in a greasy, messy bun, eyes bloodshot and flat. My limbs are shaking from overuse and exhaustion.

I direct the question over his right shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m…” He gestures to the bag. “You left some things at the hotel.”

I release a sharp, abrupt laugh. Boy, did I. My trust in men. A desire to love again. My career. Oh, maybe also some clothes. “I was instructed to pack up pretty fast.”

“I know,” he says immediately, but the next words take a bit longer for him to put together. “I hate—hate—how that happened. It was chaos. If I could do it over, I would have come directly to you.”

I don’t say anything to this. Having to leave the suite quickly wasn’t really what hurt. I like to think he was protecting me, even if it was disorienting and painful. What hurt was how he cut me off, didn’t answer my calls, and the Please take care he eventually gave me as a shitty parting gift.

But maybe what hurts most of all is how it feels like he’s sneaking up to my front door and leaving a bag without knocking. How painful would it have been to open my door and see that there, knowing he’d been here and left without a word? It would be worse than if he’d just kept all my things.

Tears, hot and burning, threaten at the back of my throat. I’ve done a pretty good job since Friday of stitching myself together, but I need him to go. All weekend I convinced myself that if I ever saw his face again, it would hit me differently. I would associate it with the betrayal of not getting to explain myself, of not getting the benefit of the doubt. But standing this close to him, it isn’t like that.

Even when I’m furious, his presence fills me up inside. I resent knowing that if he would only hug me, we would both be okay. The hollow space in my heart is uniquely Alec-shaped. The line of his neck, the curve of his mouth, the angle of his jaw—these are all odd comforts. So is the soft, steady gaze that held me like an anchor whether he was listening to me talk about work or pinning me on the razor-thin edge between pleasure and desperation. Those dark, searching eyes saw through me from the first moment they met mine in the airport. There wasn’t one second where Alec Kim didn’t look straight into the center of me, taking me in all at once. And he kept looking like what he saw there lit him up inside.

It’s how he’s looking at me now, too. It’s wild to think he can still manage this façade after the way he shoved me away in our first moment of crisis. My heart squeezes painfully, closing a shutter on tender feelings.

“I meant what are you doing here, in LA,” I say. “You said you were leaving on Friday.”

“I couldn’t.” He swallows audibly. “I had to—” He stops, reaching up to scrub his face with a frustrated hand. His eyes turn a little wild. “Have you been out all night?”

I am astounded at the nerve of this question. He told me to pack up and leave, shut me out on the phone, stayed in LA after he told me he was leaving, and now he wants to know whether I’ve slept somewhere else?

“Yep,” I say, daring him to ask where I’ve been.

But he doesn’t. He turns his face away, jaw clenched, nostrils flared, and I realize he’s struggling to not cry. “Okay,” he says, finally. “Not my business.”

What is he thinking? That he’s catching me at the end of a walk of shame? He knows better. He knows me better. If we weren’t currently at DEFCON-1 in our emotions, he would guess that I’d been at my parents’ place. This is the insanity of our circumstances taking hold of his adrenaline and dumping it like gasoline into his bloodstream.