Chapter 41

Liv

He wants me to stay.

He wants me to stay.

“You want me to stay…” I ask cautiously, “…for Katie’s sake?”

He shakes his head. “For my sake. Because of this thing between us. That neither of us was planning on or counting on, but Liv, you know it’s happening, right? I mean, this is real. I don’t know what it is yet, but I don’t want you to walk away.”

I don’t want you to walk away.

There’s a swelling sensation dead center of my chest, a buoyancy, and for a moment I ride it.

I don’t want to walk away.

I want to stay.

It’s an old, almost forgotten feeling.

Stay here.

Home.

Where my people are. Where my things are. Where my life is.

Unpack the contents of the turtle shell. Move them into shelves and drawers. Let myself fill the corners of a place.

Until—

Until someone screws up.

Until someone changes his mind.

Until someone more important, younger, cuter, better…

I can see myself as a child, standing in the foyer of one of my foster houses. The third, I think. I stood with one hand on the pull of my suitcase. Everything I owned was in that suitcase. I waited inside the door for the car that was going to come, pick me up, and take me away. Again.

And suddenly the pressure in my chest isn’t buoyant, it’s suffocating. Like I’ve taken a deep breath but it’s turned out to be seawater.

An anchor can keep you in place or drown you. That was what my foster sister, the one who taught me about carrying my shell on my back, used to say.

I’m shaking my head. Almost violently.

“I have a job, Chase. In Denver.”

“But why Denver, Liv? When you could have a job here? There have to be marketing jobs here.”

I open my mouth to try to explain, but the truth is, I can’t explain. Even I don’t fully understand the impulse that led me away from every job that would have kept me in Seattle and made me click on options in San Francisco, Denver, New York, Boston…

I only know that it had felt right to keep moving.

It had felt safer to keep moving.

I’d been in Seattle too long.

Long enough to make friends.

Long enough to make mistakes, like this one I am in the middle of.

“It’s where this job was.”

It sounds so lame.

“I could give you a job.”

I shake my head, hard. “I can’t stay here and be your nanny—I’d hate myself for that, and resent you.”

He’s shaking his head, too, his face bright, excited, hopeful, an awful contrast to the dark weight pressing me down. “You don’t have to be my nanny. Gillian could do that. Or anyone. I could—listen, what about this. This is what I’m thinking. I could buy the store. And hire you to do marketing and programs. We could do all the weekend teaser programs you were talking about, and more. You could do the admin and I could lead the programs, and—”

“No. I can’t.”

He exhales sharply.

“I can’t—I can’t stay. I can’t let you do what you’re saying. I can’t let you buy the store for me. You’d be claustrophobic—you said it yourself.”

He looks away. I’ve hit the target dead center.

He takes a breath, squares his shoulders, finds my gaze again. “So forget the part about the store. We’ll figure it out. You’ll find something. Just don’t go to Denver. Liv, I don’t want you to go.”

“You think that now.”

“I know that now.”

“But you said yourself, being tied down terrifies you. We’re both that way, for our own reasons. You’d hate yourself for tying yourself to that place, and to me, and then in the end you’d hate me, too. And the thing is, Chase, I never want you to hate me.”

As I’m saying it, I know I’m right. It will be so hard to walk away from Katie and Chase now. But if I stick around and then it doesn’t work out, it will be so much harder. Because then I would be walking away from everything. A family. A job. A home. Belonging.

I can’t do it again.

“I wouldn’t. This is different. You’re different. To me.”

I shake my head. “Chase, I know you think it is, but people don’t change that much. They think they will, they think they want to, but they don’t. You’re the guy you are, and I don’t want you to have to change that for me.”

Chase’s face has gone blank, like the stillness in the world after an ice storm.

The house is so quiet. The refrigerator humming. Rain begins to fall, gently, outside. I can hear my own heartbeat.

“No,” he says, at last. “You’re right. People don’t change. Not in the way you mean.”

They’re the words I wanted to hear, but as soon as they’re out of his mouth, I realize that I was hoping against hope that he’d say something else.

I’ll change. For you.

Stay, and I promise I will love you forever.

But that’s not what he said.

He doesn’t seem angry. Sad, maybe, like me. Because it’s been so good. Because if we were different people, in a different situation, this might be the answer.

As if he can read my mind, he says, “Are we still friends?”

“Of course. We will always be friends.”

“And—”

I recognize the shift in his voice, in his breathing, and my body is so tuned to his now that it follows along, my pulse kicking up.

“—are there still benefits?”

I’m already breathless and wet, and he doesn’t wait for an answer before he crawls across the couch to make it so.