“Sorry to be calling with less-than-ideal news, but we’ll get the next one. I just know it!”

I take a breath in and let it out silently, so Christy doesn’t hear. “You know what they say about the cookie crumbling.” I tack a mild chuckle onto the end, so she knows I’m still in this game, still rolling with the punches.

But this feels like a knife to the gut, deflating the last possible balloon of positivity I had going into today.

May first.

I tried to hold it off, I really did. I went to an impromptu improv class last night and absolutely killed it. The rest of the group was in stitches at the end of my last sketch. Their laughter rolled over me and buoyed my spirits.

For all of an hour.

This morning, I woke up with an ache in my throat like the beginning of sickness, only it’s not that. It’s not allergies, either. I’ve been taking my allergy pills religiously since we had the first melt at the end of February.

This day, every year, is the biggest acting job of my life.

Honestly, I was doing pretty well until Christy called with more bad news. Any other day, I could have brushed it off as a fact of the business, but today? Today, it pins me to my chair, weighing my hips down with defeat. Lucky for me, Helen’s birthday lunch has already come and gone. I was the life of the party then too. If the call had come any earlier, it would have been a disaster.

I try to smile at Hollywood’s Man of the Year. Tears come to my eyes instead.

I suffer through the final hour of cold calls, feeling a tiny flash of triumph when I sell an insurance policy to a prickly woman who spends fifteen minutes grilling me about different scenarios involving a rental home she and her husband were thinking of selling. But that, too, was like a balloon filled with lead instead of air.

I fucking hate this day.

It sucks the light out of everything around it.

By the time I stand up from my desk to make the beautiful, sunshine-soaked walk home, I can feel my shoulders slouching. I press them upward, against this complicated grief, and grin through it all the way out the front doors.

It’s delicious, early May in New York City. We’re not at the point yet where it’s all overheated garbage and broken air conditioners, and I breathe in what little sweetness I can find on the walk back home.

It’s not enough.

I need a pick-me-up.

I stop at the grocery store two blocks from home, covering this ridiculous grief, this ludicrous sadness, with an animal need for sweet & salty Chex Mix and a package of Rolos. I want to dump the Chex Mix into a bowl and eat all the cookie sticks and cookie whorls first, leaving the pretzels for whatever poor sucker gets to the bag after me. I want to unwrap the Rolos one by one, tearing the golden foil into a neat curlicue, and fill the gaping void in my gut with chocolate and caramel.

I take a basket from the stand at the front and move through the aisles. Don’t look at anyone. Don’t make eye contact. It’s not my usual game, but I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of something vast and unpleasant. Chex Mix, check. Rolos, check. But I shouldn’t leave here with a bunch of junk food. The sight of these things alone in my cart takes me to another level of sorrow and guilt, and I swallow a hard lump in my throat, tears stinging at the corners of my eyes.

Jesus Christ.

I blink them away. Add some bananas, and it’ll be okay. Maybe a single red apple.

I’m standing in front of the produce section, searching for yellow in a sea of green bananas, when an old woman pushes her cart up next to me. “I’m looking for pineapple,” she says tremulously. “The kind in the can, but I can’t find it. I’ve been looking everywhere.”

It’s an innocent question but her voice barrels through the last of what was holding me together.

I press my lips tight, trying to summon the instructions for the pineapple. They’re in Aisle 3. I open my mouth, but what comes out is, “I’m sorry.”

That’s all.

I put the basket down on the floor at my feet and leave empty-handed. I walk fast, all the way back to the apartment, trying to outrun it.

Wes is cooking again.

Fuck that guy.

I slam the door behind me and the first sob escapes; a guttural, ugly cry.

He comes to the door of the kitchen as I’m running past to the bedroom.

“Are you okay?”

“Don’t fucking worry about it,” I spit at him.

“Whitney—”

In my bedroom, I throw myself across the bed like I’m fifteen years old and cry into the pillow, so hard that it makes my head hurt, so hard that when it’s over, I don’t even turn my head. I just fall asleep.

A soft knock on the door wakes me.

What time is it? The bedroom is dusky, the light fading outside the window.

“Whit?” The way Wes says my name reminds me of Summer. How could it not? They grew up together. They have a lot of similar habits, even if they don’t realize it. The ache in my chest expands again and I breathe it out while I sit up in bed. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah.” I sound hoarse as balls, and I’m tangled up in my pencil skirt. I’m still trying to figure out how exactly to get it to release my legs when the door opens. Wes stands halfway inside, framed by the soft light from the hallway. “What time is it?”

“It’s almost eight.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. “I’ve got some extra chicken, if you’re hungry.”

I want to deny it, but my stomach growls. “I’m having a shitty day.” Damn it. My voice wavered on day and now I’m about to lose it again. Buck up, buttercup. “So if you’re here to fuck with me—”

“I’m not here to fuck with you. I have dinner, if you’re interested. Thought you might want to—”

“Want to what?” I feel defensive, crouched back like a cat, even though I’m just sitting here on top of the covers, in a pencil skirt that’s seen better days. “Find somewhere else to eat?”

Wes laughs, the sound adjacent to kindness. “No. I thought you might want to step into the shower and put on some comfortable clothes. It can’t be comfortable sleeping in those office clothes. Plus, your hair—” He motions around his head.

I raise a hand to my hair. It’s tangled, somehow, half fallen out of the bun I was wearing it in. “Oh. Right.”

“I’ll get you a towel.” He disappears back into the hallway and reappears a moment later, a clean towel hanging from his hand. I smile at that. He had to go into the bathroom for it, where I will be going in a matter of moments. Still, it’s almost sweet. “Food’s on the table whenever you’re ready.”

I toss myself awkwardly out of bed and take the towel. “Why are you doing this?” I’m still half-drunk from sleep and I can’t stop myself from asking the question.

Wes cocks his head to the side. “You came home in tears. Something’s up. I don’t know what it is, but you could use some food, at least.”

I am wretched, mean, and small, and embarrassment coats my cheeks with pink. “Why do you care?”

“Because you’re my roommate,” says Wes, but his eyes say something different. “I’m not that much of a dick.”

When Wes said chicken, I assumed he meant exactly what he said.

It’s not that.

I sit down at a place at the kitchen table and look it over. It’s chicken drenched in what looks like—

“Is this a red wine sauce?”

Wes puts a plate of dinner rolls in the center of the table and sits down. “Yeah.”

“I thought you meant plain chicken.”

He raises one eyebrow. “Who eats plain chicken?”

“Men, I thought.”

Wes takes some food for himself, filling his plate, and I stare at it. There is a vegetable. There are rolls. This is an entire meal.

“Come on,” he says. “It’ll get cold.”

It’s good food. Really good food, buttery and sauce-y, and nothing like what I expected. We eat in silence, sitting across from one another, but it doesn’t feel strained. It feels almost normal.

Until Wes puts his fork down and sighs, as if he’s been holding something in this entire time. “Look. I never say this kind of thing, but if you want to talk about it—”

A bite of chicken sticks in my throat. I do not want to talk about it, ever, but there’s something about the way he’s looking at me that makes me want to get it out in the open. I’m too tired to lie anyway. “My dad died when I was eighteen.”

“Oh, shit,” Wes says softly.

“Yeah.” I stab a butter-soaked carrot with my fork. “We’d been fighting a lot. He was kind of a dick in a lot of ways.” He was. He was volatile and moody, and when his mood was low, things were hard. But when it was high, it was the best ever. “He didn’t think I should go away to college, and we fought about it. I told him to fuck off.” He’d laughed at me. My dad had laughed, a sound of surprise and delight, and it had pissed me off at the time. “He was working a weird shift at that time, and got hit by a drunk driver on his way home.”

Wes puts a hand to his forehead. “That’s fucking rough.”

It can’t be nearly as rough as going to war. I know about the incident with the Humvee, but only the vague details… something Summer said in passing once.

“It still gets to me every year. I try—” I swallow hard. “I try, you know, to remember that life is short, and that it blows to spend it being angry and sad, but some days it’s hard.”

“Is there anything that makes you feel better?”

Who is this version of Wes? This version of Wes who cares what the hell I think, how I feel?

“I tried to get sweet & salty Chex mix and candy at the store, but I failed. Some old lady pushed me over the edge.”

“Old ladies will do that. Anything else?” His eyes are on mine, gentle, not a hint of the animosity that sometimes flashes there.

“Watching you eye-grope my bras made me feel better.” My mouth pulls upward in a smile. That was hilarious.

Wes rolls his eyes. “You’re never going to let me forget that.”

“I will if you agree to watch a shitty movie with me.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

We take our plates to the couch and Wes lets me pick some obnoxious romcom that lightens my soul. Halfway through, the plates pushed away onto the coffee table, he slips his arm around me. God, it feels good, a comforting weight. There’s no pressure there.

“Is this the part where we kiss again?” The couple on the screen is playing in the water on some Mexican beach, the woman in a bikini that looks like it could fall off at any moment.

Wes leans in and silvery anticipation sweeps through my veins, but he only kisses me on the temple. “I don’t fuck around with girls who are going through a bad day.”

“Oh, but you’ll put your arm around me? Wow, that’s—”

He tugs at his arm, but I lock my hand around his wrist and pull it back, leaning into the solid warmth of him.

We stay that way for the rest of the movie, not saying a word.