Chapter 10

Liv

When Chase comes home, one of the women in the movie, Simone, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Tears are pouring down my face. I’m crying so hard, I almost don’t hear the door. This group of friends, they have such an awful shared history, but they’ve always been there for each other, and Simone is such a gentle person, like, I don’t know, Beth in Little Women. She doesn’t deserve this. It’s so unfair.

I pause the movie, grab a wad of tissues from the box on the coffee table, and scrub the tears away.

Chase comes into the living room.

“Oh, wow,” he says, taking in my tear-ravaged face. “Wait. No, don’t tell me. Someone dies?”

I punch him in the shoulder.

“Ow.” He plops down on the couch beside me. He looks good. Worn jeans, thin where his thighs strain the denim, and a gray Mariners T-shirt with navy trim, including bands that stretch over his biceps. He tosses his baseball cap on the coffee table. His hair, of course, is a total, gorgeous mess.

“Shitty date?”

He gives me a weird look. “It was fine.”

“It’s only midnight.”

“I can get a lot done in a short time.”

It shouldn’t, but that makes me laugh. I don’t doubt it. “So—on a scale of, I don’t know, ‘woulda rather watched a movie’ to ‘planning marriage proposal’?”

“Um, I don’t know; it was fine.”

Chase is never cagey with me. Or at least not in this way. I raise my eyebrows. “I might need a little more than that.”

“Whatever,” he says irritably. “She was cute. Blond hair, high ponytail. Definitely loves sports. Scored the game, explained ERA to the kid next to us—”

I feel an unfamiliar twinge. Like—jealousy? Because some blond girl with low-maintenance hair knows stuff about baseball?

Surely not.

“—likes stadium food. Seems really easygoing. Loves camping, loves playing sports, too—she plays pickup basketball and Ultimate Frisbee—”

He’s ticking off the items on his checklist, one by one. In fact, he’s pretty much ticked off every item on the list, except one.

“Is she hot?”

“Um, yeah. Blond, tall, stacked—did I mention ponytail?”

Now I’m irritated. “Wearing a ponytail doesn’t mean she’s low maintenance in an emotional way, Chase.”

“No, but it means she doesn’t plow lots of energy into doing her hair.”

I can’t believe I’m getting sucked into this argument with him, but I am. “Doing your hair isn’t a moral failing. God gave me this hair—” I wrap a fist around it. I love my hair. It’s thick and malleable and a coppery fall-leaf color I’ve never seen on anyone else—naturally. It deserves all the respect I give it. “—and it’s a source of joy to me. And men,” I add.

An odd expression crosses his face. “I’m sure it is.”

“No need for sarcasm.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

I suddenly realize how far off topic I’ve let him steer me. “Did you get me off on this rant to keep me from asking more questions about your date?”

He gives me a sideways look.

I roll my eyes. “She’s perfect, but…?” I draw the last word out. “Without getting into gory details, what happened?”

“I just—I don’t know, whatever.”

“It was just, whatever?” I ask incredulously. “You whatever’d the perfect woman?”

I sound outraged, but there’s this little part of me that’s bizarrely relieved. Because I’d thought maybe he was leading up to telling me that she was on the “planning a marriage proposal” end of the scale, which would be so unexpected that—

I don’t know what. Just, really unexpected. So, yeah, relieved that it’s the other way ’round. Whatever-worthy.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “She wasn’t all that, you know?”

“Are you going to see her again?”

He sighs. “Probably not.”

This confirms something I’ve suspected since our “first date.” That Chase doesn’t want to fall for anyone, no matter how many boxes she checks on his list. Maybe even can’t.

“Chase? We’ve been friends for a long time, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So can I ask you kind of a personal question?”

“No,” he says.

“I’m going to ask anyway.”

“I knew you would.”

“Do you actually want to like the women you go out with? I mean, do you actually want to have a relationship with someone?”

His eyes widen.

“Because, honestly? It seems like you push them away. I always get the feeling you’re relieved when it doesn’t work out so you can keep playing the field and eating crap.”

“Yeah?” He tilts his head, considering. Then he shrugs again. “You may be on to something.”

“And tonight kind of convinced me. Because you actually went out with the perfect woman, and where are you? Not cuddling in her bed, not shopping for an engagement ring. Hanging with me.”

He’s giving me a weird look now. “I like hanging with you.”

“I guess that’s sort of my point. You like hanging with me because I’m safe and you know there’s no way in hell I’ll stop being safe.”

He opens his mouth, then shuts it again.

Shit. I’ve gone too far.

“You—might be right.”

Okay, that was so not the response I was expecting. I was expecting him to get mad or say something else, but he looks thoughtful. He pushes himself to his feet and says, “I’m going to get myself a beer. Switch to your iPad, and we’ll have an official consolation party.”

Okay then. Conversation over.

He goes into the kitchen and comes back with a beer and his iPad. He dims the light and plops down on the couch next to me. Fiddles around with the Netflix app.

“What’re you watching?”

“The Fate of the Furious. The eighth Fast and Furious movie.”

“Of course you are,” I sigh.

“At least my movie doesn’t deplete the rain forest by using up all the tissues in the house.”

I stick my tongue out at him and pull the tissue box closer.

We watch for a while side by side.

Sometimes I go to the movies with Eve. We sit together and share popcorn and Junior Mints. We watch the same movie. We cry at the same time.

That’s the gold standard, right?

I guess all I’m saying is that I’ve never understood why sitting side by side in Chase’s living room with two different movies and two different drinks should feel so—I don’t know, cozy.

One of life’s little mysteries.