Chapter 46

Chase

Brooks rings the doorbell on Thursday night. I get up from the couch long enough to open the door, then sink back down in front of my glass of bourbon. It’s my third. Or fourth. Or maybe fifth.

Brooks strolls over and stands beside me, forehead wrinkled. “You look like the walking dead, Chase. What the fuck?”

“I didn’t invite you over.”

“No, I came over because Rodro and I are worried about you. You were a zombie at work today. You looked happier when you were in the middle of that fight with Thea about where Katie was going to spend Christmas.”

“I’m happy.”

“Happy dudes don’t drink by themselves,” Brooks points out.

“There are more glasses in the kitchen. Right of the sink.”

He rolls his eyes, but crosses to the kitchen and comes back with an empty lowball. He pours himself some bourbon and sits beside me.

“You going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“No.”

Brooks, wise man, stays silent. Around us, the house is making its night noises, the refrigerator humming, the joists expanding and contracting. I’ve heard quite a bit of the night noises recently, during the not-sleeping portions of the last three nights, which is pretty much all of them.

Normally, when I can’t sleep, I make Liv come watch movies with me. Yes, it’s true: I have actually made up nonexistent dates just to have the excuse for one of our consolation parties.

And somehow it never occurred to me that that might be indicative of a problem.

Not too bright, this guy.

Brooks is still eyeing me like I’m a ticking time bomb. “Does this have something to do with Liv’s leaving?”

Outright lie? Half-truth? Silence?

I don’t get the chance to decide, because Brooks nods like I’ve confirmed something he already knew. “That’s what Rodro was guessing. He said you were in love with her. Is that true?”

He asks it the way you’d ask a close friend to confirm the rumor of a cancer diagnosis.

I open my mouth to deny it, because a long time ago, I decided I would never let the phrase “in love with her” apply to me again. But now that Brooks has let it drop like a bomb in my living room, I can see it’s true.

That it’s probably been true all along.

I think of that first blind date. How beautiful and polished she was, how even then I wanted to feel every curve and secret of her, and how that scared the shit out of me, because the only other time I’d wanted that before, it had landed me in sewage.

I can tell already this isn’t going to work.

A wall I threw up between us, because I knew if I let myself, I would fall for her.

All I can do is nod.

Brooks opens his mouth and I think he’s going to howl with laughter, but then he seems to realize that I’m in no condition to be laughed at and shuts it again. “We’re talking about the Liv who—and I quote—is your friend ‘like you and Rodro and I are friends’?”

I have to rest my forehead briefly in my hands.

“Chase, you okay?”

“No. I’m not okay. I’m definitely not okay.” Pretty sure, in fact, that I feel less okay as time passes.

“What happened? How the fuck—” He seems to suddenly realize that we have a genuine humanitarian crisis on our hands. “How do you get from ‘just friends’ to…this?”

His gesture takes in the mostly empty bottle, the mostly empty glass, my trashed living room, and me.

He looks pretty freaked out, too, as if something like this could happen to him if he let his guard down.

I tell him my insight about our first date. How even then I liked her too much. How I put the right amount of distance between us. I made a list of all the reasons we could never get along. I made everything between us about what we couldn’t agree on. The movies. Our snacks, our drinks. I loved that we couldn’t agree on a movie because it put all that space between us on the couch. It meant there was never anything shared between us that could pull us together.

And then…

“I asked her to come help me with Katie. Why do you think I did that?”

Brooks looks, if possible, even more freaked out.

“I don’t know, dude. Because you’re an idiot?”

“Thanks, man. That helps.”

“You know what I think you really need? Another drink.”

He’s right. I pour another bourbon, and let the rhetorical question drop.