“Oh, it’s just Levi.” She bit her lip while she typed in her reply.
Levi.
“You’ve been talking to him a lot today,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Yeah. It’s been nice catching up.”
I cleared my throat. “Did you two ever date?” I asked.
“Me and Levi? Nah.” Then she smiled. “My mom used to always joke that I’d marry him one day.”
“Why?”
“She thought he had a crush on me. I don’t know.”
My mouth went dry. “You never wanted to date him?”
She looked over at me. “This is going to sound a little eighteen-hundreds Victorian England, but his family wouldn’t have really approved of that.”
“Why not?”
She looked at me pointedly. “We were the help, Jacob.”
“But you’re not the help now.” I regretted it the second I said it out loud. I was wingmanning him, for God’s sake.
She made an amused noise. “No, I have definitely leveled up since high school.” She looked back at her phone. “I’m having drinks next weekend at his house. I was thinking the day you were going to take Lieutenant Dan to the vet? I’d be back by the time you got home.”
My stomach dropped. She was going to his house? Was this a date?
I was afraid to ask. Because I was afraid of the answer.
I knew at some point this would happen. She didn’t want me, so she’d date eventually and I had no control over it. I just thought I’d be spared this for now, safe, tucked away in the rules of our arrangement.
But she was single. And she wanted him to know she was single. Maybe he already did. If it never got back to anyone we knew, what was the harm in her doing whatever the hell she wanted?
She could sleep with him that day. The thought made panic rise in my chest.
I had no right to tell her not to go. I didn’t even have a right to be upset. All this, me and her—this was a favor. This wasn’t real. We weren’t fucking REAL.
Her phone pinged again. Then again. And again.
It wasn’t loud, but my reaction to it was physical. Every time a text came through, my shoulders creeped higher, my pulse went up. The sound was so triggering, it felt like gunfire.
Ping.
Ping ping.
Ping ping ping.
“You know, I’m actually pretty tired,” I said, picking up the remote and turning off the TV. “I think I’m going to go to sleep.”
Her face fell. “Oh.”
She sounded disappointed. I don’t know why. She wasn’t even watching the show, and she could text in the living room.
She got up. “Okay. Good night.” And then she went back to the air mattress.
I was disappointed because she wouldn’t accidentally fall asleep in my bed and the rest of the night was ruined, but I couldn’t keep watching her check her phone.
I turned off the light, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind went on a merciless tangent instead. What was he saying that made her laugh? Was he funnier than me? Did she get butterflies when a text came through? Would I have to watch her date him? Right in the middle of our deal?
I was ruminating and it wasn’t healthy and it wasn’t getting me anywhere. So I used the skills I’d learned in therapy. Redirected my thoughts. Tried to ground myself by focusing on what I knew to be positive and true.
Briana sought out my friendship in the beginning, so she must like me. She said she feels protective over me. She laughs when I joke with her. She compliments me. Tells me I smell good, that I have a nice smile.
And it was possible I was reading too much into her texts with Levi. She’d just reconnected with him today, and they probably just had a lot of catching up to do.
This helped a little—but not enough.
I fell asleep for an hour and woke up after having a restless dream about a bear attacking me on a hiking trail. Then I lay in bed worrying a plane was going to hit the house, or that one of the twins would get into an accident, or that I’d lost my birth certificate.
Had I lost my birth certificate?
I got up and looked for it, digging through the safe in my closet. When I found it, it was two in the morning, and I was wired. I wanted to go for a run. To tear through the streets at full speed and outpace this feeling, or wear myself out to the point of exhaustion so I’d be too tired to think. But I couldn’t leave without going out the front door, and I didn’t want to wake Briana. So I used my rower instead.
After forty-five minutes, I was dripping with sweat and no closer to sleeping than I had been before I started. I took a shower and figured I might as well journal to work through some of what I was feeling. So I tiptoed to the plant room and wrote. After two hours of that, I finally felt de-escalated enough to fall asleep around six, but I was up again at eight, right on schedule.
And then she texted him the whole day.
In the kitchen when I was making her breakfast. In the living room on her air mattress. In the bathroom while she was doing her makeup. Then the whole way to my parents’ house for the bachelor and bachelorette parties.
She never stopped.
Her phone was on silent now, so I didn’t hear the pings. And I didn’t ask if she was talking to him, but I knew that she was, and I filled in every awful scenario in my mind: He was flirting with her, and she was flirting back. She couldn’t wait until our arrangement was over so she could date him openly. Her mom would be happy about it because she always thought they’d get married and now maybe they finally would.
My nerves were frayed. By the time we pulled up to my parents’ house, the gnawing in the pit of my stomach was starting to make me feel sick. I was getting overheated and sweaty. I kept wiping my palms on my pants. I had to check three times that I’d put the truck in park. I couldn’t remember.
“Okay,” she said, finally putting down her phone, pivoting in her seat to face me. “So here’s your catchphrase of the day. Ready?”
I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t concentrate. “Yeah.”
“‘In this economy?’” She smiled. “That’s it. That’s the phrase.”
I just stared at her. “Okay.”
She eyed me. “It’s a good phrase, Jacob.”
“Yeah.”
She tilted her head. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
I wasn’t. I was feeling dizzy. I felt like my brain was detaching from my body. I couldn’t breathe right.
I wanted to tell her she couldn’t go to Levi’s next week. I wanted her to stop texting him. I wanted the phone to stop silently going off.
More than that, I wanted her to want me back. I wanted us to be real. I wanted this to be different and it wasn’t going to be different and I felt like I was collapsing from the outside in.
It was hard enough to deal with the reality of Briana’s non-feelings for me. But at least I had these few months. At least I got to be close to her, even if it was just going to be for a little while. But that safe space had been breached now, and water was spilling in, and I was drowning.
“Jacob?”
I blinked at her.
She was looking at me weird. “You don’t have to go to this.”
“What?”
“The bachelor party. You can just say you don’t feel well or something. We can go home.”