“See you,” I say, drinking in his tall, comforting form one last time. He raises a hand in farewell, not bothering to look back, and then he’s gone and the door closes behind him.
I don’t waste much time slipping on my pants and shirt from last night, refolding Huck’s T-shirt and placing it on the bed. I consider keeping it, but I don’t. I don’t want any reminders. Not that I could possibly forget, but I’m making a clean break. From everyone and everything.
And when he comes back, I’m long gone.
15
LORELAI
BABE
The following day, I’m sitting perched on a rocky shelf in one of my favorite high places outside of Nashville, letting the September sun warm my skin and clear my head. This is as good a place as any to wander amidst the thriving field of my many, many tactical missteps. Steamy excerpts from the night before intersperse with the painful memories of a night all those years ago. A clear pattern emerges, and I don’t love what it’s saying.
Because it appears my gut is unreliable.
Time and again, it nudges me into action, and time and again that action results in a fucking mess.
Like when I loftily decided I was going to make concertgoers stop and think. Reset their minds. Engage with some empathy. Instead, I flushed not only my career but the careers of my bandmates and my manager down the proverbial drain. I thought it would be a flash in the pan. Maybe a headline or two, but certainly everyone would forget about it and move on to the next bit of news …
Except no one forgot. Not country music radio, who refused to play any of our recordings, including the old, politically mundane ones. Not Nashville, where the glass entrance to my condo building was spray-painted with the words Yankee Bitch and restaurants refused to seat me. Not my bandmates, who had to completely fall off the radar and restart their careers from scratch. Not Jen, who was hired out by the label to someone just getting started.
Not my fiancé, who took three days to call me back （after publicly canceling our wedding） just to tell me he thought it was time for a break. “Not because of the Neil Young thing,” he insisted. “But because we’ve been drifting apart, and I need to focus on my art right now.”
Everything, gone. One song to ruin it all. Fucking Neil Young.
Ugh. I don’t mean that. I love Neil Young. And I sang what I sang, and to this day, I stand by it. I just wish taking a stand hadn’t cost me everything I had. Utter cancellation.
And last night? I mean. What the actual fuck happened last night? I squirm on the giant boulder I’ve claimed, darting glances around to double-check that I’m still alone up here, and release a humiliated groan even as my thighs clench against the tiny and persistent residual zings of a phantom orgasm.
How dare he be just as miraculous at oral sex as I’d remembered.
How dare he … what? Give me one hell of an orgasm and refuse to allow me to pay back the favor? The audacity of the man to package up leftovers?
Like, on paper, it was a good night. He didn’t technically “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” me and shove me out the door to call my own Uber. So why does it seem like that’s what happened?
Why do I have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach like it was all wrong? I confessed feelings, he confessed feelings, and then we made out, which led to kitchen-counter cunnilingus. The stuff of literal fantasies.
But my fantasies never ended with me falling asleep alone, in a disgusting puddle of snot and tears. As hot as that was, and it really, really was, I would trade it back a hundredfold if I could just have a little platonic cuddling followed by the security of knowing my friend was still my friend and nothing had changed.
I know. I hardly expected it myself.
Eventually I force myself off the boulder and hike back down the short trail to the parking lot just as the first cars filled with morning sightseers are pulling in. I go home, make coffee, and eat a breakfast of soy-sauce-free Chinese leftovers, cold and straight from the container.
By the time my phone rings with a FaceTime notification from Maren and Shelby, I’m wrung out and ready for bed. It’s all of 11:30 A.M.
“Hey,” I answer.
“Oh shit, you saw already?” Maren says. She’s clearly in her office, from the amount of planed timber and the “Poisonous Plants of Northern Michigan” graphic over her shoulder.
“Hold on!” There’s the generic racket of construction happening over Shelby’s speakers, and I watch her gingerly step out onto the green porch of some project or another, slamming the door shut behind her.
“What did I see already?” I ask dully.
“Oh shit, she didn’t see.” Shelby’s eyes grow wide.
Maren’s normally sunny face slips into an apologetic wince. “Drake’s post on Instagram this morning about you two going on tour together. You’re not going on tour together, right? You would have told us. I mean … not that there would be anything wrong with that.” She immediately changes course and I cut her off.
“No, I’m not. At least I haven’t decided yet but probably not.”
“Just probably?” Shelby asks, squinting in the sun and jabbing on a pair of what look to be Cameron’s sunglasses.
I release a breath and settle in against the back of my couch. “Almost definitely. It’s just…” and all of a sudden, I can feel the tears sizzling in the back of my throat. Fucking a. I wave a hand in front of my face, trying to stave them off.
“Lorelai!” Maren gasps, alarmed, as if she’s never seen me cry. Which, to be fair, she hasn’t. Aside from the snot fest last night, I haven’t full-out cried since my parents told me they were getting a divorce when I was a kid. Not even Drake dumping me after “Ohio”-gate made me this emotional, but these last few weeks have got me weeping like Shelby.
Which, ugh. Probably means something extra shitty.
“What happened?”
I take a deep breath. “Huck went down on me and it was perfect and then he got all weird and sent me home with leftovers.” The last part is half whine, half sob, and all embarrassing.
There’s a long, awkward silence before Shelby asks, “Did you say you hooked up with Craig?”
I nod.
Maren. “Is leftovers a euphemism?”
I shake my head.
Maren’s expression is baffled. I hear you, sister. “But why are you crying? Was it bad?”
“It w-was…”—I hiccup—“so hot. I’ve never come so hard in my liiiiiiiife,” I sob.
Through swollen eyes, I see Maren and Shelby exchange looks before Maren guesses, “So … you’re crying because it was good?”
I take another cleansing breath, trying to pull myself together. Then take two more for good measure. Yoga breaths. I fucking hate yoga, but the breathing thing is objectively useful. “I’m crying because afterwards he got all weird about it and sent me home with the rest of dinner. Alone.”
My best friends look pained, which is answer enough.
“I don’t know what went wrong,” I say. “We talked about our feelings…”
“You did? You told him how you feel?”
I think back. “Well, I sent him a sext … or a sexy song, anyway, like you said, and then I confronted him about the poetry account and we started making out and he just dropped to his knees right there in the kitchen.”