I fixed my eyes on her. She took a quick sip.
“He kissed me,” she said then, almost in passing.
“What? Chris kissed you?”
I took a huge gulp of rosé.
“I swear, I wasn’t expecting it at all. Suddenly he was just there, totally on top of me, and his lips … I tried to shove him off. You have to believe me.”
I stared at her and downed the rest of my wine. We were sitting in the outdoor seating area at the Stortorget restaurant; it was Friday night and full of people. Even so, it felt like we were all alone in our little bubble, just Amina and me. The rest of the world was canned elevator music.
“You trust me, right? You know I would never do anything with him,” said Amina.
Her giant pupils darted back and forth. It was a point of honor, of course. We were best friends.
“Obviously,” I said, since I knew what a horrible liar she is.
“He’s a jerk, a total fuckboy,” she said. “Jesus, you just don’t do that. He knows we’re best friends. It doesn’t matter that you…”
She stopped, apparently regretting her words.
“That I what?”
She looked down and fiddled with her necklace, the one with the silver ball I’d given her for her eighteenth birthday.
“That you were going to dump him.”
“But he didn’t know that,” I said.
“No, of course not.”
She kept messing with the silver ball.
“You told him?”
She really does suck at lying.
“I’m sorry. He just kept nagging me about it. He said he’d texted you a bunch of times but you never responded. He knew something was wrong.”
I couldn’t produce a single word. I didn’t even want to look at her.
“He was a bad summer fling,” Amina said, attempting a half smile. “Maybe it was for the best that it ended up like this. Now we know what a jerk he is.”
I couldn’t smile. Nor could I see any plus side to what had happened. I was still having trouble taking it in.
I really wanted to be angry. I wanted to call Chris and tell him what a pathetic pig he was and that he could go to hell. But my rage was forced into the background by other emotions that were new to me.
Above all, I felt betrayed.
* * *
The next day, he sent more messages over Facebook and Snapchat. I resisted the impulse to respond and blocked him everywhere instead. I never wanted to have anything to do with Christopher Olsen ever again.
During that week, I stopped thinking about him. Or, well, at least long periods passed without him infiltrating my brain. Several hours without an ache in my heart. I decided it would simply take time, that I had to withstand it. It was like quitting smoking.
When I got home after work that Wednesday, as August was panting its last hot breaths, I realized that Chris had hardly been in my thoughts since early that morning. I was already moving on; I had buried whatever feelings might still be there under the surface, and I wasn’t going to dig them up again. It was actually going faster than I’d thought.
Neither Chris Olsen nor Linda Lokind would be part of my future. Just like thousands of other people, they had passed through the fringes of my life. They’d had nothing more than brief cameos. Soon I would have forgotten them. In ten or twenty years, I would recall this crazy story and tell it to new friends with a smile full of horror and delight: the guy fifteen years my senior who took me to Copenhagen in a limo and booked the suite at the Grand for us; his mentally unstable ex who stalked me. I would only have vague memories of what they looked like, who they were, and what actually happened. I would definitely laugh at the whole mess and people who listened to it would question its accuracy.
If only it hadn’t been for Amina.
79
Friday was the last day of August. The end of this summer had been magical and there was nothing to suggest that the spell was about to break. The sun was shining and the sky was blue.
I thought about my Asia trip. In a few weeks, when the darkness blew in across the plains around Lund, I would finally have my one-way ticket to sun, heat, and adventure in my back pocket. Finally. I would scrape together enough money even if it meant toiling from open to close seven days a week.
Last night I had listed the Vespa for sale online. I felt horribly ungrateful, but I had made myself clear. I didn’t want a Vespa—I needed money for my trip.
In the morning I messaged Amina to ask if she had time to meet up that night. We had to talk. I was disappointed about what had happened, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I was making a mountain out of a molehill. What did it really matter that Amina had revealed to Chris that I didn’t want to see him anymore? In some ways, she had done me a favor.