But you get addicted.
This life makes regular life seem pretty dull.
Even the boredom in this job is exciting somehow.
You’re on the move. You’re never still. And you’re too busy to be lonely.
Which always suited me just fine.
That is, until Glenn grounded me in Houston—at the very moment when I needed an escape the most.
* * *
THAT SAME DAY Glenn took me off the Madrid gig, my car wouldn’t start—and so Robby wound up driving me home in his vintage Porsche in the pouring rain.
Which was fine. Better, actually. Because I still hadn’t invited him to Toledo.
Maybe it was the rain—coming down so hard that the wipers, even on the highest setting, could barely clear it—but it wasn’t until we made it to my house that I noticed Robby had been weirdly quiet on the drive home.
It was too wet for me to get out right then, so Robby turned off the car entirely and we just watched the water coat the windows like we were at a car wash.
That’s when I turned to him and said, “Let’s go on a trip.”
Robby frowned. “What?”
“That’s why I came to the office today. To invite you on vacation.”
“On vacation where?”
Now I was regretting the randomness of the choice. How, exactly, do you sell Toledo?
“With me,” I answered, like he’d asked a different question.
“I don’t understand,” Robby said.
“I’ve decided to take a vacation,” I said, like This isn’t hard. “And I’d like you come with me.”
“You never take vacations,” Robby said.
“Well, now I do.”
“I’ve invited you on three different trips, and you’ve weaseled out of all of them.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
Before my mother died. Before I got grounded. Before I got taken off Madrid. “Before I bought nonrefundable tickets to Toledo.”
Robby looked me over. “Toledo?” If he’d been confused before, now he shifted to full-on befuddled. “People don’t go on vacation to Toledo.”
“Actually, they have world-renowned botanical gardens.”
But Robby sighed. “There’s no way we’re going there.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll cancel.”
“What part of ‘nonrefundable’ don’t you understand?”
“You really don’t know yourself very well, do you?”
“I don’t see the problem,” I said. “You wanted to do this, and now we’re doing it. Can’t you just say Awesome and accept?”
“I actually can’t.”
His voice had a strange intensity to it. And in the wake of those words, he leaned forward and ran his fingers over the grooves of the steering wheel in a way that got my attention.
Did I mention that I read body language the way other people read books? I can speak body language better than English. For real. I could list it on my résumé as my native tongue.
Growing up as my mother’s child had forced me to learn the opposite of language: all the things we say without words. I had turned it into a pretty great career, to be honest. But if you asked me if it was a blessing or a curse, I wouldn’t know what to say.
Things I read about Robby in that one second: He wasn’t happy. He dreaded what he was about to do. He was doing it anyway.
Yep. Got all that from his fingers on the steering wheel.
And the tightness in his posture. And the force of the next breath he took. And the tilt of his head. And the way his eyes seemed to be using his lashes like a shield.
“Why?” I asked next. “Why can’t you accept?”
Robby looked down. Then a half-breath, a quick clench of the jaw, a steeling of the shoulders. “Because,” he said, “I think we should break up.”
Impossible, but true: He shocked me.
I turned to look at the dashboard. It was textured to look like leather.
I really hadn’t seen that coming.
And I always saw everything coming.
Robby kept going. “We both know this isn’t working.”
Did we both know that? Does anybody ever know a relationship isn’t working? Is that something you can know? Or do all relationships require a certain amount of unreasonable optimism just to survive?
I said the only thing I could think of. “You’re breaking up with me? On the night after my mother’s funeral?”
He acted like I was catching him on a technicality. “Is my timing the most important thing here?”