Page 63 of One-Star Romance

“No,” she said. “I love you.” She forced herself to keep going. She considered herself a brave person, but this was the most terrifying thing she’d ever done. “But I don’t think we’re in love the way we’re supposed to be.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“It’s not just the kiss; it’s the feelings that went along with it. I’ve tried to push them away.” She thought of Michael dancing and grinning in their office. “But these are the kinds of feelings people write songs about.” She was not normally a woman who trafficked in clichés. Love—axis-spinning, all-consuming, eye-opening love—had stunted her intellectual agility. All her blood was flowing to her heart, none left for her brain.

“But I am in love with you like that,” Rob said, a plaintive note in his voice as he reached for her hand.

She squeezed his palm and shook her head. “You’re not. One day you’ll understand that you’re not.”

He withdrew his hand, stiff, his eyes dark. “I don’t need you to tell me how I’m going to feel.”

They sat silently for a moment. “The wedding,” Rob finally said, his voice raw. She put an arm around him. He was shaking, even as he stared resolutely ahead into the middle distance.

Alongside her deep sadness, she couldn’t help the flare of anticipation that rose in her, for the unknown that came next. “We need to call it off.”

24

There were too many fucking Santas in this house. Rob liked Gabby, but this was obscene. How was a person supposed to walk through a party when inflatable snowmen and reindeer kept springing up in one’s path, a holiday spirit–themed obstacle course? And they were all grinning grotesquely, as if they didn’t know that at any moment, a person you loved could throw a bomb at you and ruin your entire life.

He’d knocked over the Santa just now accidentally, but as it lay on the ground, he was tempted to give it a good kick. The world was not all cookies and milk, buster!

No, this Santa had done nothing wrong. This Santa had not seduced his fiancée. In fact, Rob saw that this Santa’s smile had a dazed, dead-eyed quality to it. Much like Rob’s face had looked over the past weeks, when he was somehow expected to continue on doing his job and appearing in public as if he didn’t have a pile of broken glass where his heart used to be.

Rob lifted Santa back up to his feet. They both wobbled. Then Rob took a step back and looked around the room. Were people sneaking glances at him? He would not give them more to laugh at or sympathetically cluck about. He gave Santa a little pat on his head, as if he’d been assessing his sturdiness. For all anyone else knew, Angus had sent him out here to see how childproof the living room was before letting Christina loose in it. Reliable Rob.

“That one’s stable, all right,” he muttered under his breath, then looked up defiantly to find—oh Christ—Natalie Shapiro studying him. Well, this was a situation straight out of his nightmares—Natalie looking more self-possessed and radiant than he’d ever seen her, while he was falling apart.

He hadn’t even wanted to come to this goddamn party. But Angus had insisted that Rob stay with him and Gabby for at least a long weekend on his way home for Christmas with his family. Angus had gone so far as to move Rob’s plane ticket for him. “You shouldn’t be alone right now, buddy!” he’d said. “We can do whatever you want for the weekend.” Then he’d bitten his lip. “Shoot, we have this housewarming party. But a party could be good, don’t you think? A little nog, maybe some light flirting under the mistletoe?”

After the holidays, Rob would return to Arizona for the next semester, a prospect that was more unappetizing than regurgitated tuna fish. In the weeks since Zuri had called things off, he’d had bad days and worse days. If he wanted to get tenure, he couldn’t just up and disappear at the end of the semester. He still had to hold office hours. But when students came in asking for advice on linguistics PhD programs, he had to stop himself from shouting, Don’t do it! There are no jobs! Each time he started to plan for the following semester, he wanted to bellow into the abyss: What is the point? What was the point of standing in the ivory tower of academia, burying oneself in research, oblivious to the important things happening in one’s real life? He’d built his career on the idea that there was an order to everything. He wasn’t sure he believed that anymore.

His daily routine involved telling himself he needed to grade papers, then proceeding to Google-stalk Michael Garrido instead. Michael’s online presence was show-offy, like the man himself. He had not yet posted a straightforward picture of him and Zuri together on social media, perhaps out of some sense of respect for Rob. (Where had that respect been when he shamelessly flirted with an engaged woman?) But evidence of Zuri was everywhere in the snapshots of his life. Her shoes on his floor. Her hand around a sweating bottle of beer, even though Zuri didn’t drink beer! She only liked wine! Most egregiously of all, Zuri from the back, standing on a balcony, just starting to turn toward the camera. She was silhouetted by the setting sun in front of her, the sky alight with color. Most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen, Michael had captioned the image. How corny and unoriginal of him.

Zuri had offered to handle the wedding’s dissolution, which was decent of her. The worst part was how decent she’d been about it all. Well, the decency plus the way she looked at Rob as if she were a guru who felt vaguely sorry for his level of unenlightenment. She’d emerged from her love nest long enough to try to get back some of their deposits and to send their guest list a brief note: We are sorry to announce that we’ve made the difficult decision to cancel our wedding. We appreciate your love and support during this time and always. (The decision hadn’t seemed particularly difficult to her. And “we” hadn’t made the decision, Rob wanted to shout when she sent the draft over to him for approval. But he didn’t have the energy to send back anything more than a This is fine.)

But there were still people who hadn’t gotten the memo, and that was how the trouble today had started. One of these acquaintances, another groomsman from Angus’s wedding, clapped Rob on the back five minutes into the party. “My man, long time! I hear congratulations are in order.” Rob stared at him, so he continued, “Angus said you’re getting married. When’s the big day?”

Heartbreak on its own was bad enough. Mixing it with humiliation took things to a whole other level. “It’s been called off,” Rob said stiffly.

The man made a shocked face. “Holy shit, what happened?”

“She simply fell in love with her soulmate, a man who is not me.” Rob proceeded to choke down the entire glass of eggnog in his hand. The man awkwardly backed away.

Eggnog was too thick, too cloying to get the job done. For his next drink, Rob poured himself a glass of Angus’s whiskey.

Now, as Natalie began to weave through the guests toward him, Rob tried to remember if he’d had two glasses of whiskey or three. The details were fuzzy.

Perhaps she was simply heading toward the kitchen, and he could duck into a nearby broom closet before she passed by him. Then she’d forget about him, and he wouldn’t have to—

No. She’d somehow gotten much closer as he’d been deliberating the broom closet plan. Close enough that he could see her looking at him with a new kind of gentleness in her eyes. He would not be pitied. He did not need to be treated like a small child. He was a strong grown man. A strong grown man for whom his former fiancée could apparently not feel the kinds of feelings that people wrote songs about. Had Natalie heard about the wedding? Or was she simply concerned that he’d had too much to drink? (Now that he thought about it, the three glasses might have been four.)

“You doing all right there?” she asked, placing a hand on his arm. “Want to go get some fresh air?”

He flashed back to the last time they’d seen each other in the fresh air, standing out in the backyard after Christina’s christening. How idiotic he’d been, waxing poetic about how he knew that Zuri was The One, thanking his own lucky stars that he wasn’t still flailing about in the muck like Natalie was.

She didn’t seem to be flailing now. He had a stain on his shirt while she was all dewy and fresh. Her leather pants hugged her lower half like she’d been sewn into them. Had she done something to her hair? Some special cream, or whatever people did when they wanted to look nicer?

It felt imperative that he keep Natalie Shapiro from pitying him. Her pity would be the final nail in his coffin, the one thing that could make his humiliation even more complete. “I’m perfectly fine,” he said, yanking his arm away, banging his elbow into the banister behind him in the process.

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