Page 81 of Over the Edge

“I just ate, no point in ruining a good meal by walking in on something pornographic. It looks like I got in just in time. Cups?” Quinn asks, and I point to the cabinet to my left. She navigates around us, selecting a commemorative Love Letter Festival cup from 2016 and then going to the fridge to get the Britta.

“Can you blame me? She’s the perfect dessert,” Garrett says as he runs the cold back of his hand against my flaming cheek.

I gasp into his mouth as his lips seal against mine. My chin tilts upward guided by his thumb and forefinger. My eyes flutter closed. The kiss is over a moment later, but I still feel it everywhere. Not just this kiss but a collection of all the moments he’s touched me. Calluses skating across my skin. Fingers in my hair. The seer of his fingers through fabric.

“I’m going to go finish the boxed wine in hopes I forget I heard that,” Quinn says to herself. “Carry on, but please keep any moaning to a minimum.”

“Go make out with Oliver on the couch,” I say, and it feels more natural than I would have thought.

Quinn halts in the doorway putting a hand on the door jamb and considers. “Tempting. I’m more of a rendezvous in a bathroom gal.”

Even as Quinn leaves, Garrett doesn’t pull away.

“You didn’t have to kiss me,” I tell him.

“As long as they’re here, you’re mine,” he says, guiding my chin up so I meet his heavy lidded gaze. “That’s the deal right?”

His.I like that too much.

“Yeah,” I breathe out. “I just don’t want you to do anything you're uncomfortable with.”

“Don’t worry, I’m very comfortable with kissing you,” he says. His body holds in place one second longer before moving to the sink and turning the water back on. “It seems like things are better between the three of you.”

“Yeah, we’re getting our footing again. We’ve never been so out of sync before. Not even when Oliver and I broke it off,” I admit, thankful for the subject change.

“Do you think there’s a reason for it?” he asks as he plunges his hands into the mountain of suds growing in the sink. “You dry, I wash?”

I move to his other side and grab a towel. “Sure. I think there’s a part of me that was hoping they’d just forget me? I have always had this tendency to build in these excuses for people to leave or to push me away. Like, if I can know the reason, then at least I can understand it. But then they showed up and we’re in different places.”

It’s a hard truth I’ve been grappling with. If I can control why I’m alone, if I can make it my fault, then at least there'sa justification. It’s better than being left with an explanation ofjust becausethat sends me spiraling. But also it’s hard to trust myself to not do what I did to Oliver with someone else.

“That’s fair.”

“I think it’s part of what terrifies me with Lyla. If I go public, there will be plenty of people who hate me for no reason. I know that’s normal, but I don’t know if I’m strong enough. I mean, I obsess over podcast reviews and they don’t even know anything personal about me,” I say.

“From what I can tell, you’re not obsessing over them anymore.” His focus is directed to scrubbing. “But things would change. People start caring about you when they used to act like you were never there. I hadn’t seen my mom for almost four years at the time we started touring.”

“You were what, seventeen? Eighteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

His eyes jump to me as he hands me a plate and his expression shadows. “Don’t do that.”

“What? Acknowledge how much that fucking sucks? Because it does.” I hate thinking about how he went through all of that. How, even though I thought I knew him, I didn’t at all. How maybe if I paid more attention I could have done… I don’t know. Something?

“I’m just saying you’re right to expect a shift and there are things that are shitty. I have my career. I was able to make it work,” he says, voice turning hollow. Sometimes when he talks it’s like he’s telling me a story about someone else, like it wasn’t him it happened to. Maybe that’s his way of coping with it, being someone else.

“A career you seem to hate.” I feel compelled to remind him.

“One that I’m good at. One where I’m valued and I earned everything I have,” he says, but I’m not sure who he’s trying to convince. “One that I’m going back to on Monday.”

“You don’t have to.”

I don’t want this version of him to disappear, the one who jokes about wine and holds my hand at museums. The one who gets lost in the moment when he plays music. He’s the man that I—well have this massive feeling that blooms to life in my chest when I think about him. Impending dread blankets me, struck by the feeling that if he starts working again, he won’t stop. And it will be like these past two weeks never happened. I’ll lose him. But I think he’ll lose himself, too.

“Eve, of course I do.” His shoulders slump and he looks away. It’s like he’s tugged on a thick winter coat. One that he’s so used to wearing, so he doesn’t seem to notice that it’s weighing him down.

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