Page 41 of Never the Best

Yeah, your fiancée is going to really appreciate that, Rhett?

Fuck! Being with Pearl made me forget Josie, forget that I was trapped in a relationship I didn’t want. Could I break free? It would be a shitshow, but then wouldn’t divorce later be a bigger one? Myrealfriends knew this was a bad relationship for me, I just needed to find my balls and do the right thing.

Pearl and I fell into an easy rhythm of conversation, picking at slices of prosciutto and soft brie as we talked about everything and nothing. Books, mostly old favorites, recent discoveries, authors we’d loved and hated. But there were other things, too. Small glimpses of the people we’d become, the lives we’d lived outside of Savannah.

I learned that she’d been to Paris once, which she’d always wanted to do, and had spent an entire afternoon wandering through Shakespeare & Company, the iconic English-language bookstore on the Left Bank, just across the Seine from Notre Dame. She said it felt like stepping into a dream.

“Do you have someplace you’ve always wanted to visit?” she asked.

“I’d like to go to Patagonia someday,” I confessed.

“Really?”

"It’s like the end of the world, isn’t it?" I pondered wistfully. "Someplace untouched, wild. Like you could stand there and feel…small, but in a good way. Like all the noise and expectations would finally be far enough away to let you just exist."

She tilted her head as if studying me. “By expectations, I assume you’re talking about your family?”

I nodded. “The truth is that sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my whole life living for other people—doing what’s expected, being who I’msupposedto be.”

“And Patagonia?”

“It feels like it would be the kind of place where none of those things would matter. Just the mountains, the glaciers, the sky. I’d befree."

Her fingers grazed the rim of her glass. "So, what’s stopping you?"

I smiled self-deprecatingly. "Everything. Work. Family. Expectations. You know how it is."

"Maybe you should say ‘to hell with everything’ and go see the glaciers."

I wanted to ask her if she’d come with me. I wanted her holding my hand when I looked up at blue skies, breathing in my freedom.

“Patagonia will have to wait,” I replied quietly.

We both knew I wasn’t talking about taking off to the southernmost tip of South America.

“Leaving Savannah showed me there was more to life than…well, whatever it was Birdie was always chasing.” She put her hand on mine in a comforting gesture. Her compassion bowled me over. I was the asshole, the villain in her story, and yet, she was being kind to me. But what was even more surprising was how easy it was to open myself up to Pearl, to show her the cracks I’d been hiding, the weight of expectations I wasn’t sure I could carry any more.

CHAPTER 16

Pearl

There was a skip in my step. No, seriously—I’d never skipped before in my life, but there it was. For a woman who had always felt heavy, no matter what the scale said, this was a banner day.

I’d talked to my therapist the day after I returned from Newport Beach, and he’d been happy to hear that I’d not forgiven or forgotten what happened with Rhett but that I had made my peace.

“Why the hell didn’t I do this before?” I wondered, annoyed with myself for holding my bitterness and anger, my fear so close to me that it had almost killed me.

“You weren’t ready,” my therapist informed me. “You’d never have believed his sincerity earlier.”

“Am I a fool to believe it now?”

“That’s fear, Pearl.”

“Yeah, tell me about it; I feel it all thefucking time.”

“Okay, say he’s pretending to be sorry. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

I pondered that question for a while. He and I often did an exercise in which we unraveled a situation to the worst possible result, and then I had to find my way back to the plausible present.

---