Page 29 of Exit Lane
“You charmed your trucker on the side of the highway, and now I’ve charmed mine.” He steps closer, closing the neon glow from the jukebox between us. “But really. Picksomething good. I make it a habit not to date women with bad taste.”
Instead of bringing up the time he told me about Caroline dragging him to a Tiësto rave, I put on Sheryl Crow and try to calm the butterflies that seem to have taken up permanent residency in my stomach.
An hour later, we’re splitting a hot dog with “all the toppings,” which turns out to be a thing people say in movies and should never mean in real life. Relish and sweet pickles topple out as we hover over a plate splattered with mustard, ketchup, and mayo.
“Delicious,” Teddy says, swallowing and throwing his head back before lifting the latest addition to our bar-food sampler toward me. As I take a bite, I catch the tip of his finger in my mouth. A blush spreads across his cheeks, and my entire body warms.
“It’s time to play a game.” I clap my hands once. I’m clear-eyed, two giant glasses of water in my system and enough sleep deprivation to know exactly what I want. “The game we played on our road trip.”
“Let’s go back and forth and tell each other what we know to be true about the other person,” he recites back to me, both mocking and wistful. “God, Mar. You scared me so much, and I thought you were so fucking cool.” Our smiles are inches away from each other, every instinct in my body instructing me to slide past pragmatism straight into pleasure.
“I’ll start,” I whisper, his hand on my thigh, my heart beating louder than I knew it could.
XXIII
Teddy
“The first thing I know about you is that you have every right to hate me. And I am prepared to spend the rest of my life regretting how I acted. So the fact that we’re here,” she motions dramatically around us and smiles, “feels like a second chance I don’t deserve.”
All the dozens of ways I imagined this conversation taking place over the years—in my apartment in Minnesota, in the hospital waiting room at Mayo, in the Brooklyn Heights studio I rented when I moved back to New York—and I could never have pictured this. Marin’s eyes try to find a clue in mine, any indication that what she’s saying is landing. All those appointments alone, wishing I could send her darkly funny cancer memes or complain about the endless blood tests—they added up.
I let my knee rest against hers. “I did hate you. And then I missed you. But then I hated myself for missing you.” I pause, cautiously approaching wherever we’re headed next. “You didn’t know how to show up for me. It didn’t matter how badly I wanted to believe it was a traumatic situation for you and that given another chance you’d never react thesame way. I had to make peace with the version of our story that broke my heart: When I needed you to care, when I needed you to roll up your sleeves and figure all this out next to me, you left.” I pause, giving myself a moment before saying the thing I’ve never let myself dwell on. “It made me feel like maybe I wasn’t worth caring about or caring for, Mar, and that made me hate myself. That’s why I had to shut you out completely.”
Marin stares at me with a look of shock on her face, her eyes watering. She covers her mouth with one hand and starts digging through her purse with the other, desperate to find something. She pulls out a pocket-sized notebook with worn corners and gives me the kind of pinched look a kid gets when they’re explaining their artwork to the class. Tears are running down her cheeks now, and I can feel the urgency and remorse before she even speaks. “At first, I drafted you an email. But then when Carter told me not to contact you...” She places the notebook in my hands. “I started writing to you here—when I was waiting for a meeting, after a bad night out.” Flipping through the pages, I see dates from the past three years accompanied by passages in Marin’s impossible-to-decipher cursive. “It’s all the things that reminded me of you. And all the ways I wanted to say I was sorry. How I envisioned our life could have been if I hadn’t fucked it all up.”
I realize the hand I meant to playfully rest on her thigh hasn’t moved. A heat stirs in the center of my stomach. I want to talk about our feelings, and I want to play this stupid game because I’ll do whatever it takes to be near her.But really, what I want is to move that hand from her thigh to in between her legs, drag it over the seam of her jeans and then under her shirt up her stomach, over her breasts, around to her back, and under her waistband to reach the spot where her ass curves into her eternal legs. I want to show her how much my body missed her body.
It’s terrifying to have the thing I told myself would never happen, not in a million years, unfold in front of me. Part of me is holding back, expecting her to run at any moment. But most of me wants to embrace this improbable present, throw everything at it.
I grab her hand without overthinking it, watching her Rolex catch the light, taking in the beauty of something as simple as her fingers. “This scares me, Mar. Shitless, if I’m being totally honest. I had to get pretty comfortable with the idea of a future without you.”
She pulls her hand from mine and rests her palms on my thighs, leaning close enough to my face for me to count her freckles. “If you want me to disappear back into my life in Copenhagen, I’ll do it. No questions asked.” I watch her carefully consider what she’s about to say, her usual armor fading into something softer, more vulnerable, just as freaked out as I’m feeling. “But if there’s a part of you, like there’s a part of me, that wants to do this, really do this... to be together, I’m yours.”
I can’t begin to process what I’ve just heard. That everything I wanted three years ago is right in front of me.
Marin slips the notebook back into her bag, wiping the tears from her face and straightening her posture.
I wait for my thoughts to organize themselves like they normally do, but my mind is like an abstract painting—broad, messy strokes of shock and sorrow, longing and heartache, desire and horniness, trepidation and terror, all bleeding into one another. This is a person I felt resigned to hate. Who shows up for me only in the most outlandish of circumstances but not in the moments that make up my actual life.
She reaches for my forearms, a desperate joy washing across her face. “Teddy, things are different now. We’re here, again. We can start over. I can do better.”
“Things are different now for you,” I respond without thinking. “It doesn’t get to be that simple for you, Mar. You don’t get to dip out for the really fucking hard part and then show up when everything’s OK. When I’m healthy.” Before I can soften the blow, “Last call!” rings from the other side of the bar, and we’re snapped back to reality without warning.
I put a few hundreds on the counter without another word to her and shake hands with our server, who insists on giving me a hug. Marin watches stonily, handing me my coat in silence and pushing the door open, forcing us out into the cold.
The snow is softer now, spiraling as it falls. “You’re best to stay put for the night,” says a friendly trucker we threw darts with as he hoists himself into his cab. “But you two lovebirds won’t mind.” We drag our suitcases through inches of snow to the familiar motel next door. I wonder if Marin can hear my heart beating through my chest orsense the swirling confusion behind the cheeky smile I give our friend as he waves good night. I wonder if she can hear me trying to convince myself that she doesn’t just want me because it could be easy again.
Inside the lobby, the air’s stale, and we’re greeted with a grunt from the woman behind the counter. “Hi.” Marin strains for a name tag. “Hi, Dolores. We’re stuck on our way to our best friends’ wedding and hoping we can rent two of your finest rooms for the evening.”
It’s funny to watch Marin try to be charming, because she is, when she’s not thinking about it. Dolores grimaces as Marin sets her visibly expensive bag on the dusty counter covered in local business cards.
“You think you’re the only two stranded tonight? I don’t have any rooms left.”
Marin turns to me, eyes wide and desperate for help. Her natural response would likely involve a hasty bribe, perhaps a threat related to the Better Business Bureau. It’s on me to bring a little Midwestern softness to the situation at hand.
“Hey there, hi, sorry for the night you must be having. Apologies for making yet another ask of you. We’re happy to take anything you have. A janitor’s closet. A laundry room.” And in a moment of East Coast elitism, I pull out three remaining hundred-dollar bills to sweeten the deal. A polite, considered bribe.
Turns out, Dolores speaks the universal language of cash. “There’s one room. 831. It’s small. The hot water doesn’t reach. Be out by ten.” I could kiss this grumpyreceptionist. I reach for Marin’s suitcase and tug our luggage down the hall.
