Maddie was waiting at the curb when Alexa walked out of the airport. Maddie took a long look at her face when she got in the passenger seat.
“First: are we going to your house or my house?”
Alexa considered as Maddie drove out of the airport.
“Do you still need my car until you can pick yours up tomorrow? If so, my house.”
“Okay.” There was silence as Maddie got on the freeway toward Berkeley. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Alexa dropped her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
“I don’t know. I just want to be somewhere and not not cry.” She sighed. “I’ve spent the past five hours doing everything in my power to not cry. At his house, at the airport, on the plane.” She checked her phone again to see if he’d called. He hadn’t. “Now I can at least stop fighting it.”
Maddie reached for her hand and squeezed it.
“You want me to drive through In-N-Out on the way?”
Alexa shrugged.
“I’m not really hungry.”
Maddie shook her head.
“Now I know you’re in a bad place. I’m getting you In-N-Out whether you like it or not.”
When they walked through Alexa’s front door, everything in her house reminded her of Drew. The couch where he’d cried on her shoulder. The towel he’d stolen from the hotel for them to lie on in Dolores Park, now hanging up in her bathroom. The coffee table where he’d set her coffee while she was working. The hoodie that he’d left here on his impromptu trip and that she’d “forgotten” to bring back to him this weekend.
She lowered herself down on the couch and put her head in her hands.
“Lex.” She felt Maddie’s hand on her shoulder and leaned into it. Maddie wrapped her arms around her. They sat there like that on the couch for a while, not talking. Eventually, Alexa sighed.
“You were right—I want some French fries. You got us ketchup, right?”
“Of course.” Maddie ripped the bags open and unpacked the food on top of the makeshift place mats. “Now. Talk to me.”
Alexa dropped her head into her hands.
“Oh, Mad. I fucked it all up.”
Maddie pulled her head onto her shoulder.
“What happened?”
“It was all going okay. I mean, we hadn’t talked about anything, but the weekend was fine. Great. And then we went to the 4th of July party.” She thought about the party, and the humiliation hit her all over again. “And all of these other women . . . They were so nice . . . but they said . . . and he didn’t . . . I’d had too much sangria but . . .” Oh, look, she was sobbing again. Maddie folded her into her arms and let her cry on her shoulder until she was too tired to cry anymore.
She sat up and took a sip of her drink and ate a handful of cold fries.
“I guess I should start over again.” She told Maddie the whole story, except for the part about the sex they’d had when she was weeping. That seemed too intimate, too personal, even to tell Maddie. She managed to get through the whole thing without crying, but she’d probably cried out all of her tears.
“Honey.” Maddie stroked her hair. “Alexa, I love you. I would do anything for you. You know that, right?”
She sighed and nodded. She’d heard this before from Maddie. Enough to know to worry about what was coming next.
“Okay. Why didn’t you just tell him how you felt about him? And tell him what you wanted? Why did you just disappear this morning?”
She pushed herself to the other side of the couch.
“I knew what he was going to say, okay? I didn’t need to hear it.”
Maddie looked at her. She didn’t smile, or raise her eyebrows, or tilt her head. She just looked at her and wouldn’t let her look away.
“I was scared! Is that what you want to hear? Okay, fine: I was scared to talk to him! I was scared I would pour out my heart and he would tell me he hoped we could stay friends, I was scared I would see in his face when I started talking that he felt sorry for me, I was scared I’d lay myself bare for nothing, and I was scared I would reveal my whole self to him and he would avert his eyes.” She sighed. “I was scared.”
Maddie wrapped her back up in a hug.
“Oh, honey.”
Alexa rested her head on Maddie’s shoulder. Oh, look, she did have more tears in there.
Maddie sat up.
“Does cookie dough ice cream go better with red or white wine?”
Alexa half laughed, half sobbed.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
Drew saw Kat on his run, but he dodged behind a truck at the last minute to avoid her. He got home in as shitty a mood as when he’d left. He ordered an enormous Hawaiian pizza and opened a bottle of rum, mostly because Alexa hated both. By seven p.m. he never wanted to see another pineapple, but he finished the pizza just to spite her.
Not that she would ever know, but maybe somewhere she had a terrible taste in her mouth and it was thanks to him.
He dragged himself into the hospital on Tuesday morning and managed to avoid having a conversation with anyone but his patients and their parents until almost one o’clock. Of course that’s when Carlos burst into his office.
Fuck. He was grumpy and hungover. He didn’t need to deal with Carlos.
“Never learned to knock, huh?” He kept his head buried in his stack of files.
“How was the rest of your weekend? Everything cool with you and—”
Drew didn’t even want to hear her name.
“Leave it alone, Carlos.”
Carlos moved the stack of books Drew had put on the guest office chair to the floor and plopped down in the chair. Drew scowled. He’d left those books on the chair to keep anyone from sitting there. He should have known that that wouldn’t stop Carlos for a second.
“No, really, what happened? She looked pissed at the party even before you said—”
Drew looked up from the stupid files.
“I said leave it alone, Carlos.”
Did that stop him? No, of course not.
“Come on, man. You have a fight? It was bound to happen eventually. Tell Dr. Carlos about it. I’ll get you all fixed up.”
Drew couldn’t take it anymore. He’d slept like shit, because of the rum and the pizza and the absence of Alexa’s soft, welcoming body next to him, his stomach was full of nothing but strong coffee, he had the worst possible taste in his mouth, and Carlos apparently wasn’t getting the message that he didn’t fucking want to talk about it. He pushed himself up from his desk, and his chair slammed back against the wall behind him.
“I SAID, leave it alone.”
He threw open his office door, ignored the stunned look on Carlos’s face, and walked out of the hospital to his car. He had thirty minutes before his next patient; that was enough time to eat something disgusting and terrible for him.
Alexa walked into City Hall bright and early Tuesday morning. She’d been up since four, so at five thirty she’d given up on more sleep and had gotten ready for work.
At least she hadn’t dreamed about Drew, though her anxiety dreams all had very loud Drew subtext. Awake, he was never far from her thoughts. She kept thinking of what he would say about her presentation, if he’d thought about her at all, the look on his face when they’d made love that last time, the way he always held her as they slept. It was a lot easier to think about work.
She brought a carafe of coffee and a box of doughnuts into the office, along with a bag of doughnut holes. She ate the doughnut holes all morning while catching up on email and expense reports, and got so absorbed in the mindlessness of it that she jumped when Sloane exclaimed from her office doorway. “You brought doughnuts, thank GOD.” Sloane walked in and popped open the box. “Wait, all dozen are still here? You haven’t had one yet?”