(Previously)

It’s over in three minutes. They flip through my book, look me up and down and thank me for coming in. I sat in the car deciding where I was going to go next for longer than the whole thing took. When I turn it on, I tell myself I’m just going to drive, just see where traffic takes me. But I know where I’m going. There’s a reason I go south on the 101, a reason I connect to the 110 and then the 10 west. It’s too many interchanges to pretend that this is the car piloting itself. When I park on Abbot Kinney in Venice, in front of the coffee place where he tends to show up every afternoon, I justify it with the thought that I had to fill the rest of the afternoon somehow. Like that makes it less pathetic.

I looked through the window of the coffee shop. One of those places you ordered by the country of origin of the beans. Ethiopia. Burundi. Costa Rica. Always fair trade, everyone in their Tom’s shoes with Macbooks perched on tables made from reclaimed wood. I thought about going in but then I thought about how I didn’t really want a coffee and how I didn’t want to spend money on something I didn’t want because I didn’t really have money to spend on the things I did actually want. I’d just realized the irony of having this thought while sitting in a Mercedes, in a dress that would have cost $400 if it hadn’t been given to me by a designer in lieu of payment for a runway show, when there was the rap of knuckles at my window. I jumped in my seat, letting out something between a gasp and a scream.

I knew he showed up there every afternoon. I guess the surprise came from him not trying to avoid me.

We hugged when I got out of the car and he said, “I was going to call you later today.”

The fuck you were, I thought. “Well, I’m here now,” I said instead. I was shaking and I hated myself for it.

“Yeah. So that works out for both of us.”

Except it didn’t look like it was the way he wanted things to work out. He looked a little panicked, rethinking this friendly chat, even though I hadn’t given him any reason to think I was going to go all My Lai on him. His eyes darted toward the coffee shop, hoping to find allies inside. He probably would; Venice was a cliquey little hive, Abbot Kinney a neighborhood within a neighborhood where you couldn’t walk down the street without running into someone you knew. This had its benefits and drawbacks. The benefits usually became drawbacks after you stopped fucking the person.

“What are you doing on this side of town?” he asked.

“They let outsiders in sometimes. And I had a casting in the neighborhood.” In the neighborhood 10 miles from here.

“Well, fancy meeting you here.” He was stalling, desperately hoping a mutual friend would come walking up and make it impossible for me to say anything too confrontational without looking totally insane.

I thought about making it easy for him, pretending that I didn’t remember that he hadn’t ever bothered to actually break up with me, he just sent a vaguely-worded email while I was in Miami telling me how amazing I was and that he was in a “weird place”. Then something about his divorce, then a reference to an inside joke and a goddamn smiley face emoticon. An emoticon. The man was almost 40 and he was still pulling this shit and tacking smiley faces on the end. Then I never heard from him again.

But I was still having a hard time aligning this email, that stupid emoticon with the guy who, the first night I stayed over didn’t want me to leave until 3 o’clock the next afternoon because we couldn’t stop making out like idiot teenagers to the point where I had to push him away because his stubble had torn up my face. Or the guy who sent me 30 emails in the week between that night and the next time I saw him. Or the one who told me about his ill sister and asked for my opinion on dailies from the film he was working on. And he wondered if he was a failure, wondered it out loud one night after having too much to drink. Then he curled up against my stomach and I threaded his hair through my fingers for an hour before he held out his hand to me and took me to bed, just to sleep.

Though I guess there were also warning signs. We never had dinner here, in his neighborhood, where people could see us. And I never really met any of his friends. But he said he wanted to get away from the Westside more often, to see more of my neighborhood. And I had met some of his friends, the ones who were also my friends, the ones that had introduced us.

There were more items in column A than column B, but people like Charlotte knew that the ones in B carried more weight. People like me kept beating our heads against the same wall, wanting to believe that the things in column A meant something. That they weren’t just tokens offered to people they wanted to sleep with for six to eight weeks, for the amount of time it usually took to start wondering if they were still seeing other people and if they were willing to stop.

But damn those fucking eyes of his, back from across the street, looking at me like he had that night, most nights. Maybe he really was in a weird place because of his divorce. Maybe now really wasn’t a good time. Maybe I should wait it out, see if he does want to get that drink that he’s talking about now, looking at me like he remembered why he went to all the trouble of getting me to care the first place.

“Yeah. I’m home for a while now,” I said. “Text me.” Charlotte would have considered this a failure on my part, a failure to cut out something toxic and infected from my life. I didn’t care.

“I will. Really good seeing you,” he said, but the look was gone from his eyes. I wish I didn’t see what was there in its place: relief. Or the way he crossed the street to the coffee place: sprinting. Or whom he sat down with at a table next to the window: someone very blonde and very pretty.