You Were Here by Gian Sardar

Author:Gian Sardar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-27T10:44:05+00:00

13

Now

DREAMLESS. FOR ONCE. A sleep that carried her from end to end, a solid raft in black waters.

“What’d you do different?” Robert asks. Monday morning, soft light in leaves, the distant hum of a plane. “Why last night?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just lucky.” Abby stretches on the couch, luxurious with rest, then curls and faces the wall, the window above brightening in dust motes like a sprinkling of mica—fairy wishes, Aunt Emilia used to say. Beautiful. Everything. Amazing what a real night of sleep can do. Though maybe it wasn’t just the sleep, a thought tugging on her. “But I read some letters.” I spent the evening with a man who wasn’t you. “I have a game plan.” To see him again. She hears Aidan: You look beautiful like that. The way her heart slammed against her chest, it seemed impossible that others weren’t hearing it. “When’s your meeting at Warners?”

He tells her Wednesday, though they’re not meeting on the lot, but at a restaurant, and gives her the name of two producers, neither of which mean anything to her. “Look them up,” he says. “They’ve done some great stuff.” There’s a pause. “Abby, I saw it on the news this morning.”

For a moment she’s confused—the producers were on the news?

Robert continues. “Have you read what they’re saying? What he did?”

“Oh. No. I haven’t looked.”

“Well you might want to. They’re even talking about it here.”

But she doesn’t want to. She wants to stay in her pajamas, stare at a blank wall, and replay yesterday. Which she does. Over and over again. It’s strange, right alongside the heart-leaping feeling—that top-of-the-roller-coaster lift and flurry—there’s also something calming about Aidan, as if for years her view had been uncertain but just now it’s shifted to familiar. You know this place. She’s fallen right through the rabbit hole and once more is consumed with him—though differently, not just a crush, not fraught with teenage lust and a need for vindication, but rather a whole body-and-mind craving, like someone compelled to eat a certain food, not consciously aware of the reason for the demand but wanting it all the same.

Reason, however, has wrapped yellow caution tape around him, but deemed that thoughts are fine. She can relish in thoughts, bathe in thoughts, sink her feet deep into them. We all want the house down the block; we all wish we were ten pounds lighter. It is human to want. The problem is that in her mind she has already kissed him. He has already unbuttoned her blouse and she’s felt the warmth of his hand. They’ve gone grocery shopping and folded into each other watching marathons on Netflix, popcorn falling on the floor. Lust and life, all of it. And because her mind has taken her there, there is a part of her that understands she has already cheated.

And it makes her nervous, because this want is nothing like she’s known.

To think of something else, she goes to her mother’s computer and looks up the producers.

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