“Sure.” Her agreement inspired absolutely no assurance.
“I’ll call you,” I lamely called after her as she climbed into a car. She didn’t look up.
What was she so pissed about? Was it how drunk I’d gotten last night? Was she still mad that the other guys had come up and crashed our party?
I didn’t understand what was going on, and in the past with women I hadn’t ever really tried. Now in a situation where I wanted to unlock the secrets of the female brain, I found myself completely unequipped.
“Woof,” Conner barked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. He was right. She was pissed at me. I was in the doghouse and like countless men before me, I didn’t know why. Resigned, I climbed into a massive limo with tinted windows. I didn’t have energy just then for anything other than the path of least resistance.
My phone about had an epileptic fit on the drive, erupting with texts and messages and voicemails. Lola and Joel and a shit-ton of other people who’d been wanting to get in touch with me the past couple of days all clamored for my attention. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of the seat. It had felt so good to unplug. I didn’t want to be back on the grid, not yet.
But the Super Bowl halftime show would not be denied. Even Connor spruced himself up a bit for our meeting late that afternoon, with one of his pimped-out jackets. His preferred look most resembled that of a Vegas brothel owner circa 1979. Stylists had never been able to talk him out of it, and it had become his trademark look with long, open-shirted polyester collars and chains. I wondered, not for the first time, if he ever tired of it. I would have by now. Black T-shirts and jeans took a lot less effort.
But if he tired of it, he never showed it. Connor was on all the time and before I knew it, shots were flowing. Again. Turned out we all agreed on who’d be the best special guests performing with us. Or, at least they all agreed and I didn’t care.
Ana wasn’t responding to any of my texts. I didn’t know if she had her phone turned off or if she just didn’t want to talk to me. I wanted to go show up at her hotel, but that was the problem. I didn’t know where she was staying.
“You know where Ana is tonight?” I resorted to asking Lola, there with us at dinner.
She shook her head, no. “You’d better go home solo tonight. You’ve got until this weekend. That’s five more days until she breaks up with you. Keep it in your pants until then. Remember, you’ve got to look devastated.”
I nodded, feeling kind of devastated. But there, Lola had given me a good out.
“Think I’ll head home.” I stood up, excusing myself. Johnny nodded affably as always, but Connor balled up his napkin and threw it at me.
“Old man!” he called after me.
“Yup.” I nodded and headed toward the door. Paparazzi swarmed me as I made my way to a car. I could see the headlines, “Ash heads home early!” How sad, it was news that I wasn’t doing anything newsworthy.
Back at my place, I lay awake in bed for a long time. I knew it was time to make some changes, big ones in my life. I just wasn’t exactly sure how to go about doing it. It felt a little like trying to get off a train while it was still hurtling ahead full speed. The most prudent way to go about things was talking to the conductor about the path ahead, negotiating a rest stop, and checking in with your traveling companions to figure out how they felt about slowing down as well.
But there was always the other option. Hit the eject button and hurl yourself right off. I knew there’d be a lot more fallout, pun intended. But I had to admit, at three a.m. lying in bed awake alone in the moonlight it seemed like the right thing to do.
I heard nothing from Ana until the next morning. Early, I got a text message:
Let’s meet at noon at Crissy Field. The warming hut?
I remembered taking her there, had it just been a couple of weeks ago? It felt like we’d known each other far longer. I texted her back right away, letting her know I’d see her then. Earlier if she wanted. But noon it was since I didn’t hear anything back from her.
She stood outside looking so classically beautiful in jeans and a Fisherman’s knit sweater, her natural curls tumbling down her shoulders. I wrapped her in my arms with sheer relief at seeing her again. She let me hug her more than hugged me back.
On her hand, I noticed she was wearing the engagement ring I’d given her. I guess that should have seemed like a good thing. But she hadn’t worn it a single day in Mammoth. When had she put it back on? And why did it give me a strange pit in my stomach?
“Thanks for meeting me, Ash.” She greeted me with the gravitas of a nightly news reporter. “We need to talk.”
That pit in my stomach widened up into a black hole. In my experience, prefacing talking with the introduction ‘we need to’ always meant something bad. If it was good, the person would just launch straight into talking. ‘Hey, let’s head to that party’ or ‘How about pizza?’ never needed a ‘we need to talk’ before it.
“OK,” I managed.
“Here, I need to give you this.” She slid off the engagement ring and held it up, giving it back to me. I took it from her, dumb and wooden. Flashes went off, exploding around us from behind every tree, even up in some limbs. Paparazzi had clearly been waiting for this moment. But I still didn’t understand what was happening.
“I’m calling it off, Ash.”
To my left, I could see a guy down on one knee, getting the right angle, capturing it all on video. I knew I needed to keep my shit together. But what was happening?
“Do you not like the ring?” I held it, stupid, looking into her face. “I can get you another one? Maybe something smaller?”
She shook her head no, not a trace of her usual sweetness or humor. This Ana was all business. “I’m done, Ash. I don’t love you.”
My mouth fell open. It literally felt as if she’d taken a sharp knife and stabbed it directly into my chest. What was this kind of pain?
“Is this because I got drunk in Mammoth?” I tried. Was she jealous? “Nothing happened with any of those girls.”
She shook her head, dismissing me, refusing to engage. “I’d say I hope we can stay friends. But we weren’t ever really friends anyway.” She gave me a rueful glance, the first time she’d looked straight into my eyes. It felt worse, like she’d twisted the knife. And I still could think of nothing to say, standing there like a fish out of water gaping in the air.
“Good luck with everything.” She turned as if to start walking off.
“Wait!” I caught the elbow of her sweater, taking a step closer to her. “Ana, can’t we talk about this? Can we go somewhere more private?” Flashes blasted off all around us as paparazzi captured every word, every expression.
“What’s there to say, Ash?”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“You don’t get to decide that. I do.”
“But…” More flashes. Men clustered around us, one literally rolling along a huge movie camera. The whole thing had clearly been staged. I just hadn’t been in on it. Lola must have known. Was Lola behind all of this?
“Is this what you want, Ana?” I tried, desperate.
“Yes, it is.” So firm, so cold. I barely felt as if I knew her. Maybe she had been pretending
all along. Maybe this had just been a carnival ride for her, a few weeks of backstage passes and a trip to Paris plus some hot sex thrown in for kicks. Now if I could just pay for the library and step out of her way, please.
“I’m…” I swallowed. Even the breakup that we’d supposed to do in a few days would have been better than this. That I would have expected, could have prepared myself for. This? This felt like a swift kick in the groin while the ref looked the other way.
“Let me go, Ash.” She spoke quietly, just to me.
“If it’s what you want.” I couldn’t help but look into her eyes, trying to get her to meet my gaze. But she wouldn’t.
She steadfastly looked down at the ground as she insisted, still emotionless, “It’s what I want.”
Had she faltered, shown any sign of confusion or wavering in her decision, I would have pressed. Sensing a fault line, I would have tried to widen the crack, break apart her certainty. But she didn’t show any sign of weakness. She stayed clear, crisp and direct.
Then she walked off. I stood there, a big jerk with the rejected engagement ring in my hand. The thought occurred to me that I should pull myself together. I shouldn’t stand there looking forlorn and dejected. But I felt trapped in a movie I definitely would have changed the channel on, the kind of melodramatic scene where it started to rain hard on the leading man because his heart had just been broken. And damn if I didn’t feel a drop on my shoulder, that San Francisco fog stewing into something thicker. Had Lola arranged for that, too?
Ana walked right up to the street and climbed into a waiting car. She’d planned all of this, right down to the camera angle. I should feel betrayed, even angry at her.
But all I could feel right then was a fist of pain curled tight in my chest. That’s what finally got me moving. Pain like this, it was mine, private, and I finally gathered my wits about me enough to swear at them all, shoving away a guy who’d come straight up into my face. Striding toward the street, I found a taxi to climb into myself.