“I can tell she feels a lot of guilt. I said that she told me that stuff because she wanted to feel better and she thought she’d never see me again, so why not?”
“That’s weird. Because that’s exactly why she told me. She said she didn’t really know why she did it, she just wanted to feel better.”
“She’s obviously searching. Maybe she’s ready to try and get better, or at least, get some kind of help. I thought she wanted to move on, really, and I tried to tell her she could. She just needs to let herself.”
“She doesn’t know how though. She probably does want to, somewhere deep down, but she buries that with guilt and with pain.”
“So, what are we going to do?” Matt finally sunk down, slowly, into his office chair. He felt defeated, winded, far worse than he had all the evening and the night before.
“We?” Chantara raised a brow.
“Yeah. We?”
Chantara stared at him, pinning him with her dark, not so angry gaze, for a long time before she finally exhaled. “I wish I knew. Seriously. I would have done it a long time ago.”
CHAPTER 18
Callie
After three days of moping around the apartment, apparently, Chantara had enough. She swept in after work, took one look at the dirty dishes in the sink, the empty pizza box and sandwich wrappers in the living room and two bags of shopping that had yet to be unpacked.
“Get yourself in the shower, I’m taking you out.”
“What?” Callie stared at her best friend incredulously.
“Look at the place,” Chantara commanded. “God, it’s a mess. You’ve been wallowing around in it long enough. Go have a shower. We’re going out. I’m going to see if I can instill a little life into you yet.”
“No, really, I don’t want to go out.” Callie turned her attention back to the program on TV, something about fashion design and runways. She thought Chantara would leave it at that, but it must have been bad because she snatched the remote off the coffee table and turned the TV off.
“Seriously, honey, I love you, but you haven’t washed your hair in like, four or five days.” She sniffed. “Probably not anything else either.”
“Hey!”
“I’m kidding about that. Kind of. But really. You need to get out of the house. Now. You can’t keep sitting here day after day hoping that things are going to get better.”
“It’s not like I haven’t been trying. I’ve applied for a ton of jobs, but no one has called me back yet.”
“Well, we’re going out so you won’t have to think about that and everything else. It’s you and me like it used to be.”
“No, I really don’t want to go out out.”
“Relax. I’m not taking you to the bar. I’m too old for that shit.”
“Yeah right. You’re twenty-eight.”
“So are you. Which is too young to look like you’ve gone and given up on life.”
“I haven’t given up on life,” Callie protested indignantly.
Chantara moved her hands to her hips in that no nonsense kind of way she had that let Callie know her best friend wasn’t going to argue anymore.
“Then prove it. Go have a shower and put on something nice. We’ll go out to a pub or something for a drink and some onion rings.”
“A drink and onion rings? Why don’t we just go to the beer store and order something in after?”
“You’re missing the point here.”
“Which is?”
“That I want to get you out of the house.”
“Going to the beer store is getting out of the house.”
“Not like that. I want you to have a good time. We haven’t done anything together in a while. Let’s go to the pub and we can watch whatever shitty sports they have playing and have a few drinks and we’ll cab it back.” Chantara seemed to reconsider and for a moment Callie was hopeful she’d get out of it, but that hope faded as quickly as it had come. “Scratch the onion rings. I want fish and chips. You know that little Irish place a few blocks over? We can go there instead. Then we can walk back.”
“You do know that place isn’t even really Irish right?”
“But it plays Irish music and the servers wear those plaid skirt things.”
“Yes, well, my point exactly. Don’t you think it’s more of a sexy looking uniform than it is culturally accurate?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, stop arguing. Go get in the shower. Wash your damn hair and blow-dry it. Put on some makeup, even just some mascara or something. Get a nice dress on. You’ll feel better after, trust me.”
“Why a nice dress? Why not just something normal like jeans and a sweater?”
“Because that’s what you’ve been moping in for the past few days. I want to see you in something else. Trust me, you want to see you in something else.”