“Yeah.”
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “It’s not that bad yet. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”
“I know you don’t, but this guy doesn’t seem to be getting the hint.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I appreciate the offer. Why don’t you just teach me what you know about self-defense.”
“All right,” he said. “But if you change your mind, let me know.”
“I will.”
“Great,” he said. “Let’s get started, then.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon going through various self-defense techniques. At first, I felt completely uncoordinated and unable to get the timing down for anything, even though he was obviously slowing things down, talking me through each step. He showed me what to do if someone tried to grab me from behind, how to break a hold if someone had my arm, how to pull an attacker’s head down so I could knee him in the face.
The last thing we worked on was how to break away if someone came up behind you and grabbed you in a bear hug. For each of the holds we’d previously done, Jonathan had pretended he was the attacker, and this one was no different, but now he was standing behind me, with his arms wrapped around me.
“First,” he said, “you’re going to shift your body to the side, enough so you can get your inside leg behind—yeah, just like that—and you’re going to jerk your own leg forward into the back of my knee. Do it with enough force behind it so it buckles the knee and then you’ll have the person off-balance. He’ll fall forward, and as he does so, use an elbow, right to the face. Just like that. Okay, let’s try it again.”
He positioned his arms back around me, and again, I wondered why it was that I couldn’t be interested in someone like him. I doubted that he had ever slept with anyone at the office, not because he wasn’t necessarily attracted to any of the girls that had ever worked there but because he just wasn’t like that. But there was no feeling there, for me anyway, other than a person who had his arms around me; it was nothing like the way it was with Ian, whose touch was electrifying, as though every cell in my body could feel it and was clamoring for his attention.
I took a deep breath, trying to remember the sequence of motions that Jonathan had just told me. It was a little bit halting, and not perfectly executed, but I managed to do it, and when he told me how good of a job I’d done, for a moment, I felt as though I’d gained a bit of control back over my life.
After the gym, I went back home and took a shower and then changed. I didn’t feel like staying in though; it was Saturday night, after all, so I went down to Failte. I left a message for Caroline and told her that I was going to be there if she wanted to meet up. I was just sipping my first beer when she texted back and said that she was on deadline and had been working all day and she had to stay at the office but she’d try to get down there if she could. I sighed and slid my phone back into my purse. I figured that I was supposed to feel a little better now that I’d had a talk with Carl, and gotten all that off of my chest. Not that it was a therapy appointment, but wasn’t that the whole point of talk therapy anyway? That you were supposed to feel better once you were able to vocalize what it was that was bothering you?
And the thing was, I had felt better after I’d left his office, but now I felt more confused than ever, having this time to just sit here with my thoughts. Because there wasn’t going to be any epiphany, there wasn’t going to be any clear sign of what I was supposed to do. My feelings were entangled in a hopeless knot that I knew I had no hope of unraveling. I knew I could ask Caroline, or my mom, what they thought I should do and they’d have a definitive answer, but I also knew this was something I had to come to on my own. Hadn’t Carl been implying that I should trust my feelings? That what I was feeling was not inherently wrong? I tried to recall exactly how he phrased it, but now I couldn’t. The only thing I could really remember from that whole thing was the feeling I had after I left, that everything was going to be okay, even though now I wasn’t so sure.
I finished my first beer and got another. My face was already starting to get warm. I sat there and listened to the chatter all around me. People talking and laughing and generally having a good time. I couldn’t make out any specific conversations, just bits and snippets and it seemed like everyone there was with a group or a part of a couple, and I was the only one sitting alone, feeling completely sorry for myself. It would’ve been easy enough to strike up a conversation with someone, but everyone seemed so involved with the other people they were talking to, and I felt like such an outsider, which was strange because I’d been coming to Failte ever since I turned twenty-one. It was like my home away from home.
I was on my third beer when someone came over and sat next to me, their elbow brushing mine. I took another sip of my beer before I glanced over to see who it was.
It was Billy McAllister.
He was waiting for me to look at him, a smile on his face. “Well fancy meeting you here,” he said. He tapped his beer bottle against my almost-empty pint glass. “Waiting for anyone special?”
“No,” I said. My cheeks felt flushed, and I was suddenly very glad that he was here. “You, I guess. Just someone to talk to.”
“I’m so happy to hear that! And I’m told I’m a great talker. I can also be a good listener, too. You look a little down in the dumps. Everything all right?”
I took a swig of beer. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I’m just tired.”
“Your boyfriend’s not here?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“Well . . . I’ve had a boyfriend before, but no, I don’t have one.”
“Not even a pretend one?”
He was ribbing me a little, I could tell, just trying to get me to crack a smile. So I did—a tiny one—because I did appreciate his efforts. And just by sitting down next to me and starting a conversation, he had banished that lonely feeling that had descended upon me when I first sat down at the bar. So for that, I was grateful.
“Believe it or not, I’ve had a boyfriend before,” I said. If he asked more questions, I would tell him about Emmett; I wasn’t going to utter a word about Ian. It might be better if I just didn’t talk about that.