Reece followed her. “Any company would be lucky to hire you. You know that, right?”
She scoffed. “That’s not true.”
“Who says? That guy?” Reece gestured up the steps to where Roger had disappeared. “That’s what he needs you to think. He has to justify treating you like shit, and make you feel like you can’t leave.”
Leave.
The loaded word broke through her disconnect. She felt it in her body like a violent strike of lightning. Charlotte whirled around. “Do you know how much rent costs in New York?” she demanded. His eyes widened as she got in his face, but she couldn’t stop herself. She was so tired of being told what to do, of being told to quit her job like it was just that easy. “What about a MetroCard? Or a cell phone bill when you’re not on a family plan?”
Reece backed up a step, raising his hands with his palms facing out. “Charlie, that’s not—”
“No, please! Tell me! What am I supposed to do?” Her eyes were wet. She wanted to stop but the words kept coming, spilling out of her like vomit. She was so tired of having the same conversation again and again. “I keep waiting for you and Jackie to tell me, because I sure as hell don’t know. I’m not going to win the lottery,” she blurted out. “I can’t leave when I have nowhere to go.”
It broke something in her to say that. That smarting wound in her chest gaped, open and bloody like a fresh injury. Pain screamed in her throat, and she couldn’t swallow it down, couldn’t press it back, couldn’t—
She didn’t want to look at Reece and yet she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the agony on his face. His hands twitched at his sides like he wanted to reach for her. He knew better than to try. It took everything in her not to bolt away from him, not to run up the steps and hide from this conversation in an empty dorm room.
Reece’s horrified expression told her he could see all of it: everything she felt, everything she feared. She shuddered with shame and anger, resenting him for being right there all weekend, stubbornly present during the worst moments of her life.
She couldn’t feel nothing when he looked at her like that.
He just stood there, frustrated and sad with his hands loose at his sides.
“There are so many people who love you, Charlie,” he said. “We would do anything for you. You just have to ask us, remember? You have to let us help you.”
She goggled at him, her mouth falling open as she tried to hear his words. No, they were her words thrown back at her in the bright light of day. Her brain whirred with panic and suspicion and worthlessness, and Roger’s sneer and Ben’s cologne and the empty space in her life where family was supposed to be.
She thought Reece understood that people left. They walked out or moved away or decided you weren’t good enough. She could only depend on herself. She thought he knew that.
He kept looking at her with those big green eyes full of want and affection and, fuck, all the love that she never asked for and didn’t deserve. She wanted it, all of it, but what if she asked and he said no? What if she asked and asked and asked and it was too much for him, what if she was too much for him, what if he decided he couldn’t handle her and left her alone with all this agony and grief and—
Her iPhone shuddered in her hand. It began to wail her custom ringtone for Roger. She silenced it.
Commencement would start any minute now. She needed to find a spot on the President’s Lawn to watch the ceremony and live-tweet from Roger’s account. She didn’t have a choice. She was here to work.
“I have to go. This is my job.” She pressed her fingertips to the shattered glass of her iPhone, desperate to feel a pain separate from the collapsing black hole in her chest. “This is all I have.”
He gaped at her, and then the disappointment she’d braced for all weekend made its appearance.
“So what, then?” he said, folding his arms over his chest. “I’ll see you at the next reunion?”
She didn’t have a comeback for that. Reece didn’t follow her as she climbed the steps back to campus.
Chapter 15
The commencement ceremony had already started by the time Charlotte made it to the President’s Lawn. Beyond a sea of royal-blue-and-silver graduates, on a podium erected outside his mansion, the university president greeted the Class of 2018 and their families.
Roger sat beside the president with a toothy smirk on his face, tapping his foot on the floor. He had found his way to the stage without her.
Charlotte looked haggard next to the smiling families in their Sunday best. She entered the tent at the back of the crowd and sank into a folding chair by an R&C water station. As soon as she sat down, she caved in on herself and rested her forehead against her knees.
God, the way Reece stared at her before she walked away. The hurt in his eyes, the shock splitting his voice…
Reece let her in, held her close, made love to her and held her all night long and she ruined it. Again.
You are nothing.
Her job was a dead end. Her best friend hated her. Her relationship had failed before it could even start. This time tomorrow she’d be sitting at her desk with nothing to look forward to. Gray walls, gray blouse, gray future, gray existence.
She didn’t know who she hated more, Roger or herself.
Disgraceful.
Ravishing.
Is this really who you thought you’d be?
Charlotte couldn’t hear herself over the din in her mind. She couldn’t remember the words to say, the grounding techniques, the colors. Her legs felt heavy, and her arms, and her head. She pressed her fingertips into the back of her neck. Her skin was wet and clammy under her hair.
Nothing.
Eventually Roger took the microphone. Charlotte didn’t catch a word. She stared unseeing at the podium decked out in blue-and-silver bunting. The hues swam. She sat up and opened Twitter on her phone, but her hands shook too much to hold it steady.
“…forty years in the industry, I learned to get my knuckles bloody…” Roger’s self-satisfied growl wafted past her.
It was all for nothing. Years of answering his emails. Years of picking up his dry cleaning. Years of holding her tongue when he snapped at her for not laughing at his jokes. Years of smiling placidly as her morals rotted in her chest.
None of it counted.
