“That doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “What…would fix it?”
He opened up the bag of Fritos, the gesture alarmingly casual for the subject matter. “I don’t have the slightest idea. But I’ve come to the conclusion that some things aren’t fixable.”
“You just have to walk around wounded for the rest of your life?” She didn’t like that at all.
“Yep,” he said, taking a handful of chips from the bag. “There are certain things you don’t control in life. You can’t choose to have everything you want. An unpopular conclusion in this modern culture,” he said, his tone dry.
“Unpopular because it sounds sad. People want to be happy.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t happy. I have Chloe. I have a job I love. I’m often happy. I’m just also often sad. Unfulfilled. That’s part of life, isn’t it?”
“People want to be happy more often than they’re sad.”
He laughed. “That’s generous. People want to be happy all the time. They don’t know how to handle hard feelings, or being uncomfortable. I’m not great at it either, or I probably wouldn’t go out and get drunk and sleep with a stranger as often as I do.”
She winced. She couldn’t help it. The words were so hard and blunt.
“I have just accepted that there’s a certain level of pain I’ll always have to live with,” he said. “It’s the cost of life. It’s the cost of loving anything.”
She knew that loss—the kind of loss he’d had—didn’t just heal. The finality of it was hard, and it always would be.
She had more of an understanding of that now.
But her mother dying was the natural order of things, even if losing her when she had had seemed way too early. Losing a partner, especially as young as Becca and Logan had been, that was unthinkable.
Maybe accepting that it would always hurt was the healthiest thing he could do. It didn’t seem fair, though.
“Yeah, I… I don’t have anything to say. I don’t have any wisdom for that.”
“You don’t need to.”
She always felt like she did. Like it was her job to smooth over the cracks in things. Though she could remember the night she’d sat around the bonfire with Logan and just told him that loss was shitty. That hadn’t been profound, but it had been true.
She stopped herself from pulling on that loose thread. The memories of all the vacations.
He’d started it last night in the elevator, and she was determined…
She never thought of those.
She certainly wasn’t going to do it now.
“Frito?” He shoved the bag her direction.
She took her eyes off the road for a moment and met his. “Yeah, okay, I’ll have a Frito.”
She plunged her hand down into the bag and grabbed some chips, and he turned the radio up.
“Did you make reservations?” she asked as they neared the town.
“Nope. Figured we’d do a walk-in at whatever is roadside.”
“Oh, excellent,” she said. “I have tacky roadside motels on my bucket list.”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“No. I mean, in the sense that I don’t have a bucket list, I guess so, but I genuinely love the idea of it.”
“I didn’t see you as the kind of person who secretly liked tacky things.”
