Page 25 of Here for a Good Time

“Like what?” I ask, partly to ease Leila’s itching curiosity, and partly because this is news to me.

As far as I was aware, Julia and Zwe had the same views on all the big things in life.

They both liked having a stable nine-to-five, disliked traveling, wanted to live in the same city as their parents, and—to my utter shock—kept spreadsheets of their monthly expenses.

Zwe doesn’t answer, instead buying himself time by going over to help Antonio and Leila dump all the leaves and twigs they gathered into the pit.

If he’s hoping we’ll take his silence as a hint, though, we’re absolutely not.

In fact, after a few more seconds, Antonio urges, “Oh, come on, Mr. Zwe. We might be the last people you ever talk to.” He presses down on a pile of leaves. “What’s the point of secrets?”

“Look, I need something to keep me entertained out here,” Leila says. “Consider this piece of gossip your contribution for the night. Or at least a thank-you to me for building us this fire pit.”

“You accept compensation in gossip?” he asks.

She waves a twig around. “Desperate times.”

“She wanted to move in together, buy a house, settle down. I said we were moving too fast, and she left because she felt like we were moving too slowly.”

He says it all in one breath, so quickly that it takes my brain, which wasn’t ready for this specific stream of words, several moments to process it.

I try to catch his eye to make sure he’s telling the truth, but he’s deliberately avoiding me, focusing down at the pit as his hands fall into a repetitive motion. Collect, dump, pack, repeat.

Leila is the first to speak. “Not wanting to live together does sound like a solid deal breaker,” she says, awkwardness straining her voice.

“I didn’t know you guys were looking at houses,” I blurt out, hurt distorting my own. Why wouldn’t Zwe tell me about such a big move?

“We weren’t,” he says. “ She was. That was kinda the point.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

Finally, finally, he meets my gaze. “You were busy with work,” he says. It’s the shrug that makes me feel sick. “And it wasn’t a massive deal. There wasn’t anything more to that conversation.”

Why didn’t you want to move into a house with her? I want to ask, because I know for a fact that he’s always wanted the backyard life, one big enough so that the shelter dog he eventually adopts can run around in it.

The other, more pressing “why” that’s balancing right at the tip of my tongue, though, is, Why didn’t you tell me?

If we were alone back at ours, I would press and pry until he spilled.

But we’re not alone and we’re not back at ours, and right now I can see how tired he is, even if he’s done a good job of masquerading it.

Sweat sticks his shirt to his skin, his hair is greasy and ruffled by both the wind and his own hand raking through it throughout the day, and as he helps build this fire pit, he’s not moving as quickly as he typically would.

So I let it go, deciding that, actually, not making him talk about the worst heartache I’ve seen him go through in front of strangers while we try to survive a night in the wilderness, is an easy grace I can and should give him.

“Just in time,” Leila exhales once they’ve packed it all tightly within the pit. “Zwe, glasses?”

He complies, passing along his navy-rimmed pair.

“Hopefully we have just enough sunlight left to—” Holding up a medium-sized stick in one hand, she angles the sun through Zwe’s glasses, shifting the latter a few degrees down and then to the right.

The rest of us stay silent while she works.

Biting her bottom lip, she continues to adjust the angles and mutter, “Come on, please, please, work, please.”

There’s a quiet sizzling sound before orange embers start dancing atop the kindling.

“There we go,” Leila breathes out as she carefully places the tinder at the top of the pit. We exhale a collective breath when the fire spreads, its delightful shadows already dancing across our faces.

She wipes the concentration-induced sweat off her forehead and returns Zwe’s glasses.

“You are amazing,” Zwe laughs out. He looks like the personification of the heart-eyes emoji. “You just built a fucking fire in the ground. Using a stick and a pair of glasses!”

“Like I said,” she says with a playful toss of her hair. “Not just a pretty face.”

We get started on dinner soon after, and surprisingly, it’s not the worst meal I’ve ever had. He hadn’t found any vegetables that could be eaten raw, but Zwe ended up gathering a variety of berries, guava, water apples, star fruit, and three large ripe mangoes.

“Not bad, city boy,” Antonio tells him.

“So this ex of yours, was that your worst breakup?” Leila asks Zwe.

“No,” he says. “My worst breakup was a girl in high school who, it turned out, was dating me because she had a crush on my brother and kept coming over to the house because she wanted to hang out with him. What about you? What was your worst breakup?”

“Oh my, let me count the ways.” She swallows a chunk of water apple, and begins counting on her fingers.

“There was the guy who left me because I wasn’t adventurous enough after I refused to sail the open sea with him for a year.

There was the one who dumped me mid-flight at the start of our Iceland holiday.

Oh, and I took the last one to a family wedding where he broke into the bride’s hotel room before the ceremony and stole all the jewelry that she and the bridesmaids were supposed to wear. ”

“No!” I gasp.

“Yep,” Leila says dryly. “They were all my cousins, too. The bridesmaids, I mean. My family has now ordered me to run background checks on all future partners before bringing them to any big event, and you know what, I don’t blame them.”

“Did you ever find him?” Zwe asks.

Leila nods. “Oh, of course. Nobody gets away with pissing off the Chen cousins. But anyway, that’s my baggage. How about you, Poe?”

“Me?” I stammer, not expecting to be tagged into this conversation.

“What’s your worst breakup?”

I intuitively look over at Zwe, who gives me a half smile, one that says, You can lie if you want. I won’t tell.

“I was actually… engaged.” I say each syllable slowly, hesitantly, like I don’t quite believe I’m talking about it in the past tense.

A teeny, tiny part of me still kind of can’t.

Not because I’m still in love with him, but because now I absolutely can’t fathom a life where we were going to spend our future together.

“And then he… broke up with me. He got tired of me for not getting a real job, ” I say.

I force myself to look up and make eye contact at that last part.

Even now, I can hear Vik’s voice in my head saying that exact phrase, his frustration cloaking every word.

“I spent over two years working on my first book, but it got rejected by every publisher we submitted it to. When it came time to send out my second book, things weren’t looking much better.

When Vik and I first got together, he was so supportive, thought it was so cool that I was an author.

But I didn’t want to get a corporate job because I knew that would eat into my writing time, so instead I worked shifts at Zwe’s parents’ bookstore.

And Vik, that was his name, by the way,” I clarify, “would get increasingly agitated, pointing out that we were never going to be able to afford a wedding, let alone a house this way.”

My vision blurs as I stare at the flames, the yellow and orange coalescing into a new, bright, unnamed, untamed color.

At first he’d suggested I pick up more shifts at the bookstore.

Then it was sending me random job postings that vaguely related to writing, like technical writing for a software startup or content writing at an agency.

But it wasn’t like we were struggling ; we just couldn’t afford to go on holidays with his friends or his parents, at least not without him paying for the majority of the trip.

We have to prioritize our future together, he’d said.

But I didn’t see why I had to choose, why our future together couldn’t have both us and my writing.

I knew I would’ve been miserable in a corporate job, and more importantly, if I didn’t give my books my all, then I knew, I knew, I would’ve spent my whole life regretting it.

Part of me knew he was being sensible, but another part of me also kept wondering why, as my partner, his support for me drastically waned over time.

Why, if he was as proud of me and believed in me as much as he claimed to, he couldn’t be okay with sacrificing a ski trip to Japan with his brothers so I could give my dream my best shot.

When my agent and I decided to shelve my second book, that had been the breaking point.

I can’t build a future with someone who wants to pursue a hobby her whole life, he’d said.

When I realize I’m struggling to breathe, I reach into the front zip of my bag for a tissue.

They all divert their eyes when I blow my nose and dab at my eyes.

“That relationship really screwed me up, in case you can’t tell,” I laugh.

“Joke’s on him though, because guess who has a Netflix movie deal now? ”

“What a shitty human being,” Leila scoffs.

Antonio shakes his head. “Yeah, Ms. Poe, what a fucking loser,” he says, lips curled. He seems genuinely pissed off, which warms my heart.

“Thanks, guys. Oh, the best part—” I sniffle, throwing Zwe a knowing smirk. Zwe rolls his eyes in disgust. “—is that when the book I eventually published made the New York Times bestseller list, he texted me out of nowhere ‘I was always rooting for you.’”

“Oh no, that’s not the best part,” Zwe interrupts. “The best part is that when the movie deal got announced, including that it would be Tyler Tun’s directorial debut, he texted Poe to ask if he could get two tickets to the premiere for him and his niece.”