Page 22 of Square Waves (Big Fan #2)

XXI

I’ve just finished giving Izzy and Jo a tour of the store when my parents arrive.

Their first order of business: finding Willa and showering her with praise.

Then they want to be shown around too. I point out the pedestals Leon and I painted, the wheel and the kiln, and my favorite pieces by Willa and the other artists.

The absence of Leon’s work on the walls is glaring.

My dad is just as entranced by the Villeneuve chandeliers as I was the first time I saw them. At this hour, the sun is at the wrong angle to illuminate them, so Leon hung a light that shines through them and covers this corner of the store in swaths of pastel.

I can’t wait to get out of this place, where everything is a reminder of him.

“Don’t we need one of these for fruit?” my mom asks, touching the edge of one of Willa’s larger bowls with a gentle fingertip.

“I think we do,” my dad agrees.

As he goes off to pay, my mom lingers behind with me.

“This is pretty amazing,” she says.

“It really is.”

“I’m so glad you were able to do so much to help.”

“Oh, I mean, I didn’t—”

“Willa says you did.”

“I was only here for a couple of weeks.”

“Still, Cassidy. I guess it’s also that it’s nice to see you involved in something that you seem to have... enjoyed.”

The tears I thought I had curtailed earlier come rushing forward, but I blink them back. My mom has always been tender with me, even when I was putting my whole family through hell. I want so badly to prove that she was right to believe in my ability to come out the other side.

I let her wrap me up in a hug. As we pull apart, I hear someone clearing their throat into a microphone. Willa is standing on a step stool and trying to get everybody’s attention.

It’s a packed enough party that it takes a minute or two for a hush to settle over the crowd. A server is handing out glasses of champagne, and I snag two and hand one to my mom.

“Hi, everyone,” Willa says. There’s applause and a stray whoop.

Leon, I guess. She blushes, fans herself.

Someone’s wolf whistle splits the air. “Okay, okay, enough of that. I really just wanted to say thank you. Because my name is on this store, and my ceramics are for sale. But this never could have happened without my community, and their work, and their love and sacrifice. My sister, Cerise, and her kids, Jackson and Tavi. My parents, Curtis and Leslie.” She indicates a knot of smiling family members, who accept some applause of their own.

Her dad takes a little bow. “My Bryce.” Even from this far away, I can tell her eyes are wet.

“And I would have been dead in the water—especially these last two weeks—without my friends Cassidy and Leon.”

My mom is beaming and directing a silent golf clap toward me, but all I can see is Leon across the room.

His gaze locks with mine, and I feel everything.

Every scorching kiss he’s pressed to my skin.

And all of the fear and disappointment and hunger that’s been gnawing at me for weeks now. It’s so much bigger than him. Than us.

“And of course,” Willa continues, “I will never be able to offer enough thanks to the artists who have given me the honor of showing and selling their work here.” Leon and I are still looking at each other. He nods, and we slip through the crowd, out the door, and into the night.

It wasn’t quite three weeks ago that Leon and I stood outside of a different front door. I was two drinks deep then too, but mostly I was using tipsiness as an excuse to do what I’d maybe always wanted to. To let myself be just a little bit reckless with him.

Now I’m just... wrecked.

“Good party,” Leon says.

“Good party,” I agree.

We look at each other for another long moment. He takes off his hat. Ruffles his hair.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “About earlier.”

“Yeah, well. Same.”

He takes a step toward me, but I stay planted. The smile that was starting to bloom on his face falters and then falls.

“I’m flying back to DC on Friday.”

“I know.”

“And I have no idea what I’m going to do from there.”

Leon looks at the ground between us as if he’s sizing up the distance.

“I can’t be...” I continue. “I can’t be thinking about you. Or Berkeley. Or high school. I need to go back to my real life.”

He looks hurt. And a little insulted. “What about this isn’t real life ?”

“Well, I don’t have a job, for starters. I’ve just had all of this time to hang out with you and, like, fuck around.”

Leon’s eyes narrow. “So that’s all this was. Fucking around.”

“Listen...” I sigh. “I’m glad this happened.

I’m glad to have gotten a chance to actually get to know you and like you.

But tonight—we just keep misunderstanding each other.

I don’t want to trap either of us in the past. And I think the easiest—the best—thing to do is to let each other go, so we can move forward. ”

Leon’s jaw tenses. “I mean... if that’s how you really feel, then fine. But that’s not how I feel. And I think—honestly, I think you’re just scared, Cassidy.”

My anger flares. “And since when are you my therapist?”

He sighs. “I’ve known you for a long time. And I know you don’t want to talk about this, but I’m not eighteen-year-old Leon anymore, and I’m not Cooper Abbot either.”

The sound of his name in someone else’s mouth—the reminder of how public my pain is—finally snaps something in me. “Don’t you dare say that name to me.”

Leon looks chastened. But he doesn’t back down. “I’m sorry I overstepped. But am I wrong?”

He’s not, and we both know it.

“I just can’t—I can’t do this with you.” My voice cracks. I feel like I’m going to crumble where I stand. “For a million reasons. Cooper being one of them. My life’s a disaster, Leon. And I can’t figure it and you out at the same time.”

He takes a step toward me. But that’s as far as he goes. “You don’t have to...” he starts and then sighs. “You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Well. I know better than to argue with Cassidy Weaver when she’s dead set on something. But for the record, I thought what we had was real. And I wanted more than this.”

My eyes trace the planes of his face. I look for his dimple, but it’s nowhere in sight when his expression is so worn down and sad. “It was real,” I say. “And also, can you just trust that I know what’s best for me?” I try to shift my eyes off him, but I can’t bring myself to do it.

Leon looks like he wants to argue. But I asked for something, directly, and he’s going to give it to me. So he turns around. I watch the breadth of his shoulders, the line of his spine, as he walks away from me.

Then I press my forehead against the store’s cool exterior brick, and I finally let the dam break.

I’m crying about everything, now: how scared I am that I’m twenty-eight and washed up.

That I’ll never figure out what to do with myself.

That I’m too hurt to love anyone else well.

I’m crying because someone hurt me when I was twenty-two, and it’s like they say: Grief is a spiral.

I keep moving further and further away from it, but I still have to pass the same points on the circle every now and again, and I hate it every time.

Eventually, the tears slow and then stop. I’m left with the worst thing of all: the truth I didn’t want to admit to Leon or myself. That it’s not just men I don’t trust when it comes to love.

It’s also me.