The One That Got Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

me better or worse, and neither did I. If it was such an aberration in character, what had I done to deserve the distinction? Danny offered to talk to him, but I refused to hear of it. It was bad enough that Eamon had blown me off; he didn’t need to know that I’d actually been hurt by it. And he never said anything about the encounter to Danny, either, which I always thought was even stranger than his going AWOL on me. He’d slept with one of his best friend’s roommates and never came up with so much as a “Hey, man, she’s really cool and all, but it wasn’t going to work out.” It literally seemed to be as if the whole thing had never happened.
    Eventually I stopped feeling that treacherous little leap of hope every time I checked my email, or my phone rang. I stopped “nonchalantly” asking Danny who he’d been hanging out with when he got home from a night out with friends. When SXSW rolled around, I let Nicole march me around to all the parties tarted out in biker boots and a miniskirt, because she promised the distraction would help me forget. So I hover-pissed in graffiti-covered toilet stalls at music venues all over the city. I dated guys who picked me up at them. Then, after what was supposed to be a cleansing break from the male of the species, I got entangled in a messy on-again, off-again relationship with a wildly talented—and even more wildly narcissistic—blues guitarist, which culminated a couple years later in a five-alarm screaming match under the streetlights outside the Continental Club.
    And then I met Noah. Recovering from the aftershocks of that intense, unstable relationship, and the years of crappy judgment that had preceded it, I was wobbling like a vase somebody has jarred with their elbow. Then Noah reached out his hand to steady me. It was so blessedly effortless to be with him: he was seven years older, seven years kinder, and it was obvious from themoment I met him that he would never dream of accepting a greenroom blow job from a tongue-pierced backup singer named Des’rae. He would never dream of cheating on me at all. And by the time I let him inside my body for the first time, I was certain that when the sun rose on the next day, he’d want to spend it with me. And the next day, and the day after that, just like that sunrise, he’d always be there.
    He made it so easy for me to fall in love with him. Somehow, his divorce a year earlier hadn’t made him bitter, it had just made him lonely; he welcomed me into his life as if I were exactly what he’d been waiting for. I was wide-eyed at my good fortune. He had a ruggedness to him, which, mixed with his courtly Southern charm, reminded me of my stepfather, John, the best man I’ve ever known. I looked into his beautiful eyes, the color of oxidized copper—and I knew I was seeing my future.
    —
    A ping from my phone shakes me from my reverie. It’s a photo, from Noah himself, who has taken a couple of rare days off work to hike the Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia: against a backdrop of spiny blue ice, his feet are planted in the snow, arms flung wide into the glaring sunlight. His grin is as cheerful as his persimmon-orange ski coat, which he bought last year for our expedition to Iceland to chase down the northern lights.
This place is beyond cool
, says the text.
Can’t wait to show it to you
.
    Warmth glows in my chest.
Wish I were there now
, I write.
Until then
…I tug down my tank top and snap a photo of my cleavage. It’s far from the world’s most spectacular cleavage, but he sure likes it.
    Never had a hard-on on a glacier before
, he writes back.
First time for everything
.
    As I dawdle in bed, trying to summon the motivation to getup and go for a run, I catch a whiff of aroma in the air and sniff incredulously, but it’s unmistakable—someone’s brewing coffee. According to my clock it’s only 9:14, which means Eamon must be up; Danny only wakes up before noon on weekends under threat of bodily