Page 70 of Engineering a Love Story

By the end of the day, Seth has called four more times. I finally answer that evening while lying on my couch, my head still logy. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you last night. It won’t happen again,” I say.

“Jesus, why haven’t you answered your phone all day? You disappeared last night. I was picturing you there alone. No one would know if you were in trouble.”

“I’m perfectly fine here alone.” Even through the fog of my hangover, I recognize the truth in this statement. All through the previous weeks and months, with everything I’ve done and accomplished, all I went through—no one was here. No one helped me. Not Ash or my father. Not Howard or Lars. Not Seth. “Thanks for checking,” I say. “But I can let you go, if there isn’t anything else?”

“What? No, wait. I want to talk about what you said last night.”

I hate that I don’t know what he means. “I was drunk. Please don’t put much stock in anything I said. Again, I apologize.”

“Do you not remember our conversation?”

I pause, embarrassed. “I have pieces.” Very few. Still, there’s one thing I need to know. “Did you take papers from my apartment?” When Seth doesn’t immediately respond, I’m ready to end the call.

“Hold on, we talked about this last night. I already explained.”

“Again, I can’t—”

“Okay.” I hear Seth’s deep inhale. “As I said, it was stupid and I felt terrible about it, almost as soon as I left. But I thought I was leaving for good that morning. I didn’t plan on seeing you again. Like, I was at your place that weekend thinking this was it, you know? Time to grow up. Commit. Do it all. And then you start saying you lack context. And that maybe you don’t buy the idea of falling in love? You said those things. And I’m out here, lying to my best friend, and you’re not even divorced, and I realized the whole thing was just a fuck-up. Same as always.” He exhales. “So, I was out. And then I just impulsively grabbed that stupid Sofra thing. Just to lash out, I don’t know. I threw it away in DC. I never wanted it. Manish hires dudes to pose as prospects and get dirt on our competitors anyway. Besides, Sofra sucks. But I shouldn’t have taken it. I’m sorry.”

I try to decide if he’s telling me the truth. I remember Seth leaving that morning and thinking he might not call again. And I wasn’t entirely honest with him either, letting him believe my independence to be more solidified than it was. Maybe we both acted badly.

Plus, I can’t sustain my anger about those slides, not when I remember Ronald’s sweaty finger on my neck. Seth is right—Sofra does suck.

“Why did you start calling me again?”

“I couldn’t do it. Stay away. I didn’t want to.” Again, I hear his childish stubbornness. “I like myself more when I’m with you. Who I am, who we are. Who we might be.” Sadness lands on me with his words, ones I’d so wanted to hear from him before. “And then what you said last night? About the train?”

A loan moan escapes me. Apparently, I really did say it all out loud. With no small amount of horror, I wonder too if I said about the tweed, but I can’t bear to ask.

“Seth—”

“And your great love. That maybe that was me. I didn’t know you felt that way. Maybe it is me on that train. Us. Shouldn’t we find out?”

“But … when you were here that weekend, thinking all those things, talking about love—and our unborn children for god’s sake—we never talked about how any of it might work.”

“We’d have figured it out.”

“But what does that mean? Do you have some sort of proposal?” I don’t have to write research about Aurelian any longer, but Seth doesn’t know that. “Is Aurelian failing? Because of PayNow? Is that what this is about? You don’t care so much about your job now?”

“Aurelian isn’t failing. We’ve got a new engineer working on PayNow. That team had built more of it than we thought. There’s some damage control. We lost Chase. But it’s not a big deal.”

Not a big deal? After everything I went through? I wonder if he actually bore any consequences at all. He got his wrist slapped maybe by his CEO. But no one implied he was a whore.

“No. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Can’t what? What do you mean?”

“Restart any of this. It’s done. I’m done. I’ve already decided.”

“How can you just decide? Your head tells your heart what to feel? The only time you expressed any emotion, you were drunk. You said those things. And now they don’t matter?”

“I offered to quit my job so we could be together. How can you say you didn’t know how I felt?”

“But I couldn’t let you do that, not when you like your job and you’re good at it. And I’m always one quarter away from being fired.”

“What are you proposing then? Will you change jobs? Move? How does this work?”

Seth pauses. “I don’t know how any of it works.”