Ball and the fallout with Ronan after it happened, but I dismissed them every time, saying there was nothing there in the first place, so it was nothing.
“But it wasn’t nothing, you know?” I sighed into the receiver.
“Huh?”
“No, no, I mean, I’m over him,” I said, forcing out a laugh that sounded more like a cough. “I mean, yeah, I’m over him. Way fucking over him. Shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean to swear.”
“I literally don’t give a single fuck,” the kid replied. “All I need to know is whether you want to take this interview or not.”
I stared up at the ceiling of the phone booth, which was littered with dried clumps of multi-coloured gum.
“I mean, did I think of him while I was with Alexander?” I said. “Well, yes. I guess I did. But it was only because the contrast between him and Alexander was so obvious, you know?”
“You’re just going to keep going, aren’t you?”
“It’s not like I was thinking about how I’d rather do all the things I did with Alexander with Ronan instead,” I said. I let my chin fall to my chest. “Shit. That’s exactly what I was thinking. Goddammit.”
The boy blew a sputtering sound through his lips and said, “Sounds like you’re totally over him.”
“Who asked your opinion, you little turd?” I snapped.
Okay, so I hadn’t changed overnight. No one does, alright?
The kid laughed. “You’re funny, lady.”
I gritted my teeth and said, “And would you stop calling me ‘lady’. Believe me, I’m the furthest thing from it.”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so.”
“If you say so.”
I rolled my eyes and slouched even further against the smudged, smeared glass.
“All this time I’d wanted to be someone else, someone rich, someone in a mansion, someone who had power, you know?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“But it took having it to see that all I want is to be myself.”
“Good for you, lady.”
“And that was the one thing that was always true with Ronan,” I said, briefly closing my eyes. “He was trying to teach me to be somebody else, but I’d never been more myself than with him.”
There was the sound of a bubble popping on the line and then the kid said, “Would you be offended if I just put down the receiver and went for a smoke?”
I pulled the phone away from my cheek to stare at it incredulously.
“Umm, yes,” I said, moving it closer again.
“It’s just seems that you’re working through some deep shite right now, which, hey, I’m all for, but you’re kind of boring the hell out of me.”
I bit back a string of curses I had at the ready for him and knocked my forehead against the wall. “I’ll take the interview, okay?”
“Okey dokey.”
I waited as he typed something into a computer and then he was back. “You’re all set for tomorrow at 1 p.m. The address is—”
“I know the address.”
“Wow, you’re so cool,” the teenager said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Third floor, okay?”
I told him I got it.
“Is there anything else?” he asked, and I could imagine him spinning lazily in his office chair, the phone cord tangling around his chest.
“I’m guessing you don’t want to hear about the Le Ball in Paris?” I asked, grinning.
“It’s been nice talking to you, lady.”
I hung up with a middle finger pointed at the receiver and shoved my way out of the phone booth. Of all the places that could be hiring, why in the hell did it have to be Merrion Hotels? I was doing perfectly fine shoving my feelings beneath Candace’s hard-ass futon and letting them gather dust with her lipsticks that had rolled under there. I didn’t want to be thinking these things: stupid things like wondering how things could be different, stupid things like wondering what Ronan was doing, whether he was thinking of me, stupid things like wondering if I might run into him tomorrow.
I laughed at myself as I climbed the stairs back up to Candace’s crowded loft, because that was absolutely not what I wanted. I did not want to run into Ronan. I did not want to see Ronan. I did not want to speak to Ronan.
And yet the next afternoon when I found myself once again crossing that sea of grey marble in the gloomy iron and steel lobby of the Merrion Hotels building, I couldn’t stop myself from checking to see if he was there. It was probably foolish to check the faces passing from the elevators or the