Page 89 of For the Record
The store…the ring…Did he actually love me before we even signed papers? I mean, I was halfway there before everything fell apart in our friendship. I knew deep down there was more there. Maybe he did too. But the ring came from Vegas, so there was no sense in that. I just needed Adam. I needed my honest, truthful Adam, who only ever said what I needed to hear, not what I wanted. That was why I needed him most.
I stood up from the couch, ready to research, and gave my dad a hug. “I gotta go. Love you.” I kissed him on the cheek and was about to walk right out the door when his voice stopped me.
“Rachel. Remember, by birth, you’re my daughter. But by choice, you’re my best friend.”
Currently Playing: Thank you by Led Zeppelin.
***
I had an idea of what to expect when I walked into Sip ’n’ Spin once I saw Adam’s bike outside. The other manager’s car wasn’t here, and I didn’t see Poppi’s car, so I was walking into this entirely alone.
It had been two days since I’d last seen him, and it was almost—actually no, it was entirely pathetic—how much I missed him. Even with the anger raging inside me, even while sleeping in his bed and sobbing on his pillow at night, I still missed him. A lot.
Opening the door, I instantly heard the sound of something loud slamming into what sounded like the floor in one of the back rooms. I walked over, setting my keys on the dry countertop and moving past the still somewhat wet parts of the store.
My wedges clicked along the peeling linoleum down the hall and into our storage area, where Adam was sitting on the floor with a crowbar, attempting to lift up flooring that had been glued down sometime in the seventies.
He turned around when he heard me, eyes looking up and down my outfit, his neck turning slightly red. I was still in a pretty sore mood this morning, despite wanting to see the man, and nothing made me feel better than dressing myself up. Even if I was only leaving the house to get the mail, I always felt better dressed up.
His eyes eventually left my skirt and lifted back to my eyes. Neither of us said anything, but you could see the apology in his eyes. See the sorrow in the bags underneath. He looked like he hadn’t slept in two days, and if I knew Adam—which I did—he probably hadn’t. He’d probably stared at his phone, waiting for the house alarm to go off so he could run to my rescue. That’s just who he was.
My mouth fell to a flat line. He looked down in his hands and lifted the crowbar toward me. “Want to take your anger out on these floors?”
Only he could make me smile in this state. As much as I wanted to say no, I couldn’t. So I accepted the tool and sat down on the dirty floor beside him.
These floors really were glued with some kind of twisted magic, because after twenty minutes of silence—other than me groaning when I got to a particularly rough spot—I’d only pulled up three pieces. I could practically hear Adam thinking, holding himself back from asking what I thought and if I was still pissed. He knew I was upset, but he didn’t know where that left us. Truth be told, I didn’t either.
After some time passed, and I gave up on digging up these fossils that some would call flooring, I leaned my head against one of the shelves on the far side of the wall. Adam sighed and moved to sit next to me, making sure to leave a good bit of space between us. Probably because he was concerned I might deck him.
“Are you okay?” He broke the silence.
“No. Not really.”
He nodded. “I miss you a lot. It’s been a weird couple of days.”
I snorted, imagining a living situation that included Adam and Crew. “How’s Crew’s place?”
“Last night I woke up to him making empanadas at two a.m. because he couldn’t sleep. He was also playing Taylor Swift loud enough for the neighbors to hear.”
That had me chuckling even more. I could picture Adam coming into the kitchen and shouting at him, with Crew acting all innocent.
“How’s home?” he asked.
“Not the same.”
He hummed and leaned closer to me. “I know you’re mad. I’m really sorry I screwed up. I should have—”
“Where did you get my ring?” I cut him off, asking the question that mattered more than any of the others bouncing around in my cranium.
He stayed silent, with his mouth slightly ajar.
“Because I talked to Dad yesterday. He said you showed it to him before Vegas. I figured he remembered it wrong, of course, but then I googled the chapel where we got married. There wasn’t a jewelry store within three blocks of it. And the one I found wasn’t open that day.”
Adam dipped his chin before looking up at me. “I got it before we left. Before you even went on that date. I had plans for it, for us, and then I got jealous and felt stupid holding a ring for you while you might be interested in other options. So I thought I should let you go, let you have fun on a date with that random guy in hopes that you’d come right back to me.”
He stopped, like I would actually want him to not go further, so I gestured for him to continue.
“My original thought was that I’d get the ring, get your dad’s blessing—whether he remembered or not—and take you on a ride. I wanted to go to that mountaintop you loved so much, lay out a blanket, and lay it all out. I was going to surprise you with keys to the store—tell you it was mostly yours if you wanted it. That we could spend a few years saving and buying my partners out so it could be fully yours. That I’d gotten it started, but we could finish it together. That you could have your own work in it too, so it wasn’t like some pity gift. At the end…I was going to pull out the ring and just go for it. If you said no, I was willing to accept it and let go. Probably wouldn’t be hanging around you much anymore, but I would’ve been okay as long as you were happy. I was going to do it the weekend we got back from Vegas. When we were still riding a vacation high and still felt calm and relaxed. I thought maybe it would make you want to say yes. I was genuinely terrified.”