Page 86 of Holding Out for a Gyro
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chelsea
Challenge: Go to the beach
And then Bas was gone, and my brain catastrophized.
How had I kept wanting him more? By the time I realized how badly I’d started to need him, it was too late. He’d locked on to his trip with no sign that he’d want anything to change when he got back. That was on me. I recognized what a fool I’d been, scared of my own shadow and getting exactly what I’d been afraid of: abandoned.
It didn’t help that I saw him everywhere I went. I couldn’t believe I’d known him only a few months. His stamp was on everything. I passed the Jefferson, site of our first so-called date, and wondered why I hadn’t grabbed him with both hands when I had the chance. I woke in the morning to an empty kitchen and wished I could take back everything I’d said in November. Why couldn’t I fake it a little longer?
And the market. I couldn’t even go in there. I did once, but it felt like a betrayal, and I could tell the food hadn’t been prepared by Bas. I had to resort to driving out to a normal chain grocery store across town to buy my dinner. It all tasted wrong.
I missed him, and it hurt so much I almost wished I’d never met him.
If I’d known there was a chance he might suddenly disappear from my life, I never would’ve given him a chance to worm his way into my everyday thoughts. It was exactly why Old Chelsea built the walls Bas had systematically destroyed. I could havesaved myself all this grief if I’d pushed him out before he’d made the first crack. Even so, I wouldn’t go back and change a thing. Knowing him had been something special, a total surprise. It just sucked to return to my normal loneliness. Charlottesville had never been so tedious.
Luckily, work distracted me. I had to finish all my designs so they wouldn’t be hanging over me all week, and I picked up shifts at the coffee shop to make up for a sudden dip in my funds. My mom cashed the check I’d sent her in November, and I needed spending money in France.
I didn’t know if my dad had ditched her again or if the two of them were out enjoying my hard-earned cash. I might’ve called to find out, but she had my number and hadn’t bothered to warn me. She hadn’t even called. I guess I could at least take solace in the fact she must have thought about me long enough to endorse the check.
Tired of giving her a pass, I wrote her an actual letter, one I intended to send. It wasn’t as scathing as the first, but I reminded her what a shit childhood I had, and mostly due to the man she was currently choosing over me. I let her know that as long as she kept the status quo, I could no longer be a part of her life. If she kicked him to the curb, or more likely if he eventually walked out on her, she could contact me. Until then, I considered myself an orphan.
Then I dropped the letter in the mail, doubting she’d ever acknowledge it. I was an adult now, and her job was done.
My trip to France with Elizabeth couldn’t come soon enough.
Saturday morning finally arrived. Elizabeth called an Uber, and we flew out of Charlottesville on the scary-ass tiny plane that had to go vertical in negative five seconds to pull over the mountains. Then from Atlanta, we took off for our final destination of adventure in a faraway land. When the flight attendants announced our imminent arrival in Paris, all mytension melted away, and my smile grew so wide, I thought my face might split in two. God, I loved to travel. New sights. New smells. New foods. All within reach. I’d stop worrying about my mom. Maybe I’d stop dwelling on Bas.
We arrived in Paris sometime around nine a.m. local time and hailed a cab to take us to our hotel. It was my idea to spend one night in the city before boarding a high-speed train to Saint-Tropez so I could get more out of our trip. Elizabeth would get plenty of time relaxing on the beach, but I wanted to see things.
And Paris did not disappoint. Despite our jet lag, we dropped our bags and went in search of the hop-on hop-off bus I’d found online. Earphones in, we soaked in the architecture, the Seine, the Parisians out strolling, and heard the song “Aux Champs-Eysées” approximately two hundred times.
We stepped off the bus to walk around the Eiffel Tower, then grabbed lunch at a random café where the waiter opened our bottles of soda behind his right shoulder, like some kind of street magician. Everything was as glorious as I’d ever hoped.
“Maybe I’ll stay here forever,” I told Elizabeth. But the old promise didn’t cheer me up.
As much as the lure of foreign lands pulled at me, my ties to her always drew me back home. And now, I had a second reason to return.
I couldn’t believe how much I missed Bas, even with so much to distract me. The old me would’ve been horrified by how much I’d let my life intertwine with a man’s. How much my happiness depended on the existence of another person. It scared me, but Bas didn’t. Did that mean I’d versioned up? I hated it.
Now I was plagued with worries I’d never dealt with before. What if Bas stayed in Greece? What if he forgot about me? Would I just feel like this forever now? My stomach cramped, and I picked at the fries I’d been rhapsodizing about minutes before.
“Tired?” Elizabeth asked. “Maybe we should skip some of the things on your itinerary. I don’t think we can make it to three museums in one afternoon.”
“Whatever,” I said, staring up the Haussmann architecture—a name I learned from the audio tour.
“So the Louvre?” She scrunched her face up in question. “The Picasso?”
“You pick. I don’t care.”
“Does Paris not impress you, my queen?”
I sighed. “Paris is fine.”
“Paris isfine?” She steepled her fingers and appraised me, like she was my therapist. “What is eating you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the jet lag.”
