Page 2 of Knights Like These
“I am not in love with Archer. I have never been in love with Archer. He is my oldest friend, he needs help, and I am currently—” I gesture at the suitcase by the door, the duffel bag I’m praying will zip, the storage unit key sitting on Lauren’s counter because everything I own is now in a ten-by-ten concrete box off Highway 169. “I’m not exactly drowning in options here.”
I eat another spring roll while Lauren processes this.
“How’s he doing?” she asks, softer now. “With the divorce.”
“He says he’s fine.”
“Do you believe him?”
“It’s Archer. He’d say he was fine even if he was on fire.”
She almost smiles at that. We both know him—Lauren not as well as I do; nobody knows him as well as I do—but she’s watched us be friends for half our lives. She was there freshman year when Coach Davis made the hockey team take ballet, and fifteen-year-old Archer Lockwood walked into the studio looking like he’d rather be literally anywhere else on earth.
I remember him at the barre. I don’t mean to remember this right now, but my brain does it anyway—puts him right there in the mirror, too tall for his body, scowling at his own feet while I tried to teach him a tendu. He was terrible. Truly, impressively awful. But he kept showing up every Tuesday and Thursday, and by the third week he wasn’t scowling anymore. By the fourth week, he waited for me after class and said, “Same time Thursday?” like it was a question, like I might say no.
I never said no.
Fifteen years. I’ve never said no to Archer Lockwood. Not once. And that’s probably the part that should worry me, if I were the type of person who examined her own patterns, which I’m not, because I’m busy eating Thai food and pretending everything is normal.
“What about Matt?” Lauren asks, and I knew this was coming. I’ve been waiting for it since I sat down.
“What about him?”
“Have you talked to him?”
“No. We broke up two months ago. There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You were together for a year and a half.”
“And now we’re not.”
Lauren pulls the pad thai toward her and twists noodles around her fork, watching me the way she does when she’s choosing her next words carefully. Lauren is the only person I know who uses silence like a weapon. I brace myself for impact. “He was a good guy,” she says.
“He was a great guy.”
“So what happened?”
“I told you what happened. He wanted to move in together, and I wasn’t ready.”
“You’d been dating for a year and a half.”
“So?”
She lifts one eyebrow. “So at what point would you have been ready?”
I don’t answer because I don’t have one.
Matt was a high school history teacher who loved to read, cooked me dinner, and never once raised his voice. He was patient, kind, and steady, and he loved me in this quiet, consistent way that should have been enough. It should have been more than enough.
Three months ago, he sat on the edge of my bed and said, “I feel like there’s a part of you I can never reach.” I sat there with nothing to say because he wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t explain it either. Not to him. Not even to myself.
I just said I was sorry. And he left. And I felt nothing, which is worse than feeling sad because at least sadness would have made sense.
“He and I just didn’t work out,” I say. “It happens.”
Lauren nods slowly. She doesn’t believe me. I can see it in the way her jaw tightens and her eyes linger on my face a beat too long. But she lets it go—for now—and reaches for her wine.
“Okay,” she says. “So you’re flying to New York tomorrow.”
