While We Were Dating - Page 20

Just listening to Ben prattle on made her breathe slower. She took another breath in and let it out. Thank goodness she was with him.

For a moment, she let herself think again about what it would have been like to be in the back seat of some town car right now, with a silent driver, hurtling from LAX to Palm Springs, lonely and scared and with nothing to distract her except her phone, where she would probably be scrolling through social media and WebMD and all of the other places that would stress her out even more. And then she turned to look at Ben in the driver’s seat, a smile dancing around his lips as he bopped along to Kesha, and she let out a breath. Thank God she was here.

“How on earth did you make the switch from being a backup dancer to being in advertising?” she asked him. Yeah, she was curious about this, but she mostly just wanted to get him talking again.

He laughed.

“Is it that weird of a trajectory? I think it was just that after having been on the other side of the camera for a while, both dancing and also with the crew work, I was so fascinated by how the whole package was made. I knew being in the actual production side or in front of the camera wasn’t for me, so I tried to figure out what was for me.”

His voice sounded so warm and comfortable next to her. She relaxed into it.

“Why didn’t you think being in front of the camera was for you? I could see you there.”

He laughed at that.

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” he said. She’d meant it as one, but he didn’t give her a chance to say so. “But while I loved the dancing, it very much felt like a career for three years, five, max. Like a football player, except with less money and fewer concussions. And I didn’t love it enough to be an instructor and give it my whole life. A lot of the guys went on to try acting, but I wasn’t interested—what, I’d wait tables for years and maybe get one or two lines on some show eventually? I knew it wasn’t my calling, and neither was doing camerawork, as fun as it is.”

“How did you figure out that advertising was for you?”

He groaned.

“I’m so sorry I have to admit this, but it was my brother. I came home for Christmas, that last year in L.A., when I’d quit dancing and was still doing crew stuff but was sort of . . . aimless. And he tricked me into going out for drinks with him and said he’d pay, and I was too young and broke to realize there must be an ulterior motive. And then he asked me all of those fucking questions about where I saw myself in the future and what I love and what I wanted to be doing with my life and blah blah. I was so mad at him.” He shook his head. “I kept thinking about what he’d asked me, even though I didn’t want to. And I realized the thing that fascinates me the most is drawing people in, figuring out how they tick, turning something into nothing. So eventually I asked Theo if he knew anyone who did that kind of work. I didn’t even realize what it was, at that point. He said it sounded a lot like what people do in advertising and marketing to him. And some friend of a friend of his who worked at an ad agency talked to me on the phone for like an hour, and everything they said sounded right up my alley. So I moved home—and back in with my mom, who was not thrilled about that—and went to school up here. I sort of assumed I’d move back to L.A. at some point, but I’ve liked my jobs in San Francisco, so I never left.”

She liked the fond, exasperated way he talked about his brother.

“Plus, your family is all in the Bay Area, right?” she said.

He nodded.

“Not all, but mostly. I have some family and lots of good friends down South, of course. But . . .” He shrugged. “The Bay Area is still home. Despite . . . all of the changes over the past decade or so, it still feels that way.”

That sounded familiar.

“Yes, definitely,” she said. “I do love L.A. now, even though it can be . . .” She bit her lip and tried to think of the right word. “Overwhelming sometimes. But when I come up here—or, I guess, up there, since we’re pretty far south now—it feels right.” She laughed. “Sometimes I make excuses to go up there. Like this ad campaign.”

He flashed her a smile.

“Well, I, for one, am glad you made excuses this time.”

She felt an enormous desire to give him a hug. The only thing that stopped her was the impossibility of hugging someone who was currently driving a car down Interstate 5.

“Me, too,” she said instead.

Six

A few hours later, they pulled into the hospital parking lot. It was a ghost town at this hour, with only a handful of other cars. They’d spent the end of the drive playing all the road games they could figure out how to play at night—license plate bingo didn’t work so well, but then it was rare to see anything but California or Nevada plates in this area anyway. They’d also played progressively louder music, and told fake stories about the people in the cars around them. Anna told herself she was doing all of this to keep Ben awake and entertained in the wee hours of the morning, but really, it was to keep herself busy, so she wouldn’t anticipate what was at the end of the drive.

Now they were finally here, and Anna was terrified about what she’d find inside that hospital.

Ben looked at her after he turned off the car.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded at him, and then shook her head.

“I’m not okay.” She’d tried to practice saying that over the last year, but it was still hard. She made herself smile. “But we came all this way, can’t miss the main event!” She tried to make a joke out of it, and very much appreciated that Ben gave her a pity smile.

“If you need a minute, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

She unbuckled her seat belt. She’d dreaded arriving, but now that they were here, she had to get inside.

“No, I need to see them,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Ben reached for his seat belt but didn’t release it.

“I don’t have to come in,” he said. “It’s totally okay, my feelings won’t be hurt, I can just sit here and catch up on my—”

She shook her head progressively harder as he talked.

“No, please come with me.” Wait, did that sound too needy? “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I’d hate to have you come all this way and then just wait in the car.”

He unsnapped his seat belt and opened his car door.

“Okay, then. Let’s go.”

As they walked out of the tiny parking lot and toward the hospital doors, Anna fought back the impulse to reach for Ben’s hand. That was ridiculous, she barely even knew him, why was she relying on him so much? No, she was a grown-up; she could handle this. She could handle it even if . . . No, no, she wasn’t going to think about that right now.

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