They Ignored Me on My Birthday, So I Cancelled Them novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Ride

Hallie drives Miles home and gives him her number; Brynn and the others arrive soaked at midnight, he ends it and gives her a week, and the tablet in the kitchen lights up with a chat called Miles Budget.

Her car was a plain black sedan, and the seat warmer was already on.

I sat on a folded towel she pulled from the back seat and pulled her gray sweatshirt over my wet shirt.

It smelled like laundry soap.

My teeth were chattering too hard to say thank you, so I nodded.

She turned the heat up and pulled out of the lot without asking where I lived.

"Address?" she said at the first light.

I gave it to her, and she typed it into her phone.

"It's your birthday," she said.

"How do you know that?"

"Somebody on the front bench said birthday boy." She glanced at me and back at the road. "Nobody sang."

"No."

"Nobody got you a towel either."

"No."

She was quiet for a mile.

I looked at my hands. They were pink and wrinkled from the water.

"I was only here for my niece," she said. "She wanted a video of the flume. I got the wrong day and ended up on the ride by myself."

I didn't ask why anyone would ride alone to film something for a child.

I was too cold to care.

At the second light she said, "Can I say something rude?"

"Go ahead."

"If somebody walked past me like that, I'd have gotten off the ride."

"I paid for the ride."

"Then you should have left with it." She said it flatly, not unkindly. "That's all."

She didn't say another word until we pulled up in front of my building.

I started to take off the sweatshirt.

"Keep it," she said. "Wash it, give it back. I'll need it eventually."

She took my phone out of my hand, which was so startling that I let her.

She typed a number in, tapped call, and a phone buzzed in her cup holder.

"There," she said. "Now you've got mine. If you need a dry shirt in the future, or a second opinion on your friends."

"They're not my friends," I said, and heard how it sounded.

"I figured." She handed the phone back. "Go get warm, Miles."

I was out of the car and halfway up the stairs before I realized I had never told her my name.

Then I remembered Brynn saying it on the platform, loud enough for the whole dock.

That was all it was.

My apartment was dark and cold.

The spare key lived in the lockbox by the stairs, where it had lived since before I met Brynn.

I stood in the shower until the hot water ran out.

I put on dry clothes and sat at the kitchen table with my phone off.

It was nearly midnight when I heard my car in the lot, then the stairwell, and four sets of shoes squelching.

Brynn came in first, with her pink umbrella still hanging from her wrist.

She threw my keys on the counter.

"You are unbelievable," she said. "We had to take a ride-share to the lot, and Trent had to pay."

"Trent can afford it."

"That's not the point!" She laughed, and it was a bright, tired little laugh, the one she used when she wanted me to laugh back. "You turned off our passes, Miles. In front of the coaster line. It was so embarrassing."

Daphne leaned on the doorframe. "It was a joke, right? A birthday prank?"

Lindy said nothing. She was looking around the kitchen at the dishes, the toaster and the lamp.

Trent stood behind Brynn with one hand low on her back.

I looked at the hand until he moved it.

"I'm not laughing," I said. "It's over, Brynn."

She smiled.

"Don't."

"You have seven days to be out of here. The lease is in my name. After next Sunday I change the locks."

"You're serious."

"Trent," I said, "go home."

He spread his hands. "Man, it's your birthday, you're upset, I get it. Sleep on it."

"I don't need to."

Brynn tilted her head at me, the way she did at a restaurant when I said I wasn't hungry.

"You'll be back by Friday," she said.

She picked up her bag, walked past me into the bedroom and shut the door.

Trent steered Daphne out ahead of him, and Lindy went last, already typing on her phone.

I stayed where I was and listened to them go down the stairs.

On the counter, the old tablet we kept for recipes lit up.

It was still signed in to Brynn's account from the winter she borrowed it.

A message preview slid across the screen, with the name of the chat above it.

The chat was called Miles Budget.

Lindy: ok so he cancelled it all. updating the sheet. what did we lose

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