Hiraeth: a homesickness for a home you can’t return to or that never was.

The word stayed with me the entire afternoon. Soaking into my bones like the summer sun. Hitting roots in me, populating within my body. I understood it with frightening clarity.

Hiraeth.

A home that wasn’t mine but that I couldn’t, for the life of me, stop trying to worm my way into. A place I missed without ever visiting.

A place of my own I could call home.

Maddie: How many women have you slept with since we broke up?

Chase: Really?

Maddie: Really.

Chase: Ladies first. How many men?

Maddie: No, you.

Chase: I feel like this is highly counterproductive to what I’m trying to achieve here.

Maddie: Which is?

Chase: Your lips wrapped around my cock as I examine the top of your head for stray grays.

Maddie: I actually have a few. My mom said it runs in my family.

Chase: I can have the tweezers ready if you want.

Chase: (my romance game is strong today.)

Maddie: Thanks, but I wouldn’t trust you with a stress ball.

Maddie: Also, grays are natural.

Chase: I’ll take your grays. All fifty shades of them.

Maddie: Now stop stalling and tell me.

Chase: Four.

Maddie: Wow.

Chase: I’m guessing it is not a good wow.

Maddie: Correct, Sherlock.

Chase: You?

Maddie: Zero.

Chase: Wow.

Maddie: I’m guessing it’s a good wow.

Chase: Yeah. Although it is beyond me how you managed to withstand the tights-and-tie-combo charm.

Maddie: Ethan is exactly the kind of man I want to fall in love with.

Chase: Love doesn’t work for your ass, Mad. You can’t tell it who to fall for.

Maddie: You really think you’re immune to falling in love?

Chase: Yes.

Maddie: Elaborate.

Chase: Yes, I really am immune to falling in love. I’m unable to. It’s a nonproblem.

Maddie: Why?

Chase: I’ve seen the ugly side of love and now I’m all sober when it comes to the other sex.

Maddie: Tell me about Amber.

Chase: Only if you come to the engagement shoot with me on Monday.

Maddie: Do I get to shoot my fake fiancé?

Chase: Har. Har. Yes or no?

Maddie: This is blackmail.

Chase: I’d rather call it negotiation.

Maddie: I hate you.

Chase: You wish.

Maddie: What are you doing tonight?

Chase: You, hopefully.

Maddie: Try again.

Chase: Out on the prowl, since my soon-to-be temporary girlfriend is refusing to see me.

Maddie: Back to being a cheater, I see.

Chase: We’re not exclusive. You kiss Ethan all the time. I bet Ethan kisses other women too.

Maddie: Forget it. Go have your fun. I hope you catch hispes.

Chase: Hispes?

Maddie: Herpes, pour homme.

Chase: Fuck, I’ve missed you.

Maddie: I actually stole this from Ray Donovan.

Chase: You can untwist your little (patterned?) panties. I’m currently at my parents’ house, playing chess with my father. And losing. Thanks to you.

Maddie: Strawberries (re: panties). How is he feeling?

Chase: Good (re: panties). And not good (re: Dad).

Maddie: I’m really sorry. There is nothing I can say to make this better, but I’m thinking about you and your family all the time. I’m seeing Katie next week for lunch. I want you to know I’ll be there for her.

Chase: The end-ness is unfathomable. Today he is here, but tomorrow, who knows?

Maddie: My mother began to write me personal letters when she first found out about her breast cancer. Little anecdotes about me as a child, about her as a mother. We bonded over flowers. I always got excited when she took me to work and there was a big order for a wedding. When she beat cancer the first time, she didn’t stop writing me letters. When I asked her why, she said it didn’t matter. Just because she didn’t have cancer didn’t mean she wouldn’t die. And she wanted to remind me she’d always love me. I think maybe telling him how you feel now is a good idea.

Chase: How did it feel? I mean, afterward.

Maddie: I felt betrayed by her. I kept thinking how could she do this to me, even though it didn’t make any sense. I knew she didn’t choose to be ill. I felt robbed of something. Tricked. Cursed. But then, slowly, I got back on my feet. You will too.

Chase: What if I don’t?

Maddie: I’ll make sure you will.

Chase: I won’t let you stick around and help me.

Maddie: I won’t ask.

Chase: So you’ll save me, but won’t fuck me?

Maddie: Precisely.

Chase: Monday. I’ll pick you up at six.

Maddie: Monday.

Chase: Mad?

Maddie: Yes?

Chase: Thanks.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHASE

It was the same studio.

Of course it was the same fucking studio.

An industrial loft on Broadway.

I wasn’t surprised. Mom had one assistant on her payroll—Berta—who was approximately eighty years old (not an exaggeration for the sake of making a point). She should’ve retired about three decades ago, but Berta was a widow, no kids, and Mom said the job kept her busy. Berta had a personal, ongoing feud with technology and used the Yellow Pages whenever she had to book anything outside the usual service providers the family used. Which meant that the studio—Events4U—was the same one she’d booked for every family occasion in the last century, including engagement shoots, Christmas cards, condolences, virtually every official picture taken of Booger Face, my college graduation pictures, and Katie’s Himalayan cat’s funeral photos (more on that never; I still hadn’t forgiven her for wasting everyone’s time while providing the feline with a proper burial).

I opened the door for Mad, dangerously close to crawling out of my own skin and bolting to the other side of the planet, thinking about the last time I’d been in this studio. Who I’d been with in this studio. It wasn’t that my family hadn’t visited here afterward, but I’d flat-out refused to set foot in this studio ever again on the grounds of I WASN’T A FUCKING MASOCHIST.

Until now.

Madison breezed in, her movements, like her being, swift and sunny. She leaned her entire upper body against the counter, greeting the person at the reception like she’d known her her entire life. Her pixie hair was growing a little longer than usual, sticking out playfully. It was fuck hot, and I wondered if she was going to let her hair grow and if that meant hair yanking during sex was in the cards for me.

Madison laughed at something the receptionist said, then fished her phone out of her bag and showed her something. The receptionist, I realized, was the same woman who’d taken my picture all those years ago. The memory slammed into me like a truck in a busy intersection. This was a one-person-operation business. The woman had been the one cooing at my (real) ex-fiancée and me—two nervous postgrads who’d made a fatal decision to get married before they’d known who they really were—to smile at the camera.

She won’t recognize you. She owns a studio on Broadway. She sees hundreds of people every week, some of them remarkably ugly, some of them remarkably beautiful. Your face doesn’t chart.

“Oh goodness.” The woman, who introduced herself as Becky, pushed her glasses up her nose, blinking up at me. She was fiftysomething, athletic looking, with a gray, conservative dress, hair the same color as her dress, and enough jewelry to sink the Titanic. “It is you again, Mr. Black.”