“It was my brother’s room!” he yells so loud, my heart skips a beat.
Silence falls across the car. I blink.
“You have a brother?”
“He’s dead, okay?” He shoots me a dirty look, as if I killed the guy with my own bare hands.
His words land like gunshots. I don’t know what to do with them. I glance at Lane. He looks pained and relieved in equal measures.
“I lost my shit when I saw you in there, because it’s his room. It always has been. So stop thinking it’s something you fuckingdid, okay?”
“You wantmeto stop? Listen, buddy, you’re the one who ‘lost your shit’ with me, like I majorly fucked up.”
I feel sick, my chest so tight I keep tugging on the collar of my sweater, desperate for air. This is even worse than I imagined. My anger has evaporated, as if Lane just hit the off switch, leaving me alone in the pitch black.
“I just couldn’t tell you.” He keeps his eyes locked on the gearshift. “I should never have spoken to you like that, but when I saw you in that room, I just… Anyway. I’m sorry.”
“?‘Anyway’?” I say flatly. “You have no idea, do you? You just told me your brother died, Lane. In the middle of a fight—like that explains everything. We’ve known each other for six months now, and we spent almost that whole time living together; I invited you home to meet my family; I told you stuff nobody else knows…”
Hot tears are trickling down my cheeks. I brush them away with my sleeve.
“I trusted you—and you never thought to tell me?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is?”
“I get that, I do. But this is us we’re talking about. I thought we…”
I force myself to breathe, trying to make sense of the thoughts racing through my head. Lane has just told me he lost his brother, and I can’t brush that off.
“What happened?”
“A bike accident. Three years ago. November twelfth.”
A bike accident?I think back to how mad he got with Ethan, and it suddenly makes sense.
“November twelfth?” I whisper. “So that evening, when you forgot I was making us dinner… It was the anniversary of his death?”
He nods. My brain is scrambled.
“So now you know. Now you get why…”
It almost sounds like a question. But the truth is—I don’t.
“You had so many chances to tell me,” I say. Everything is slowly slotting into place. “Somany. But you said nothing. Why couldn’t you justtellme?”
Part of me wants to scoop him up in my arms and hug him tight, tell him I’m sorry, tell him I have brothers, too, tell him I can only imagine how painful it all must be… But there’s another part burning even brighter inside me. I feel empty. Hollow. Lane helped me when I was down—true. But ultimately, all he’s given me is a big, fat black hole of nothingness. It had hurt, thinking that we had slept together and it didn’t mean anything to him. But this feels somehow worse. The truth is that I never mattered to him at all.
I’m shaking. He rests a hand on my wrist, and when I look into his eyes, I can’t read him.
“Come back—”
I whip my hand away so fast, it slams against the window.
“So what’s the plan? You think telling me some sob story is going to make it all better?”
He frowns. “No, but—”
“But nothing! Knowing the truth makes it even worse.” I shake my head sadly. “I thought you were mad at me because you couldn’t stand me being on your couch anymore. So yeah—it’s kind of a relief that therealproblem was the room, not me. And hearing about your brother breaks my heart, it really does. But you know what hurts even more?” I look at him. “That I didn’t count enough for you to tell me the truth. Even when you knew how cruel you were being. You didn’t care enough to tell me about him.”
