“That wasveryungrateful of you, Emily,” her mother snapped before the woman was even out of earshot. Grey attacked her omelet with renewed vigor and tried to keep her voice low.
“I’m allowed to have boundaries.”
“These people are the reason you have a career.”
“Wait, I’m confused. Is it them, or is it Ethan? Anyone but me, right?”
“I didn’t say that. There you go again, always jumping to the worst conclusion.”
Grey closed her eyes. Opened them. This could all go differently. She could put her fork down, unclench her jaw.I don’t want things to be this way between us.They would sit there for hours, crying and apologizing, reopening all their old wounds before cauterizing them for good.
Or her mother would play dumb. Raise an eyebrow. Shut her down.I don’t know what you mean, Emily.Make it hurt even more than it did when she didn’t try, when it was all still unsaid.
Grey made eye contact with the waitress.
“Could we get the check, please?”
When she got back to the hotel, Ethan was already there, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows of their penthouse suite, glass of bourbon in hand. He glanced back at her when he heard her open the door, but said nothing.
“How did it go with Perry?” she asked, kicking off her sandals and padding over to him.
“Bad.” His voice was hoarse. “How was seeing your mom?”
“Bad.” She rested her head on his shoulder.
He offered her the glass. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“It’s okay. I don’t think it would’ve helped.”
She took a sip, even though it was the middle of the afternoonand she hated bourbon. It burned her throat and made her eyes water, but her nerves felt a little less raw. It was hard to remember that not so long ago being this close to him, his scent and his warmth, had made her palms sweat. Now it soothed her like a weighted blanket. She handed the glass back to him and wrapped her arms around his waist.
“Can we stay in tonight?”
He pulled her close and kissed the top of her head.
“Please.”
ETHAN PACED THE LENGTH OFtheir suite like a tiger in an enclosure. Grey had been gone for hours, getting a late lunch with one of her high school friends. When she returned, the two of them would take a car out to Forest Hills to have dinner with Sam’s parents. In the meantime, Ethan had no idea what to do with himself. He’d taken a long, scalding shower, scrubbing his skin until it was red and raw. The minutes ticked by like hours as he wore tracks in the carpet.
Back in L.A., there were a lot of things that reminded him of Sam. But he lived in a different house now, he didn’t see any of their mutual friends anymore, and until recently, he barely went out. He’d made his life as small as possible so he’d hurt as little as possible. But even without stepping foot in Queens yet, just being in New York had opened the floodgates. He’d tossed and turned the night before, drifting in and out of dreams filled with fragments of memories so vivid that he woke up gasping.
The first time he’d met Sam had been the summer before sixthgrade. Sam had moved in a few blocks away, and Ethan had caught a few glimpses of him as Ethan rode by on his bike while they were unloading the truck. He was short and scrawny, like Ethan; a tiny ball of energy with dark curly hair.
Ethan had been terrified to enter middle school. He was too shy and too pretty for his own good, perpetually trying to slip under the radar to avoid becoming a target. He’d lingered around the edges of a pack of rowdy, unruly boys he had nothing in common with, for no reason other than self-preservation.
Sam had approached Ethan and his friends while they were setting off bottle rockets in the park. The ringleader, Jimmy, had started to push Sam around, taunting him. Ethan had watched this scene play out half a dozen times, and it always ended the same. A skinned knee—maybe a bloody nose—before a tearful retreat. But something incredible had happened: Sam made him laugh. Made all of them laugh. Though Ethan couldn’t recall exactly what Sam had said, he’d never forget the looks on everyone’s faces, how surprised and disarmed they’d been.
He’d sought Sam out at school, and eventually they stopped hanging out with the other guys at all. They saved up enough money mowing lawns to buy a camcorder, and their afternoons and weekends were occupied with running around the neighborhood shooting their own increasingly elaborate movies.
Ethan loved Sam’s house. It was so different from his own. First of all, it was quieter. Sam was an only child, while Ethan had four older sisters who were constantly fighting, crying, stomping, yelling on the phone, slamming doors. When it was quiet in his house, it meant that something was wrong. It meant that something had set his father off and they were all trying to lie low to avoid being singled out as the object of his wrath.
Sam’s parents, too, were polar opposites of Ethan’s. To Sam’sembarrassment, they were still obviously, desperately in love. Sam’s mother had been an opera singer, Italian, from Italy, and his father was an art director at an ad agency in the city. Their house was crammed to the brim with books and instruments and mysterious objects that may or may not have been art.
They’d accepted Ethan into their family wholeheartedly, automatically setting out an extra plate at dinner and an extra bowl of cereal in the morning. The first time Ethan had shown up with his shoulder throbbing, nearly wrenched out of its socket, Sam’s father had wanted to call the police, but Ethan had begged him not to. It would have only made everything worse. That night, Sam’s parents had made up the guest room for him, instead of his usual sleeping bag on the floor of Sam’s room. He hadn’t gone home for three weeks.
He’d envied so much about Sam: his easy charisma, his creativity, his quick wit. He knew Sam had been jealous of him, too. They’d entered high school the same height, barely five and a half feet tall. The summer before their junior year, Ethan had sprouted up five inches, and then another four before they’d graduated. Sam wasn’t unattractive, and he was so damn charming that he’d never had trouble dating, but he’d always joke about how he had to talk women into liking him despite his appearance, not because of it. Once Ethan had grown into his looks, the amount of attention he got from girls just from standing around and scowling had been borderline unsettling.
But even so, Ethan felt like he was always trying to keep up with Sam. When they’d watched their first unpolished VHS “dailies,” Ethan had been shocked at how wooden he looked next to Sam. Sam was a natural from the beginning. He’d brought everyone to tears as Tevye in their high school production ofFiddler on the Roof; a half-WASP, half-Italian seventeen-year-old flawlesslychanneling a middle-aged Jewish peasant. Meanwhile, Ethan had white-knuckled his way through his one song as Perchik, the handsome socialist revolutionary.
