“It’s not a contest, Murph. I’m not choosing Daniel over you.”
“You sure? Because you did this weekend.” The words tumble out before I realize I’ve said them, and they’re too heavy to hang in the silence for long. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“No, no, you’re right.” Kat’s voice is small, but honest. “I know I sprung the Daniel thing on you last minute and brought him to the bar without running it past you. That was uncool of me.”
My shoulders relax an inch. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
She’s quiet for a moment, either unsure of her answer or unwilling to share it. “I was scared.” Her voice pitches up, like it always has when she’s talking but doesn’t want to be. “Because, um. Because I didn’t want you to be sad.”
“I wouldn’t have been sad to meet him at Thanksgiving, but Wednesday was supposed to be about us.”
“I know, I know.” She’s staring down at the floor again. “I should’ve just had him drive out on Thursday instead of bringing him to the bar.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because…” I watch her lips open and close, searching for the shape of the right answer. She settles on the truth. “Because I think he’swow,” Kat says. “He’s my boyfriend, Murph. I want him around. Not all the time, but most of the time. That’s kind of how it goes.”
I swallow twice. The truth didn’t sound as good as I had hoped.
When I don’t speak up, Kat does. “If you and Ellie were together, like actually together, wouldn’t you want her around too?”
I picture a table with Kat and me next to two emptybarstools. When Daniel is seated at one of them, it makes sense that Ellie is there too. When Daniel gets erased, Ellie goes with him, and it’s just me and Kat again. Like it used to be.
“Sometimes,” I say quietly. “But not all the time. I like when it’s just us.”
Kat reaches across the bed and gives my arm a squeeze. “Like right now?”
“Yeah,” I say, “like right now.” I try to bottle up the moment in all its quiet joy. Who knows when it’ll happen again. “Where is Daniel, by the way?”
Kat smirks, and her gaze bounces to the window and back. “He’s, uh. He’s in the driveway.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I didn’t know how long we’d be, and it’s not like he wants to go home and hang out with my parents. He swore he didn’t mind.”
I shove back the comforter and head for the window facing our driveway. Sure enough, there’s Kat’s Honda Civic idling with the lights turned off. If I squint, I can just barely catch the outline of an enormous man shoved into a tiny car, his face lit up blue by the light of his phone.
“Oh my God, I feel so bad.”
“He’s got games on his phone,” Kat says with the sort of nonchalance of a mom talking about her iPad child. Meanwhile, someone’s going to have to hire a crane to lift my jaw off the floor. To be blunt, I’ve never seen this kind of selflessness from a straight man. I scrape the last bit of air from my lungs with a sigh.
“I think you’re right,” I admit. “I think he’swow.”
Kat’s smile is almost too big for her face. “You’re the best for saying that, you know that?”
“I mean it. I’m glad you brought him home.”
She frowns. “Okay, now I know you’re lying.”
“I mean, yeah. But not about him being great. Way better than I thought he’d be.”
She squints at me, suspicious. “What did you think he’d be?”
“I don’t know, he’s a straight guy! My expectations were low!”
Kat’s laugh must be loud enough for Daniel to hear, or else he just sees us in the window. Either way, the lights in the car flip on, and Daniel gives us a big goofy smile and a wave. We laugh and wave back, and once we do, he kills the lights again and goes back to his phone.
“I like him,” I say.
