Sadie’s eyes go wide. “Seriously?”
Ian nods. “The convent is like an hour from Shannon,” he tells her. Then his expression changes, going thoughtful and alert, and suddenly—horrifyingly—I know exactly what’s coming.Don’t do it, I plead silently.Say anything, anything but—
“You guys should come,” Ian suggests.
I freeze, both shocked to the depths of my person and wholly, dully unsurprised: in fact, this is exactly like him. Ian loves both big groups and unexpected situations, is forever inviting some random kid from his James Joyce seminar out for a bowling night in Southie or organizing a party bus for a twenty-person trip to eat giant turkey legs at King Richard’s Faire. I found it charming, back in Boston. Right now, not so much.
“Really?”Sadie asks, sounding delighted.
“Really?” Gabe says, looking significantly less so.
“Yeah!” Ian exclaims. I can see him getting more and more excited by the idea, the ingeniousness of it coalescing in his mind. “Why not? It’s only a couple of days.” He turns to me. “I mean, if you think that’d be okay with Imogen?”
“Yeah, no, totally, it’s not that I don’t think it’d be okay with Imogen, I just—” I stop short, frantic as an animal forced to chew its own leg off in a desperate attempt to free itself from a trap. I can feel the same cold panic radiating off Gabe from clear across the table. There’s no way to explain why this is a horrible idea without outing ourselves, and it’s too late for that now; my carefully assembled itinerary—myneat, tidy plan—is dissolving in front of my face like so much cigarette smoke.
Still, through the soupy haze of hysteria in my brain I can’t deny the delicious lick of something unexpected, the opening chords of a song I haven’t heard in a very long time. It occurs to me that even after everything that happened, I’ve been waiting to see Gabe again since the day I said good-bye to him last summer.
“We definitely don’t want to put anybody out,” Sadie promises. She looks completely and obviously enamored by the idea of coming along, her pretty face lit up like her veins are full of neon. “But that sounds amazing, actually. Like, assuming you guys are for real and this isn’t just a politeness offer, and we’re not messing up your romantic vacation or anything like that.” She looks at Gabe. “Isn’t that the point of a backpacking trip?” she asks, sounding almost beseeching. “Like, going wherever the whim takes you?”
“Kuddelmuddel!” Ian bursts out like a contestant on a game show who knows he’s got the winning answer. He looks to me for confirmation. “Right?”
Gabe’s eyes narrow. “What?”
I shake my head. “Forget it.”
For the first time all night, Gabe looks directly across the table at me.What are you doing?his expression seems to beg. After all, I could still save us; it wouldn’t even take that much. I could weave a thousand excuses. I could tip my hand and tell the truth.
But I don’t.
“It’s a real invitation, dude,” Ian declares, sitting back in the booth, his long limbs everywhere like he doesn’t have a care in the breathing world. “We wouldn’t ask if we didn’t mean it.”
“Ryanair flights are like thirty bucks right now,” Sadie puts in. “Or thirty euro, but still. I was looking today,” she explains, off Gabe’s quizzical expression. “I thought we couldn’t make it work ’cause we’d still have to pay for a hotel and car rental and all that stuff, but if we have a place to stay...” She mirrors his wide-eyed stare. “Oh, come on,” she cajoles, hooking her arm around his and resting her sharp chin on his shoulder. “It’ll be an adventure.”
“An adventure, huh?” Gabe asks, lips twisting. But then, to my utter surprise, he nods. “Okay,” he says slowly, like he knows he’s outnumbered. “Fuck it. Why not, right? Let’s go.”
“Sweet!” Ian is grinning. “Glad to have you aboard, kids.”
“To Ireland,” Sadie says, raising her pint glass. “And new friends.”
The rest of us raise our beers in a sloppy cheers, giddy; beer sloshes down my wrist as we clink. I look everywhere but at Gabe as the band starts up again, grateful that the music is too loud to think about what might happen next.
Day3
“Wake up, Drunky Brewster,” Ian says the next morning, nudging me with one gentle knee and waving a paper cup of weak British coffee in front of my face. “We gotta go meet your friends at the airport.”
I shake my head into the sheets. “What?” I mumble. My head is pounding, my stomach gurgling from all the beer we drank last night; for a second I’m completely disoriented. Then I remember:
Gabe. Sadie.
Ireland.
Oh my God, what have I done?
I scramble upright, head clearing as suddenly as if I’d fallen through thin ice into Star Lake in January. “Why did you do that?” I demand, trying not to sound too ear-splittingly shrill and knowing I’m missing by several octavesat least. “Just invite those guys to Imogen’s last night without asking me first?”
“Wait, what?” Ian sets the coffee down on the nightstand, blinks at me. “Really? You’re mad at me now? Last night you were totally into the idea.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I tell him, though I know I can’t actually blame him for assuming otherwise. I wanted so badly to convince him that everything was fine, and I overshot so hard that for a second I even managed to convince myself it was a good idea. “It’s just, it’s weird.”
