I frown at that, spying an empty bench beneath a row ofchestnut trees on the plaza; I sit down and after a moment Gabe joins me, tipping his head back to peer up through the leaves. “There must be something you like about being in Indiana, right?” I ask, bumping his shoulder with mine before I can talk myself out of it. “Like, even just one thing.”
“I mean, the bars,” he reports. Then, off my eye roll, “I’m kidding. I’m kidding.” He scratches the back of his head. “I like how quiet it gets at night,” he says finally. “Like if I’m walking home across campus from Sadie’s or the library or wherever. It’s peaceful. And it gets kind of peaceful in my head, too.” He shrugs, looking a little bit embarrassed at the revelation, like maybe he said more than he meant to. “What about you?” he asks, stretching his arms out along the back of the bench and changing the subject. “What do you like about Boston?”
“I mean, everything, kind of,” I confess. “Like, don’t get me wrong, it’s cold and miserable a lot of the time, but there’s something about it that just feels really... homey to me? I can imagine being there a long time, I think.”
Gabe’s eyebrows flicker at that, I notice, but he doesn’t comment. “Your roommate sounds cool” is all he says.
“She’s fantastic,” I confirm, smiling at the thought of Roisin’s preppy button-downs and her love of all things Star Wars. “She reminds me of Imogen, kind of, because she’s so open and fun and easy to get to know. She invited me to come visit her in Georgia this summer, even.”
“That’s awesome,” Gabe says. “How was it?”
Now it’s my turn to realize I’ve said more than I necessarily meant to. “I mean, it’s possible I didn’t actually go,” I admit.
Gabe looks confused. “Why not?”
“I don’t really know,” I say slowly. It was an instinctiveno, a reflex; it wasn’t until later that it occurred to me my instincts might have been wrong. “Like, we’re really, really good roommates. We’re going to live together next year, she’s the closest person to me at school—um, except for Ian, obviously—but I guess I still kind of held myself at a distance from her sometimes? I was always afraid of things getting, like...” I trail off, waving my hand.
“Messy?” Gabe supplies.
“Yeah.” I nod, feeling myself blush. “Like if we got too close inevitably I’d do something to make her realize she didn’t actually like me that much.” I’m surprised—shocked, even—to hear the words come out of my mouth: this isn’t the kind of thing I’d normally say to anybody, let alone him. I didn’t even know I was thinking it. “Anyway, I’m going to try and do better at that this year,” I resolve. “Noteverybodywho gets to know me can possibly be destined for horrible disappointment, right?”
I’m joking around to cover my own embarrassment, but when I glance over at Gabe he’s gazing back at me, even. “There’s nothing disappointing about you, Molly Barlow,” he says quietly. My heart stutters a bit inside my chest.
“Well,” I say, standing so quickly I almost get dizzy, allthe blood rushing out of my head at once. “We’ll see, anyway. You wanna go find some lunch? My treat,” I add, when he hesitates.
Gabe makes a face. “Ian’s treat, you mean.”
“I mean, yes, Ian’s treat,” I admit, sighing a little. “He gave me some cash before we left. But what are you going to do otherwise, starve? I get if you’re sensitive about Ian paying for stuff, but it’s only because—”
“First of all, can you stop saying that?” Gabe asks me, sounding irritated again for the first time since this morning. “That I’m sensitive about stuff? You said it the other night, too, and it makes me sound like such a fucking pansy.”
I roll my eyes. “First of all,” I mimic, “don’t say pansy.”
“Now you sound like Imogen,” he points out.
“Good,” I shoot back. “Imogen is smart.”
“IknowImogen is smart,” Gabe says. “And you know what I mean. It makes me sound like somebody who can’t handle himself.”
You were just saying you don’t think you can, I almost point out, then think better of it. “It makes you sound like somebody who’s afraid of emotions and isn’t going to let his son play with dolls, actually.”
“My son can play with dolls if he wants to, Molly!” Gabe says, but he’s laughing, which is something. He tilts his head back, stares up at the trees. “I just want to not feel like my life is spiraling wildly out of control at every moment.”
That stops me. “What’s spiraling out of control?” I ask,sitting back down beside him.
“Well, I’m depending on your boyfriend for my pocket money, for starters,” Gabe says immediately, ticking off a list on his fingers. “I’m about to apply to a bunch of extremely expensive medical schools I don’t even want to go to—and yes, you win, this is me saying it: I don’t want to go to medical school. I don’t even want to go back to Indiana, honestly. Five will get you ten, my girlfriend is about to break up with me because I can’t seem to stop being a dickbag, even when I want to. The other day I spent a hundred dollars I definitely do not have onskydiving, for some reason. And then there’s y—”
He snaps his jaws shut at the very last, but the look on his face is as clear as if he’d finished the sentence:and then there’syou.
And then there’s me.
I gaze at him for a moment, every bone in my body gone hot and heedful. After all, it’s not like he’s wrong.Somethingis happening between us, clearly, though whether it’s garden-variety muscle memory or a rarer breed of bird altogether I couldn’t honestly say. What I do know is that I’ve been batting it away all week: in the obvious moments, like the other night outside the hardware-store bar, but also every single time I’ve stared for half a second too long at his sharp wrists or the cliff of his collarbone or remembered what it’s like to hold his hand. I miss him, Gabe Donnelly with his swagger and his smile and his heart as big and steady as a steamship.Not just as a person, but asmine.
And if the way he’s looking at me now is any indication, he misses me, too.
I shake my head to clear it, tucking my hair behind my ears and staring out across the plaza at the Arc. This is a dangerous road to travel, even if it’s only in my mind. No matter what’s about to happen between him and Sadie—no matter what’s going on with Ian and me—there are a million reasons why Gabe and I are a plane crash waiting to happen. There’s so much he still doesn’t know.
“You’re twenty-one, dude,” I remind him finally, nudging his elbow with mine in a way I hope is sufficiently platonic; I feel the ache of it anyway, the dull singing of an overworked muscle. “You don’t have to have everything perfectly figured out. You don’t have tobeperfect.”
