I grin down at the screen: I’m headed back to Boston in a couple of days, and the closer it gets the more excited I find myself—for my very own campus apartment and long nights of bingeing sexy time-travel shows, yeah, but also to settle into myself again, to see who I might actually be now that I don’t have to work so hard at being perfect. It’s corny, maybe, but it kind of feels like Roisin isn’t the only one I haven’t seen in a while.
Nope, I promise, tucking my phone into my pocket and turning my face up toward the sunshine, heading for home.Got everything I need.
That afternoon I’m rinsing a coffee cup at the kitchen sink, the light spilling in warm and dappled through the window, when Vita lets out a sudden, affronted hiss; I jump as she darts from between my ankles, her patchy fur standing on end as she charges the back door. I turn around and gasp as a startled, high-pitched bark splits the silence: on the other side of the screen sits a tiny, wrinkly-faced beagle puppy.
And there, holding the leash, is Gabe.
“Hey, Molly Barlow,” he says, raising his free hand in a greeting. He’s wearing frayed khaki shorts and a soft-looking T-shirt, his face scrubbed clean and smooth. The bridge of his nose is faintly pink from the sun. “I was hoping you’d still be here.”
I blink as Vita barrels toward the dining room in outrage,her angry paws thumping a tattoo against the hardwood. “Um, yeah,” I say slowly, my head falling to one side as I stare at him across the tidy kitchen. It feels like I’m seeing an apparition. It feels like I’m seeing a ghost. “I’m still here.”
“I see that.” Gabe smiles. “Hi.”
“Hi.”I motion to the puppy, who’s standing up on four short, pudgy legs now, turning in snuffly circles on the porch. “Who’s this?”
“This is Ellie.” Gabe tugs her leash to get her attention, just gently; then, by way of explanation: “My mom got lonely.”
“I know the feeling,” I say, and Gabe nods.
“I got all the way back to Indiana,” he confesses. He jams his hands deep into his pockets, Ellie’s leash still looped around one wrist. “I got all moved in, I got my schedule and all that. But I couldn’t do it.”
I stare at him for a moment, heartbroken and hopeful. I wonder if this is our lot, mine and Gabe’s, to surprise each other over and over until the very end of the world. “Do you want to come in?” I finally ask.
“Oh!” he says, like he’d forgotten he was standing out there. “Um. Yeah.”
He opens the screen door, stepping into the kitchen and letting the leash go. Ellie runs over to Vita’s water bowl and takes a few loud, thirsty slurps. Gabe and I watch her for a moment, neither one of us saying anything; suddenly some spell has been broken between us, awkwardness settling downlike a fine, brackish mist. I clear my throat. Gabe scratches his collarbone. Neither one of us looks at each other. We’re circling something, clearly, but it feels like neither one of us knows how to cross that final stretch.
“So what are you going to do instead?” I ask finally, my voice oddly jovial. Suddenly I don’t know what to do with my hands. I clap them together for safekeeping, rocking back on my heels in a nervous little dance.
Gabe lets out a quiet laugh. “I have no fucking idea,” he admits. He sits down with a heavy sigh at my mom’s antique kitchen table, the polished wood knotted and scarred. “I was so busy trying to convince myself I wanted to be a doctor that I never really let myself think about anything else.” He leans back, rubbing a hand over the top of his dark, shorn head. “I don’t evenlikescience.”
I hide a smile. “I know that about you, in fact.”
“You could have mentioned it,” he says with a grimace.
“Seriously?” My eyebrows crawl.
Gabe holds his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay,” he concedes, lips twisting. “I guess you tried.” He lifts his face and looks at me then, with an expression like he’s about to dive into the deep end of the ocean. “I broke up with Sadie,” he says.
I try to keep my face neutral, but the knowledge hooks itself into my rib cage and pulls the bones wide—my whole heart exposed and vulnerable, like he could reach out and cup it in the palm of his hand. “Yeah?”
Gabe nods, tilting his head back and looking at the ceiling. “That part wasn’t right, either,” he tells me. “She was great, but it wasn’t—I mean, I didn’t—” He stops, looks back at me. “I kept looking at the dumb picture I took of us,” he says quietly, seemingly out of nowhere. “The one from Paris.”
I wrinkle my nose at him, teasing even as my pulse races. “The one where I’m making the world’s dumbest face?”
“It is a pretty ridiculous face,” Gabe admits, grinning a little. “But we also just look really... happy in it? Ifelthappy that day, for the first time in a really long time. I felt like myself. And it wasn’t ’cause things were fixed, necessarily, or because I had solved all my problems. The more I looked at the picture the more I realized that it was ’cause of you.” He takes a deep breath and then he says it. “I love you.”
I shake my head. My first reaction is bald denial, thatno you don’tready on the tip of my tongue.I don’t deserve it, I want to tell him. Instead I take a pause and remind myself that I do.
“I kind of don’t think I ever stopped,” Gabe continues, shrugging helplessly. “I thought if maybe I could cut off the oxygen to that part of myself it would be fine, you know? Like if I acted a certain way for long enough, then eventually it wouldn’t be acting anymore.”
That makes me smile. “I am sorry to inform you, turns out it doesn’t work that way. At least, it didn’t when I tried it.” I sit down across the table, the side of my foot brushing hisfor the briefest of seconds. “Speaking of breakups,” I begin.
Gabe raises his eyebrows. “You and Ian... ?” he asks.
“There is no more me and Ian,” I admit.
That surprises him; I can see the relief—and the hope—on his face in the second before he schools his expression. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
