“Actually, no,” I hear myself say, surprised by the urge to stray from my carefully curated itinerary. But there’s something about the energy of this place that I like, a sense of possibility. I watch a burly, bearded waiter hurry by with a tray of bright-pink cocktails in delicate champagne coupes. “Let’s stay.”
Ian orders us a couple of beers and we find a spot to post up near the bar as the crowd thickens all around us, cologne and bright lipstick and plaid button-down shirts. We keep getting muscled into each other, my chest pressed up against Ian’s. Behind me a girl who’s already half drunk is telling a very enthusiastic story to her friends, all hand gestures and colorful British expletives; I duck out of her way, scooting from side to side to avoid a pint glass to the back of the head. After a while I’ve got a rhythm down—my hips rocking ever so slightly into Ian’s, then back again, holding my glass up so I don’t spill on my dress. Beer drips down onto my wrist. I lift my arm to lick it away and when I look back up Ian is staring at me, the intent on his face so overt it makes me shiver. He raises his eyebrows, something that just misses being a smile tweaking the corners of his mouth. “What are we, dancing?” he asks, head tipped down close to mine.
It takes me a minute to realize what he’s getting at, that low swoop in my belly. Then I grin. “Why?” I ask, flirtatious. “You wanna dance?”
Ian shakes his head, mischievous. “I mean, not particularly.”
“Well then,” I tease. “What do you want?”
He’s about to answer when the girl behind me swings her glass with particular vivacity; I overcorrect as I’m ducking out of her way, stepping directly onto the foot of the dark-haired guy standing to my right. “Whoops,” I start, blushing like a clumsy tourist; I turn around guiltily, free hand held up in apology. “I’m sorry.”
“Nah, it’s cool,” says a deep American voice I know in the cells of my bone marrow, a voice I know in the ventricles of my heart. “You’re good.”
He glances at me quickly, then immediately does a double take; for a moment both of us just freeze. I can’t stop staring, struck silent by the shock and the horror and the fact that apparently I wasn’t hallucinating yesterday in the tube station: it’sGabe, who I’ve known almost as long as I can remember. Gabe, whose family I destroyed for the second time last year. He’s here in this pub in London in dark jeans and a soft-looking henley, a bottle of Amstel clutched in one hand.
And he’s with a girl.
She was with him yesterday in the Underground station too, I realize now, though I didn’t notice her at the time—as if my brain was protecting me somehow, only seeing what it wanted to see. It feels like this whole trip is reshuffling in front of my eyes like a deck of enchanted cards from ananimated movie, becoming something other than the thing it was five minutes ago. It feels like my whole life is.
“Um,” I manage finally, just the one idiotic syllable. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Gabe echoes, sounding just about as useless. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I—I’m onvacation,” I retort, more snottily than I necessarily mean to. “What areyoudoing here?”
“Yeah,” Gabe says, gesturing to the beautiful blonde beside him. “Us too.”
Us. Right. I suddenly remember Ian waiting patiently at my side, watching the proceedings with a curious, quizzical expression. I hesitate for a moment, realizing abruptly that I have no idea how to explain what’s going on here. “This is Gabe,” I blurt roughly. “Gabe, this is my boyfriend, Ian.”
Just for a second, what looks like the ghost of a reaction—surprise? Jealousy?—flares across Gabe’s achingly handsome face. Then he grins, and just like that he’s the King of Funtown, same as he always was back at home. “Wow, good to meet you, dude,” he says easily, reaching his hand out for Ian’s. “This is my girlfriend, Sadie.” He turns to the blonde, lays a confident palm against her back. “Molly’s from Star Lake,” he explains smoothly. “She dated Patrick forever, way back in the Stone Age.”
I blink. He’s not wrong, certainly—Ididdate Gabe’s brother, Patrick, forever—but that’s definitely not our only connection. By the end of last summer he was the only Donnelly I had any interest in giving my heart to at all.
“Oh wow,hi,” Sadie says. She’s tall and toned, with a long waterfall of hair braided into a fishtail over one golden shoulder. Her handshake is firm as a bear trap. “It’s so cool to meet you. How wild is this, right?”
“Seriously wild.” I smile what I hope is the smile of a normal person and not an escaped convict whose haunted past is flashing before her eyes three thousand miles from the scene of the crime. It occurs to me that if we hustle, maybe Ian and I can still make our reservation at the chicken-under-a-brick place. Hell, maybe we can hop a flight to Burundi. Anything to get out of here.
I’m about to make an excuse—a migraine, a phone call, explosive uncontrollable diarrhea—when the hostess interrupts. “Any parties of four waiting for a table over here?” she calls, popping up on her toes and shouting over the din in the bar. “I could take a quad right now.”
The chatter in the crowd gets more purposeful then, everybody peering around to see who’s going to claim it. But there don’t actually seem to be any four-person parties waiting; it’s all couples like Ian and me—or Gabe and Sadie, I think with shocking sourness—and big, raucous groups. The quizzical hesitation is palpable as we look at each other, the four of us coming to the same obvious, horrifying conclusion at once.
Sadie’s the one who says it. “Do you two want to double up?” she asks cautiously. There’s a low midwestern lilt to her voice, Kansas maybe; it makes me think of wide-openspaces, of long afternoons running around in the grass. “I mean, were you waiting for a table?”
“Totally,” Ian says. “Let’s do it.” He glances at me for confirmation, apparently oblivious to the panic and dread I’m sure must be radiating off me in a thick, noxious cloud. “That’s cool, right? Honestly, I just want to sit down someplace. I’m about to eat my shoe.”
“Um.” I purposely don’t look in Gabe’s direction, same as I can tell he’s purposely not looking at me; it feels like one stray second of eye contact might give up the game here, lay our whole sloppy history out for everyone to see. The last thing I want is to have dinner with him. I don’t see how Icanhave dinner with him without one or the other of us somehow plowing up the past I’ve spent the last year keeping buried for everyone’s benefit. I don’t trust myself not to lose my head and start screaming, to demand an explanation for why he ghosted like he did.I needed you last fall, I want to tell him.Ineededyou, and you made sure I knew I didn’t matter.
It’s that last thought that has my spine straightening: after all, if Gabe can act like there’s never been anything worth remembering between us, then so can I. “Sure,” I say brightly, tucking my hair behind my ears and smiling. “Absolutely.”
Gabe looks shocked, then slightly irritated, like he was counting on me to come up with a plan for emergency evacuation and—just like always—I’ve let him down. Well, screw him, I think. At least one of us has to be a damn adulthere. “Sounds like a plan” is all he says, raising his hand at the hostess and smiling his dazzling politician smile. “We’re four.”
The hostess nods briskly and leads us through the clusters of tables to one of the booths at the back; I slide in next to Ian and across from Gabe, still careful not to make eye contact.
“So when was the last time you guys saw each other?” Sadie asks as we get ourselves settled. She’s got sharp blue eyes and a faint spray of freckles across her nose, with pale eyebrows and the kind of deep, even tan that tells the story of a summer spent outdoors. “Molly, is your family still in Star Lake?”
“Um, my mom is,” I admit, glancing down at the menu, “but I don’t get back there too often. We haven’t seen each other since last year.”
“Long time,” Gabe agrees, scanning the beer list. Neither one of us volunteers any other details.
