According to the clock on the dashboard, it’s twelve-thirty A.M. by the time I climb into the passenger seat of the Bronco across from Patrick, fussing with the tricky seat belt until I finally hear the buckle snick into place, just like I have a million times before. This is the car I think of when I think of the Donnellys—the one Connie used to haul us all around in, the one we crowded into every morning for the sleepy drive to school. We used to climb up onto the roof and look for comets.
“Thanks for taking me,” I say now, swallowing down the strange thickness of memories in my throat as Patrick pulls out of the driveway. “You really didn’t have to do that.”
Patrick keeps his eyes on the road, his face cast reddish in the dashboard light. He’s got the faintest batch of freckles across his nose. “I know,” is all he says.
We ride in silence the whole way to my mom’s house, no radio and the woods pressing in on either side of the road, close and haunted. The headlights carve broad white slices through the dark. There’s not another car on the road, just me and Patrick; I open my mouth and close it again, helpless. What can I possibly say to him? What could I possibly tell him that would matter?
After what feels like a living eternity Patrick turns up my mom’s winding driveway, the Bronco coasting to a stop on the side of the house. “Okay,” he says, shrugging a little, hands resting loosely on the steering wheel. It’s the first time he’s opened his mouth since we left the farm. “See you, I guess.”
“Uh-huh.” I nod mechanically like a robot or a marionette. “Okay. Thank you. Seriously. I—seriously, yeah. Thank you.”
“No problem,” Patrick mutters. He barely waits until I’m out of the car before peeling back down the driveway, which is why I’m so wholly surprised when he slams on the brakes again before he’s even halfway to the road.
“Fuck it,” he says, getting out and slamming the door of the Bronco behind him, closing the distance between us in what feels like three big steps. “I just. Fuck it. I hate this.”
“Patrick.” My heart is pounding wetly in my throat, fast and manic. I didn’t even make it up the walk. “What the hell?”
Patrick shakes his head. “Ihatethis,” he repeats when he’s reached me—when he’s close enough so I can smell him, overwarm and familiar. “JesusChrist, Mols, how can you not hate this? Just being in the same car with you makes me want to scrape my own skin off. I fucking hate this. I do.”
I stare at him, stunned, unsure if this outburst is global or specific, if I should apologize or yell back or kiss him hard and honest right here where we’re standing.
If he’d even let me. What it would mean if he did. What it means that part of me might want to, even as I can feel myself falling into Gabe.
“I hate it, too,” I venture finally, ten years of history pressing at the insides of my rib cage, like time itself is expanding in there. I wish for the hundred thousandth time that I knew how to make this right. “I’m so sorry, I—”
“I don’t want to hear you’re sorry, Mols.” God, he sounds so, so tired. He sounds so much older than we actually are. “I want it to stop feeling like this.” Patrick shakes his head. “I want . . . I want . . .” He breaks off. “Forget it,” he says, like he’s suddenly remembered himself, like a sleepwalker coming back from a dream. “This was stupid, I don’t know. I wanted to make sure you got home; you’re home. Like I said, I’ll see you.”
“Wait,”I say too loudly, my voice ringing out in the quiet yard. “Just. Wait.”
I sit down on the ground where I’m standing, night-damp grass whispering cool against my legs. Then I turn my back. “Come on,” I say, facing away from him just like we used to when we were kids and needed to talk about something important or embarrassing. “Sit for a sec.”
“Are you serious right now?” he asks me instead. “I—no, Molly.”
Even though I can’t see him I can picture the look on his face exactly, the barely contained annoyance, like I’m embarrassing us both. For once, I don’t care. I tip my chin backward until just the top of his head comes into view behind me, that curly hair. “Just humor me for a second, okay?” I ask. “You can go back to hating me right after, I promise. Just humor me for one second.”
Patrick looks at me for a long minute, upside down and scowling. Finally, he sighs. “I don’t hate you,” he mutters, and sits down on my mother’s front lawn with his broad, warm back pressed to mine.
I breathe in. “No?” I ask when he’s settled on the ground behind me, the first physical contact we’ve had in over a year. I can feel each individual pleat of his spine. We’re hardly even touching—it’s nothing to write dumb romance novels about, certainly—but it’s like my body is full of sparks anyway, like I have no skin and I can feel him in my organs and my bones. I try to hold very, very still. “You don’t?”
“No,”Patrick says, then, all in a rush: “I don’t like you with my brother,” he tells me, so fast I know that’s what he was trying to get out a minute ago. The back-to-back on the ground trick still works. “I just—I think about you with him, and I don’t—I don’t like it.”
I feel the blood moving through my veins, a low frantic swish.What does that mean?I want to ask. “Well, I don’t like you with Tess,” I say instead, addressing the trees at the far end of the property. Patrick’s hand is planted on the grass not far from mine. “As long as we’re airing our grievances.”
“I don’t know if you get to have an opinion about me and Tess,” Patrick says immediately. He moves his hand away from me then, sitting up a little bit straighter. A breath of cool air slices between his back and mine.
“We were brokenup,” I blurt, turning around and losing the physical contact entirely. “Come on, Patrick. Before anything ever happened with him, youbroke up with me, remember?”
I’m surprised at myself for saying it—I never even think about it that way, because it feels like making excuses. It’s true, at the basest of levels: Patrick wasn’t my boyfriend when I slept with his brother at the end of my sophomore year. We’d been fighting for months, ever since I’d first floated the idea of going to Bristol, when we finally hit a wall and he told me to get out. But technicalities have never, ever mattered when it came to the two of us.
“Are you really going to try to argue that with me right now?” Patrick demands, still facing away from me. “We were together our whole lives and he’s mybrother, and you’re telling me it doesn’t matter cause we broke up five minutes before?”
“That’s not—” God, it feels like he knows how to twist everything, to make it seem like I’m trying to wriggle out of what I did. “I’m not saying—”
“You kept that secret from me for ayear,” Patrick says, and he sounds so hurt it’s heartbreaking. “A whole year. If your mom hadn’t written that freaking book, would you ever have told me? Before we got married or whatever? Before we had kids?”
“Patrick,”I say, and I know that I’ve lost this one. He’s right—the secret was almost worse than the act, how every single day we were together after that was a lie of the most epic proportions, a million small untruths hardening like a crust on top of the big one. I faked the flu at Christmas junior year just to avoid seeing Gabe while he was home from Notre Dame, I remember suddenly. Patrick brought me soup andHome Aloneon DVD.
Now I turn around again, settle my shoulders against his one more time. “I’m so sorry.”
