Cooper dropped into the seat on the opposite side of Theo. As usual, his long hair was thrown into a sloppy but weirdly perfect bun, and he wore one of his favorite band T-shirts, some folksy artist I could never really get into. There really was only so much banjo I could take in my life.
“Nothing.” Theo shrugged, giving Cooper the briefest glance. “I guess Noah’s not even playing tonight.”
“Yeah, he got cut,” I said.
“He didn’t get cut.” Cooper rolled his hazel eyes. “It’s just the preseason. They’re saving his chops for the regular season.”
“Yeah, that makes way more sense.”
Cooper snorted, shaking his head. “What’s with the mood on you two? Come on, look alive. Monday Night Football’s back, you’ve got a cold beer, it wasn’t as blistering hot as fucking usual today.”
I nodded and took a swig of my IPA. Cooper was right; we were being mopes. And this was our first night back at the North Star, watching football in our normal corner of the bar, where Fletch, our favorite bartender, basically reserved us a TV to watch Knights’ games, which weren’t always on the rest of the screens, not unless Noah was playing more of a regional team.
“Sully’s just pining,” Theo said, and I scoffed.
“Okay,” I drawled, “way to deflect from your own piss-poor mood, you fuck ass.”
“I’m not in a bad mood,” Theo argued. “This is just how I am.”
I narrowed my eyes at my older brother and then shrugged. He wasn’tentirelywrong about that.
At times, I envied him for that. Blake, too. Neither of them felt the urge to, I don’t know, mask their moods the way that I did. I did it less around Theo and Cooper because they knew me well enough that it didn’t seem entirely possible, but sometimes, I wished I could be like that all the time. I wished I could lean into what I was feeling without it overtaking me.
Cooper Roberts, though, was the opposite of my brother. He was outgoing and charismatic, often matching my energy, but seeming to do it without care. Everything Cooper did appeared easy—it had been like that since he and Theo became football teammates, and then friends, in high school. And I envied him for that, too.
I just wished things were fuckingeasier.
“Listen, I don’t know what happened to the two of you in Boston earlier this summer, but…” Cooper heaved a sigh and flagged down Fletch. “Shit’s been weird ever since.”
Fuck, was he right about that. Althoughweirdonly really skimmed the surface of what I’d been feeling. I badly needed to shake the fuck out of it.
“Sorry, Coop,” I said after he ordered his favorite beer—a stout from Ivers, one of many local breweries. “No more weirdness, I promise.”
Cooper chuckled like he didn’t believe that to be true, which was probably fair, considering the next thing I did was open my phone and click on Ellie’s and my last exchanged text, which was saved at the bottom of my messages. It was from three years ago, when she’d reached out after my parents’ divorce.
I hadn’t responded.
It would have been too painful, talking to her. Besides my parents, she was the only other thing I ever remember thinking would last forever.
I’d been coming here a lot lately—to our text thread. Not because of that last unanswered message or any of the othermessages in our conversation history. I didn’t dare dive through those and open more wounds.
No, I’d been spending a little too much time checking on her?—
“Christ, are you looking at herlocation?”
Goddamnit. Theo caught me right as I’d clicked on Ellie’s contact photo, hovering at the top of our messages, which brought me—yep, to a map.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Theo swiped my phone away from me before I could look at it, which was likely for the best.
Ellie had never stopped sharing her location with me when we broke up. Maybe she realized, maybe she didn’t. But I admittedly took advantage of it either way. When she first moved away, I checked where she was…a lot. It was almost like I’d needed the confirmation, needed to see it in real life. That she was across the country. That she’d really moved to Boston. That she wasn’t here. And she wasn’t coming back.
Her little dot hovered in Natalie’s house mostly. It moved back and forth between there and the MIT campus, and in some ways, I was so fucking proud of her. To see her there, pursuing her dreams, even though it killed me to be so far away from her.
But then the dot started moving to other places, and I knew I had to stop before I spiraled and started looking up addresses or pinpointing locations.
It was intrusive. It wasn’t my place. I didn’t have the right to know details about her, not anymore.
