Page 309 of Mad Girl

“I don’t belong to him.”

You stared at me a moment. “In his bedroom at his parents’ place, he used to keep a picture of you two tucked into the corner of his mirror. Did you know that?”

As someone who’d explored every inch of Michael’s room, of course I knew that. “Yes. A picture of us at the beach a few years ago.”

“Right. Well, now he keeps that photo tucked inside a book on his nightstand. He took it with him when he moved out.”

Now, this, I hadn’t known, and my heart sank. Poor Michael.

Through my leggings, you traced an indistinguishable pattern on my knee, your eyes locked with mine. “You see, I’ve always suspected he had feelings for you. It’s why I wouldn’t crawl into bed with you that time, why I put a stop to our first kiss, why I tried to pretend the second kiss never happened, why I’ve forced myself to fight what I feel for so long. I want to take something my brother wants—has maybe always wanted—and I feel terrible about it. It’s one of the worst things I could possibly do to him, and that’s what I’ve been trying to sort out: how I can have what I want without completely upending Michael’s life.”

Dread lanced through me. “What are you saying?”

“He got the dad. He got the perfect, storybook family. He got you, all to himself, for seventeen years. So maybe if I”—you searched my gaze, hesitating—“if I let him keep the dad, and the picture-perfect family, I can have this one thing. I can have you. And maybe eventually he’ll forgive me for it. And maybe when that happens, I can finally tell John who I am.”

My eyes burned at the unfairness of it all. At the stupid, reckless decisions I’d made throughout the years to make this already complicated thing more difficult for you. “How Michael feels about me isn’t an excuse for you to put off telling John who you are.”

You shook your head. “I can’t have everything. I can’t have you and a proper relationship with John, too. I can’t be that selfish.”

“You can’t just not tell John you’re his son. That isn’t an option.”

“It has to be.”

“My dad won’t stand for it.”

“He’ll have to.”

“Casey, I’m telling you right now—he won’t.” Voice hard, I added, “And neither will I.”

“Do you want me to walk away again?” you asked, gaze flashing. “Because that’s what I’ll have to do if Nic forces me to tell John, and Michael doesn’t take it well, or the news somehow leaks, and it puts their family on blast in the media. We’ll have to wait until everything settles—until Michael eventually falls for someone else.”

“According to my dad, we should wait, anyway. And he’s probably right.”

“And then what? I watch the guys at school trip over themselves to be with you next year? I watch you go through boyfriend after boyfriend because you’re finally free to do what you want?”

“Maybe I’ll just focus on school.”

“Right. Until you’re at some party, a few whiskeys deep, and some fucking son of a senator or oil tycoon tells you how beautiful you are.”

“Why does he have to come from a certain kind of family? Maybe he’s on scholarship and his dad’s, like, a car salesman.”

You stared back at me, so sullen and miserable that a tender little lump caught in my throat.

“And, anyway, do you think I’m that easy? After everything I’ve told you about myself?”

“I think,” you said, voice shaking with emotion, “that you’ll like how easy it is to give yourself to another person when you’ve got liquid courage running through your veins.”

“So that’s why you’re in such a rush to nail me down before college.”

You made a face. “Nail you down? Of course you’d see it like that. It can’t possibly be because I—” You stopped abruptly, choking the rest of that sentence back, more than miserable now. Wrecked.

“Because you what?” I asked, heart spiking with fear.

Throat working hard, you quickly looked away.

Please don’t say it, I thought. Not because I didn’t want to hear it. Never because of that.

Because saying it would make that terrifying thing between us real—would drag it from the dark into the light—and I couldn’t face it yet. How massive it was. How powerful it had become. How it had crept through that house over months and months, filling every crack and crevice within me—all the hollow spaces and tiny fractures within you—where I’d selfishly allowed it to grow, its roots buried so deep that there was no way to rip it out without breaking us both.