We jumped apart. I scrambled around the kitchen island, placing it between us. He backed up to the kitchen table. Our eyes met—his dark and piercing, mine probably frantic and disoriented—and crashing cymbals sounded between my ears just as Gabby walked into the kitchen.
“Hey you . . . two.” She’d started her greeting with a smile, but ended it with a frown, glancing between us. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Abram, the muscle at his jaw jumping, pushed his fingers into his hair, his eyes sliding to the side and giving the full weight of his glare to Gabby. “What are you doing here?”
Holy hadron collider, he sounded pissed.
She retreated a step, visibly alarmed. “I left a note. Yesterday? On the doorstep?” When he continued glaring at her without speaking, she lifted her palms. “Jeez, Abram. What the hell? You look like you want to murder me.”
Abram’s glare flickered to me for the briefest of instants, and then dropped to the floor. He lifted his hands to his hips, but he still held the partially eaten donut, a fact he didn’t seem to realize immediately. Giving his fingers a stern double take, he studied the donut for several seconds before taking a deep breath and placing it on the kitchen table behind him.
During this odd moment, Gabby sent me a wide-eyed look. I knew it was supposed to impart something to me, but I had no idea what. I wasn’t yet thinking clearly, still recovering from my franghorngry moment of madness.
Make no mistake, it was madness. Gabby had saved me—saved us both—from making a colossal and intractable error in judgment.
“Gabby,” I said, my voice breathless and quiet because my thoughts were too loud. I gestured to the bag on the island. “I picked up some, um, donuts, if you want any.”
“She’s not staying.” Abram said this firmly, his hands now fully on his hips, shifting his scowl from her frown to my face.
I stared at him, working hard to catch my breath and keep my eyeballs from broadcasting how badly I still wanted . . . I still wanted.
He stared back. He blinked. Aggravation dissipated, becoming something else entirely—conflict, concentration, fervor—and I experienced that bizarre tunnel vision again.
Eventually, Abram took a deep breath. He closed his eyes. He shook his head.
“Fine. She can stay for an hour, and that’s it. And she has to leave her cell phone on the kitchen table.” Eyes still closed, he rubbed his forehead like he had a headache.
Gabby’s mouth dropped open, and she seemed to be on the precipice of saying something—likely cheeky and inappropriate—so I shook my head furiously, making my eyes as large as I could, hoping to impart to her that saying anything at this moment would likely result in her being expelled from the premises.
She started, rolled her lips between her teeth, and shifted her eyes back and forth between Abram and me. Clearly a struggle for her to keep quiet, she appeared to be almost bursting with the need to speak her mind. Come to think of it, I’d never known her to hold her tongue. Ever.
It must’ve been a real character-building experience, not getting what she most wanted in that moment; even if it felt like a compulsion; even if it would have been a terrible, terrible mistake.
I know how she feels.
*
If someone had asked me for one word to describe myself prior to Lisa’s phone call earlier in the week, I would have replied, rational.
But no person is just one thing, one label, one facet of their personality or single characteristic or decision they’ve made. This was a fact that could sometimes be super inconvenient. Like now.
“What’s going on?”
My eyes cut to Gabby’s. Held. I couldn’t believe she’d been quiet for so long. It must’ve been a full five minutes since she left her phone on the kitchen table and we climbed the stairs to Lisa’s room.
Gabby sat on the low bookshelf at one end of the room, her legs extended in front of her, her ankles crossed, her false fingernails tapping on the wood. I sat on the bed, my feet flat on the floor, my arms crossed over my stomach. I’d been slouching and staring at nothing since entering the room.
When I didn’t respond, because I was still debating what to say, she whispered, “Does he suspect?”
“Suspect what?” I whispered back.
Her lips formed a flat, frustrated line and she crossed to the bed, sitting next to me and leaning her head toward mine. She smelled like sweetness and flowers. “Does he suspect you’re you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Because, man, he looked pissed when I got here.” She breathed out. Now she was slouching too. Her gaze turned assessing as it moved over me. “So, what’s going on then? What did I interrupt? And don’t say nothing, because I definitely interrupted something. Were you two fighting?”
I stared at her, wondering where I’d placed those prunes.
“Mona!” she whisper-hissed.
I stood, waving my hands around my face, feeling harassed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I didn’t even want to think about it. That person in the kitchen? That wasn’t me. I wasn’t her. She wasn’t rational. And I didn’t know how to be rational about it. Or rationalize it.
Gabby breathed out again, a huff this time. “You’re so frustrating.” She stood and shadowed me around the room. “Just tell me what happened. I will die of curiosity if you don’t. Do you want me to die? Don’t answer that!”
Upon reaching the corner of the room, I spun, my hand nearly knocking over the pile of CDs I’d yet to put away. “Gabby. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Her nose scrunched and her lips became impossibly small. “Fine.”
“Fine.” My arms were crossed again, but I didn’t remember crossing them. “Now, tell me—”
“If you tell me what’s going on between you guys, I’ll tell you what happened with Lisa and Abram last year.”
I laughed, it was a tired sound, and I shook my head at her. “You already promised to tell me about Lisa and Abram if I told you that stupid story about my TA.” Blarg! Rocks of emotion in my throat. Ignore! “And besides, Abram already told me what Lisa did.”
Gabby flinched and stepped back. “He did?”
“Yes, he did,” I said through clenched teeth, feeling angry all over again on Abram’s behalf. “How could Lisa do that? What the hell was she thinking?”
Gabby exhaled loudly a third time, closing her eyes. “Okay, well, first of all, she was drunk.”
“Not a good excuse.”
“And she was angry at Tyler.” Gabby paced away, her tone resigned. “And Abram—I mean, you would’ve had to be there—was just the most delicious thing, so hot. And during his set? Talent is such a turn-on, you know? And that voice . . .” her tone held a dreamy quality and she was staring at nothing, clearly thinking about my messy Adonis.
So, I snapped my fingers in front of her face. “Snap out of it!”
She flinched, coming out of her daze, and glared at me. “What was that for?”
“You’ve already expressed how happy he makes your hoo-hah. I don’t need to hear it again. Tell me what happened—from your perspective—with Lisa that night.” I fought to suppress an irrational flare of jealousy. Some primal part of myself wanted to claw her eyes out for thinking thoughts about Abram.
NO THINKING THOUGHTS ALLOWED!
Placing a hand on her hip and waving the other through the air, she continued. “Fine. After his set, I’m trying to get her upstairs, so she can sleep it off, and she gives me the slip. I freak out, because—you know, she’s shit-faced and somewhere—so I call Leo. He and I start searching the house, calling everyone, and then Abram calls Leo, says she’s with him.” Gabby paused here to wince and peek at me. “Naked.”
The flare of irrational jealousy was now more of a campfire, every word out of her mouth building it higher. “What happened next?”
“We race to his room and”—Gabby’s wince intensified—“he’d put a shirt on her, but she was all over him. And instead of laughing it off, or keeping her occupied—which is what would have made sense to me—he looks pissed and is pushing her away. I mean, he looked like he was about to lose his cool.” She stopped here to give me a look like, can you believe this guy?