“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 broken up,” I blurt, turning around and losing the physical contact entirely. “Come on, Patrick. Before anything ever happened with him, you broke 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 my brother, 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 a year,” 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 and Home Alone on DVD.
Now I turn around again, settle my shoulders against his one more time. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine. I mean, it’s not.” Patrick exhales, waits a minute. Leans back, so I can feel him breathe. “We’re even, then, is that what you’re saying?”
It takes me a minute to realize he’s looped back around, that he’s talking about me and Gabe versus him and Tess. I shake my head though he can’t see me—he can feel it, probably, and that’s enough. “I don’t know that I’d call us even, exactly.”
“No,” Patrick says, and I don’t know if I’m imagining him pressing back a little bit harder against me, like he’s letting me know he’s still there. “I guess not.”
We sit there for a long time, both of us breathing. I can hear crickets calling in the trees. A dog barks far away, and Oscar answers. My stomach makes a sound, and Patrick snorts.
“Shut up,” I say automatically, sending my elbow back into his rib cage. Patrick grabs it for a second before letting me go. “What do we do now?” I ask him quietly.
“I don’t know,” Patrick tells me. For somebody who thought this was a stupid experiment he hasn’t made any move to turn around, I notice: I wonder if he’s afraid of it like I am, like seeing his face again will break whatever spell we’re under, the night and the privacy and the feeling of being home. “I have no idea.”
“We could try being friends,” I venture finally, feeling like I’m edging dangerously close to a precipice, like I’ve got more to lose than I did twenty minutes ago. If he shuts me down again that’ll be the end of that. “I mean, I have no idea if we can actually do it, but . . . we could try.”
Now Patrick does turn to look at me; I turn, too, when I feel him moving, his gray eyes locked on mine. “You want to be friends?” he asks, the barest hint of a smile I can’t read pulling at the edges of his mouth. “Seriously?”
“If you’ll have me.” I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah.” Patrick shakes his head as he climbs to his feet, like that’s typical. “You never did.” Then, before I can contradict him: “Let’s be friends, Mols, sure. Let’s try it.” He heads back across the lawn toward the Bronco. “Can’t be any worse than what we are now.”
Day 29
I take a different route than usual on my run, closer to the highway, past some weird commercial remnants of Star Lake’s failed 1980s redevelopment—a McDonald’s, a family-owned water park called Splash Time that looked like a lawsuit waiting to happen even when I was five, and a Super 8 with a scrubby lawn housing a broken fountain and a flimsy sign stuck into the grass reading BUILDING FOR SALE BY OWNER. I’m so distracted thinking about Patrick—have been thinking about him for more than twenty-four solid hours by now, the moment in front of my house and everything it might or might not mean—that it doesn’t really register until I pass it again on my way back, pushing hard through the last couple of miles.
BUILDING FOR SALE.
Huh. I wonder if the contents are for sale, too.
Probably the smart thing to do would be to go home and call them like a grown-up, but the truth is I’m excited now, this little lick of adrenaline flicking its way through my veins. I cross the mostly empty parking lot and the drab, faded lobby to where a sleepy-looking clerk is slouched greasily behind the desk. “Can I help you?” he drones, blinking twice.
I take a deep breath. “Hi,” I say, sticking my hand out in what I hope is an authoritative manner, pasting a let’s-make-a-deal smile on my red, sweaty face. “I’m Molly Barlow, from the Star Lake Lodge. I was hoping to talk to somebody about purchasing your TVs.”
*