“Shh,” he says mildly, but he’s got one hand wrapped around my calf and he’s tugging and then I’m down on the couch cushions with him, my knee bent and brushing his thigh. “Hi.”
“Hi.” I huff a breath. “This can’t keep happening.”
“It can’t, huh,” Patrick says, not even really a question. His gray eyes are latched on mine.
“No,” I insist, shaking my head. “Patrick—”
“Did he just kiss you good night?” he interrupts me. “My brother?”
My eyes widen. “Why is that your business?”
“Because I want to know.”
“Too bad,” I say immediately—that’s over the line, even for whatever Patrick and I have going on here. That’s just over the line. I get up off the couch, but Patrick stops me, curling his familiar hand around my wrist.
“Wait,” he says, and he sounds so sincere I stop and look at him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You’re right; that was fucked up. I’m sorry.”
I let him tug me back onto the sofa, curling one leg up underneath. “I mean it,” I tell him quietly. “We gotta stop.”
Patrick nods without saying anything. He picks at a loose seam on the back of the couch. “I got into another program for the fall,” he tells me quietly. “This Outward Bound–type thing, in Michigan. Rangering-type stuff, running parks tours.” He shrugs. “It’s a gap year, for if your grades aren’t great.”
“Your grades are fine,” I say automatically.
Patrick frowns. “Not this year.”
“I’m sorry.” I think of what Tess said when she told me they got back together, all this stuff about the future. “Did you tell Tess?” I ask. “That you’re going?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Patrick’s head comes up, looks me square in my face. “Because I wanted to tell you,” he says.
I’m not sure which one of us leans in first.
It’s not like the other night against the tree trunk, that desperate scrabbling—this is slow and measured, his long eyelashes brushing my cheeks. I make a quiet sound against his mouth. “Shh,” he says again, warm hands wandering up inside my T-shirt, skimming along the stretchy band of my bra until I’m shaking. Finally, I pull away.
“What is this?” I demand. It’s worse that it wasn’t a fast, messy blur this time. Somehow that makes it even worse. “What are you doing with me, Patrick? Tess is my friend.”
“And Gabe is my brother,” Patrick says, mild as milk toast. “But here we are.”
“Should I break up with him?” I blurt, then immediately feel my cheeks flame. It feels horrifying to articulate the idea out loud—just as horrifying as it feels to be doing this to begin with. I care about Gabe. I’m falling in love with Gabe. So what the hell am I doing here? “Should I?”
Patrick shakes his head. “I’m not breaking up with Tess,” he says decisively. “Not again.”
I stare at him, pulse fluttering like the inside of a hive at my wrists and my collarbone. The damp summer air presses down. He leans forward to kiss me again, eases me back against the arm of the sofa. I close my eyes and sink in.
Day 67
Gabe’s the only one home when I come to pick him up for a double date with Kelsey and Steve the next evening: “In here,” he calls when I rap my knuckles against the screen door. His bedroom’s off the kitchen, a smallish afterthought of a space that used to be the servants’ quarters a hundred years ago when the farm had horses and pigs and cows to milk. Gabe got it when he turned thirteen, on account of he was the oldest.
“Hey,” I tell him cautiously, leaning against the doorway: It’s the same as I remember it, the blue-and-green plaid bedspread, the pine dresser—everything almost preternaturally neat for a teenage boy, like maybe nobody even lives here. Patrick’s room was always a disaster.
“Hey,” Gabe says, pulling a frayed gray polo over his head. I haven’t been in here all summer—haven’t been in here at all since everything first happened between us, actually, the night in May of sophomore year when Patrick dumped me.
I remember stumbling down the back staircase and into the kitchen, physically disoriented—it felt like a canyon had opened up between us, like in some old cartoon where a crack appears in the earth and the ground breaks apart all in the space of five seconds. Like strolling blithely off a cliff and not noticing until you look down. I stood there in a numb haze, barely registering the sound of the side door slamming shut, then the rev of the Bronco’s noisy engine as Patrick took off.
I didn’t realize I was crying until I saw Gabe.
“Hey, Molly Barlow,” he said, glancing at me once and then again more closely; he was making a turkey sandwich at the beat-up butcher block counter, twin slices of bread already laid out on a plate. His graduation was in a week and a half. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “No, nothing,” I said, wiping my face and thinking for a minute of claiming allergies before realizing he’d never believe me and that it didn’t really matter anyway. It was, after all, just Gabe. “Had a fight with your brother, we’ll work it out, it’s fine.”
“You people, had another fight?” Gabe put the knife down and licked mustard off his thumb. He looked genuinely surprised. “What the hell, huh? Like, are the rivers turning to blood?”
“Shut up.” I laughed a little, sniffled. “I mean, kind of. It’s the same fight, I don’t know.”
“About boarding school?” Gabe asked, then hesitated. “I mean, sorry, I’m not trying to crawl up your ass or anything.”
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s fine.”
“Okay,” Gabe said, crossing the kitchen to stand beside me at the sink. This close he was taller than I’d realized, my head just about level with his sternum. It was rare for us to be alone. “So . . . what?”