“Hmm,” Shane grunts. “Are you mad at her? Do you blame her for what happened?”
I pause with my beer bottle pressed to my lips, staring at the buzz of yellow and red light reflected in the bar mirror from the juke box behind us. My mind seems to have ground to a jarring halt. “I don’t know,” I tell him, because it’s the god’s honest truth. I don’t know what the hell I should be thinking anymore. I know I love her. That won’t ever change? But do I hold her responsible for the death of our child? It would be easy to be angry and place blame where it fits easiest. Malcolm’s dead already, so hating him even more isn’t going to make me feel better. Hating Coralie might make me feel self righteous and free at last, able to head back to New York without feeling like I failed in achieving something with her here, but it would be forced. She didn’t lie to deceive me. She lied to save me from further hurt. I shake my head, raising the beer bottle in my hand and pouring half its contents down my neck. “I just don’t know what I think or feel anymore. I thought all of this stuff was a side note in my relationship with Coralie, but now it feels like it’s the only thing in my head. I can’t fucking think about anything else.” I shake my head. “Jesus, we would have made terrible parents.”
“No you wouldn’t, man. You guys would have been great. Every parent thinks they’re going to be a massive failure at raising a kid, believe me. I know. Tina’s crying every five minutes because she thinks she’s gonna accidentally let our newborn drown in the bathtub or something. But when it comes down to it, you step up to the plate. You figure that shit out. You and Coralie would have figured it out, too. You woulda had a better chance than anyone else I know, anyway.”
“How d’you figure that out?”
“Because you guys loved each other so much. Every kid in school used to watch you guys together and flip out, because you were both so invested. There was no Callan or Coralie. Only Callan and Coralie.”
“Pffffttttt.” I blow out a long sigh between my lips. It feels so sentimental thinking back to those days. I’ve tried so fucking hard in the past to stop thinking about Coralie altogether, but that was always a futile exercise. “We didn’t know we were special at the time,” I say, but this is an out and out fallacy. Both of us absolutely knew. There was no hiding from it.
“Look, man, I know she’s all you’ve wanted for the past decade, but trust me. Ending up with your high school sweetheart is not all it’s cracked up to be. You know them inside out, front to back. You know what they’re thinking at all times. You can pretty much guess what they’re gonna be wearing each day based on how they said good morning to you when you got out of bed. You can anticipate each other, know exactly what’s going to come out of their mouths when they’re pissed off, when they’re happy, when they’re sad...”
“And these are all bad things, because…?”
Shane hunkers down next to me, casting a wary eye at the barmaid like she’s a Soviet spy. “There are no surprises left, Callan. None. It’s awful.”
I laugh for the first time since Coralie left my house. “You wouldn’t be saying that if you didn’t have it, asshole. Trust me.”
“I don’t think I can trust a guy who’d rather sleep with one woman the rest of his life instead of hitting all of that New York pussy.”
Shane is so full of shit. I know him. I’ve known him his whole life. He’s not a one-and-done kind of guy. He wouldn’t know how to have casual sex even if there was a naked woman laid out on a bed in front of him, telling him she wanted to get fucked and never see him again. He’s been with Tina forever. I’m pretty sure she’s the only woman he’s ever slept with—the only woman he ever wants to sleep with. He’s just trying to make me feel better, and it isn’t fucking working.
“Just stop talking,” I tell him.
Shane pulls a face at me and then gestures for the barmaid to bring us another round of beers. She gives him a scandalized look, throwing her polishing cloth down on the bar. “You’re not even halfway through that one, Shane Willoughby,” she says.
“I’m aware. But the rate you move, Carolyn Anderson, I’ll have finished and drank his.” He tries to take my beer from me, but I shoot him a glare that tells him quite plainly what will happen to him if he tries to touch the damn bottle again.