“Is there some reason I’d be mad at you?” It’s like he’s torturing me, and I haven’t even told him the things he should be torturing me with yet.
“You know there is, or you wouldn’t be asking! You know the answer.” Shouting makes my head ache more. It’s like the mother of being hungover.
“I suspect the answer.”
“Jack, come on. Please.”
He closes his eyes. “I’m going to sit here in complete control while you tell me if I shot your boyfriend.”
“You’re my boyfriend! Is it that he touched me first?”
“Not even close.”
“Please, please, please, let’s not go there. You don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to say it.” At which point, it occurs to me I could have just answered the first question with, Alex who? Huh? and this wouldn’t be happening. I’d still be a terrible person. I’d be lying through my teeth. But at least he wouldn’t know.
I say, “You first. Tell me something terrible about yourself. The absolute worst thing.”
“Apart from shooting someone?”
“That was kill or be killed. It doesn’t count. Some other worst thing.”
“You know the worst thing after that. It’s what I did to you when I was J and you were Cat—and what I thought about doing.”
Jack is so earnest, like the face on an earnest vocabulary flash card.
Earnest with a dark side.
Human.
“Worse than that.”
His jaw moves around like he’s trying to decide whether to open it or not. “I liked holding that gun, in the kitchen. I knew what I was doing was stupid shit, but I felt like God.”
I’m not confessing to a guy whose worst thing is something he felt. “Oh no, a boy who likes guns. I heard there’s a club with, like, forty million of you in it. Come on, something you’re ashamed of.”
Jack looks like he wants to throw me but not catch me. Not the look a girl wants to inspire.
“Besides what happened to my father? Isn’t that enough?”
“Stop yelling.”
Jack retakes control of himself. I’m pretty sure he can change his pulse, heart rate, and body temp at will like ancient yogis.
Oh God, I really didn’t want to make him go there.
I say, “Fine, I’ll tell you. I went to a lot of parties last summer. U of M college parties. I made out a lot, are you happy?” I’m halfway between you-asked-for-it and wanting to jump off the balcony. “I was all, ‘Eff you, Connor, you think you can sleep your way through the dance team and I won’t notice? I’m with college guys, ha!’ I was fifteen.”
“Right, and now you’re sixteen. I don’t care if you did every guy in Sigma Nu—”
Why would he say something like that? I halfway want to tell him just because it’ll make his stomach hurt.
Jack says, “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. Nick? Sorry.”
“Like you never went to parties or drank or hooked up?”
“I’m sorry. I never should have said that. But, Nicolette: Alex Yeager. Was Alex Yeager your boyfriend? It’s a yes-no question.”
“He was not my boyfriend! He was cheating with me.” It just falls out of my mouth when I didn’t mean it to. “He had this other girlfriend. Only he says they broke up. Except they didn’t. Then he says he loves me. Only he didn’t. And I totally didn’t love him—I was getting back at Connor. I was being an idiot. I was having an adventure.”
Jack is over being sorry.
You can see it in his face. In the way he tilts his head, waiting for me to tell him the rest. And it’s not that I don’t want to tell him. It’s that I want to tell him and for him to still like me.
What are the odds?
Jack won’t even look at me. “Get to the part with Connie.”
“Stop judging me. I completely blame myself for that, I do. If I’d broken up with him when I figured out there was this other girl. Or if I’d figured out that the reason he wanted us to be a big secret was so not because I was so underage. If I’d done one thing differently . . .”
My ears are ringing so much, it feels like my head is going to shatter like a wineglass when a show-offy soprano belts a high note.
“This isn’t recounting your life to Saint Peter to get into heaven,” Jack says. “I hunted you down. My good-guy credentials were canceled, ask a cop.”
“Fine. So he tells me he broke up with her, but she’s, like, a stalker. I can sort of tell he’s a creep, but he keeps saying he loves me. And he’s in college. And he comes out for the weekend sometimes. We go to the drive-in in Kerwin.”
Jack looks up. “Esteban Mendes let you go to the movies with this twenty-one-year-old sleaze son of a mob boss? Try again.”
“I’m not making this up! I didn’t tell Steve! Are you kidding me? I mean, this guy drives his Camaro out from Michigan to go on a date. It’s not like I wanted him in jail for statutory rape. Which is what Steve would have done to him. He would have skinned him and hung his head over the fireplace.”
“But I graciously did it for him.”
“Please, that wasn’t supposed to happen!”
Jack is stone-faced.
“If you don’t even believe me, can I stop? Even though this is no end of fun.”