“Then come back when you’re sober.”
He looks up the street. “I know what’s happening to you, Natalie.”
I give a frustrated laugh. “What, that I’m being jerked around by someone who’s dating one of my former best friends?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not dating her.”
I don’t care what he says. I’m not body-language illiterate—that was a date. “Beau, go home.”
“I’m sorry about the other day,” he says. “I messed up. I should’ve been here.”
“No.” I half-laugh in disbelief. “Actually, you shouldn’t have, Beau. You also shouldn’t have asked for my number or kissed me in a public restroom while you were on a date with another girl, but, I don’t know, maybe you were just drunk then too!”
He stares up at me, fingertips resting on his hips. He runs one hand over his mouth again as he turns back toward his truck. As I watch him walk away, my heart starts to pound in my chest. “Beau, wait,” I whisper-shout as I climb through the window onto the porch roof.
He looks back up at me. “You’re right, Natalie,” he says. “That’s what kind of person I am. You got me nailed.”
He opens his truck door, and I walk to the edge of the roof. “You shouldn’t drive right now,” I say, scanning the neighbors’ windows in anticipation of flicked-on lights that will lead to phone calls that will get me busted.
For a long moment, he stares up at me, and then he gets in his truck. Furious, I climb down onto the porch railing, drop into the yard, and cross toward him, jerking the passenger door open. “Get out.”
“It’s my car,” he says. “You get out.”
“Why did you come here, Beau?” I say. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Get out, Natalie,” he says again.
I don’t budge, so he clambers out of the truck and storms around it, pulling me out of the cab and closing the door. He starts to make his way back to the driver’s side, and I chase him, cutting between him and the door. “You can’t drive like this.”
He grabs me suddenly by the waist. I grab him back, kissing him as he lifts me against the truck. He burrows his mouth against my neck, tightens his arms around me. We move sideways and he pulls the door open, lifting me into the cab and stepping closer until our stomachs are locked together, my legs wrapped around him, his hands roaming across my neck as he kisses me over and over again.
What the hell am I doing? My anger floods back into me, and I push him away.
He staggers back into the street. “Fine. You want to know why, Natalie?” he says. “Because my whole life I’ve thought I was crazy, but now I know I’m not the only one. And that would be real nice, except the other person—the only other person in the world who sees what I see—is the love of my best friend’s life, and I’m not quite sure how the hell to handle that.”
My heart seems to stop in my chest. I stare up through the darkness into Beau’s eyes. They’re serious and stern, the inside corners of his eyebrows creased. “What are you talking about?”
“The two different versions of Union,” he says. “I know you can see them both.”
“How do you know about that?” I breathe.
“Because,” he says. “I can see them too.”
16
When I finally invite Beau up, I almost regret it. He’s far past tipsy and has a difficult time climbing on top of the porch. The whole time he’s struggling up over the railing to the roof, I’m picturing him falling, an ambulance waking my parents up to find a drunk boy they’ve never met passed out below my bedroom window.
As soon as he’s up, I reach back through the window to help pull him through. He hops down into the closet and pulls me against him, wrapping his arms around my shoulders.
His body is warm and tense around me, his heartbeat palpable all down my rib cage and stomach. He buries his face into my neck, and there’s a part of me that knows I should push him away—that every second I spend with him makes me want more time, and, even if I weren’t leaving in a few weeks, a boy who doesn’t show up when he says he will but then shows up, drunk, when you’re not expecting him probably isn’t someone I should let myself feel anything for.
Short term, I want nothing more than to stand against him like this. Long term, I know letting this happen will make things hurt worse later.
I pull back and sit down on the floor, folding my knees up against my chest. He sits down across from me. “Tell me everything,” I say.