I want to go after her, to apologize, but at the same time I feel betrayed, no matter how illogical that is. How could Matt and Megan be together? And why isn’t she at Georgetown? It shouldn’t matter—they’re not my Megan and Matt. It’s hypocritical and I know it. How can I tell Beau he doesn’t need to feel bad about what’s going on with us when I feel bad about what’s going on between them?
“How do you and Wilkes know each other?” Matt asks, his voice tight and awkward. This whole thing is too weird.
I open my mouth to answer, but I’m cut off by someone drunkenly shouting from across the pool.
“SCREW YOU, BEAU WILKES.” I turn to find Rachel and some of the dance team girls huddled together on a couple of Derek’s plastic chaise lounges, Solo cups in hand. She smiles aggressively and lifts her cup to wave at me. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” she calls.
The crowd sort of oohs, and Beau sets a hand on my back. “You want that beer yet?”
“Or fifteen consecutive tequila shots, whichever you find first.” Beau’s version of the world or not, tonight might be harder to get through than I had realized. I glance at Matt. “You want a drink too?” Beau stiffens beside me.
Matt just shakes his head. “Nah, I shouldn’t.”
Beau relaxes again. “Be right back, then.”
I watch him slip off into the crowded kitchen, until I feel Matt’s stare on me. “We’ve met before,” he says.
“We have?”
“At the movie theater. And at some point before that, right?”
“Oh.” I peel my hair off my neck and pull it over my shoulder. “That’s right. I think maybe we met at a party last summer, or something.”
“Huh.” Matt digs his hands into his pockets and looks down at his shoes. “Are you from around here?”
“Rhode Island,” I lie, as quickly as my brain allows. “I’m just here visiting family.”
Matt laughs. “Rhode Island? What’s in Rhode Island?”
“Brown University, for one thing.”
“You go to Brown?”
“I start in the fall.”
He glances over his shoulder to the kitchen, where Beau’s filling a couple of cups from the keg. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not Wilkes’s usual type.”
“And what would that be?”
Matt looks back again. I follow his eyes to the girl leaning across the counter, death-glaring at Beau. “Rachel Hanson,” Matt says. “Crazy girls in general.”
“I wouldn’t call Rachel crazy,” I say. Matt looks confused, and I backtrack. “I mean, she doesn’t strike me as crazy. It’s sort of admirable how she just screams whatever she’s thinking at the top of her lungs.”
“Even if what she’s thinking is that she’d like to shave your head?”
“That would be her mistake,” I say. “I’d look great with a shaved head.”
“Probably so,” Matt says, blushing. The joking, the flirting, the feeling that it means something to be wanted by Matt Kincaid. God, this feels so familiar. But he’s also different from my Matt, more relaxed. Definitely less animated or affected, though just as friendly.
I look over his shoulder into the kitchen. Rachel’s gone, but Beau’s been hijacked by Derek and some of the other players. He’s leaned up against the pantry door, staring straight past everyone to me, and when I meet his gaze, he just barely smiles. It’s such a small, quiet expression, but it lights him up, makes me flood with heat until I have to look away.
“So is he any good?” I ask Matt.
“No, he’s pure evil,” Matt jokes.
“I mean at football,” I clarify.
“Yeah, he’s good. Really good, but lazy. He could be great if he wanted.”
“You don’t think he wants to be great?”
“Nah, not really. I don’t think he’d know how to handle it if the world found out how good he was. He can barely handle having us rely on him, and most of us have played together since we were ten.” Matt pauses and scratches the back of his head anxiously. “It was the same way with Rachel, you know.”
“Oh.”
It feels like a slap in the face, and he must notice because he hurries to say, “Not as you and him. I mean, he was the same way with her that he is with football.”
“I don’t get it. What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain,” Matt says, staring out over the pool. “They only lasted as long as they did because she kept settling for less and less. She’d cheat on him and he wouldn’t even care, but every time she got in a fight with her mom or got pushed around by some other guy, he’d be there for her and they’d slip back into it.”
I find myself thinking about my Matt, how many times I let things drift on because I couldn’t parse out loving him from just wanting to be with him.
“When it comes down to it, Wilkes can’t help himself,” Matt says. “He’s a martyr. A self-sabotaging martyr, actually, which in my opinion is the worst kind.”
I laugh. “What a monster.”
“Exactly,” Matt says, smiling at the ground. “It’s probably what makes him so good at the game, but it’s also why he took all the blame when we both accidentally burned down my family’s barn when we were thirteen. And now I’m forever in that dick’s debt.”
“Do you want me to trip him or something so you can catch him?”