“Sorry. I just want to be honest.”
“I know you do,” I tell her. “It’s just that, for the first time in a really long time I feel sort of weird about how I’ve been with girls. I always justified it like they were only after one thing, too, and maybe some of them were. But I know that wasn’t always true. And Cody made some crack about not being able to go anywhere where a woman wouldn’t be crying over Luke and . . . Jesus. Am I that bad?”
“You’re asking your sister if you’re as bad a player as your guy friends who are actually out at bars with you say you are?”
“I mean, does it seem like I’m that bad?”
She adjusts how she’s sitting on the couch so that her knee rests on my thigh. “Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“Kind of. I mean, sometimes we’ll be out for drinks and your phone will be buzzing constantly. You don’t even notice it anymore. Or, we’ll be having a nice dinner and some girl will walk up and start talking to you and I can see you struggling to remember her name. It’s . . . I mean, I’m used to it now but, yeah. It’s sort of shady.”
I lean my head back against the couch, disengaging from the conversation and tuning back into the TV and whatever game Fallon is playing with David Beckham.
“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” she whispers. I know this conversation is making her anxious. Margot has a constant struggle with frankness and guilt when it comes to busting my balls.
“You didn’t.”
“It’s just . . .” she starts, fidgeting with her pajama top, “you went from Mia—and only Mia—to everyone. There was no in-between.”
“I haven’t wanted anyone the way I wanted Mia,” I argue.
“But someday you will,” she says. “Maybe it will be London. And you said she’s wary of guys, and then she sees you tonight at the bar? No wonder she keeps you at arm’s length. Would you trust you?”
A sour weight settles in my stomach. “I know.”
“Look, I’m not saying you need to go through the AA of players or anything, but maybe look at what you’re doing and who you are. Your life is this perfect combination of luck and ambition, but you treat women like gym equipment.”
I choke on a sip of water. “Margot. That’s horrible.”
She raises her eyebrows as if to say, Well?
“Just learn to treat a girl the way you want to be treated,” she says. “And I don’t mean by playing with their private parts.”
I snort. “‘Private parts.’”
Rolling her eyes, she says, “You were a really good boyfriend to Mia.”
This rattles me somehow. It’s easier to remember the end, when I was lonely and she was broken and we didn’t ever seem to get each other right. I turn to look over at her. “Yeah?”
Smiling, she says, “Yeah. You were. You were perfect. Everyone envied her.”
“Well,” I say, turning back to the television, “obviously I wasn’t perfect or she wouldn’t have stopped needing me.”
Margot goes still before she reaches for the remote control on my lap and mutes the show. “?‘Needing’ you?” Her voice is sharp. “She shouldn’t ever have needed you. Wanted you, sure. Enjoyed being with you, sure. Desired you—gross—sure.”
Groaning, I make a grab for the remote but she holds it out of my reach.
“You know what I mean,” I say.
“I don’t think I do. Mia lost every one of her dreams in a single, horrible afternoon. It changed her, and that affected your relationship. That doesn’t mean that you fucked up somehow.”
“At the end of the day,” I say, sliding my plate onto the coffee table, “what we had wasn’t strong enough to weather what she was going through. End of story.”
Margot gives me a one-shouldered shrug. “True.”
I growl at this, wishing she had argued with me. This is why I hate talking about Mia. It just sucked. The whole thing sucked, there was no rhyme or reason to any of it—her accident, her distance, my heartbreak, our breakup—so it still feels like a raw wound. I hate uncovering it. But it was just a breakup. They happen every day.
“Luke, you were nineteen!” Margot says, raising her voice. “Sure, you said some shitty things to her because you were hurt, and she was terrible at talking about her feelings, but you guys grew apart.”
“I know. I just never saw it coming,” I tell her, leaning across her lap to reach for the remote.
“Do we ever see the big things coming, though? A predictable life never changed anyone.”
I turn on the sound, and turn up the volume to let her know we’re done talking, about Mia, about London, about me.
Chapter SEVEN
London
I DROP MY KEYS in the bowl by the door, kicking off my shoes. They thump loudly onto the wood floor in the otherwise-silent loft. Lola and Oliver are either at his place or asleep, but for once I’d really love someone else to be here to distract me from my foul mood.