Another glances over at him, currently talking to a very pretty girl in the corner. “It doesn’t look like he’s changed much,” she says.
The conversation moves on to other things, but my brain does not. As soon as I can extricate myself, I go the bathroom, wishing I could stay here until this horrible night is over. I step into a stall, listening to two girls at the sink plot ways to get their married boss in bed. It reminds me of the conversation I overheard at a work dinner of Rob’s, long before last year’s disastrous holiday party: Christina saying that the second she got the the chance, she was going down on Rob “like it’s the end of the world.” Only Christina would think giving someone a blow job was a good way to spend her last few moments alive.
I was so mad at the time, and I’m still mad. She’s gotten her wish by now, I’m sure. Probably multiple times. I can’t tell if what I’m feeling is jealousy, or just pure rage that she got what she wanted.
I sit in the stall listening to them, feeling as if my entire history is littered with men I couldn’t trust, men who didn’t want me quite as much as they should have. And Brendan is worse than all of them: happy enough to fuck me as long as he never has to acknowledge it to his friends.
I walk out of the bathroom, certain I can’t stand another minute of this night. I cross the bar, heading to the front door, when a hand grasps my elbow. I want, so badly, for it to be Brendan. It isn’t, of course.
“Hey,” the guy says. “I think I know you from somewhere.”
He’s tall, though not as tall as Brendan, and cute, but not as cute as Brendan. He’s got the same kind of confidence, though—a guy who’s used to getting what and who he wants. He starts trying to figure out how he knows me, without success.
“I think I just have one of those faces that looks familiar to everyone,” I tell him.
“Maybe it’s because you look like that actress. The British one. Sienna somebody. Do you know who I’m talking about? She—”
Suddenly a massive shape inserts itself between us. Brendan, glaring down at me with the wrath of a hurricane.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he says.
The guy I’ve been talking to wraps his arm casually around my back, hanging a hand off my hip.
“Remove your hand,” Brendan says, his voice a low growl, “or I’ll fucking help you remove it.”
The guy removes his hand.
Brendan’s fingers wind through mine, too tight and restrictive to ever be considered sweet, but instead of leading me to the deck, we move in the opposite direction.
He glares at me. “I thought you were all ready to get back together with Rob?” he spits out.
“I’m not following.”
“If you’re planning to get back with Rob, I don’t know why you’re flirting with that guy.”
“I wasn’t flirting. He said he recognized me, and we were trying to figure out from where. And since when do you care? You invited me to this thing and then ditched me.”
“I care,” he says angrily.
He pulls me into the poorly lit hall, and I look up at him, watch as his eyes darken, pupil overcoming iris. He pulls me tight against him, and as much as I don’t want to forgive him, I can feel myself softening.
“I want to take you home now,” he says, his voice low, skimming my skin.
It’s a weird, primal thing, the way just the sound of his voice and the look on his face can create this shift inside me, making my skin feel stretched too tight over my bones, lips tingling, everything so sensitive, seeming infinitely fragile. I go from feeling nothing to feeling everything in a second. Not that I’ll let him know that.
“Maybe I don’t want to go home with you. You talked to pretty much every girl in this bar but me. I’m sure one of them will be game.”
His lashes lower, his mouth hovering so close that I swear I can feel it before it touches mine.
“I don’t want to take any of them home, Erin. And you don’t want me to.”
“I’m still pissed,” I say. But the words are slightly breathless, unconvincing.
“I know,” he says, “but I can probably do a thing or two that will make you forgive me.”
As we drive back down the mountain in utter silence, I try to figure out what happened tonight, why he acted like he didn’t care that I was there and then did a 180. I glance over at him, making out the the silhouette of his jaw in the moonlight—blade sharp, his mouth grim. He’s every bit as unhappy as I am.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
It takes him a second to reply, and he sounds reluctant when he does. “I’m sorry about before. I shouldn’t have pulled you away from that guy. You probably should be meeting people. Seeing what’s out there.”
My heart begins a long, dizzying spiral downward. I don’t want to meet guys. I don’t want to meet anyone who isn’t Brendan or be with anyone who isn’t Brendan. And I don’t want him to want me to.
“Why?”
“Rob’s going to push hard to get back together. You should know what your options are, before he comes home.”
I could tell him I don’t want options. That I can’t imagine getting back together with Rob now. Except that would puncture the bubble, wouldn’t it? The fact that we should not be doing this, that we both believe this must end, is also what makes it possible.
We get to his apartment, and there are no slow kisses, no leisurely removal of clothes. It is quick and silent—as if it is urgent, or as if he wishes it weren’t happening at all.
Brendan’s cell rings late that night. Another call he rushes to the other room to take. I remain in bed, but even from where I lie, I can tell the girl on the other end is yelling at him. I wonder if it’s Gabi, or maybe someone else, just as besotted as me, who can’t seem to move on.
Either option is painful, because whoever this girl is, he’s still taking her calls. Which most likely means she still matters to him, and if tonight was any evidence, she probably matters more than me.
51
Erin
Present
Several nights later, a phone rings in the middle of the night again. The calls to him have disturbed me so much that it’s actually a relief to discover it’s for me.
I grab it on the second ring and take it to the other room, but a minute after I’ve settled on the couch and begun trying to soothe my father, Brendan follows me.
I wave him off. “Go back to sleep,” I whisper.
I don’t want him here for this. The two times we’ve driven to Denver, my father was comatose. This—my father sobbing—is worse in some ways.
He shakes his head. “Your dad?” he mouths, and I nod.
He gets his phone, directs Uber to the address my father gives me, and the two of us sit there, me with my head on Brendan’s chest, watching the car’s progress on his phone while I listen to my father cry on the other one.
“Your dad needs help,” he says after we finally hang up.
“He refuses to get any. I tried, and he and my mother both went nuts. It was the summer after my junior year, and my mom threw me out.”
His fingers tighten around mine. “I don’t know how you did this in high school. You ran track, and you were valedictorian, and then you dealt with this bullshit at night.”
I shrug. “Between Sean going to juvie and my dad’s stuff, it just felt like someone in the family had to prove to the world we weren’t a lost cause.”
I still felt like a fraud, though, delivering my speech at graduation. No matter what I persuaded the audience to believe, I knew I was every bit as sick as the rest of my family.
“It’s just a lot of pressure. I don’t know why you never gave up.”
“I can’t just walk away,” I reply. “This is a problem I helped create.”
“How can you say that?” he asks. “You’re not holding a bottle to your father’s mouth every night. You’re not buying Sean coke.”
“I’ve spent my entire life covering for my dad and rescuing him, doing t
he same thing for Sean. I should have been helping them, but I was no better than my mom. All I did was make it easy for them to get worse. Hell, I’m still helping both of them. My brother and my father are sick, but my mom and I…we’re sick too.”
“That’s why you hid it all from Rob,” he says after a moment. “Not because your family is such a disaster but because you think you’re just as bad. You think he’d like you less if he knew.”
“He would. Anyone would.”
“I don’t,” he says, pulling me closer. “I think maybe I like you better for it.”
Eventually he leads me back to bed, and as he pulls me against him, I feel something changing inside me. I don’t understand him. I don’t understand how he can act like he doesn’t know me when we’re out and take calls from some other girl while I’m here, yet be so perfect at times like this.
Either way, I’m glad I told him. A secret you keep to yourself festers and grows until it begins to seem monstrous in your eyes. But now, in one fell swoop, it isn’t something quite so poisonous, something I can barely stand to acknowledge. Instead, it becomes a part of my history, what led me to where I am. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t admirable, but it isn’t quite as ugly as it seemed when I kept it to myself.
That night Brendan sleeps closer to me than he ever has, his fingers tracing some secret pattern over my skin as I fall asleep.
52
Brendan
Three Years Earlier
“Do you love me?” Gabi asks every morning.
There are no words for how uncomfortable this question makes me. Because I said it once, I can’t exactly stop saying it now. So she asks every morning, looking up at me with that mixture of expectation and unrest in her face, and I tell her I do. She asks every afternoon. She asks when we go to bed. She asks and asks, and I have to wonder if the reason she keeps asking is because she knows, like I do, that what I say isn’t true.
Her need for constant reassurance begins to wear on me. It’s not enough that we’re in the same place. She has to be right beside me with her fingers wound through mine. She’s jealous of Erin. She’s also jealous of the book in my hand, the television show I’m watching, phone calls to my mother. She’s jealous of anything that directs my attention away from her. She seems to sense, though, when she’s pushed me too far—just when I get to the point that I’m wondering if I can deal with this shit for even a few more weeks, she starts taking off her clothes.
I fall for it every fucking time.
On a rare afternoon without her around, I go online and look at pictures from the wedding. It’s an exercise in masochism, but I can’t seem to stop. I remember watching Erin walk down the aisle. It was the moment I finally knew I could commit. God, I wish things had happened differently. I wish she’d been willing to hear me out. Mostly, I wish I’d been worthy of her in the first place.
When Gabi gets home from her tour, I don’t really feel like having sex. That makes her cry, of course. Everything seems to make her cry these days.
She asks if I’m cheating. Is jerking off to thoughts of your best friend’s girlfriend cheating? I doubt it. I tell her I’m not.
She isn’t reassured because she knows I never turn her down. It even surprises me a little, the fact that I don’t want to. I guess maybe I’m kind of bored with our whole thing.
Or maybe it’s that I know it would be better with someone else.
53
Erin
Present
My late-night discussion with Brendan stays with me. If I have a hand in what’s gone wrong, perhaps the solution isn’t to keep doing it. Perhaps the solution is to take my hand out. But can I? Can I really not answer my mother’s calls? Can I really not bail Sean out the next time he’s struggling? I sort of doubt it.
I call Sean for the first time in nearly two weeks, and the moment he answers, I know something is wrong—first and foremost because he doesn’t sound happy to hear from me. This is always a bad omen with Sean. Second, because he volunteers no information, another bad sign.
"You sound distracted,” I say. “Are you in the middle of something?"
"Uh, no. Just studying."
Something feels off about the conversation. I couldn't begin to pinpoint what it is, but I know when Sean is lying, and he’s definitely lying right now.
I ask how classes are going, and in the lag between my question and his answer, my stomach slides to my feet. Sean only needs a few credits to graduate, but I've already paid tuition for the counseling program he'll start in September, so we're on a fairly rigid timeline. I wonder if he’s already flushed my life savings down the toilet somehow.
"Oh," he finally says. "Yeah. They're good."
"What are you taking again?" I ask, though I know exactly what he’s taking. I filled out his registration form myself when he missed the summer deadline.
"Hey, I've got to run," he says. "Can I call you back?"
There’s nothing I can do but agree, knowing he won't call back. Knowing something's gone wrong, and he's going to avoid me until he's fixed it. Or made things worse trying. I don’t want to keep feeling this way, but I don’t see how I could possibly abandon him either.
Just after lunch, Timothy returns from a meeting with a slam of the office door that rattles the file drawers of my desk.
“Erin,” he says. “My office. Now.”
When I walk in, he is crumpling up one of the new campaign brochures, and then he swivels in his seat and throws it at me. I watch in shock as it bounces off my arm and hits the floor.
“The chancellor’s notes are on there,” he sneers. “Did you really think you’d get away with going above me?”
I stare from him to the paper on the floor.
“Pick it up. Fix it. And don’t let me see your face until it’s done.”
I’m so shocked that I feel blank—not worried, not scared, not even angry. But I know I’m completely over this situation. “No,” I reply quietly. “You don’t get to treat me like this. You don’t get to treat anyone like this.” I return to my cubicle, determined to do what I should have done long ago.
I grab my purse and walk across campus to Human Resources, and as I go my shock finally gives way to rage. I’m ready to report him for this and a hundred other things he’s done. The late nights, the disrespect, the threats. The list grows in my head as I walk, and comes to a screeching halt when I reach their office and find it closed. A note on the door informs me they’re away for a team-building retreat and will return after the weekend.
I’m left with a whole lot of anger and no outlet for it. Fifteen minutes later I find myself in Brendan’s apartment, ranting, and it’s not until my whole story has spun out that it occurs to me that showing up here unannounced is a girlfriendish thing to do, the kind of thing I’d expect him to hate. Fortunately, he’s so pissed off on my behalf that he doesn’t seem to notice. “I have an easier way to deal with this than going to HR,” he says, curling a fist.
“You and Olivia. She suggested I build a car bomb the last time he bothered me.”
“I promise I won’t use a weapon,” he says.
“Brendan, this isn’t the Wild West. Physical violence solves nothing.”
“You know who says that? People who know they can’t win a fight. I don’t have that problem.”
I smile. He is ridiculous but also sweet. I shouldn’t, but I like his outdated chivalry. “I am forbidding you to beat him up, Brendan.”
“Fine,” he says. “My tours are done, and we both have an afternoon free for once, so we might as well make the most of it.”
“Should I get undressed?” I ask with a smirk.
“I was thinking about going to a vineyard,” he replies. “But I like the way your mind works.”
The vineyard belongs to a friend of his. It hasn’t officially opened yet, but a small shop on the ground floor is selling wine and cheese. Brendan buys a bottle of pinot noir and way more food than we could possibly eat—four kinds of cheese, cra
ckers, prosciutto, Marcona almonds—and leads me across the grounds to a spot near the lake.
It's a perfect day for a picnic: a light breeze, sunny but not hot. I spread the blanket, and he lays out the food. Does he realize how romantic this is? It may be the most romantic, date-type thing I’ve ever done in my life. All we need is a violinist and maybe some swans and we’re straight out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.
He opens the bottle of pinot and pours some into plastic cups for both of us.
"You bought a lot of cheese. We're never eating all this."
"Don't try to act like you're a delicate little sparrow,” he says. “I saw you pound a large movie popcorn last week, remember?"
I flush, remembering what else occurred in that theater.
He hands me a glass of wine. "You're blushing, Erin."
"No, I'm not."
He catches my eye, his mouth turning up almost imperceptibly. "What are you thinking about?”
"Syria," I reply primly. "Did you know we've now got a large percentage of our military deployed to Syria?"
I completely made this up, but I don’t see Brendan reading The Wall Street Journal too often, so I’m probably safe.
"Do you always blush when you're talking about Syria?" he asks. “Where, by the way, we do not have a large military presence. Just admit that you’ll never enter a theater again without thinking about last week."
"Will you?"
That light in his eyes turns feral. God, it's ridiculous how little it takes to make me want him. He takes the wine from my hand. “Yeah, but there are one or two more things I wish we’d done there, though.”
He pushes me onto my back, wrapping a hand under one knee to pull my legs apart. "What are you doing, Brendan?" I ask, but my voice has already gone breathy and slightly desperate. He pushes my skirt up around my waist. "Someone could see us."
"They can't. I've checked every angle from the main building." He slides my panties off and pockets them. “And sex out here is on my bucket list.”
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