Dedication
For my mom, who taught me how to be a feminist
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Katie Cotugno
Copyright
About the Publisher
Day 1
Ian tells me he loves me for the first time in front of an enormous display of medieval torture devices, halfway through a tour of the Tower of London on the second morning of our trip.
“Shit,” he says as soon as the words are out of his mouth, reaching down for my suddenly sweaty hand and tugging me gently toward the back of the group. He’s sheepish and wide-eyed, his thick straight eyebrows hooked together with alarm. “I’m sorry. This is, like, the world’s most awkward venue to be saying this to you.”
For a moment I just gape at him. “No, no,” I lie—though not, I suspect, super convincingly. Over the nicker of my own skittish heart I’m vaguely aware of our guide rattling cheerfully on in a crisp British accent: “While these were once thought to be the axes which beheaded Anne Boleyn, in fact history shows she died by the sword. Now, if you’ll look over to your left . . .”
Ian grimaces and rests his warm, heavy palms on my bare shoulders, shifting me out of the path of a family speaking enthusiastic German and using a selfie stick to take a picture of themselves in front of a collection of antique flails. “I mean, it definitely is,” he admits. “But honestly, I’ve been thinking it since we took off from Boston. I mean, before that too, but especially since we got here. And every time I opened my mouth I was worried it was going to come out at a wicked inopportune time.”
I laugh at that, I can’t help it. “Like now?” I ask as he takes my arm and moves me again, both of us edging aside as another gleeful gaggle of tourists jostles its way through the crowd, camera flashes exploding.
“I mean, yeah,” Ian says, his pale face going pink under his Red Sox cap. He digs the complimentary Tower map out of his pocket and refolds it a couple of times, nervous. We’ve been in London since yesterday morning. We’ve been dating for five full months. “Like now.” He makes a face. “Is that weird?”
“Oh yeah,” I assure him, unable to hide a smile. Out the narrow window behind him I can see a raven flying in lazy circles against the blue-gray August sky, swooping low and then righting itself gracefully. The guide said there are seven of them living in the Tower, a creepily macabre brood of avian house pets. “But not in a bad way.”
Ian tilts his head to the side, hope splashed all across his handsome face. “No?”
“No.” I reach up and fuss with the sleeve of his T-shirt, suddenly shy myself. The skin of his upper arm is warm and solid and smooth. The truth is, I’m not so much shocked by the setting he’s chosen for this particular declaration as I am by the fact that he’s saying it at all. You don’t even know me, I think, then push the notion away, banishing it to the place where I store all the messiest parts of my past. “Not in a bad way at all.”
“Okay,” Ian says, letting a breath out, scrubbing a hand through the day’s worth of vacation beard on his chin and smiling a little uncertainly. “Damn, Molly. I should have at least waited till we got to the room with the Crown Jewels or something.” He glances around, shaking his head. “It’s really morbid in here, now that I’m looking. This was not a slick move on my part.”
“No, come on, this is great.” I giggle, motioning around at the empty suits of armor standing at attention along one wall, the reproductions of executioner’s masks hanging up alongside some horrifying metal contraption with a million sharp teeth, the intended purpose of which I’d rather not contemplate. “You’re really getting your William the Conqueror on.”
“Shut up,” Ian says, but he’s laughing too now, his studious face cracking open. “That’s not even the right time period.”
“Oh, well, God forbid I mess up my time periods,” I tease. That was one of the things I liked first and best about Ian, how silly and self-aware he could be for someone so serious; getting to know him was like finding a secret late-night dance party in the green-lampshade reading room at the Boston Public Library. “I love you too.”
“Really?” For one second Ian looks completely, purely delighted; then, just as quickly, he shakes his head. “You don’t have to say it back,” he reassures me, shoving the map back into the pocket of his dorky cargo shorts. “I mean, you know that, obviously. But you don’t.”
“Yes, thank you.” I wrinkle my nose. “I know that. But I want to.”
Ian squints at me like he’s looking for the punch line. “Really?” he asks again. He sounds very young even though he’s two years ahead of me at college in Boston; he’ll be a senior when we go back to campus in two weeks. “You do?”
I laugh, not a little nervously. “Yeah, nerd,” I say, trying not to feel like a jerk at how shocked he sounds by the admission. He said it to me without expecting it back, I realize abruptly. He said it to me like an offering. “I do.”
Ian grins at me for real then, slow and steady. You could light the whole London Eye with that smile. “Okay,” he says. “Well. Good, then.”
“Good,” I echo, more certain than I was even just a moment ago when I blurted it out. I do love him, after all: I love his brain and his heart and the person I am when I’m with him. The person he makes me want to be. And isn’t that what love is, really? Wanting to be the best version of yourself for someone else? If that’s the rubric that we’re using, then I’ve been in love with Ian since the very first day we met.
I was in the library at BU one rainy Saturday morning in late October of last year, rain streaking down the tall, wide windowpanes and a forbidden cup of coffee from the café downstairs rapidly cooling on the desk in front of me. It was barely a week after the clinic visit and I still had faint stomach cramps, a feeling like someone periodically reaching a cold hand inside my body and squeezing as hard as they could. Still, as I sat there in the carrel in my sweatpants and ponytail, a bulky plaid scarf wrapped around my neck, I was calmer than I’d been in two full weeks. I’d been gravitating toward the library more and more the last few days, in between classes and after dinner, drawn to the tall shelves and stain-resistant armchairs and most of all to the immaculate, antiseptic silence. Boston is a pretty quiet city, all Unitarian churches and hipster coffee shops and cobblestone streets made uneven by tree roots, but lately it was all too bright and loud and overwhelming, like I was walking around with my organs on the outside of my body. Everything felt screamingly, ferociously raw.
I was halfway through a calc problem set that wasn’t due until Tuesday when someone stopped next to my hard wooden chair and cleared his throat. I startled, blinking up at the sandy-haired guy casting a broad shadow over my notebook. He looked like everything I’d always pictured when I thought of Boston: broken-in corduroys and L.L.Bean boots unlaced halfway down, a plaid flannel shirt rolled up to his elbows. He was pushing a metal cart full of library books.
“Um,” he said, motioning at my coffee cup and smiling a shy, sheepish smile. “You’re really not supposed to have that in here.”
“Oh!” I felt myself blush deep and red, shame flooding all the way down to the soles of my feet inside my sneakers. “Shoot, I’m sorry.” It was such a small, stupid thing, a contraband coffee, but getting called out for it by a total stranger flew directly in the face of everything I was trying to be here, with my neatly organized planner and my soothing playlist of classical mus
ic and my homework done three days ahead of time: somebody who didn’t cause any problems. Somebody who didn’t break any hearts. “Um. You can take it, or I can go throw it away, or—”
I broke off, swallowing hard. I knew this was hormones, theoretically—the doctor had told me that might happen, a flood of emotion like PMS dialed up to a thousand—but suddenly I wasn’t at all certain I wasn’t about to burst into tears.
It must have been achingly clear on my face, because Library Boy blanched. “You know what, it’s okay, actually,” he assured me. Then he grimaced. “I mean, it really isn’t, probably my boss is going to be kind of a dick about it if he sees you. But I won’t tell.”
I took a deep breath, bit my tongue until I tasted iron. God, I was not about to have a meltdown in front of this random person just because he’d been unlucky enough to talk to me. I was not going to have any more meltdowns at all, not ever, but I was most definitely not going to have one now. “I’m sorry,” I said again, more calmly this time. “I’ll get rid of it. I don’t want to be a rule-breaker.”
That made him smile. “Fair enough,” he said, letting go of the cart handle and scrubbing a hand over his scruffy chin. “I don’t want to be an enforcer, in case that wasn’t abundantly clear.”
“Is that your job?” I asked, the small talk steadying me a little. There was something about him, that stormy morning, that felt oddly, instinctively safe. “The library enforcer?”
He nodded seriously. “Do I look intimidating?”
I gazed at him for another minute, taking in his tortoiseshell glasses and the Red Sox T-shirt peeking out from underneath the collar of his flannel, the beat-up leather band of his Swiss Army watch around one wrist. “Not really,” I admitted.
He grinned then, holding his hand out. “I didn’t think so,” he said with a shrug. “I’m Ian.”
“I’m Molly,” I said, and we shook.
After that I fell into a routine of Saturday mornings at the library: textbooks stacked neatly on the table, water bottle tucked safely away inside my bag. The following week, Ian smiled and waved when he saw me. The week after that, he recommended a Barbara Kingsolver book he thought I might like. The week after that, it occurred to me that I was looking forward to seeing him, glancing up from my notes every couple of minutes and scanning the stacks for his kind, serious face.
Still, after everything that had happened back in Star Lake and after, I definitely wasn’t looking for anything romantic, on top of which I couldn’t imagine who in their right mind would possibly want to date me if they knew the kind of skeletons I had rattling around in my dorm room closet. Which is why I was so surprised, right before Thanksgiving, when Ian came over to the carrel I’d started to think of as mine and asked, so haltingly it sort of broke my heart, if I wanted to go see a Springsteen cover band at the Paradise that night.
“Um,” I said, taken aback and caught off guard and so deeply pleased I physically couldn’t keep from smiling, like the Boss himself had shown up in the reference section, climbed up onto one of the study tables, and launched into “Born to Run.” It occurred to me, somewhere at the very back of my secret heart, that I hadn’t felt anything like that since Gabe. “Hm.” I put a hand against the side of my face, felt the blood rushing there. “So here’s the thing. It sounds really fun and I promise I’m not just saying that. But I’m—” I broke off. “Just . . . not really in a place to be dating anybody right now.”
Ian raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think I’m trying to date you?” he asked. When I blanched, he grinned.
“I mean, I’m definitely trying to date you,” he admitted, jamming his hands into the pockets of his olive-green khakis and rocking backward on the heels of his boots. “But if it’s not on the table, I can respect that. Honestly, no pressure. I’d also really like to just be your friend.”
I squinted at him, looking for the catch but not finding one. “Really?” I asked.
Ian nodded and held his hands out like one of the street magicians posted up by the T station in Harvard Square, nothing here. “Really.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding slowly. “Then let’s be friends.”
And that’s how it started, as a friendship: turkey-melt lunches in the dining hall where he asked about my business classes and told me about the books he was reading for his Irish-American Writers seminar; a trip to the Ben and Jerry’s on Newbury Street because somebody had left a stack of two-for-one coupons on top of the trash can in the hallway of my dorm building. “What’s the deal with you guys?” my roommate, Roisin, asked the week before Christmas break, pulling me aside at student-discount ice-skating night on the Common. Her hat had a giant pom-pom bobbing on top of it; her brown skin was faintly rosy with the cold. “I feel like he’s been staring at you piningly all night.”
I shook my head, reaching out for the paper cup of hot chocolate she was offering. “We’re just friends,” I told her, and I meant it; still, when Ian mentioned going on a few dates with a girl in his teaching cohort in the middle of January it put me in such a bad mood that I blew off the superhero movie we were supposed to go see and jammed my sneakers on my feet instead. I ran all the way to Jamaica Pond in the screaming, skin-cracking cold.
Don’t be spoiled, I scolded myself as I swallowed down deep gulps of the dry, stinging winter air. After all, it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know if or when I would be. Ian might have thought he wanted to date me for a minute there, sure. But only because he didn’t actually know me at all.
Still, as the weeks went by I saw him more than I didn’t: we ate mushroom and ricotta slices at the trendy pizza chain across from the BU arena. We sat in the oversized chairs on the second floor of the student center and studied for exams. In March we went to an extremely long, extremely awkward improv show in the black box theater on campus, after which we stood bewildered on the sidewalk and tried to figure out what we’d just watched.
“Okay,” Ian said, rubbing a palm over his face. He shuddered visibly, like a dog shaking off water after a bath. “Wow. That was . . .”
“Special?” I supplied.
“That’s one word for it, certainly.” Ian grinned. “I think I need a beer. You wanna come over for a beer?”
I looked at him for a moment, his cheeks ruddy in the streetlight, his hair growing out past the collar of his warm-looking woolen coat. “Sure,” I said. “That sounds great.”
We followed the trolley tracks back down toward Kenmore Square, still totally unable to get over the weirdness of it: “I think my favorite part was when that one guy sang the Barney theme song and then meowed like a cat for six minutes,” Ian said thoughtfully, and I laughed. It was only a couple of weeks until spring break, but Boston was still freezing and damp, the winter clinging endlessly on; my mittens had long since gone gray and dingy, a hole in the webbing between my fingers and my thumb. It had snowed again a few days before, everyone in the dining hall looking out the window and groaning in unison as the fat flakes began to come down, and now I picked through the slushy black remains of it, water seeping into my ankle boots. “Easy,” Ian said, catching my hand when I almost slipped on a patch of ice slicked over the cobblestone sidewalk. “I gotcha.”
“Thanks,” I said as I righted myself again, my whole body going pleasantly alert inside my parka.
Ian smiled a little shyly. His hand was improbably warm. “No problem.” He started to let go, but before I knew what I was doing I tightened my grip, like a reflex. Ian’s eyebrows shot up in the darkness, but he didn’t comment. “It’s just down here” was all he said, nodding at a quiet side street.
Ian lived with two roommates in a scuzzy student apartment near the Fens, a listing walk-up where the narrow stairwells reeked of weed and Bagel Bites and his mail was perpetually getting stolen. The living room was drafty and cavernous, with tall coffered ceilings and molding that had been painted thickly over so many times it had lost all its detail; in the hallway, t
he colorless carpet was worn completely bald. The linoleum was peeling up in the kitchen. The windows rattled inside their frames.
It was Friday, and Ian’s roommates—a kid named Harvey who was studying engineering and stayed at his boyfriend’s most nights, plus a girl named Sahar who played in a punk band in Somerville on the weekends—were both out; the apartment was quiet, save a faint, irregular scratching in the walls. “It’s a mouse,” Ian confirmed, when he caught me tilting my head to the side to listen for it. “He’s basically our fourth roommate, I’m not going to lie to you. He doesn’t even have the decency to scurry. He just, like, strolls through the room while you’re watching TV or making a sandwich or something. Harvey calls him Old Chum.” He grimaced. “You’re rethinking your decision to come over here now, aren’t you.”
I looked at him evenly for a moment, then shook my head. “No.”
Ian’s ears got faintly red. “Okay,” he said, clearing his throat a bit. “Well, good.”
He got me a beer from the ancient fridge and burned some popcorn in the microwave; we sat on the sagging IKEA futon in the living room and watched a Friends rerun on cable. It was late, nearly time for the T to stop running, and I knew I should head home, but the longer I sat there the clearer it became that I didn’t actually want to go back to my tall, sterile dorm building. I wanted to stay here, in this warm, scruffy place.
“Your socks are wet,” Ian observed suddenly, reaching out and flicking the bottom of my foot; on TV, Joey and Chandler had just left a baby on a bus.
“My feet are freezing,” I confessed, tucking them up under me.
“They are?” Ian made a face. “Why didn’t you say something? Hang on, wait a sec.” He got up off the couch and disappeared down the long, narrow hallway, his shoulders so broad he seemed to fill the entire space. When he came back he was holding a thick pair of navy blue socks.
“They’re clean,” he said, handing them over. “I’m not a monster.”
That made me smile, surprised and delighted; then I felt my face fall. He was being too nice to me, I thought, suddenly as close to tears as I’d been that very first morning in the library. I didn’t deserve it, after everything that had happened. I didn’t deserve him. This was a guy who’d read to little kids at a Head Start for his senior service project and confessed to being the Dungeon Master for all his friends’ D&D games one of the very first times we hung out together. He’d been honest and good from the beginning. The last thing he needed was me stomping into his calm, steady life with my talent for drama and flair for catastrophe, leaving my muddy tracks across his floor.
9 Days and 9 Nights Page 1