“Are you okay?” Ian asks, and I startle; I didn’t even realize he was awake. I look over at his sweet, sleepy face and abruptly feel like the Loch Ness Monster: why the hell am I obsessing over Gabe and his girlfriend when I’m lying next to Ian? Enough is enough.
“Just hung over,” I say, even though between all my ridiculous, farcical encounters I hardly had time to drink anything last night at all. Then, pulling him toward me on an impulse: “Come here.”
I slide my hands up under Ian’s T-shirt, bite lightly at his bottom lip. Then, a second later, I wrinkle my nose and push him gently away. “Okay,” I say, laughing a little. “Wait, maybe not. Your mouth tastes like ass.”
“I just woke up two seconds ago!” Ian protests. “And you’re the one kissing me! You think you taste like a fucking Shamrock Shake right now?” Then he grins, pulling me back under the covers. “Don’t stop.”
That makes me laugh, warm and pleased-feeling; I’m settling in closer when Imogen’s voice rings out.
“Hey, travelers!” she calls from the kitchen, banging what sounds like a wooden spoon on the underside of a pot. “Get out here! I’m making Irish breakfast before you go!”
Ian groans low and quiet against my mouth. “Is she serious right now?” he asks, knocking our foreheads lightly together.
“Imogen doesn’t kid about breakfast foods,” I say, nudging him off me and swinging my bare feet down onto the rag rug. We get dressed and pad out to the crowded kitchen, where Imogen is standing at the stove in front of a hissing frying pan full of sausages, flipping them onto their backs with a wooden spoon.
“Morning,” she says, shooting me a look that I immediately recognize as meaning I’m sorry and we’ll talk later and you’re my best friend all at the same time. I nod and offer her a small smile, pressing my fingertips against her shoulder in return.
“You guys took off early,” Ian says, nodding at Gabe and then Sadie, who’s slicing tomatoes at the kitchen table, rosy-cheeked and satisfied like a person who unequivocally spent the night having super-romantic makeup sex. Just looking at her makes me want to howl.
“Yeah. Just tired, I guess.” Gabe is standing at the counter pouring coffee out of the ancient metal percolator. “Here,” he says, handing me a chipped mugful. I muster a mumbled thanks and turn away, ignoring the quizzical look I can feel him shooting at my back. I don’t want anything to do with him this morning. I don’t want anything to do with him for the rest of my life.
In the meantime, though, we’re due at the airport in Shannon by ten thirty for our flight to Paris; just a few more hours, I promise myself, and Gabe and I will finally be able to go our separate ways. We cram our stuff into our suitcases, strip the beds, and pile into Imogen’s tiny car, where she cranks the eighties rock station too loud for any of us to talk. Sadie sits in the middle of the backseat, Gabe on one side and me on the other; I stare out the window at the gray Irish morning, arms crossed and cardigan wrapped tightly around me.
Imogen drops us off curbside, hugging everybody good-bye and grabbing me by the arm. “Can I talk to you?” she asks quietly.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I blurt, relieved. Then, calling to Ian: “I’ll meet you guys in there!” I turn back to Imogen, shake my head. “I’m really sorry about last night.”
Imogen waves me off. “No,” she says, “I am.”
“No, me,” I say, and smile. “You’ve been so amazing—you are always so amazing. I didn’t mean to come all the way here and pull all my same old Molly shit.”
Imogen sighs, raking her fingers through her dark, shiny hair. “I shouldn’t have said that. That’s not what you were doing. And honestly, even if you were, I was so happy to see you I don’t even care.” She leans back against the car door, settling in like we’re back in the kitchen at the cottage and not in the airport drop-off lane under the watchful eye of a security guard who’s already motioning at her to hurry up. “I get why it sounds like a bad idea,” she admits. “Me and Seamus. I would probably think it was a bad idea, if somebody was saying it to me. But I love him, Molly. I really do. And if it turns out to be a disaster, then I’ll just . . . get on a plane and come home.”
I nod. It occurs to me that maybe this is what friendship is sometimes: saying your piece, then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. “I’m happy for you,” I promise. “I really, really am.”
Imogen smiles like the sun coming up over the mountains back at home in Star Lake. “Thank you,” she says quietly. “I’m happy, too.” Then her lips twist. “My mom is going to fucking murder me.”
“Yup,” I say, and laugh, and then suddenly the two of us are cackling, obnoxious hysterical giggles, like we used to when we stayed up too late watching rom-coms in middle school. I double over, my purse thudding to the pavement; Imogen holds on to the rearview mirror on the side of the car. The security guard scowls wildly, though he stays where he is.
“Okay,” she says finally, wiping tears from her eyes with the heels of her hands, smiling. “I’m so glad you came, dummy. And I love you.” She hugs me tight then, the smell of hyacinths and oil-based paint. “Travel safe. And remember what I said, okay? You should never have to be afraid to be who you really are.”
“Yeah,” I say, swallowing down that precry tightness in my throat and face. Not for the first time, I wonder what exactly I did to deserve a friend as true as her. “I know. You’re right.”
“I mean it,” Imogen says firmly.
“Ladies!” Now the security guard is marching in our direction, pointing to his watch. “You cannot be having your afternoon tea in my—”
“I’m going!” Imogen promises, flashing him a dazzling grin.
I’m smiling as I walk through the sliding door into the airport, though the warmness in my chest vanishes at the sight of Gabe and Sadie holding hands near security, her chin resting on his shoulder as she peers at their boarding passes. Well, good for them, then, I think snottily, hooking my hand in the strap of Ian’s backpack and tugging gently as we head for the checkpoint. “I love you,” I murmur in his ear.
It should get better once we’ve boarded the plane. Gabe and Sadie are sitting a few rows in front of us on the opposite side of the aisle, too far away for me to be able to see them. But it turns out imagining them is even worse: napping with their heads on each other’s shoulders or talking about their plans for the fall back in Indiana or tucked together under a fleecy airline blanket watching a movie, Gabe’s hand wrapped around the inside of her thigh.
I curl up next to the window and spend the trip staring out at cloudy gray nothingness with my cardigan on backward and tucked over my knees, arms crossed so I can make myself as small as humanly possible. I want to pull myself out of my own bad mood, but I don’t know how to: It’s like I’ve twisted the rusty top off some tightly sealed container, and now I can’t screw it back on.
“How you doing?” Ian asks me finally, nudging my arm as the flight attendant passes by with a cart full of snacks I have no interest in eating. He’s been absorbed in a book on his phone, seemingly unbothered by my inability to quit sulking.
He clicks out of the app now, opens up a game of Scrabble. “Want to play?”
I don’t, really, and he beats me literally every single time, but it’s not like I have a better idea. “Sure,” I tell him. Anything to help get this flight over with. We’re booked at a sweet little rooming house I’ve been looking forward to since I found it online back in the spring, antique cast-iron tubs and tulips on all the bedside tables and a tiny café on the ground floor famous for their croque madame. Best of all: it’s clear across town from Gabe and Sadie’s hostel. “Why not?”
The two of them are waiting for us when we get through the jet bridge and into the terminal. “Hey dudes,” Gabe says, sounding downright cheerful. It makes me want to punch him in his face. “How’d it go?”
“Great,” I say brightly, breezing straight past him. “Let’s move.”
It ta
kes forever to get through customs, all of us shuffling along like a herd of drowsy cattle. It smells like sweat and McDonalds and old-lady perfume. By the time we finally get our passports stamped my stomach is rumbling and my mood is subterranean; all I want to do is drop our stuff and go to lunch. “Come on,” I say, looping my arm through Ian’s and rubbing my face against the shoulder of his T-shirt. “I’m about to get hangry.”
“Just let me pee really fast?” Sadie pipes up, although I’m not really sure why that has anything to do with Ian and me. We’ve made it to Paris, after all; there is absolutely no reason for us to still be traveling as some kind of weird, fraught foursome. Still, I find myself stopping as she wriggles out of her backpack, dropping it gently on the tile floor at Gabe’s feet. “I’ve had to go since we got off the plane.”
“Me too, actually,” says Ian, dropping his own backpack into the pile; I park my bag beside it, my shoulders bunched and aching. “I’ll be right back.” Sadie passes me her purse and Ian hands off his passport, which I rest on top of Gabe’s beat-up L.L.Bean duffel for safekeeping. It’s monogrammed, I notice for the first time, with Chuck’s initials.
Once they’re gone Gabe and I stand there for a moment looking anywhere but at each other, his hands shoved in his pockets and me picking at my fingernails with enough intensity to rip them clean off. He feels like a completely different person than the one who almost kissed me in the alley outside the hardware-store bar twelve hours ago. He feels like someone I’ve never even met.
“I’m going to grab a bottle of water,” he says finally, clearly looking for any flimsy excuse to get away from me. I can’t blame him, though it makes me hate him even more. “You okay to wait here with the stuff?”
I shrug. “Do whatever you want,” I can’t resist muttering. “I mean, you probably will anyway.”
Gabe stops half a dozen steps away, face darkening. “Okay, can I ask you something?” he says. “What is your problem with me today?”
“I don’t have a problem with you,” I snap.
“Really?” Gabe raises his eyebrows. “’Cause you’re doing a pretty good job of acting like you do.”
“Oh, am I?” I all but shout, whirling in his direction like I think I’m going to shove him with both hands; suddenly I am so monstrously, ferociously angry. I’m angry that he tried to kiss me last night. I’m angry that I kind of wish I’d let him. I’m angry that since the very beginning, the consequences of whatever he and I have been to each other have always fallen squarely on me, whether that meant girls tucking condoms into my work locker or me lying on my back on an exam table at a clinic in Boston, imagining myself into a cloud. It’s not even a hostile act on his part. It’s just how it works. Gabe gets away with things. I pay for them. Gabe moves on. I get stuck.
But I can’t say that in the middle of the airport in Paris while our significant others use the bathrooms less than fifty feet away. I can’t say that ever, probably, but especially not now. So I sigh, tucking my hair behind my ears and trying one more time to zip myself up, taking a few steps closer and lowering my voice to an acceptable pitch. “Nothing,” I tell him. “Just forget it, okay?”
“I don’t want to forget it,” he argues. “Come on. It’s me.”
I shake my head, debating. We’re about to go our separate ways, after all. Who knows when I’ll see him again? Finally I just say it: “I saw you and Sadie last night, okay?”
Gabe looks at me blankly. “You saw Sadie and me . . . ?”
“The two of you.” I grimace. “On the pullout. When I came back to Imogen’s after the bar.”
Just for a moment, Gabe looks completely and utterly stricken. Then his eyes narrow. “What the hell were you doing?” he demands.
“I wasn’t spying on you,” I snap, immediately defensive. “It wasn’t some creepy, tawdry thing. I just walked in minding my own business and there you were.”
“Okay.” Gabe shrugs, and the cavalier ease of it takes my breath away. “Well, I’m sorry you saw.”
I gape at him. “That’s it?” I can’t keep from saying. “Sorry I saw?”
Gabe sighs. “Sadie and I are together, Molly. What did you think we did?”
I open my mouth, shut it again. He’s right, of course. Even as their relationship has been going on right in front of my face for the last three days—even though we’ve been broken up for a year—it occurs to me I’m still thinking of him as on loan to her, like a sweater she’ll eventually give back. “You realize you tried to kiss me two seconds before that,” I sputter.
Gabe nods. “And I think we can both agree that was a giant mistake.”
“Uh, yup.” I huff a noisy breath out. “That’s a fact.”
We face off like that for a moment, glaring at each other, the hassled crowd like schools of fish bobbing and weaving all around us. I know I should leave it alone, that there’s nothing to be gained here, but something small and stubborn in me isn’t quite ready to concede the point: “So what?” I can’t resist pressing. “You guys are all made up now? Everything is fine? You’re just going to add last night to the list of things you’re not going to talk to her about and move on with your lives in perfect artificial happiness?”
“Perfect artificial—” Gabe’s eyes widen. “First of all,” he says, “you’re not exactly one to talk about keeping secrets.”
I know he’s right, which doesn’t stop me from bristling. “This isn’t about me.”
“It’s always about you, Molly!” Gabe explodes, loud enough that a teenage girl in a Bruno Mars T-shirt whips her head around in alarm. “That’s the fucking point!”
I stare at him for a moment, taken aback. It’s an uncomfortable echo of what Imogen said last night, although something about the way Gabe is looking at me makes me think that’s not exactly how he means it. If he hadn’t spent the last year ignoring me completely, I’d almost think—
“You know what?” Gabe continues before I can ask him what exactly he’s getting at, scrubbing a frustrated hand over his face. “This is ridiculous. This whole trip was a terrible idea. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen here.”
“It was,” I agree hotly. In fact, it seems absurd to me that I ever thought it could work. I convinced myself it could because I missed him; I convinced myself it could because I didn’t want to say good-bye. I couldn’t let go of everything that happened a year ago on the other side of the ocean, and now I’ve gone and risked everything I’ve worked for in the here and now. “We should have called it that first night back in London.”
“It’s good we’re splitting up, then.”
“It’s great we’re splitting up!” It sounds dangerously close to a wail, and for one horrifying second I think I might be about to cry. I swallow hard, biting my tongue until I taste metal and blinking as fast as I possibly can.
That’s when Ian and Sadie come strolling across the terminal.
“Hey, pals,” Sadie says cheerfully; she’s wearing last night’s jeans and a T-shirt top with the names of all the US national parks printed on it in a pattern that makes the shape of a tree. “You ready?”
I swallow. “Yup,” I manage, trying to keep my voice steady. I glance at Gabe. “Let’s just—”
“Where’s our stuff?”
My stomach drops, the sensation of tumbling out a window just before you fall asleep. I whip around, though I know it deep in my body even before I turn and look: the pile of bags Sadie and Ian charged us with watching is nowhere to be found. In fact, nearly everything is gone, nothing left behind but my gauzy cardigan sitting in a cotton puddle on the floor.
“Um, you guys,” Sadie says, sounding oddly, preternaturally calm. “What happ—”
Gabe cuts her off: “Who had the passports?” he demands.
Holy shit, I realize with a fresh wave of horror, the passports. Part of me can recognize that this is funny in an eighties-comedy kind of way, all of us frantically patting our pockets like we did anything with them—and our wallets, I
realize belatedly—besides what we all know we did. The other part is blinded by dumb, scalding panic.
“This isn’t happening,” I mutter, my heart like a trapped bird at the back of my mouth, something I need to cough up or spit out. But of course it’s happening: the truth is, this all makes a sick kind of sense. I got tangled up with Gabe again and it led to calamity. Just like it always does. “I can’t believe I let this happen, I—”
“Did you guys walk away?” Ian asks me. “Is that why—”
“We were right here!” Gabe snaps. “We just—” He breaks off. “Did you see anybody?” he demands, looking at me urgently.
“Of course I didn’t see anybody!” I nearly shout. “Did you see anybody? If I had seen anybody, don’t you think I would have said something? Like: hey, don’t steal our fucking luggage?”
“Okay,” Sadie says, in a voice like she’s talking to a bunch of panicked children. “Let’s all take a breath. Maybe it just got lost somehow.”
I whirl on her. “All our stuff?” I counter. Suddenly I’ve had it with her, her guilelessness and her waterfall of hair and her can-do, wilderness-survival-guide, not-like-other-girls superiority like a battering ram against the back of my skull. “Maybe all our stuff just somehow got—”
“Easy,” Ian cuts in, holding his hands up. “Hey hey hey, Molly, easy, you’re okay. This is totally solvable.”
“Is it?” Gabe growls. He is so, so pissed: at me, at the situation—and at himself most of all, if I know him as well as I think I do. “Because I’ll tell you, dude, from where I’m standing it looks like a pretty colossal clusterfuck.”
Ian nods. “No, it’s bad, I’m not saying it’s not bad. But we’ll go to the embassy, we’ll sort it out.” Through the haze of panic in my own mind it occurs to me to be shocked he’s not losing his shit at this. How is he not losing his shit at this? “We should find the airport police, first of all. You got your phone still?”
9 Days and 9 Nights Page 13