9 Days and 9 Nights

by Katie Cotugno

  Ian was right, of course—it’s packed with a million people speaking a million different languages, all iPhone cameras and ugly sneakers and squabbling families elbowing for the best view. It’s also stunning. When we finally make it over to the railing I can see for ages in every direction, verdant green parks and tall, filigreed buildings and swaths and swaths of dense blue sky.

  “Okay,” Gabe says with the kind of quietly delighted astonishment I haven’t heard out of him since his dad was alive. It makes me think of being out on Chuck’s boat in the summertime, of fat fish pulled from murky brown lake water. “You can call me whatever you want, like maybe I really am a filthy American or whatever, but. This is awesome.”

  I laugh, his excitement contagious. “It is, right?”

  “Yeah!” He’s grinning openly now, gesturing out at the view with no trace of the briny skepticism he’s been marinating in all week long. “Like, look at that, Molly Barlow. That’s special.”

  “Yeah,” I agree, letting myself wonder for a moment at the tremendous improbability of us winding up here together. In the west the sun is just starting to sink, Gabe’s skin going golden in the warm, toasted light. “It’s pretty special.”

  He glances over at me then, holding the eye contact a beat too long for it to feel strictly casual. My whole body warms in spite of the stiff, chilly breeze ruffling my hair. “So what happened, huh?” I can’t help asking, clearing my throat a bit and taking half a step away from him, reminding myself what a bad idea it is to get too close. “Sadie wasn’t into this?”

  Gabe makes a face, glances out at the skyline. “She’s afraid of heights, remember?”

  I roll my eyes. “That’s not really an answer.” I feel bad for ruining the moment, but not bad enough to keep on pretending like everything’s fine among the four of us. I don’t know if it’s the bird’s-eye view or what, but something about being up here makes me feel like it’s time to cut the crap and tell the truth. “Come on, dude. What’s going on with you guys, huh?”

  “What happened to not talking about anything personal?” Gabe asks; his tone is teasing, but underneath is a flash of the craggy irritation I’ve gotten used to from him over the last few days. Then he sighs. “I don’t know,” he admits, shaking his head. “This has been . . . not a great trip for us, clearly. Like I said, most of it is my fault. I think she thought I was a certain way, back at school? And maybe I was, a year ago. But now I’m not.”

  My heart pings with recognition, a circuit lighting up inside some complicated machine. “You seem the same to me,” I tell him honestly. “Like you’re going through a thing, maybe. But not, you know. Fundamentally altered.”

  Gabe smiles—not as broadly as he was a minute ago, but it’s something. “Thanks,” he says. “I mean, I think.”

  We gaze out at the view for another long minute, neither one of us saying anything. In the distance the sun is getting heavier, the sky turning orange and pink. There’s a question mark hanging in the air between us, the conversation not quite finished; sure enough, after a moment he looks over at me one more time. “So what about you?” he asks, rocking back on his heels and raising his eyebrows. “What’s up with you and Louis XIV?”

  I roll my eyes. “Shut up,” I scold, though truthfully—guiltily—I have to work not to laugh. “Don’t call him that.”

  Gabe must sense he’s almost got me: “Oh, come on,” he says, eyes widened like a standup comedian delivering a punch line. “You didn’t even know he was a secret billionaire, apparently. Like, listen to that sentence for a second. That is an absurd fucking sentence.”

  My whole body prickles, red and embarrassed. “Enough.” I push myself away from the railing. He’s laughing now, like he wants me to share this inside joke with him, two Star Lake kids having one over on my dopey outsider boyfriend. And I’m not going to do that. “You don’t know anything about my relationship with Ian, okay?”

  Gabe shrugs. “Maybe not,” he admits easily. “But I know you. I’ve known you almost my whole life, and I know you can’t possibly be happy.”

  That galls me—the presumption of it, maybe, the sheer leap on his part. “Oh, really?” I counter, drawing myself up like the heiress to a ball-bearing fortune affronted by a mouthy peasant kicking mud onto her dress. “And why’s that, exactly?”

  “Because all of a sudden you’re so—so—” He breaks off in frustration. “You’re just—”

  “What?” I demand. “Oh my God, just say it already.”

  “Tidy,” Gabe spits out finally.

  “Tidy?” Now I do laugh, loud and barking, though it’s not like I don’t know what he’s getting at, exactly. More like I don’t want to think about it. “Wow, Gabe. You really know how to insult a girl. Next thing you’ll be telling me I practice good hygiene or have elegant penmanship. Really putting me in my place, there.”

  “I’m not trying to insult you,” Gabe snaps, like I’m being stupid on purpose. “I’m trying to tell you what I see. And what I see is you turning into this small, inoffensive, terrified version of the person I used to know.” He shakes his head. “You said it yourself a minute ago when you were talking about your roommate, that you’re tying yourself up in knots trying not to give anybody a reason not to like you. And that’s a ridiculous way to live.”

  Oh, I do not like him saying that to me. I do not like it at all. I feel like he’s caught me at something obscene and perverted; I feel careless and ashamed for letting him get close enough to look. “Okay then,” I reply, voice brittle. “Thanks for the professional diagnosis. Any time you want to stop mansplaining me to myself, that’d be great.”

  Gabe rolls his eyes. “I’m not mansplaining anything to you, Molly,” he counters, openly annoyed. “I’m saying that I have noticed, over the course of this weird, miserable week, that you’re putting on a twenty-four-hour stage show like you’re headlining at the fucking Copacabana for everyone else’s benefit, and I’m asking if it doesn’t get tiring sometimes.”

  My mouth drops open. “That’s not—” I start, then immediately break off because of course he sees me just like he always has; of course we both know it’s true. It’s exactly what I’ve been doing, actually, and it is tiring, but at this point I don’t know how I’d possibly go about dropping the act even if I wanted to. Still, Gabe of all people calling me out on it makes me want to run all the way down to the bottom of this tower.

  “None of this is actually even your business to begin with,” I counter finally. “We don’t date, I’m not your problem, so—”

  “Yeah, well, whose fault is that, again?”

  “Oh my God!” I gawk at him, stunned by the bald unfairness of it. “You want to relitigate our breakup right now, Gabe? Fine. Our breakup was my fault. I fucked up. I own it. I have been owning it, I promise you. Basically everything I have done all year has been about me owning it, so . . .”

  I trail off as Gabe’s eyes narrow. “What does that mean?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I say, too quickly. “Forget it.”

  “I don’t want to forget it,” Gabe presses. “Tell me.”

  “Why?” I ask—cornered and fearful, all talons and teeth. It occurs to me that we’re making a scene, inviting all manner of curious glances in our direction, but for the first time since I left Star Lake last summer, I don’t actually care. “Seriously, why are we even having this conversation? You said yourself we’ve never been friends, and for some reason I’ve been trying to convince myself that we were, or at least that we could be, but you’re right.” I shake my head at my own stubborn stupidity, counting off on my fingers. “If we were friends you wouldn’t have fallen off the face of the planet after last summer. If we were friends you wouldn’t have lied to me and said we were cool. If we were friends I would have mattered enough that you could have been bothered to call me back sometime between last October and the moment we ran into each other in freaking London, Eng—”

  “I didn’t call you back because you broke my fu
cking heart, Molly!”

  That stops me, baffled and blinking; for a moment the whole world seems to go quiet. “I did?” I ask, and my voice sounds very small.

  Gabe gapes at me. “You know you did,” he says immediately. “Are you seriously going to look at me right now and say you didn’t know that you—”

  “No, I just—” I break off. I remember the moment last summer when he found out about Patrick and me, the hurt and betrayal and bewilderment on his face. “I mean, of course I know I did. I guess I just . . . thought you were over it.”

  “Yeah, well,” Gabe says flatly, that belligerent shrug of his shoulders. “I’m not.”

  “But the way we left things last summer—” I shake my head, stubborn. “You made it seem like we were okay.”

  Gabe makes a face. “Come on, Molly. What was I supposed to say to you? You were going to Boston, you know? You were starting fresh.”

  I consider that for a moment, the last twelve months reshuffling in my mind like the vacation photos my mom used to get developed at the drugstore in Star Lake. I thought about Gabe this year—in the stairwell as I left him a voicemail and in the waiting room at the clinic, sure, but also a million other times: eating a really amazing slice of pizza at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the North End with Roisin. Sticking a carrot I’d begged from the dining-hall guys into the smiling face of a snowman on the Esplanade. At the very end of the semester when all the trees exploded into spring on Commonwealth Avenue, a canopy of pink flowers up above my head. I thought about Gabe every time I heard a dumb joke in the elevator, every time I went to the movies, every time our song came up on Spotify while I ran.

  It never once occurred to me that, halfway across the country, he was thinking about me, too.

  “But—” I don’t understand. “You’re here with Sadie.”

  “And you’re here with Ian!” Gabe explodes, looking at me like I’ve totally lost it. “Jesus Christ, Molly. Obviously you’ve moved on. You can’t possibly be angry with me for trying to do the same thing.”

  “I’m not angry,” I protest, though as I say it I realize that’s not true at all. Suddenly everything from last fall comes back in a rush: the loss and the loneliness, the dull certainty that he’d moved on without a backward glance, while—just like always—I was the one facing the fallout. “I needed you. And you weren’t there for me.”

  Gabe’s face darkens at that, confusion and worry. “Needed me how?” he asks urgently. “Molly, what happened?”

  I shake my head again, knowing there’s no way to say it. Knowing in my bones that it’s time. I look at him for a moment, standing here tall and honest in the most beautiful place on the planet. “I was pregnant,” I finally say.

  For a second Gabe just blinks at me, uncomprehending. “Wait, what?” he asks, shaking his head. “When?”

  “When I got to school,” I tell him. “Last fall.”

  “Last fall—” The realization creeps up his face, his lips thinning half a second before his eyes go sharp and wary. “So it was—?”

  “You and me,” I say. “Yeah.”

  He tilts his head to the side. “But we were careful,” he says, “right?”

  “I thought so,” I say, shrugging. “I guess we weren’t as careful as we thought.”

  “And you—?” Gabe doesn’t finish.

  “I had an abortion,” I tell him. My voice doesn’t waver at all.

  Gabe doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then his eyes go wide. “Holy shit,” he blurts out, like he’s only just connecting the dots for the first time. “You’re saying that’s why you called me? And I didn’t—fuck, Molly.” He shakes his head. “I am so fucking sorry.”

  I shrug. All around us crowds shuffle along the observation deck in a colorful blur: families with balloons tied to their strollers, groups of teenagers shoving each other playfully, two middle-aged women using a cell phone camera to fix their wine-colored lipstick. I wonder if this is how I’ll remember this trip, as a long series of emotional crises conducted while strangers Instagrammed themselves all around me. “You didn’t know,” I remind him, all the hot fury burning just a moment ago drained suddenly out of me. “I could have kept trying.”

  “It’s not your fault.” He lifts his hand to the back of his neck, like he’s checking to make sure his skull is still attached to it. He looks shell-shocked. “Shit.” He wraps his fingers around the guardrail and stares out at the city for a moment, like we’re back in the pine-scented quiet of Star Lake and not here, in this bustling, cacophonous place. It’s full sunset now, the sky red and dripping; all around us, the world seems to glow. “I am really, really sorry you had to do all that on your own.”

  “I wasn’t alone,” I promise him. “My mom and Imogen were both fantastic.” Even Roisin, who I barely knew back then, somehow seemed to figure out something was going on—she brought me Rice Krispies treats from the dining hall and a month-old Cosmo she’d filched from the big recycling bin on our floor. “I was way luckier than a lot of people would have been.”

  “I know,” Gabe says. “But still, I wish I’d known. I wouldn’t have tried to get you to change your mind or anything, I don’t want you to think that. I just wish I’d been there to hang out with you. I would have brought you all the fucking Red Vines in Massachusetts.” He lets a breath out. “I’m just sorry I wasn’t there.”

  He wraps his arms around me then, squeezes; I hold on just as tightly, breathe him in. “I’m sorry too,” I say into his chest, not even sure which part of it I’m apologizing for. All of it, maybe. But underneath the regret relief is blooming, slow and soothing: telling the whole truth is like aloe on sunburn, the balm of finally being totally seen.

  I take a step back, or try to; Gabe catches my waist and holds on, like he doesn’t want to let me go. I hesitate as the air between us changes, getting heavier; my breath catches in the cavern of my chest. When he looks at my mouth I can feel it in my elbows, the hot zing of desire. When my forehead brushes his cheek I can feel it behind my knees. It’s like my heart is being squeezed for juice as we stand here, dripping wet and sticky down my ribs.

  Still: “We can’t,” I remind him again, though it feels physically painful to say it. But I’m not going to do that to Ian, even if I know—and I do know now, with a certainty that thuds like my own heartbeat—that things between us are never going to be exactly right. And it’s not because of Gabe, or because Ian isn’t wonderful. It’s because it’s time to be who I really am.

  Gabe holds me for a minute longer, strong and steady. Then he squeezes one more time and lets me go. “We’re good?” I ask as the sky detonates in the distance. “For real this time?”

  Gabe smiles at that, just faintly. Then he nods. “Yeah, Molly Barlow,” he promises, and I believe him. “We’re good.”

  It’s almost ten by the time we finally make it back to Ian’s parents’ house, the wide, leafy street gone purple-dark and quiet. Both of us pause on the doorstep like there’s some kind of invisible force field preventing us from going in, Gabe shoving his hands into his pockets and me rubbing my arms against the chill. I want to stretch this moment out as long as possible. I want to cup it in my hands to protect it like a flame.

  “Look,” Gabe says. We were silent all the way home on the Metro, up the steep hill back to the house, and his voice sounds deeper than I think of it as being, more grown-up. “Can I just—” He breaks off, taking a step toward me. Thinking again. “I don’t want to do anything out of line. I just want—”

  “Yes,” I say, popping up on my tiptoes and wrapping my arms around his neck, hard and impulsive; Gabe holds on so tight and desperate I almost can’t catch my breath. I want to unzip my body and put him inside it, for us to become one person. I feel like I can’t possibly get close enough.

  I don’t know how long we stand there frozen in place like two magnets, Gabe’s hand on my neck and my face pressed into the hollow at the center of his rib cage, breathing in his warm, slightly sweaty
smell. All I want in the world is to keep him. But I know that he’s not mine to have. We’ve never quite managed to get it right, me and Gabe, the two of us all near-misses and missed calls and dangling conversations. I still love him so ridiculously much.

  “Okay,” I say finally, taking a step back and breaking the moment, knowing I have to say good-bye. “Um. Travel safe, yeah?”

  Gabe nods, clearing his throat. “Yup.” He and Sadie have an early morning flight, need to be at the airport before seven; on one hand I’m sorry I won’t get a chance to see her off properly, but on the other I can’t imagine what I could possibly say that wouldn’t taste like a lie or a betrayal. I’m a damage doer, no matter hard I try not to be. Maybe everybody is, in some way. “I’ll see you around, Molly Barlow,” he says quietly.

  “Yeah,” I promise, swallowing down the longing, holding my hand up in one last wave. “I’ll see you.” The tips of our fingers brush again, so lightly I think I might have imagined it, in the moment before I turn and go inside.

  Ian’s asleep in the master bedroom when I get up there, French TV flickering blue in the darkness and a paperback splayed open on the mattress beside him; I root around in the sheets until I find the remote, clicking it off and plunging the room into deep, velvety silence. He rolls over on the mattress, blinking awake. “Hey,” he murmurs. He looks younger than usual in the slice of white moonlight sneaking through the linen curtains, his face smooth and unguarded. “How was it?”

  I swallow. It feels like I’ve lived a whole year in the last twelve hours. It feels like I’ve lived an entire life. “It was good,” I tell him finally for lack of a better answer, climbing under the covers beside him. “It was a really good day.”

  Ian smiles sleepily. “I’m glad.”

  “Me too,” I say, laying a gentle hand on his back. In the morning I’m going to set about fixing. Tonight, I’m going to let him rest. “Go back to sleep.”