Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
I nearly trip down the last two stairs. “Excuse me?”
“You never once laughed with me like that…” Mike stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Not in a year of dating and six more of whatever this’s been.”
He’s right. “Mike…”
“It’s weak, I know, but I gotta ask because it’s going to damn well eat me alive if I don’t…”
“Ask what?”
He turns so I can see his face. “Why couldn’t it have been me?”
The question is like a knockout blow. Worse yet, there are too many childish parts of me that itch to say I have no idea what you’re talking about. Parts of me that are rioting because I came down here to face him in the first place. I’m ashamed to find so much cowardice dwelling in my psyche.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I wish it could’ve been.”
He nods. He assumed as much. It only hurts more.
I cross the room until I’m standing right in front of him. I take his familiar hand in mine. “I’m so sorry, Mike. I—”
“Clementine—”
“No, I never should have encouraged anything more than friendship with you. I told myself it was easy, it made you happy, and it made our moms happy to see us together…But I think on some level I knew it meant more to you than it did to me, and that meant you couldn’t hurt me.
Which was something I needed, I think, at the time. ”
“Not anymore?”
I’m surprised to find those feelings in the rearview. “Not anymore. I should have told you as much when we last spoke, but I wasn’t sure I knew it then. I…For what it’s worth, I don’t want to lose you in my life. I really do love you, Mike.”
“Like family,” he clarifies.
I nod. “Your friendship means the world to me.”
“That’s a knife in the gut, you know that, right?” He’s not being cruel—he says it with a solemn half smile.
“I know. And I’m sorry.”
“You’ve nothing to be sorry for. In some fucked-up way, I’m happy for you.”
I stub my bare toe into the wood grain until it hurts.
“Hey—I’m serious. I don’t mean to be a dick, but I was kind of worried you weren’t capable of the feeling at all. Like one of those super-normal-seeming sociopaths.”
My snort eases the tension clouding the room. “I don’t know what feeling you mean.”
Mike gives me a come on glare.
“I’m not in love with him.”
And it almost kicks the wind out of me, how immediately I know that it’s a lie. How wrong it feels, uttering those false, gutless words.
Mike shakes his head. “You’re only bullshitting yourself.”
“He lives in Ireland,” I say, because at least it’s honest. “His day job is being famous. It’s just not realistic.”
As if that was all the confirmation Mike needed, he turns back to the fridge and grabs two cases of beer, handing one to me. “When you were offered that scholarship from whatever fancy-ass music college Ev went to, why didn’t you take it?”
“I couldn’t leave my mom. You know that.”
Mike shakes his head. “You, Clementine, have a bad habit of beating the pain before it can beat you. I don’t reckon even you know why you do that, but I’d suggest looking into it. One day avoiding everything that could hurt you might just leave you with nothing at all.”
—
The world’s longest game of Monopoly finally ends when Beth leaves us all destitute—devoid of property, money, and our dignity.
It’s nearly three in the morning, but I’ve been checked out for hours.
Mike’s words have snagged in my mind like a needle on a record.
We say our goodbyes and good nights and I think of his warning as I drop Ev’s car at her place.
Heart strangely hollow, I stand by her mailbox and call her once, but it goes to voicemail.
I get back to find Tom and my mom putting away the game and cleaning up stray pizza crust. When her bones begin to ache, Tom helps my mom to her bed upstairs and he and I tidy the rest of the house in silence.
“It’s not going to fit us both,” I say, observing my twin bed from the doorway. “You take it.” A yawn sweeps across me. “I can crash on the couch in the basement.”
Tom kneads his fingers into my neck. “Come on.” He walks in and clicks on the fuzzy green bedside lamp.
“You’ll be uncomfortable all night.”
“Not possible if I’m holding you.”
He toes off his boots and then strips to his briefs, shaking his long curls loose from their tie.
Illuminated in a funky lime-green glow, with the bandage still plastered across the swollen bridge of his nose, he looks like an acid trip.
Then he crawls into my daisy-covered childhood bed and I shake my head.
“What?”
“You don’t fit,” I say, stripping to my underwear and finding an old Funny Girl T-shirt in my drawers. “I warned you.”
“It’s fine, see?” He’s a little cramped, and his ankles hang off the end of the bed, but sleep will be feasible. That wasn’t what I meant, though, and the thought clenches in my stomach. I turn off the green light.
Slipping in beside him, I try to exhale the entire day. I can’t reconcile the fact that we performed a sold-out show this evening for fifteen thousand people. I’ve lived forty lives in the span of seven hours. I’m able to let go of almost everything minus my conversation with Mike.
Avoiding everything that could hurt you might just leave you with nothing at all.
“Was it nice to be home again?”
Tom’s voice is so gentle, I turn my face away to swallow a wave of emotion. “Mhm.”
“Clem?” When I don’t respond, he brushes the hair from my face to get a better look at me in the moonlight. “Clementine? Have I done somethin’ to upset you?”
Yes, I want to say. You made me fall in love with you.
There’s an uncanny feeling of some divide, cleaving itself down the center of me.
The Clementine that grew up in this very bed.
Slept in it, every night, nobody else in the creaking house but her mom and her dog.
That Clementine, sore from being on her feet all day, saving every dollar for the three of them, her high notes drowned out by the roar of the showerhead while everyone else was asleep…
And this Clementine—the one who lost a thousand dollars’ worth of Conor Callaghan’s chips in Atlantic City, who rode in Rhett Barber’s Thunderbird along I-84, and was offered the opportunity to audition for the West Side Story revival.
The Clementine who, despite all protective barricades and padlocks, has fallen grotesquely in love.
Horrifically so, and with someone who not only makes a living never staying in one place too long, but who’s all but told her he’s hooked on heartbreak.
That Clementine, the first one tells her, is an utterly foolish little girl.
A child who’s going to have to grow up real fast in the next seven days.
The realization ripples through me like a pebble breaking an untouched lake.
“No, I—” My voice breaks. I swallow hard. “You ever watch The X-Files ?”
The duvet rustles and Tom shifts behind me. “Mhm. Why?”
I stare at the secondhand bookcase across from the bed. If I strain my eyes, I can almost make out all the titles I know are shelved here. Sharp Objects. Murder on the Orient Express. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perhaps I can’t read them at all, and I just have them memorized.
“Did you like Scully?”
Tom is quiet for a moment. I can hear the wheels turning in his head, trying to parse out why on earth I’m talking about Dana Scully at three in the morning. He settles on, “She’s a fine character, sure.”
“But she’s always wrong.” My eyes have begun to burn.
“I bet she wishes she could be a believer, like Fox is. I bet Eurydice wished she could believe in the power of song the way Orpheus did. But these women…their skepticism kept them safe. Because everything outside of logic is…is unknown, and the unknown is…is—”
“Terrifying,” Tom supplies.
I can’t speak past the lump in my throat.
Tom wraps his body around mine, a vine contorting itself to the fence of its home.
“You don’t have to change who you are, Clem.
Your mam is a wonderful woman, and she loves you with a vastness oceans might envy.
But at some point in life we become whoever we needed most as a child.
Whoever your mam couldn’t quite be for you.
That’s human. And you needn’t beat yourself up for it. ”
And I know in this moment, that when I’m back in this bed alone, back in my real life—I’ll never be able to forget.
Not how it feels to be held like this by him.
Not the clear compassion in his eyes when I turn over and our gazes meet.
Not his lips on mine. I’ll never be able to shake how it felt to step into that unknown.
To perhaps be loved by Tom Halloran, and to know for certain how badly I loved him in return.