Can't Look Away(54)

I sit up, irritation rising in my chest. “Why don’t you want to have a baby?” I’m not yelling, but almost.

“That’s not what I said.” He sighs, interlacing his hands across his chest.

“Everyone keeps asking when we’re going to have one.”

“Who’s ‘everyone’?”

“I don’t know. People at the club.”

I watch Jake resist the urge to roll his eyes. “We’re both still young,” he reasons. “Your mom was almost forty when she had you.”

“That was a completely different situation, and you know it.” I scowl. My parents’ choice to have me was a now-or-never sort of verdict, a decision they came to as my mom got past the point of “advanced maternal age.” In retrospect, having me is something they likely regret. Or at least look back on with indifference.

“I’m not like my mother,” I press. “I want a baby. And I don’t want to be fifty when my child is in grade school.”

“Look, I’ve been busy with work and the solo album.” Jake swallows, his Adam’s apple dipping. “I need the summer to focus.”

“Fine. So we’ll start trying in the fall.” I don’t give him the luxury of posing it as a question.

He fiddles with the edge of the top sheet. French blue scalloped embroidery. He stares at his fingers, lost in thought. Finally, he looks up. “Did you know my ex lived in Flynn Cove?” The question is so out of nowhere, it spears me. It cuts right into my center.

“What?”

“Molly.” He locks my gaze, a flash of blue. “I mean … I’m sorry—it’s just…” He sighs, runs a hand through his unkempt hair. “What are the chances we both end up living in the same tiny town?”

“Um, I don’t fucking know.” I will the panic out of my voice, edging my stance toward anger. I need to play my cards right here. “What does that have to do with anything we’re talking about? Sounds like a question you should be asking a therapist, if you care so much.” I glare at him. I can’t stand it, Molly, the degree to which you’re under his skin. “She’s my friend,” I add, because that seems relevant to mention.

“I know. I’m sorry, Sees.” His face falls. “Come here.”

“No.” I scoot off the bed, though I want nothing more than to go to him. To wrap my limbs around his body and bury my face in the crook of his warm neck and exist there forever.

“Sisi.” His voice is pleading.

But in this moment, I have leverage, and I’d be stupid not to use it. I storm into the bathroom and lean against the vanity. I don’t realize I’ve been crying till I look up at the mirror, my eyes shiny and red around the rims. I turn on the tap. I double cleanse my face and do my whole routine—toner, vitamin C, half a dozen expensive serums that probably don’t even work. I brush my teeth.

When I reappear in the bedroom, I’m calmer. Jake looks genuinely sorry, watching me ruefully, his notebook still discarded on the floor.

“You’ve been crying,” he says.

I want to tell him then, the thing I’ve never told him before. The blood. Our baby. I open my mouth to speak, to say the words, but I can’t. What good would they do? Jake would only wonder why I lied to him all this time, and the last thing he needs is another liar in his life. He has you for that.

I came here to show Jake who you truly are, what you’re capable of, and time is ticking. I’d assumed that you’d be too guilt-ridden not to reveal yourself, but perhaps I underestimated you, Molly. Perhaps I’ll need to encourage your honesty in a different, more forceful kind of way.

I think of our baby, a heavy mix of longing and hope weighing in my body. I think of you, just a few miles away across town, sick with the same yearning.

Eventually, sleep pulls me under.





Chapter Twenty-two

Jake




2014

One Sunday evening in late October, after Molly left the apartment to get dinner with a friend—Liz, he was pretty sure—Jake headed to the studio to meet Sam and Hale. They were behind on the second album, and Ron wanted the song list finalized by the end of the year.

Jake loved Brooklyn in the fall; the crisp quality of the air and the way the leaves on the trees lining Driggs seemed to catch fire for a few precious weeks, bright flames of gold and amber lighting up his city. He didn’t mind that the season preceded winter, the way Molly did.

It was a pleasant evening—not too cool, the sun dropped low in clear skies—and Jake would’ve walked across the bridge to the East Village if he hadn’t been running late. He was in a good mood—he had been for a while now. He didn’t think he’d ever take it for granted again, having Molly back in his life. Sometimes, he couldn’t believe how lucky he was that she loved him the way she did. Every now and then, he felt a flash of guilt, like he would never actually be deserving of that kind of love, and Molly would never truly understand why. The month without her was a period of murky darkness he didn’t like to remember, and so he did his best not to think of it. This was how Jake Danner lived his life—by pushing the hardest parts into the past and keeping them there.

That wasn’t to say he hadn’t learned from his mistakes. He had, this time. Molly made him want to change—made him want to be better—in a way that no one else had before. He felt a wave of love just thinking of her: the way she sat at the little desk in their apartment in her favorite blue-and-white-striped dress, her legs crossed underneath her, her pale hair pulled back into a loose knot that piled around the nape of her neck.