Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(21)

Only it hadn’t worked.

And worse, he’d left her completely in the dark.

That’s what she minds: that he hadn’t told her, that he hadn’t trusted her enough to believe she’d be supportive. After nearly two years together—two whole years of being the most important person in each other’s lives—this feels like a kick in the teeth.

“Aidan,” she says now, her eyes trained on his shadowy profile in the dim light of the car. “I’m always on your side. But you can’t put me in the same category as your parents. You can’t lie to me just because you’re afraid of how I might react.”

“I didn’t lie.”

She fixes him with a hard look. “You’re doing it again right now.”

“I didn’t…” he begins, then stops and blows out a long breath. “I didn’t mean to lie. At least not to you.”

“Then why did you?” she asks, feeling her throat tighten a little. “I would’ve understood.”

“Maybe,” he says grudgingly. “It’s easy to say that now.”

“Still.”

He shrugs. “I guess I felt bad about the Stanford thing.”

“Yeah, but that was never serious,” Clare tells him, sitting forward. “And I knew Harvard wasn’t, either.”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” she says firmly, then hesitates, because she knows the only way to get through this is for her to be honest, too. “I mean, maybe there was this tiny little part of me that—”

He doesn’t even wait for her to finish. “See?”

“But that’s not the point,” she says, trying to curb her frustration. “If you’d told me you were scrapping the application, I would’ve understood. I would’ve been supportive either way.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Aidan,” she says with a sigh, “you should’ve just been honest with me.”

He traces a finger along the ridges of the steering wheel, then leans forward and rests his head against it. “Why are we still talking about this? It doesn’t even matter anymore. It would’ve turned out the same either way.”

“Yeah, but we’re supposed to be a team. After all this time, you should’ve had more faith in me.”

“Right. Like you have in us?”

Clare opens her mouth, then closes it again, not sure what to say to that. Instead, she falls back against the seat with a sigh, and they’re both silent for a minute, then two.

“The thing is,” Aidan says eventually, “maybe I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Have enough faith in you.”

This hits her like a shot—a hard, bright pain in the center of her chest—and she struggles to keep her face neutral. “Then maybe,” she says, unable to look at him, “we have bigger problems.”

“Maybe we do,” he says, moving a hand to the door. He glances over at her, and there’s a flicker of impatience in his eyes. “Are we done yet?”

“What?”

“I just don’t feel like talking about this anymore.”

“Aidan,” she says. “Come on. You can’t just keep avoiding everything.”

“And you can’t just keep planning everything,” he says, sounding uncharacteristically surly. “This isn’t a homework assignment. There’s not gonna be an answer for everything, okay? There’s just not.”

He opens his car door, and when the overhead light snaps on, they both blink like stunned animals.

Clare glances at the green numbers of the dashboard clock. “So, what?” she says in a low voice. “Your plan is just to spend the rest of the night pretending nothing happened? You just want to—what?go bowling right now?”

“You’re the one who brought me here,” he says, stepping out of the car. She shoves open her own door, then hops out and glares at him from across the hood.

“We can leave if you want.”

Without answering, he begins to cross the parking lot, punching the lock button from over his shoulder. Clare flinches as the car lets out two shrill beeps, then hurries after him toward the giant bowling pins at the entrance.

“So what is it, anyway?” Aidan asks, pausing just as they reach the door. Inside, the orange light of the lanes gives off a faint glow, and they can hear the cheerful music of the video games in the lobby.

“What do you mean?”

“On the list,” he says. “What is this on the list?”

She frowns at him. “You don’t remember?”

He remains silent, but there’s something deliberately stubborn about it.

“Yes, you do,” she tells him, digging in, too.

“Not really,” he says, just as a group of middle-aged men in blue bowling shirts, their names stitched above the pockets, come lumbering out the door, causing Aidan and Clare to take a step back and away from each other.

When they’re gone, he turns back to her with glassy eyes.

“So?” he asks, and she shakes her head, exhausted.

“Forget it,” she says, pulling open the door and walking inside without him, happy to let the noise and lights of the place wash over her: the bright sound of the balls striking the pins, the clinking of glasses, and the confusion of voices, all of it a hazy, welcome distraction.