Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(34)

“And it wasn’t me who clocked you,” Scotty continues, his eyes moving to Clare. “I’m pretty sure it was Aidan’s elbow.”

“That’s not the point,” Clare says, feeling Aidan’s gaze on her. She lowers the ice, but when she catches Stella’s grimace at the sight of her eye, she shifts it back onto her cheek. “You guys are idiots for fighting at all.”

“It is the point,” Scotty says, sitting forward. “Because everyone’s always blaming me for everything, and I’m always the screwup around here. But it wasn’t me this time. It was your hothead boyfriend.”

Nobody says anything, and Clare looks over at Aidan, a move that requires her to turn her whole head. His left eye is nearly swollen shut now, but the rest of his face is completely ashen, and his mouth has fallen half-open.

He looks like someone has punched him all over again.

They stare at each other, weighing something invisible to the rest of the world, and then, finally, Clare tips her chin down.

“I’m not her boyfriend anymore,” Aidan says quietly, still watching Clare, and after a pause, she nods in agreement.

“He’s not my boyfriend anymore,” she echoes, but something about the way they’re saying it doesn’t make it sound quite real.

She sets the dripping bag of ice on the table, scattering a few of the cards, and forces herself to look at Stella, who is staring at her, wide-eyed and genuinely astonished.

“Wow,” she says, blinking a few times. “I’m gobsmacked.”

Clare can’t help smiling, though it makes her eye begin to throb again. “See? And you didn’t think you’d get to use it today.”

“There’s no other word for it.”

“You guys broke up?” Scotty says, looking from Aidan to Clare, then falling back into his chair. “I didn’t think you’d actually ever do it.”

Me neither, Clare thinks, trying to swallow the lump in her throat.

Beside her, Stella shakes her head in disbelief. “End of an era,” she says, a little wistfully, and Clare glances over at Aidan, who attempts a smile in spite of his sore eye.

“End of an era,” he echoes, and in spite of her sore heart, she smiles back at him, too.

The Dance

12:02 AM

Later, after the ice has melted and new bags have been made, after cuts have been cleaned and bandages pressed on, after the kitchen fills up again and the party resumes as if nothing ever happened, Aidan and Clare slip out to the empty patio together.

When they reach the spot where the fight occurred, they both stop. In the light from the kitchen windows, they can see a few drops of blood on the flagstones, and a small glinting sliver from Scotty’s broken glasses.

“Scene of the crime,” Aidan says, lifting his gaze. Stella fashioned him a thin white bandage out of some tape and gauze, and it sits just below his eye so that from a certain angle, it almost makes him look like a football player, or like one of those tourists with a needlessly thick layer of sunscreen.

But beneath all that, even in the shadows, Clare can see the regret scrawled across his face.

He scratches the back of his neck. “I really am sorry, you know.”

“I know,” she says. “I do. But I still don’t get it. What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know,” he says with a shrug.

“This can’t just be about your sister. That was over a year ago. And honestly, it wasn’t even that bad. There’s no way you can still be mad about it.…”

He’s doing his best to avoid her eyes, so Clare takes a step closer, putting an arm on each of his shoulders, forcing him to look at her.

“So what are you so upset about?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “You and me, I guess. Tonight. Everything.”

“Yeah, but those aren’t reasons to use Scotty as a punching bag. You’ve been annoyed with him all night. How come?”

Aidan ducks away from her grip, walking over to the edge of the deck, where he stands looking out over the yard. “I don’t know,” he says again, and when Clare walks over to join him, he sits down on the top step. “We used to always talk about California. Hanging out on the beach. Learning to surf. And now he’s staying here.”

“Yeah, but that’s not—”

“It would’ve been so easy, you know?” Aidan says, the words tumbling out in a rush now. “All he had to do was go to class more often. Read a book every now and then. Pay attention. He’s not an idiot. I mean, he is—but not in that way. All he had to do was try a little harder, and we could’ve been out there together.”

Clare swallows hard, hurt by the truth of it: that she’d wasted so much time thinking similar thoughts about Aidan and Harvard, daydreaming about the two of them together on the East Coast. While all that time, Aidan was wishing the same thing—only about Scotty.

“I don’t know,” he says, kicking at the stones of the patio and scattering a few acorns. “I guess I didn’t even realize I was pissed at him.”

“You’re not really,” Clare says, her face growing warm as she thinks about her own conversation with Stella earlier. “You’re just sad to leave. And you’re taking it out on him.”

Aidan shrugs. “It’s just that so much is about to change. It’d be nice if there was at least one thing that could stay the same, you know?”