99 Days(58)

“Sorry,” I mutter as Patrick hands it back to me wordlessly.

“You okay?” Gabe murmurs in my ear. He’s got one warm hand on my knee, reassuring. I nod.

We order the potato skins; Tess tells a story about her new roommate from Barnard, who she just friended on Facebook today. Patrick’s arm is hot and solid against mine. I think of spring of sophomore year again, the end of May and our third argument in as many days—about stupid, inane stuff, whether or not to go to the underclassman formal or what music to listen to while we studied for chem. This time it had started over plans for the weekend and boomeranged right back to Bristol, just like it had every other afternoon this week. I kept waiting for things to right themselves between us, for this bizarre alternate universe where Patrick and I couldn’t be in the same room without arguing to go back to normal.

Also, I was waiting to stop feeling like Arizona might be a really good idea for next fall.

Neither of those things had happened yet.

“Okay.” I took a deep breath and I got up off the bed where I was sitting, pacing past the desk and dresser and back again. I knew every last corner of this room: the warped closet door that never quite closed correctly, the stain on the rug from where we’d ground in Play-Doh by mistake when we were seven. It might as well have been my own. I carved a hand through my hair, frustrated. “You don’t think we’re—” I struggled for a minute, trying to think of how to say it without pissing him off, without making myself more foreign to him than I already seemed to be right now. “You don’t think we sometimes, like . . . spend all this time together at the expense of other stuff in our lives?”

Patrick blinked at me. “What?” he asked, shaking his head faintly. “Like, what are you even saying?”

“I’m just asking!” God, he was irritating me so much lately, moody and intractable in a way he’d never been before—or, if he had, in a way that had never, ever been directed at me. I didn’t know which one of us was changing. It scared me to think maybe both of us were. “Can we just—”

“Molly, if you want to go to Arizona to run, you should go to Arizona to run.” Patrick’s voice was flat and careless. “I didn’t realize I was holding you back quite so hard.”

“You’re not holding me back!” I burst out. “I’m asking you a question; I’m trying to have a conversation with you. I thought that’s what we do: We have conversations. We’ve been having one long conversation our whole lives and now—”

“Now you’re bored, and you want to go have other ones. I get it, kid. I do.”

“Can you not finish my sentences, please?”

“Why, is that holding you back, too?”

“Okay, stop it. Just—stop, for a second.” I sat down on the floor, back against the doorframe where Chuck had measured how tall we were the whole time we were growing up, pencil lines and his neat, blocky handwriting: Julia. Patrick. Molly. Gabe. This was my family, I thought, looking across the room at Patrick’s hardened, hurt expression. This would always be my home.

“We wouldn’t have to break up,” I told him softly, gazing at him across the bedroom. “If I went. That’s not what it would mean. We could visit, we could—”

“Yeah.” That was the wrong thing for me to say, clearly—I actually watched him shut down then, the angry set of his jaw. “Whatever. Okay. You can leave now, Mols. We’re getting nowhere. I’ll see you, really.”

“Patrick.” My eyes widened—I couldn’t believe he was doing this again. It was like he was determined to get rid of me any way he could. “Why are you doing this? Can you stop, like, actively pushing me away—”

“I’m not pushing, Mols!” His voice cracked then, hoarse and aching. “You want to run so bad? Go run. Seriously. Don’t come back.”

I blinked. “What does that—?”

“It means this isn’t working,” Patrick said coldly. “It means we should just be done.”

I stared at him for a moment like he was suddenly speaking Mandarin, like he was someone from clear on the other side of the vast, breathing world. “Are you breaking up with me right now?”

“Yeah, Mols,” he said, and he sounded like a stranger. “I am.”

*

A burst of laughter rips me out of the memory, spooking me so hard I startle a second time, though at least I don’t send any more silverware flying. Gabe’s still got his palm on my knee. He squeezes a bit, then slides his hand farther over, fingertips picking at the seam on the inner thigh of my jeans.

That’s when Patrick nudges his leg against mine.

I can’t tell if he’s doing it on purpose at first, just the barest hint of pressure, heat seeping through his layer of denim and mine. I try to concentrate on what Imogen’s asking, about who’s around to help stretch canvas for her art show, but I feel like I’m listening from the bottom of the lake. My breath comes fast and ragged all of a sudden, and I concentrate on slowing it down so nobody will hear.

The worst part is I can feel myself responding in other ways also, the low swoop of want in my stomach and the skin all over my body tightening up—and I don’t even know who I’m responding to. What is up with me, how messed up am I, that I think it might be both of them?