Once, I was driving on the I-5 back in L.A. when a white pickup truck veered aggressively into my lane, clipping the bumper of the car in front of me. The accident was terrible, but by some miracle, I escaped unscathed. For days, I couldn’t get rid of the sick, swooping feeling of having barely dodged something cataclysmic. I have the same feeling now.
“Forrest?” Margot’s voice reaches me from what seems like a great distance. “Did you finish?”
I turn to look at her, and the dam-breaking relief rushes through me, roaring in my ears. She’s spending the night withme. Sayingmyname. I have to physically restrain myself from crawling on top of her. Greedily seeking comfort when, like Savannah said, Margot is the one who needs support.
“Are you okay?” I ask once I have a grip on myself.
She’s sitting on the other end of the living room love seat, curled up in a flannel blanket, her golden skin and hair alive in the firelight. She’s stopped crying, but her eyelids are a little puffy. She shrugs, and the blanket slips off, tugging at the large neck hole of my T-shirt to reveal a delicate shoulder.
“It wasn’t exactly light reading,” she says. After a moment she adds, “I don’t like being reminded of that time in my life. I like the idea of Savannah blaming herself even less.”
I’m quiet for a minute, tallying everything I just learned against everything I already know about Margot and Savannah. “Is that why you’ve never told her what happened with Adam?”
She looks at me sharply. “She had nothing to do with it.” At my raised eyebrow, she shifts irritably. Exhales. “Fine, it wasn’t abouther, but about how I am with her.”
I nod slowly as my theory is confirmed. A pillow hits my face.
“Stop being so all-knowing. No one made you the omniscient narrator here.”
I shake my head with a small smile. “I don’t know everything.But she said she was living with you. That you had ‘even more’ time for her. I can imagine that would put a strain on any relationship.” She’s curling herself into an ever tighter flannel ball, and I know I’ve got it right. “You said yourself the last thing you want is Savannah blaming herself for anything. So you shielded her, like she said you always have.”
A dull red flush is creeping up her cheeks. On a selfish level, I don’t want her thinking about her ex for another goddamn second. But a bigger part of me knows that if she’s never told her sister what happened, then she hasn’t told anyone. And more than anything, I want to be the person she confides in.
“You can tell me,” I say softly. “I want to know, if you want me to.”
Her eyes are as wide and unblinking as a startled doe’s, staring at me like I’ve said something crazy. And maybe I have. But then she takes a shuddering breath and starts talking like she’s just been waiting for someone to ask.
“It was this big night for Adam,” she says in a small, resigned voice. “He’s a journalist, and he’d won a prize for one of his pieces. I was so excited for him, because things had always been tense between us professionally. I’d had a lot of early success, and he…” She glances at me, and the tiny crease between her eyebrows looks like a load-bearing structure for approximately one metric fuck-ton of toxic male insecurity. She takes a breath, and I copy her, hoping it’ll soothe my building anger. It doesn’t.
“Let’s just say it was hard on his ego,” she summarizes. “So a week before our wedding, we were supposed to go to the awards ceremony, but that morning, Van came down with a huge flare. She’d been pushing herself so hard as my maid of honor, and it flattened her.”
Margot looks at me and pulls her blanket like an iron shield around her. “I chose to stay with my sister at the hospital thatnight. It was the worst I’d seen her in years, and it was all my fault.Myfault for letting her take on too many responsibilities.” She sighs. “But even if I’d had nothing to do with it, I would have been there. She’s my sister.”
She looks away at the fire, and when she speaks again, her voice is hushed. “Adam couldn’t forgive me. He said I would always put Savannah ahead of our relationship, and I told him he was right. So he ended it that night, and the thing is, as devastated as I was, I couldn’t really blame him. Because he’s not the villain in this story,” she says, her voice shaking. “It’s me. That night, I realized I’m not cut out to be in a fully committed relationship with anyone except my sister.”
When she looks back at me, she’s not crying, but there’s a bone-deep tiredness that has nothing to do with the amount of sleep she’s gotten. “Anyway, like you saw in the letter, Adam was the last straw in a whole stack of rotten straws. I started writing my Happily Never After file to cope, and never wanted to try another relationship again, until—”
She stops herself and looks down at her feet, which have migrated to the side of my boxer briefs. Her toes scrunch like they’re trying to hide.
“Until?” I repeat, mouth going dry.
She sneaks a hand out of the blanket to brush hair out of her face with a flash of impatience. “Untilthis. Whateverthisis. Which I don’t like, for the record.”
And just like that, all the denial over what I want with Margot evaporates. For weeks now I’ve put off turning down the grant at Caltech, even though I know I have to. With this unbelievable admission that Margot might be willing to put her battered trust in me, the temptation to move back to California is more powerful than ever. And this time my research, the grant, even my gardenias have nothing to do with it. Reaching for her, I pull her into my lap, leaving most of her blanket behind.
“You don’t like this,” I repeat.
“Not at all,” she says, tilting her face up to mine. Her breathing picks up. “You’re very dangerous for my mental and emotional health. You’re also very unattractive.”
I cup her face in my hand, wishing I could erase every moment she’s been punished for her incredible selflessness.
“You have to know I’d never ask you to choose me over your sister,” I say softly, wanting to make every promise Adam never gave her. “I’d never punish you for loving her, Margot.”
Her gaze stutters up to mine. “I… I know you wouldn’t.” She swallows. “You understand what it’s like to give up everything for your family. You’d do anything for your father.”
She’s right, of course. It’s why I know I’ll be scraping whatever’s left of my heart off the airport floor when I watch her plane fly away in two weeks. So I kiss her. There’ll be plenty of time to worry about that. Right now the snow’s only getting deeper, the night’s almost gone, and I still have a very long list of ways to get her to admit she likes whateverthisis.
23MARGOT
