Page 81 of The Pleasure of Panic

“If you leave tomorrow, I want to go with you.”

“Why?” I ask. “I mean, we’ve known each other one day, Finn. One. Day.”

“I don’t care,” he says. “You make all the sense to me, Issy. It’s like… all the questions I have about my life, what I’m doing, where I’m headed, why I’m here… they were like a cloud. A mist. Something intangible, like an obscure haze that had no definition. And then you come into my life and suddenly, all those stray particles coalesced and became something real.”

We both think about that for a little bit. I picture him in my head. Standing in something that looks like a cloud slowly moving around at his feet. And then it begins to move quicker, spin faster, until I appear—an apparition made of water molecules or some other life-giving element—and become his reality.

It’s a beautiful vision, even I have to admit that. Like a line of poetry.

But there’s this little nagging question in the back of my head. This feeling that something is wrong here. Not him. I believe him when he says we have this connection.

But what of the mist that wasn’t me? All those particles still left behind?

What of that?

“If you leave with me you’ll be on the run too.”

“I’ve been on the run since the moment my father handed me that box on graduation day, I just didn’t realize it.”

“Will they come looking for you?”

“Who is they?” he asks.

“Them, the Bureau. Them, the Mob. Whoever. Who’ll miss you if you run, Finn? I guess that’s the question I’m asking.”

He thinks about this for a long time. A long time. And then he says, “You know what I hate about stories?”

I’m more than a little confused at the topic change, but that’s overridden by my own curiosity at where this might be going. “Stories as in books?”

“Or movies,” he says.

“What?” I ask. “What do you hate?”

“The endings.” He pulls me tight against his chest and I take him in. His scent, the curve of his biceps as I trace my finger down the length of his arm. His large hands. “I never get the endings.”

“What do you mean? You don’t like them?”

“No, I like a good ending as much as anyone. But I don’t get them. Because there’s no end to a story. Just because you run out of pages doesn’t make it the end. So I get to the end of a movie or a book and I think… I feel like I was cheated, ya know?”

“OK. I’ve read some good endings. Seen a few movies that leave me satisfied when they’re over. But I get what you’re saying. And I guess the author or movie director just wants people to make that part up.”

“Right,” he says, playing with my hair, twisting the dark strands around in his fingers, looking at me thoughtfully as he does this. “Just make it up. That’s my whole point. We’re making all this up, Issy. Every second of our lives we’re creating our own reality.”

“What’s that got to do with people missing you if you leave?”

“Those people don’t count unless I let them count. So yeah, I guess the Bureau might wonder where the fuck I went. In fact”—he laughs—“I know they will. And I guess the Mob will be more than a little interested, if only because they want to know what my future looks like as it pertains to them. But that story is over now. They’re at the end and there’s no more pages, there’s no more film to see. Because this is my story, not theirs.”

“It’s deep,” I say, after giving his answer some consideration. “But not what I was looking for, exactly. So I’ll rephrase the question. What will those people do if you disappear with me?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - FINN

I know what she’s asking .

And she knows I’m evading.

So it comes down to this. Do I give her what she’s looking for and scare her away? Or do I let it ride and see how far we get?

I’m still trying to decide when she says, “You know what Jordan told me? Last night when we were discussing the game?”