Page 31
I laugh. “Are you worried?” He didn’t even look worried when a very famous actress told us she was ‘gushing blood’ from her incision.
He forces his face into a less concerned shape. “No, never. I just don’t want to blow forty bucks on funnel cake for you. But come along.”
He leads me down the exit ramp, his hand moving from my shoulder to the small of my back, as if he’s suddenly convinced I’m the kind of girl prone to fainting spells.
He orders a funnel cake and two lemonades. “You were wrong before, you know,” he says to me.
“I do need to eat,” I argue. “My entire caloric intake in the past twenty-four hours has been a sip of butterbeer and a pack of Oreos last night.”
“Not that,” he replies. “What you said. That I’m only interested in the bad girls.”
He carries the funnel cake over to a spot in the shade and pushes me to sit.
“Fine,” I amend. “Not bad girls. Just temporary ones.”
He tears off a piece of funnel cake, examining it as if it’s some bizarre curiosity—a winged pig or a tomato with eyes. “Not even all that temporary,” he says. “I was engaged once upon a time, after all.”
I stop chewing, momentarily…frozen. I can’t explain why, but the fact that he was once engaged—that he wanted to spend forever with another person—makes my stomach sink.
“What happened?” I ask. The funnel cake has turned to mush in my mouth.
He lifts his head. His eyes are dark, unreadable. “I went away for a month as part of my fellowship. While I was gone, she fell in love with my dad.”
The funnel cake in my hand falls to the ground as I stare at him. I wonder if I’ve misunderstood somehow. Because it’s difficult for me to imagine how anyone with Hayes could choose someone else, but it’s impossible to imagine that someone chose his actual birth parent. “Your dad?” I ask. “Your real dad.”
He nods, putting the funnel cake in his mouth at last. “He’s a movie producer, extremely wealthy. And still relatively young, since he was only twenty when I was born. It was everything she wanted.”
He doesn’t sound bothered by any of this. He could be discussing his taxes for all the emotion in his voice.
“But your dad,” I repeat. “I mean, who does that? And what more did she want?”
He shrugs. “She accused me, when she left, of not loving anyone as much as I love myself.”
I hate her, this insane stranger who left the man beside me for his own father and was an asshole about it to boot. I hate her in a way that I never hated the actress Matt cheated with, hate her more than I ever even hated Matt. I don’t understand how he can just accept it all. “That’s a pretty bitter thing to say to someone you’re leaving, especially under those circumstances.”
He swallows. “She wasn’t wrong. I’d lost a patient and I was floundering, not sure if I wanted to stay in medicine at all, more consumed with my own shit than hers. And I was still finishing my fellowship back then, making nothing, so it’s not as if there was any other benefit to sticking around.”
I’m still so dumbfounded I can barely respond. I wonder if it’s why he’s in that ridiculous house—if it’s some Great Gatsby-esque attempt to prove his worth to her.
“It sounds like you actually forgave them,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t see how.”
He wipes his hands on a napkin. Apparently one bite of funnel cake was enough. “I was forced to learn a few hard truths about myself, and I got a little sister out of it, so it’s not all bad.”
My mouth opens, and he holds up a hand. “Before you suggest that I not write off an entire enterprise based on one bad experience, allow me to remind you, you’ve done the same thing.”
He swipes some powdered sugar off my upper lip with his thumb, small laugh lines forming at the corners of his eyes as he does it. There’s so much affection in the look he gives me, so much sweetness, that my heart breaks for him even more. He’s taken that bitter parting shot of hers and made it his motto, embraced the idea that he isn’t loving or loveable, when nothing could be further from the truth.
If he was mine, I’d have held on with everything I had.
* * *
When we’ve hit every ride and eaten a year’s worth of junk food (which, for the record, Hayes completely enjoyed even if he wouldn’t admit it), we head home. After the heat of the day and all the walking, the passenger seat and air conditioning are all I need to be lulled to sleep. When my eyes open, we’re in front of his house.
“It’s about time you woke up,” he says. “The neighbors are probably calling the cops to report a comatose teenager in my driveway.”
I yawn. “They’d have placed that call years ago if they were going to. So how will you spend the rest of your day off?”
“The sky’s the limit,” he replies. We both climb from the car. I’m strangely reluctant to leave.
