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“I thought you weren’t into Theo.”
My stomach drops. “I’m not. I wasn’t. Ever.”
“But you’re saying,” he says slowly, “in some version of the past, you made out with him?”
“For like a minute.”
He rubs his hands over his face. “I’m not even sure if this happened, but you certainly seem to think it did.”
“I know it sounds impossible, I get that, but it did. I was feeling sad and desperate. It wasn’t great, he was really cold afterward, and I immediately regretted it. I don’t—”
“Sad and desperate over what?”
“You, partly. And just the state of my life.”
“So you made a wish for the universe to show you what would make you happy and—” He shakes his head. “I’m the result of that? I’m the prize at the end of the game?”
“I mean,” I start, stumbling, “Yes—I mean no, but—”
“Why not just tell me how you felt? That seems, I don’t know, a million times easier?”
“Because I was scared. Because I’ve known you my whole life and didn’t want to ruin it. Because I assumed you weren’t interested in me. But being sent back to the plane over and over made me realize I didn’t care if I failed. I had to try.”
“So which Mae is real? The one who goes for what she wants, or the one who makes out with my brother when she’s afraid of facing her real feelings and then wishes it away?”
“This one. The one right here, telling you that I want this to happen with you.”
“I need—” he starts, and slides his hands down his face. When he looks up at me, even in the low light I can tell that the glow in his eyes is flattened, like a candle has been blown out. “I need you to give me some space.”
His words leave a ringing silence in the cold, cavernous room. My stomach dissolves away, painfully acidic. “Andrew. It wasn’t—”
“Mae,” he says very calmly, “don’t. Don’t make it sound like it isn’t a big deal. You made out with Theo because you’d decided—without ever even talking to me—that you and I weren’t going to happen. Whether you’re remembering something from a dream, or you hit your head or—I don’t know—you’re somehow repeating time, don’t make it seem like it’s not totally strange that you think you and Theo actually—” He stops abruptly, unable to finish the sentence. “And then instead of dealing with your life the way it is, you—make a wish?” Frustrated, Andrew rakes a hand through his hair. “God. I can’t even process this—whatever this is.”
“Andrew,” I start, and there’s a waver in my voice that I have to work to swallow down. “It’s not like there wasn’t a weird sense of fate for you here, too. You told me about the tarot cards.”
“Oh, come on, Mae, of course we know that’s bullshit.”
A tiny fire ignites. “What’s happening to me isn’t bullshit—whether you believe me or not.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think destiny includes kissing one brother and then the other.”
“How many ways can I say that was a mistake?”
He bends, scrubbing his face with a hand. “I think you have more feelings for Theo than you’re admitting.”
His vulnerability here makes me ache. “Andrew, I know you’re having a hard time believing this, and I realize that what I’m telling you doesn’t help my case here, but no. There’s nothing there for me. I think I got another chance to make it right. And maybe also to save the cabin.”
He laughs, but it isn’t an Andrew laugh I’ve ever heard before. It’s a hollow husk of a laugh. “You need to get over your savior thing with the cabin.”
Ouch. I try to string together a few words in response, but my brain has gone blank with hurt.
“This is so weird,” he says, mostly to himself, and then he pushes out of the sleeping bag and walks back along our trail of clothes, picking them up as he goes. Gently, he places mine in a pile in front of me, and starts pulling on his boxers, his pants, his shirt, sweater, socks.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” he says quietly. “You should probably head back up to the house.”
And . . . that’s it.
I get dressed in mortified silence. I want Andrew to watch like he did last night, with his hands tucked behind his head and a sleepy, satisfied smile on his face. But he turns his back to me, bent over his phone. When I move wordlessly to the door, he follows, walking me back to the house. I’m not surprised, though I’m heartbroken. Andrew knows I’m afraid of the dark and even when he’s mad at me—even when I’m pretty sure we just ended things—he’s still the best man I’ve ever known.
chapter twenty-four
Another sleepless night.
I vacillate wildly, staring up at Theo’s bunk in the darkness with an odd mixture of mortification and anger. My gut says I shouldn’t have told Andrew what happened with Theo, but my gut has always been an idiot. This is the kind of thing I’d have to share with him eventually, right? Isn’t that what people do when they care about each other? They share their flaws and mistakes just as readily as they share their strengths?
