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“She’s right.”
“What?” Turning in my seat, I see his jaw has set again, and it terrifies me.
“She’s right. Mila, I don’t know much about anything.”
“Are you kidding me? You’re brilliant. You were teaching me about String Theory just this morning.”
“Yeah, because I researched it for a movie.”
“Yeah, and last week it was the history of the NRA and the Irish Mob.”
“All for movies,” he repeats as if I’m not getting it.
“So,” I say in both reply and question. “What does that matter?”
“I read on a tenth-grade level. I’m not…I’m not a lot of things. She’s right.”
“Lucas, you don’t really think that.”
He speeds up. My parents are only a forty-minute drive from my house, but it feels like a small and silent eternity when we finally pull up in front of my cottage. Lucas sits idle while I study his face. “Come in,” I say, opening my door, but I know it’s in vain. Inside my chest, just around the lodged bullet delivered by my own mother, tiny pieces of me are starting to fracture in a web-like pattern around it. He’s got his hand on the top of the wheel, his eyes bleary when he speaks.
“You know, I spent the night after our first date looking up what your degree meant. I had no fucking clue.”
“Most people don’t.”
“But some do.” He glances at me. “Isn’t that the type for you?”
“Come on, Lucas, she spoke out of her ass. She’s a horrible woman, and I’ll never talk to her again after this.”
He shakes his head. “Not true, you two talk often.”
“I love you,” I insist. “Right now, I don’t love her.” But he’s not hearing me.
A sad smile lifts the corner of his mouth. “I stayed up until four in the morning watching The Graduate, so I would know about it the next time you brought it up, but you never did.”
My heart sinks as he turns to me with a resignation that starts to tear me apart. Another crack, and then another, the web expanding across the whole of me threatening to shatter like glass.
More confession spills from his lips as I sit stunned. “That night at the pyramids, when I got upset, it wasn’t because I was tired.” He swallows audibly. “It was because I’d been trying to impress you and instead, you fucking schooled me.”
“It’s just stuff I learned in geography and other stuff I picked up.”
“Your mother is right, you’d be marrying down. And I do know it, I’ve always known it.”
“Jesus, Lucas, who said anything about marriage?”
“I just did,” he snaps without missing a beat, before scrutinizing my reaction. “Was that never a thought for you? Fuck, am I completely wrong about this, about us?”
“No, Lucas, God, no, I just, I didn’t think…”
“Think what?” he asks testily. “That I’m capable of marriage?”
“Stop. I’m not her, stop putting words in my mouth.”
“You look at me the way she does sometimes, like I’m an idiot.”
“Yeah, well, I hope you’re getting that look from me right now because you’re acting like one!”
He goes on as if he’s stuck in his own headspace instead of our conversation. “Maybe I fooled myself. Maybe we both did.”
