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“Sounds boring as fuck.”
Nolan laughed to cover the sting of truth. His life wasn’t as dangerous as it had been when he’d been with Donati’s Syndicate, but that didn’t mean he was bored.
Did it?
“I prefer to think of it as growing up,” Nolan said.
“You sure you’re not just asleep?”
Nolan looked at him, his old rage, his dearest friend, fighting to be let loose. “What’s with you tonight? You trying to get me to throw a punch?”
Will sighed and turned his eyes to the mirror behind the bar. “You already did that, remember?” He paused. “You just seem checked out.”
“I’m not checked out,” Nolan said. “I’m steady. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” Nolan didn’t say anything and Will continued. “I miss it, man. I miss you.”
Nolan swallowed the lump in his throat. “I miss it too.”
He’d already dropped out of law school when he met Bridget, had already joined the Syndicate, thinking it would help him figure out how to be a man. She’d been sitting on a blanket on the dried grass at Ramsey Park, readingCases and Materials on Constitutional Law, her brow furrowed in concentration. Nolan had recognized the textbook, but it had only warranted passing attention in the face of the woman reading it.
She’d been wearing some kind of short striped dress that was obviously a waitress uniform, her name tag announcing her — BRIDGET — as if he needed to know anything but the way the light caught her hair, the lump that formed in his throat when he looked at her.
He’d fallen a little in love with her on the spot, a feeling that only grew as he got to know her over the next few months. She was studious and shy, slogging her way through school part-time while she worked an assortment of odd jobs, determined to help her parents, to make the world a better place.
He’d been surprised to find out Will knew her from school, had known her most of his life, even if they hadn’t been close. They’d fallen immediately into an easy camaraderie, the three of them hanging out at The Chipp, watching Little League games in Ramsey Park, and swinging on the playground into the early morning hours.
Bridget loved Southie, loved its little groceries that had been in the same family for four generations, loved the pubs like The Chipp where everyone knew the drunk neighborhood dads emerging at two a.m., counting on someone to come along and get them home.
She’d made Nolan see the honesty in it, the heart, an observation that had made his own house — an historic brownstone on Beacon Hill — seem fake and stuffy. It was a place where one didn’t put one’s feet on the coffee table, where one didn’t take off one’s shoes until they went to bed at night, where one dressed for dinner and never came down to breakfast in one’s pajamas.
Bridget’s family walked around in their pajamas whenever they wanted to, sometimes until noon on a Saturday. They lay on the couch to watch TV and set their drinks on an old coffee table with rings from drinks past. They talked too loud, laughed too much, shouted when they were angry. It had been real in a way that had been unfamiliar to Nolan, different even from his grandparents’ tidy, quiet house two streets over.
He’d wanted to be better for her. He’d even asked her once if she thought he should go back to law school, but she’d only said that he should do what made him happy — and what made him happy was being with her and Will, pretending he was just like them. It had lasted almost three years, right up until Bridget dumped him.
The Syndicate had fallen shortly thereafter, another sign that it was time for him to move on, time to go back to school, much to his mother’s delight.
“You ever think about calling her?”
Will’s question pulled him from the past.
“No.” Nolan spoke too quickly, the ever-ready answer to a question he’d asked himself too many times.
“You’re not curious?”
“There’s nothing to be curious about,” Nolan said, his eyes on the bar. “She was crystal clear.”
It’s over, Nolan… I don’t love you anymore… It was never going to work…
He’d fought her at first, but then he’d seen the glint in her eyes, the shine of determination that he’d come to know so well.
It was too late. She’d already made up her mind.
Will sighed. “Still… sometimes things change.”
“They do,” Nolan agreed. “They did. They just didn’t change the way we wanted them to.”
He stood and rested a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Want a ride?”
