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But I shook my head. “Go ahead and sleep in. Jess can put in some work in the morning to earn that ride back to her car. Just try to get some rest.”
His and Jason’s footsteps faded away as they went inside and trudged up the stairs. I wondered if Jess was already asleep, or if she was lying awake, disobeying me…
Or if she was awake, adhering to my orders and suffering for it. That was a nice thought.
“Are we really getting wrapped up in this again?” Lucas said. His shoulders were hunched as he stared across the yard. I passed the cigarette, wrapping my arm around his back.
After a moment, I said, “No. We’re not getting wrapped up in anything.”
He hunched a little more. “Yeah? Why is she sleeping in our house, then?”
“Because I’m not sending her walking home alone in the dark, Lucas. You wouldn’t either.”
He grumbled something, flicking what remained of the cigarette into the dirt and stubbing it out.
“Look, Jessica likes to pretend her life isn’t going to be the dull suburban dream her parents set her up for,” I said. “So she riles people up, gets the reaction she wants, and dips. That’s how it goes. That’s how it’salwaysgone.”
“Might go differently if we were a little pushier about it.”
I looked over at him in surprise, but I’d thought the same thing. None of us had everpursuedJessica — we simply ended up thrown together, clashing like billiard balls knocked aimlessly around a table. It wasn’t from lack of desire, it was from simple realism. She wasn’t meant for us. She didn’t exist in our world; she visited it, had a look around like a tacky tourist, and left the moment it got too real for her.
She was the girl we couldn’t have, no matter how close she got. Despite the games we played, the decision was hers in the end. It was her choice.
And the choice was never us. It couldn’t be us.
“There’s nothing to push for,” I said, as if it were really that simple. “She’s going to get out of Wickeston and move on to bigger and better things. She’ll find some good-looking dumbass who fits her aesthetic, get married in a flashy ceremony, and spend the next twenty years having boring sex and becoming best friends with her vibrator, before she divorces him in a mid-life crisis. She’ll be that chick who moves to Vegas for a fresh start and constantly tells everyone about who she was in high school. That’s it. Nousinvolved.”
His chest rumbled slightly, and when I looked over, he was chuckling. “You’ve got it so bad. You have a whole fantasy life laid out for this woman and you can’t even manage a little self-insert? You can’t add a littlewhat-ifin there?”
I was too tired for this conversation. “I thought you didn’t want to get involved, so why do you care?”
“Because I can’t stand to see you so fucking torn up over it,” he said. “You can’t let it go. It’s been years of this shit, and you still can’t stop.”
In the illumination from the porch’s light, I noticed something on his neck that I hadn’t earlier: scratches. Long red scratches, doubtlessly from someone’s long pink nails.
I traced my finger over one of them. “You get into a fight with a cat today?” I said, and he scoffed.
“Don’t start.”
“Hey, I didn’t start anything. You’re the one who drove her off in your car and fucked around.”
“We didn’t fuck around. Much.” He added that last word with a sardonic glance in my direction. “At least I didn’t carve a damn heart into her finger.”
I shoved the back of his head as I got up. “I’m going to bed before I carve you up too. Don’t stay out here all night.”
“I won’t.” He waved me away, and I had my hand on the door when he suddenly said, “Hey, Manson?”
“Yeah?”
“What if she wanted to?”
I turned back, my hand still gripping the doorknob. “Wanted to what?”
“What if she wanted to…you know…” He was trying so hard to sound casual. “What if she wanted to get involved? With us?”
I took a deep breath.
“What if she wanted to get involved with us…” I repeated the words slowly, mulling them over as I had so many times.Toomany times. “What if she admitted she’d been wrong all along and wanted to give this a try? What if she said she’d been hiding her true feelings because she was scared of rejection, but she was ready to throw all that away? What if she woke up tomorrow andchanged her whole life to be with us? Damn her mother, fuck her friends, forget her plans. What if?” I shook my head, wrenching open the door. “That’s way too many what-ifs for me.”
