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“This is your baby?” I whisper.
“No, he’s not.”
“He…he has your eyes.”Am I wrong?
“Yeah, he looks a bit like me…but he’s not biologically mine. That’s Ripley Hale.”
Hale.It’s unlikely he’s my parents’ kid, so only one thing really makes sense.
“As in…?” I can’t even finish. Tears well. Overwhelmed tears. Happy but also sad that I’veforgottenthis monumental moment in my brother’s life. The brother I’m the closest to. “Moffy has a son.” I wipe at my wet cheeks. “He has a husbandanda son…when he said he’d never have either.” He sacrifices so much for others, I never thought he’d choose a family of his own. I’m so happy for my brother, but the mourning of this memory tries to swallow me whole.
Donnelly passes me tissues, but he seems like he’d rather do more. Struggling to stay seated, he’s rooting his hands on his kneecaps. I zero in on the dried blood and broken skin along his knuckles.
“Were you there tonight?” I ask after blowing my nose. “Or…maybe it wasn’t tonight. Last night? Whenever I hit my head.”
“Time’s a little fucked up for me too,” he admits. “I wasn’t there for the whole thing.” I see how he’s lookingintome. I crave to reach that expression, to understand and know and feel, but it’s like my fingers are pressed to frosted glass and he’s stranded on the other side.
Or maybe I’m the one isolated and marooned.
“What are we?” I whisper.
It blows him back. He looks to the ceiling, then the wall, trying to hide his face in every direction.
Maybe I didn’t ask that right. I blink a ton. “Are you…my boyfriend?”
Donnelly runs a hand against his neck. “Not exactly.” He returns to my gaze. “We were hoping…but we didn’t get there yet.”
Oh.I search my brain, but nothing is there to unscramble. I keep thinking this new info will crop up a puzzle piece, a memory, but I can’t fill the missing picture if my mind is empty.
“You said…you said you were partly there tonight,” I say softly. “Does that mean you know about…?”
“About?”
I shouldn’t ask him. I could ask anyone else, but if Original Luna hoped to be with Donnelly, then maybe confiding in him is what she would do, most of all. And isn’t she still me?
“I can’t remember anything about what happened, and I had a rape kit done. And they said it came back…I just want to know if you saw anything or—”
“You weren’t raped,” he cuts in and then reaches out a hand.He’s holding my hand.I like how he encases my palm. It slows my racing pulse.
But I blink, emotions barreling towards me at full speed. “Uh-uh, that doesn’t make sense. I’m a virgin. And they said the test came back…” My voice tapers off at the way he’s staring at me. He’s offering the answers in his eyeballs.
I want to scoop them out. Eat them up. Metaphorically. He’d probably think I was a total freak if I mentioned that out loud.
“I….” I grapple for words.
“You aren’t a virgin, Luna,” he says, helping me out.
When did I lose my virginity?I gasp for breath a little. How is this possible?Three years.I’m missing three years!
He adds, “We had sex.”
“We had sex?” Shock widens my eyes.
I had sex. With Donnelly?
Whoa.Whoaaa.I give him a short once-over. I can hardly believe that happened. He’s so much older, probably twenty-six…or twenty-eight? I’m older too, I know, and maybe he’s more experienced. It wouldn’t stop me or bother me. But no way would my dad be understanding of that age-gap. Maybe he doesn’t know.
Donnelly clarifies, “The morning before all of this”—his eyes flit around the hospital room, then back to me— “we had consensual sex. So whatever bodily fluids they found in that exam, they were from me.”
