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“Every day.”
She wondered if this was a mistake, showing him her pain so he could see they had the same scars. It didn’t feel like a mistake.
“She’s my best friend,” she said. “We should talk more. I should call her more, but …” She scraped the toe of her sneaker against the wood of the porch. “Sometimes we’re busy, but the truth is I feel like I should be happier. I left her in Indiana to come here, and I’m afraid the more we talk, the more she’ll know I didn’t have a good enough reason.”
Nick didn’t answer immediately; she knew he was chewing it over. “Do you want to go back?” he asked.
“I can’t,” she said. “Kevin’s got a job, I’ll be getting a job—”
“If it was just about you,” he said. “If everybody in your life would be happy with you doing exactly what you wanted to do, would you go back to Icarus?”
Hayley thought of how much she’d cried—and worse, how often she’d cried alone.
“No,” she said quietly.
“So you know you left for a good reason.”
“Yes. Maybe.”
A pause. “I don’t know if I’m making things better or worse.”
She smiled. “Better. Always better, rock star.”
“Notalwaysbetter.”
Hayley sighed. “You had a spotless record before me, didn’t you?” She sat down. “You honestly don’t know how to handle people not liking you.”
“I wouldn’t sayspotless.”
“What would you say?”
He spoke carefully. “The more I get to know you, the more it bothers me that I ever gave you a reason not to like me.”
“Nick.” She was gentle. “All the bad stuff makes the good stuff sweeter.”
She barely heard him chuckle over the ambient noise of the car.
“Weirdest thing,” he said after a moment. “I was jealous of Gavin earlier.”
“How come?”
“I was backing out of the driveway, and I’m watching him kind of jog up the front steps of their house, and then I’m thinking he probably didn’t even notice the steps. I would’ve needed a couple extra minutes and someone to lean on.”
“Sure.”
“It’s not a big … I mean, that’s as itshouldbe, right? Because he shouldn’t be thinking of me all the time or how those steps are harder for me, or … I’m saying the Becketts have a life.”
“Sure,” she said again. “I hear you.”
“It’s just that every time I drive away from their place, it’s like I can feel the distance growing. Like their life goes on in their house while I’m living my life driving home, and we’ll always be on separate tracks. Even if I lived with them, we’d still be separate.” He sounded frustrated. “Does that make sense?”
More than he knew.
“There’s this movie where these ghosts are bound to this kid,” she said. “They have to follow him around, but they can’t hug him. I used to feel like that a lot, like I was some special kind of ghost. Like even though I could hug people, it wasn’t the same as what other people did. I was in the same room, but I wasn’t sharing the same space somehow.”
“Yes.Exactly,” Nick said. “What’d you do about it?”
“I held on to Kevin and left Indiana.”
