“Believe it or not, I don’t just sit through hours of conversations with you silently judging you. And if it takes me a while to tell you things like ‘Hey, my wife left me for my college roommate,’ maybe it has nothing to do with you, okay? Maybe it’s because I don’t like saying that sentence aloud. I mean, your mom didn’t leave when your dad cheated on her, and my mom didn’t leave my dad when he broke my fucking arm, and yet I couldn’t do anything to make my wife stay.”

My stomach bottomed out. My throat clenched. Pain stabbed through my chest. It all made sense at once: the hesitancy and deflection, the mistrust of people, the fear of commitment.

No one had chosen Gus. From the time he was a kid, no one had chosen him, and he was embarrassed by that, like it meant something about him. I wanted to tell him it didn’t. That it wasn’t because he was broken, but because everyone else was. But I couldn’t get any words out. I couldn’t do anything but stare at him—standing there, out of steam, his chest rising and falling with heavy breaths—and ache for him and hate the world a little for chewing him up.

Right then, I honestly didn’t care why he’d disappeared or where he’d gone.

The hard glint had left his eyes and his chin dropped as he rubbed at his forehead.

There were millions of things I wanted to say to him, but what came out was, “Parker?”

He looked up again, eyes wide and mouth ajar. “What?”

“Your college roommate,” I murmured. “Do you mean Parker?”

Gus’s mouth closed, the muscles along his jaw leaping. “Yeah,” he barely said. “Parker.”

Parker, the art student with the eccentric clothes. Parker, who’d picked most of his left eyebrow away. He’d had pretty blue eyes and a certain zaniness that my friends and I had always imagined translated to a golden-retriever-esque excitability when it came to sex. Which we were all fairly sure he was getting a lot of.

Gus wasn’t looking at me. He was rubbing his forehead again, looking as broken and embarrassed as I’d felt thirty seconds ago.

“On your birthday. What an asshole.”

I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until he responded: “I mean, that wasn’t her plan.” He looked away, staring vaguely through the parking lot. “I sort of dragged it out of her. I could tell something was wrong and … anyway.”

Still an asshole, I thought. I shook my head. I had no idea what else to say. I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around him, pressing my face into his neck, feeling his deep breaths push against me. After a moment, his arms lifted around me and we stood there, just out of reach of the parking lot’s lone floodlight, holding on to each other.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into his skin. “She should have picked you.” And I meant it, even if I wasn’t sure exactly which she I was talking about.

His arms tightened around my back. His mouth and nose pressed against the crown of my head, and inside, a mournful Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young cover picked up, guitar twanging like its strings were crying. Gus rocked me side to side. “I want to know you,” I told him.

“I want that,” he murmured into my hair. We stood there for another moment before he spoke again. “It’s late. We should grab some coffee inside so we can get home.”

I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to pull away from Gus. “Sure.”

He eased back from me and his hand ran down my throat, resting on the crook between my neck and shoulder, his rough thumb catching the edge of my collarbone. He shook his head once. “I’ve never thought you were stupid.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say, and even if I had been, I wasn’t sure if my voice would come out thick and heavy, like my blood felt, or shaky and high, like my stomach did.

Gus’s eyes dipped to my mouth, then rose to my eyes. “I thought—think it’s brave to believe in love. I mean, the lasting kind. To try for that, even knowing it can hurt you.”

“And what about you?”

“What about me?” he murmured.

I needed to clear my throat but I didn’t. It would be too obvious, what I was thinking, how I was feeling. “You don’t think you ever will again?”

Gus stepped back, shoes crackling against the gravel. “It doesn’t matter if I believe it can work or not,” he said. “Not believing in something doesn’t stop you from wanting it. If you’re not careful.”

His gaze sent heat unfurling over me, the cold snapping painfully back into place against my skin when he finally turned back toward the bar. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get that coffee.”

Careful. Caution was something I had little of when it came to Gus Everett.

Case in point: my hangover the next morning.

I awoke to my first text from him.

It said only Ow.

18

The Ex

THERE WERE NO more nights on our separate decks. On Sunday Gus came to my house looking like he’d started going through a trash compactor only for it to spit him back up halfway through. I felt at least as bad as he looked.

We put the chaise lounges on the deck flat and lay out there with ice packs on our heads, chugging the bottles of Gatorade he’d brought over. “Did you write?” he asked.

“Whenever I picture words, I literally gag.”

Beside me, Gus coughed. “That word,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“Should we order pizza?” he asked.

“Are you kidding? You almost just—”

“January,” Gus said. “Don’t say that word. Just answer the question.”

“Of course we should.”

By Monday, we’d mostly recovered. At least enough that we were both working at our own tables during the day (two thousand words hammered out on my end). Around 1:40, Gus held up the first note of the day: I TEXTED YOU.

I REMEMBER, I wrote back. A HISTORIC MOMENT IN OUR FRIENDSHIP.

NO, he said. I TEXTED YOU A MINUTE AGO.

I’d left my phone charging by the bed. I held up my pointer finger as I hurried from the room and grabbed my phone. The text just said, Do you know how to make a margarita?

Gus, I typed back. This is fewer words than the notes you wrote me to tell me about this message.

He responded immediately: I wanted to put in a formal request. Writing notes is a very casual form of communication.

I don’t know how to make a margarita, I told him. But I know someone who does.

Jose Cuervo? he asked.

I pulled open the blinds and leaned out the window, yelling toward the back of our houses, where the kitchen windows were. “GOOGLE.”

My phone buzzed with his response: Come over. I tried not to notice what those words did to me, the full-body shiver, the heat.

I went back for my computer and walked over barefoot. Gus met me on his porch, leaned against the doorjamb.

“Do you ever stand upright?” I asked.

“Not if it can be helped,” he answered, and led me into his kitchen. I sat on a stool at the island as he pulled out the limes then went into the front room for his shaker, tequila, and triple sec. “Please, don’t trouble yourself to help,” he teased.

“Don’t worry. I would never.”

When he’d finished making our drinks we went out onto the front porch and worked until the last streaks of sunshine had vanished into that deep Michigan blue, the stars pricking through it like poked holes, one at a time. When our stomachs started to gurgle, I went back to my house for the rest of the pizza and we ate it cold, our legs outstretched, feet resting on the porch railing.