He’s shouting after me, sputtering words, but I don’t hear them. I find the door, push it open, and walk through the crowded bar and out to my car.
* * *
The driveback to Ian’s is quick, which is good. I’m emotionally spent, which is why, when Ian asks how my night was, I promptly burst into tears. “I’m so dumb.”
“Whoa, hold up, Willa. What are you talking about? You are not dumb.”
“I am, Ian. I am when it comes to him.”
“Him? Who? Who were you with tonight, honey? Who the hell upset you?” My sweet friend looks fierce.
“I knew it. I knew I should have stayed away. He said he wanted nothing to do with us. He said awful things when I told him I was pregnant.” I’m crying and snotty, and somehow, I find myself on the couch with a blanket and a cup of tea—those are Ian’s cures for just about everything.
“Wait? You saw Rose’s dad?”
I nod, sniffling. “Tonight.”
“Where? You don’t have to tell me, of course, but you never talk about him. I didn’t know he lived around here.”
“I didn’t either. God. I had no idea, or I’d have never moved here. But he does. And I ran into him yesterday and we met up tonight.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No. No, he’d never hurt me. Not physically.”
“Emotional hurt is abuse too, honey.”
“I know,” I nod. “But it’s not like that. He just...messes with my head. Tonight, he seemed like himself again. Like the Knox I fell so hard for. But how can that be? How can he be two totally different people?”
Ian looks like he's seen a ghost. “Whoa, time out. What did you say his name was?”
“Knox. Knox Gallagher.”
“Fucking hell.” He walks into the kitchen and reaches for the orange liquor on top of the fridge. Resuming his seat on the couch next to me, he pours a generous amount into his teacup, then gestures to mine. “Feel like pumping and dumping tonight?”
I shake my head. “No, I need to keep my mind clear.”
“Fair enough, but I need a drink for the conversation we’re about to have.”
I burrow into the couch, sitting crisscross applesauce, and twining my fingers into the throw blanket on my lap. “You know Knox?”
“Yea. Everyone does,” he says, and I wince, thinking back to the girl kneeling in front of him yesterday.
“He and his friends are a little notorious on campus, I guess you could say. They live at the old chapel on the edge of campus. Booker, that’s one of his buddies, is Bainbridge royalty. His great-great-great-great grandfather founded the school. Those four guys—Booker, Whit, Knox, and Ty—have a reputation. They’re all good-looking as hell, they have more money than they know what to do with, and they seem a little untouchable, I guess? I’ve gotten to know his friends over the last few months, and honestly, they're good people, but Knox and I have never really gotten along.”
I look at Ian, a little surprised. He’s so easygoing that I can’t imagine him having beef with someone unless they’d done something really wrong, or unless they were hateful or judgmental. And though Knox is clearly the king of mixed signals, I can’t see him being homophobic or anything like that.
Ian smiles wryly. “I don’t hate him or anything. He just annoys the crap out of me, and the feeling is mutual. We just rub each other the wrong way, I guess you could say. He was in my Psych Seminar last year—he took a senior level class as a freshman because he’s cocky as shit. And he just walks around with this huge chip on his shoulder. Anyway, he’d spout off in class like he knew what he was talking about, and none of us had any clue, though we'd all been studying Psych for four years, while he barely cracked a textbook.”
“The cocky thing I can definitely see,” I say, thinking back to the way he approached me in our high school auditorium a million years ago. “But he’s really smart. And his childhood was rough. He’s got a million issues, and I remember him saying something about an endless stream of therapists, so I’m sure he had a lot to contribute to the conversation.”
“Far be it from me to judge, but it just pissed me the hell off that he had no regard for the studies or the research. Hell, half the time it seemed like he’d barely done the reading, but he wanted us to consider him a freaking expert since he’d been through some shit.”
“But he really had—” I rush to say. “We didn’t get into it, but I know his mom did a number on him, and his dad was never in the picture.”
“I heard rumors that he had it tough at home,” Ian takes a sip of his doctored tea. “I guess the tipping point for me was when he was picked to be on a panel. It was unheard of—he was a freshman. But he’s smart and can be charming when he wants to be, so he was chosen to help evaluate the senior studies. Anyway...the day of? He was nowhere to be found. He never showed up. I heard he got trashed at a party and by the time he woke up, all our presentations were over. So, you could say he didn’t make a great impression on me.”
I wince. “I can see why. But at his very core, he is—or at least, hewas, a great guy. I just don’t know what happened to him.”
