Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [101]
“It’s so weird,” I said. “This reminds me of another picture. One of my best friend and her older brother. He’s struggling to hold her up, just like you’re struggling with Marcus. And she’s screaming her head off, too.”
“Hope and Heath,” Hugo said.
“Oh, right,” I said dumbly. “You know them. I forgot.”
“I didn’t know him too well,” he said.
“And her?” I was curious to hear what he remembered.
“Well, Hope and Marcus were best friends as little kids.”
I tried to breathe normally, but gulped down more oxygen than any normally breathing person should.
“Something wrong?” Hugo asked.
I shook my head. “Go on,” I gurgled.
“I didn’t pay much attention to them, but they were cute together, you know.”
“Actually, I don’t know.”
“They were like little playmates in the sandbox,” he said. He shook his head with amusement. “But you know, Marcus has always been a lover….”
I tried to sound casual. “Really?”
“I can remember him running home from school one day—he must have been about ten years old. He was all excited because he had kissed Hope behind the backstop on the playground. It was his first kiss and he was shouting so loud that the whole neighborhood could hear. ‘On the lips! On the lips!’ Like it was the most amazing thing in the world. Like he had invented kissing on the lips.”
(“Sometimes it did feel as if we have invented it and all intimacies. Our bodies surging and retreating in innumerable positions and countless combinations for us and us alone…”)
Hugo was still chuckling. I was choking on too much air.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re not jealous?”
The truck hit a smooth stretch of recently paved road, and the rumble of the tires shushed themselves.
“Of course not!” I insisted in a voice that was too loud for the sudden drop in noise.
We pulled up to the small station house, and Hugo shifted into park. My bus idled at the curb, scheduled to pull away in five minutes. He turned his whole body to look at me, and I caught another whiff of winter-fresh smoke.
“Well.” I chewed on my bottom lip for a second, then gestured toward the bus. “The Port Authority Express waits for no one, so…”
It was the sorriest of made-up excuses. I didn’t have to take that particular bus back to New York. I could have taken the next one, or the one after that. Or I could have accepted Hugo’s offer to drive me all the way back home. I could have tried, over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour ride home, with his help, to unravel the messy tangles of our relationship.
But I didn’t. I thanked your brother for the ride, told him I was glad to have finally met him, and wished him a safe drive back to Maine. He responded in kind, thanking me for the company and conversation, assuring me that the pleasure was all his.
My hand rested on the door handle.
“I love your brother,” I said.
“I know you do,” he said.
I tugged the handle, he tugged my sleeve.
“I also know that he’s not an easy person to love.”
I was off-balance, one foot on the ground, the other still inside the truck. “I’ve got the opposite problem.”
“What’s that?”
I planted my other foot on the pavement.
“I love him too easily.”
I always have. And probably still will, and still do wherever you’re reading this right now.
sixty
I’m back at the empty apartment. I headed straight for the Cupcake, belly-flopped onto the bottom bunk, then glanced up out of habit. I was eager to see a new Tiger Beat centerfold signifying that everything was going to be just fine with me and Hope, but it’s still Marty McFly, as it had been when I had left:
YOU CAN TAKE ME “BACK TO THE FUTURE” ANYTIME.
I’m feeling really out of my body right now, as if I really had time-warped back to the future in a pimped-out DeLorean instead of returning to the city in a no-frills