Wanting, desperately, to change topics, I flip the conversation back to her. “What are you going to do now that you’ve quit the company?”
She pales a little at my question, and I almost feel bad about asking. Almost.
“I haven’t decided yet,” she finally mutters. “It’s all so fucked up.”
“I’m sure they’d take you back. If that’s what you want to do.”
“No.” Dylan shakes her head, pink-and-white curls bouncing around her shoulders. “I didn’t just burn that bridge, I incinerated it. There is literally no chance they’ll take me back. I wouldn’t go back if I could anyway.”
“What happened?” I chew on my lip as I ask the question. “I mean, I know you said you were…”
“You can say pregnant without me bursting into tears, Tristan. It’s okay.”
I glance over, trying to gauge whether she’s lying, but she’s got her sunglasses firmly in place, her hair hanging down across her cheek, blocking part of her face, making it nearly impossible to read her. “Okay, so what are your options?”
“I don’t know, Tristan,” she snaps out the words. “I haven’t really thought about it. I hadn’t exactly created a life plan in the event a situation like this arose. I thought I had at least five more years with the company before I had to even think about what was next.”
“I just don’t know what to do for you, Dylan. I’m trying to help, and I have no idea what to do. Or say for that matter.”
She lets out a dry laugh. “So I want to distract myself from my problems by focusing on yours, and you want to distract yourself from your problems with mine. It’s just like old times.”
“Except now we can drink.”
“Legally you mean. I seem to remember a few nights when we got our hands on some beer from somewhere while we were still in high school.”
“Right.” Memories of the bitter-tasting liquid, settling like stone in my stomach, roll through. If memory serves correctly, the first time we partook in underage drinking I made it through three quarters of a beer before I started throwing up. Violently and with enthusiasm. It hadn’t been enough to stop me from drinking again a couple of weeks later at a party. “If Stella ever asks, we were perfect angels.”
“Goes without saying.”
Uncomfortable silence stretches out between us. I attempt to tap my fingers along the top of the steering wheel in time with the beat of the music. Unfortunately the tune is unfamiliar, and my mind is going in so many different directions, I can’t focus enough to catch the rhythm. In the passenger seat, Dylan shifts from side to side, fiddling with something on her phone in an effort to look busy.
I hate the tension between us. “So here’s what I think.”
“That you should sex up Owen Gallahanger again?”
I snort this time. “No. I mean, yes, but not right this second.”
“Well that’s good. It would be awkward with me in the car.”
“Yes, that,” I agree. “But what I was really thinking, before you put sex with Owen back in my head, is that we should put all the shit aside, and just hang out in Savannah.”
“I can get down with that. I do, however, want to point out that it is a sad state of affairs if sexing up Owen was ever out of your brain.”
“I think you need to get a sex life of your own to worry about.” The very instant the words are out of my mouth I wince, followed up by a cringe on Dylan’s small intake of breath. Fuck me. She’d obviously had a sex life, recently, and seeing as she’d just suffered a miscarriage and had failed to mention who the father was, she probably wasn’t looking to rush right back into a new relationship.
“I think I’m going to fly solo for the immediate future, thanks.” Even out of the corner of my eye I can see the way she pulls herself together. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
Following her lead, I run through the loosely laid plans I had made for our adventure. “Brunch at this place I heard about in the historic districts; there’s the trolley tour which will take us close to Jones Street.”
“Jones Street?”
“Reputed to be the prettiest street in America. Then we have a couple of options. There’s the food tour—”
“Yum. I’m down with that.”
“Or the fifteen-person bike tour where we pedal our way through a tour.”
“I vote food.”
“Okay, so we’ll spend the day eating our feelings.” I confirm with a quick nod of my head. “Sounds perfectly healthy.”
“We tried drinking them.” Dylan points out. “Then spent the next day throwing up.”
I pull the car into the parking lot of the trolley tour company. They’ll eventually dump us close enough to the restaurant, and then later the start of the food tour. My stomach is already starting to feel full just thinking of all the food we’re going to consume this close after stuffing it over capacity at Thanksgiving dinner. I should have worn leggings instead of blue jeans.
As soon as the car is in park Dylan starts to open the car door to get out. I reach over, placing a hand on her arm to stop her. I wait until I’m one hundred percent certain I have her full attention before I speak. “I want to say this now, before the moratorium on talking about our feelings officially starts.”
She licks her lips, her eyes widening slightly, before she nods her head jerkily. “Okay.”
“I’m here for you. For whatever you need. Whether it’s to cry, to scream, to eat our body weight in food, or drink it in alcohol. If you want to talk about it or not, which I know you don’t,” I say when I see her mouth open to no doubt vehemently deny her desire to talk. “You’re my family, Dylan. Because family isn’t blood. We learned that earlier than most. Family, true family, is what you make it. I chose you to be my family, and now I’ve somehow seemed to have chosen the Gallahangers, but you were my family first, Dylan. You sealed that deal when you held my hand that first night when I cried—when you cried with me and told me that being a foster kid wasn’t so bad because now we had each other. We still have each other, and it’s still okay to cry. I’ll sit here and hold your hand. No questions asked. You know that, right?”
“Yes.” The word is said whisper-soft, just barely audible even in the small confines of the car.
“Good. Because sometimes I think you think I’m going to think less of you if you have to lean on me every once in a while. I don’t need you to be a rock all of the time, Dylan. I don’t want to be the one constantly being held up by you while you’re too scared to admit you’re drowning. It’s okay to be just barely keeping your head above water sometimes, to let me be the one throwing the life vest. And I’ve officially beaten that particular metaphor to death, haven’t I?”
Dylan snorts out a laugh through the small cluster of tears I see in her pale blue eyes. “Definitely.” She swipes a finger under her right eye. “I love you, Tristan.”
“That’s good, because you’re stuck with me, and my kid too. And it looks like you might be stuck with Owen and the rest of his crazy family, as well.”