I look up at a bright star, which becomes two. “Wow.” They swirl around each other like they’re dancing. Maybe it’s them, is what I find myself thinking. “I guess some people just get lucky.”
“Or they make their own luck.”
“Maybe.”
A light breeze touches his hair. He takes off his jacket and gently drapes it over my shoulders. I shiver from the comforting heat of it and the scent of his body. God, he smells good. Like warmth and wishes and whiskey. He takes my hand again. “Tell me who it was.”
“Who what was?”
“The person who hurt you.”
Is he really asking me about this? I sigh and it feels heavy, like it’s coming from a mired, long-buried place.
“Did it happen in high school?”
God, why’s he so curious? When all my defenses are down? Against every shred of common sense I possess, which at this point in time has been all but obliterated, I hear myself say, “Yes.”
“A boyfriend?”
His persistence has slid past some barrier in me. “He was never really a boyfriend. More of a crush. He was the starting quarterback.”
His expression as I confess this detail makes me feel like he’s getting things, piecing things together. And I realize I was wrong about him. He’s not cold, not at all. He’s one of the most complicated, feeling men I’ve ever met. You just have to get past that hard surface to find it. “That’s why you reacted the way you did in the limo, when I told you I used to play quarterback.”
I shrug lightly.
“So you had a crush on the quarterback. What happened next?”
“Everyone had a crush on the quarterback. I’m sure you know all about it.”
“People get crushes on all kinds of people all the time. Did you date him?”
Did I date him. An interesting question. “I don’t think you could call it a date.”
“You went out with him.”
“Once.”
“Tell me what happened.”
I guess sometimes when someone makes a request into a donut hole of a perfectly vulnerable moment, it’s possible to eke out an answer. “It was a party. A pool party, the first week of school, at a senior’s house. I was a junior and all the football players were there and we went along. Me and Josie and a few other people.”
“He noticed you and you started talking to you.”
“Yes.”
“You had a crush on him. And one thing led to another.” Of course he knows the story. He probably has a thousand stories like this, told from the other point of view.
I can’t answer. This was a terrible idea.
“Luna, it’s okay. Keep going. Once it’s out, it’ll feel a lot lighter.”
I mean, what the hell. Maybe he’s right. I’ll feel lighter and he’ll go back to Chicago and I’ll never have to see him again. “We were drinking this punch they gave us. And he invited me upstairs to a room where there were a lot of football players. But then they all left and it was just us. And then … ” God. Why am I telling this story to him, of all people?
His voice is low. “Did you consent to it? Or not?”
“I don’t know. I had a crush on him. Everyone did. He was the guy every girl wanted. And he wanted me. I was seventeen and a lot of my friends already had boyfriends and were talking about the things they were doing and … I wasn’t really expecting everything but he was very pushy and … anyway, I went with it. It happened.” More tears are wetting my face. We’re this deep in anyway, so I keep going. “I cried because … I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. He didn’t seem to notice that part of it and when we went back downstairs all his friends laughed and teased him because … they all knew. I understood then that he did this all the time. Every weekend. I wasn’t special or chosen, I was just one of many. A conquest now conquered, before he moved on to the next one. Of course I wished I could undo it, but I couldn’t. So I didn’t let it devastate me, even though I’d expected something a little more … meaningful, maybe. A lot of people do, though, right? There’s nothing unusual about that. So I got on with my life.” He waits. I’m sure he can tell there’s more to this story. He doesn’t push. He just holds my hand as I stare out at the water. So I keep talking. “But then, about six weeks later I realized I was … late.”
As soon as I say it, I wildly regret it. I regret all of this. I regret not fighting harder to change Josie’s mind about signing that damn contract. And I fully expect Gage to disengage, to say goodnight, to walk up the beach and jump on the first private jet back to Chicago. Why would someone like him want to hear about something like this from someone like me?
Instead of skirting around the subject squeamishly, he grabs it by the horns. “He got you pregnant.”
The tears are streaming now. The dancing stars are blurry. Gage puts a clean handkerchief in my hand and I use it to wipe my eyes.
“Did he step up?”
“Step up? If you call handing me a crumpled wad of dollar bills and telling me to ‘take care of it,’ then yes, he really stepped up. He wasn’t interested. He answered my call once but he threatened to deny everything if I tried to ‘corner’ him. That’s how he put it. I later found out this wasn’t the first time this had happened to him. We were just collateral damage to his fun, ‘alpha’ lifestyle. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even though I knew I couldn’t care for a baby—I mean, I could barely care for myself—I just couldn’t do it. I made my decision and I was going to keep the baby and figure everything out along the way, somehow. By then, people knew. The school found out. It was a small, conservative place and my dirty secret became exactly that. Everyone treated me differently, which seemed kind of amazing in this day and age, but they did. People avoided me and bullied me on social media. The country club mothers didn’t want their daughters hanging around me because I was a bad influence—while he got congratulated. I was told to stay home and finish high school online because of the ‘backlash’ but none of it tarnished his star, not one bit. I was scared and alone. But Billy Burke was a hero for slaying girls all over town.”
“Billy Burke. I know that name. He played two seasons for Notre Dame.”
“Did he?” I’d made a point of not following his career.
“He was their up-and-coming golden boy before his neck was fractured in a bad tackle made in the final few seconds of the playoffs. He never made it to the NFL.”
“Good.” I’m not a vengeful person on the whole but I’m glad to hear he fell off his pedestal.
“What happened next?” As Gage asks me the question, he does the most outrageous thing. He smooths my hair with his rough hand, so, so gently. He’s not scared of this, or disapproving, or disgusted. And I can just tell by the staunchness of him in this moment—even though I can’t know for sure, I somehow just do—that Gage hasn’t done the things I’m describing. That he would have stepped up, or not let it happen the way it did in the first place. His women cry because it’s so good, not because it’s so … awful. Because it was. It was painful and scary and heartbreaking. And it succeeded in making sure I wanted nothing to do with it again for a very long time.