Page 36 of This Might Hurt

He straightens up slowly from where he’s pulling on socks and tilts his head at me, his expression somewhere between concerned and entertained. “You didn’t mention the part of your plan where you shoot someone.”

“I’m not shooting anyone,” I snap, getting up and following him down the hall to the bathroom.

“You’ve been obsessed since the first moment you saw this thing.” He opens the lower cabinet under the sink and sticks an arm deep past all the bottles of mirror cleaner and bleach. Wood scrapes on wood, then he emerges with the pistol carefully cradled in his palm.

“I’m not,” I argue distractedly, with no conviction, as I study every detail of its aggressive shape. When I try to touch it, he pulls it out of my reach. “I just… When you use it, everybody does what you want. They listen to you.”

“If you want someone to listen to you, maybe go to therapy instead.” He offers me a mocking grin, like it’s fun to play with me, but he wraps the gun in a t-shirt after checking it’s not loaded and pushes it into his bag. “There. Is your twisted little heart happy now?”

“You of all people can’t bring up therapy,” I mutter, heading for the door. “You have ten minutes.”

“You subtracted extra time!” he yells indignantly after me, but I ignore him and make my way down the creaky staircase.

The sound of dishes clattering drifts from the kitchen, along with soft humming and the sizzle of pans.

I head straight out to the front porch, easing the screen door shut behind me so it won’t bang, and sit on the steps.

Dew still clings to the grass, making the whole yard sparkle in the faint morning sun.

I’ve barely slept this week, so I rest my ear against my knee and tell myself I’m allowed to doze for exactly eight minutes before throwing my entire life into the incinerator.

The soft creak of hinges jolts me upright, listening for Archie’s laugh or the scuff of Colin’s house shoes. Nothing happens. “Are you finally r—” I tilt my head and squint up to find Ramona looking at me with a red cloth napkin balanced in her palm.

“I’d come down there,” she offers with a small, dry smile, “but I’d never get up again.”

“Sorry.” I scramble awkwardly to my feet and shoot an uneasy glance at the front door, praying Jude will bail me out.

Ramona grins knowingly. “I told him to hurry up. It’s rude to keep someone waiting.”

“Oh.” I hold my phone up like an idiot. “I’m watching. He still has three minutes.”

Her burst of startled laughter is overwhelmingly happy. “Oh, I wish I could come along on this road trip, just to watch you two. You’re going to have a great time.”

“Sure.” I drop my gaze to the napkin she’s holding so she can’t see the lie in my eyes. Two foil-wrapped bundles peek out from the folds of slightly wrinkled red linen.

“Vegetable breakfast burritos.” She holds them out until I have no choice but to accept them.

Heat spreads all the way through the wrapping to my palm, damp and smelling so delicious my stomach cramps.

“I went to the farmers market this morning before you woke up, so there’s fresh potatoes in there, mushrooms, red cabbage, and avocado. ”

“Oh, no. You shouldn’t have done all this…

” I trail off when I realize that if she left the house this morning, she must have seen that no one was sleeping on the made-up couch.

My face feels hot. All I’ve ever wanted was a kind gesture, anything to prove my existence matters to someone.

Now I’m holding the unquestioning love of a complete stranger in my hand, and it makes me feel terrible.

“Thank you very much for this,” I manage.

“Okay, how many minutes early did I make it?” Jude finally bursts out onto the porch with his backpack over his shoulder and a cute mess of damp hair sticking in every direction.

“Only two,” I tell him. “But if you have nothing else to be proud of, I won’t take that accomplishment away from you.”

Ramona fails to stifle a snort, which makes Jude’s face light up in a devastating grin.

I carry the burritos down to the car and pretend to check the tires on my rental so I don’t have to watch their never-ending hug, with her arms tight around his lean body and his face resting in her cloud of soft hair.

I don’t turn around until he knocks on the hood of the G-Wagon and tips his head like let’s go. I can’t read his expression, but his eyes look wet. At her age, every goodbye must feel harder.

Then, all of a sudden, we’re back where we started—me behind the wheel and him slouched in the passenger seat with his backpack between his legs.

Everything’s quiet except for the cracking of gravel as I turn the car around.

Ramona waves from the porch, so I make myself wave back.

I can feel his eyes on the side of my head, reading me like the sad books he apparently likes so much.

“Oh wow, look!” Jude dives forward against his seatbelt, propping a hand on the dashboard.

Dust curls up around us as we slow down to read the words emblazoned on one of the pickup trucks parked at the base of the hill behind Ramona’s house—Russ Baker, Property Inspector.

For the first time in my life, I can taste the reality of a choice I made, swirling in the hazy air.

Up there in the trees, some guy is having an absolutely terrible day because of us.

“Can we sneak up and watch?” Jude begs, craning his neck to try and see.

I accelerate, weaving around the holes and ruts in the badly maintained road. “Absolutely not.” When the trucks have almost disappeared in my rearview, I glance over at his profile highlighted against the long blue shadows of the grassland. “Do you ever feel guilt?”

“Hmmm.” He tilts his head, considering. “Not anymore. You can only hold so much, then it starts falling off the top.” After a long silence, he pulls a knee up and leans against the door where he can watch me. “Do you?”

“I don’t know. I want to.” I wish he could tell me what I’m going to feel when I hurt people on purpose simply because they hurt me first. “I will before this is over, won’t I?”

“It’s okay.” He sneaks a foot around the gear shift and nudges my thigh with the toe of his battered brown boot. The laces are barely held together by the thinnest of strings. “I’ll take it. You’re going to stay good.”

After fifteen minutes of fiddling with the radio, he settles on some kind of quiz show about celebrity drama and unwraps one of the breakfast burritos.

The car fills with the comforting but aggressive scent of hot, cooked potato.

He offers it to me with the foil carefully folded down, but I shake my head without taking my eyes off the road. “I can’t. You should eat both.”

He takes a giant bite, but his eyes are angry, like I spat in Ramona’s face. “She made them for you.”

My grip on the wheel tightens. “You’re not listening. I can’t. If I eat anything, I’ll be sick.” He’s never going to understand until we walk into Carrick House and he sees for himself.

“Oh.” After a pause, he reaches back and extracts a t-shirt from his backpack, wrapping it around the second burrito with its foil and towel, then wedging the whole thing carefully in the glove box. “You can eat it after the wedding. You’ll be hangry.”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t get hangry.”

“I really doubt that.” He punches my shoulder lightly. “You brought me along to tell you what to do, so don’t bitch about it.”

“That’s not what I said at all.” But when I look at him, he’s laughing, winding me up, and suddenly I feel so grateful he’s here with me that I almost tear up.

Within five minutes, he’s sound asleep like a dick, snuggled deep in his oversized Mothman hoodie with his t-shirt riding up to show the thinness of his hips. He breathes with perfect regularity, like a metronome you could play music to.

I think about the ride back from the river that night, how I’m certain his hand on my hip wasn’t a dream after all. If I touched him now, it would be for me more than him. Maybe that’s why I don’t. I want to pretend for as long as possible that I’m strong enough for this on my own.