Page 21 of The Getaway List
“I love you,” I say, not sure what else to do.
“I love you, too,” says my mom meaningfully. “I wish you wouldn’t do this.”
The tears welling up in my eyes are part relief and part guilt, but they don’t do anything to shake my resolve.
“I’ll see you at the end of the summer,” I tell her, and when she doesn’t respond I realize she’s already hung up on me. The tears start spilling in earnest then, blazing hot and dead silent, like my body is just leaking them. I turn around for lack of anything better to do and end up turning right into a person—right into Tom, whose arms are around me in an instant, pulling me in so firmly and easily that I’m crying into his shoulder before I can even fully register that he’s there. He doesn’t ask, just holds me there like we’re a two-person island in the middle of the sidewalk, until I’ve gotten enough of a handle on myself that he pulls away and starts leading me back to the apartment.
In the elevator I see the Pop-Tarts I forgot wrapped in a paper towel in Tom’s hands, the ones he must have run out to give me. My eyes blur with tears all over again, a memory unearthing itself—Vanessa never had sweets in the house when Tom was little because she didn’t like them, and he lost his eight-year-old marbles eating his first Pop-Tart at our apartment. For years we were basically Tom’s dessert dealers. Only in this moment it isn’t just a memory—it’s one more pivotal thing in our shared history that for some reason my mom doesn’t want to turn into a future. A future she actively prevented us from having for years.
Tom settles us on the couch and hands me the Pop-Tarts. I munch on them through tears, explaining the whole of it—the real reason why we’ve been kept apart. The fight my mom and I had about it before I left. The way she didn’t answer a single one of my texts, and the way she hung up on me just now.
I leave the bit about me ending up “like her” out of it, because it feels too close to me to touch right now, and it’s not the crux of the issue. “I just don’t even know who I am anymore,” I say instead. “And even just being here for a day is the closest I’ve come to feeling enough like my old self that I can figure out a new one.”
Tom is quiet a moment, staring thoughtfully at my hands. I know he’s working out what to say but my problem is I’ve never been good with quiet, not even the kind I know I can trust.
“I know that probably sounds ridiculous,” I admit.
Tom shakes his head. “No. That makes perfect sense. I think—I know exactly what you mean.”
This time it’s me who takes a moment to speak. Not because I need to think of what to say, but because I wonder if I’m right to ask it. “Is that also why you’re taking the gap year?”
He nods slowly, just one bob of his head. Almost like he’s not entirely certain of the answer he’s giving. “These past few years—they didn’t really go according to plan for us, huh?”
I choke out a laugh. “Not even a little.”
“I heard you tell your mom you want to stay,” says Tom, a question in the words even if he doesn’t voice it.
I lean forward, newly hopped up on processed sugar and determination. “I can find a summer sublet. I have savings from all my part-time work. And if the ‘Dear, Love’ Dispatch is still willing to take me on, I’ll still have plenty of income to help with—”
“Riley. Respectfully, shut up.” Tom leans in, too, so he’s close enough for me to see the sincerity in every inch of his expression. “You know there’s literally no world where you’re not welcome here for as long as you possibly want to stay.”
“I just—don’t want to presume is all,” I say, even as the warmth of his words curls out of my chest and spreads all over the rest of me.
Tom nudges my knee with his socked foot. “By all means, presume. I only ever wanted to be presumed by you.”
It feels settled then, in a way that isn’t worth quibbling about. I push my knee back into him. “You’ll be eating those words when I finish the rest of your beloved Pop-Tarts.”
“Nah. We’ll just cage fight each other for them, fair and square.”
For some reason it’s this and the playful gleam in Tom’s eye that suddenly have me bursting into near-hysterical laughter. Like Tom’s words have been just enough of a balm that I can finally make room not just for the hurt of what my mom said on the phone but the utter ridiculousness of it.
“Should I worry about being the punch line of whatever you’re laughing about?” Tom asks.
I shake my head, still wheezing out a laugh when I say, “My mom—she’s got this whole thing in her head—she’s convinced we’re holing ourselves up in some sex bungalow.”
Tom lets out a choked laugh of his own then, his cheeks turning alarmingly pink the way they always do in the rare moments I catch him off guard. “There’s too much Crate & Barrel in the apartment for it to be any kind of bungalow,” he says.
I couldn’t stop laughing right now to save my own damn life, but I manage to say through it, “You might be underestimating the sexiness of a well-crafted faux-marble cheese plate.”
Tom’s laughing, too, but it tapers off faster than mine does. His eyes are steady on mine, his smile wavering when he says tentatively, “If you think it’d be weird being roommates, though—I totally get it.”
Oh, shit. I only meant to bring it up as a joke, but Tom’s always been less jokey than I am. Or rather, more likely to see whatever truths lie under a joke.
“I mean—would it be weird for you?” I ask.
“No, not at all,” says Tom at once. A quick beat passes, and he adds, “Only if it’d be weird for you.”
It’s clear then that we’re at risk of this becoming an endless feedback loop of “but only if it was weird for you,” so I go ahead and say the thing that’s awkward but probably needs to be said. “Okay. Worst-case scenario, our raging teenage hormones get the best of us and we make out and ruin everything and I have to go home.”
