Page 32 of The Getaway List
“I do,” I insist. “I had front-row seats. And boy, did they come with perks. I’d probably still be hiding under the bleachers somewhere if you hadn’t taken me under your wing.”
Tom shakes his head, turning to me again with a fond kind of sternness. “You were shy, is all. But you were always you. And you would have found your voice just fine without me.”
This makes my eyes sting because only someone like Tom would have noticed that—the person I was under the very crusty, silent surface. Even when we were way too young for that kind of patience and understanding. Tom’s always been an old soul.
“Sure, maybe,” I concede. “But it would have taken an excruciatingly painful long time, and I would have had to write a whole soppy memoir about it to cope. And title it I Would Have Been Less Pathetic If I’d Just Had a Tom Whitz in My Life, Dammit.”
Tom smiles, lightly bopping my foot with his fist. “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me. A flattering one, but the wrong one.”
“Oh, bullshit,” I say candidly. “Like I said before. We’ll always know each other best.”
Tom’s eyes dip away from mine again. I stare at him like I can bring them back, but he’s lost in a thought. His fist stays on the top of my foot and I go very still, hoping he keeps it there. Hoping he can feel the way I want to pry out what it is he’s been holding inside without cracking him open in the process.
“Earlier you said—after all the quiet,” says Tom.
“I didn’t mean anything by that. Really, I didn’t,” I say.
“I know,” says Tom quietly, staring at his hand. At the fist slowly uncurling itself as he grips the top of my foot, almost like he’s trying to press some kind of understanding into it. “I just—I wanted to explain. Or at least have it out in the open. It never, ever had anything to do with you. You’re my favorite person and always will be.”
This isn’t news to me, because I’ve felt the same way about Tom since we were eight. But the way he’s saying it still scares me a little. Maybe even the fact that he feels like I need to hear it at all.
“You’re mine,” I say back, in case he really does need to hear it.
The edges of his lips quirk, but his eyes stay cloudy, still not meeting mine. “I guess you could probably tell by now that I, uh—I’m not like I was back home. Coming to New York was like getting dropped onto another planet. It wasn’t even that everyone knew each other or that people weren’t nice, because they were. I just—felt like I was separate from everything. Like I’d spent my whole life so grounded in who I was and who I loved and here, it’s just—everything is constantly moving. All the time. I couldn’t keep up, and at some point I just—got overwhelmed. I just stopped trying.”
It feels like the wind has been knocked out of me. Like I’m feeling some shade of his hurt slowly absorb into me, but not near enough of it, and not fast enough. I want to reach out and take it from him. I want to push it out the window of this very high-up movie-set apartment.
“I wish you’d told me,” I say instead, trying very hard to keep my voice steady.
Tom squeezes my foot lightly. “I didn’t want to. And I think that’s why it was easier to just fall off the map sometimes. In some ways it was like—if I could stay the Tom I was in your head, it wasn’t so bad.”
I know what he means to an extent, even if it aches to hear it. I’ve felt the same way these past few years, slowly losing my sense of self. Like there was still some substantial part of it that didn’t matter as long as I had Tom, who knew me no matter what.
But I guess I don’t fully know what he means, and never can. Tom built us a group of friends a mile wide, and I got to keep every one of them. Tom came here on his own without any soft places to land.
“Well, respectfully, that’s ridiculous,” I tell him. “There is no version of Tom that could ever live badly in my head. I love all of them. Even the ones that are bad at texting back in a timely manner.”
Tom swallows hard, his eyes finally meeting mine, red-rimmed and a little misty. I’m remembering suddenly the moment he met me at the door a few days ago. How he was happy and how quick he was to meet my energy, but how neither of those feelings were half as pronounced as his relief.
“But mostly I just wish you’d told me so I could have helped,” I say, my voice low.
“You did,” says Tom, quickly and effusively. “You don’t even know how much. I was so shit at being in touch, but you always were anyway. Every time you texted me it was the closest I’d come to feeling like myself again. And this sounds weird, maybe, but sometimes I had—” Tom pauses like he needs a moment to phrase it. “Imaginary conversations with you, almost. Like what you’d say if I did tell you.”
I lean in closer, settling my head on his shoulder. The electricity I’ve felt being near to him is still there, but it’s a distant hum. There’s only an ache in this, and a need to heal it.
“I hope imaginary me was wise,” I say.
“She was. And even if she wasn’t—there is no version of Riley that could ever live badly in my head,” says Tom, with a smile I can hear in his voice even if I can’t see it in his face.
I smile, too, even if my face feels strangely heavy with the effort. “Touché.”
We stay like that a little while, my head on Tom’s shoulder, his hand on my foot. I stay quiet in case he has more he wants to say, but it feels like whatever we need it’s already right here, in the way we’re carrying each other’s hurts—the old ones and the new, the ones we saw coming and the ones we couldn’t have. We stay still for so long that I wonder if maybe we’re just going to fall asleep like this, and my eyelids start to drift. But at some point my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I don’t want to look, but Tom says quietly, “It could be your mom.”
It’s not. It’s another notification from the “Dear, Love” Dispatch, asking if I want to accept another delivery. I set the phone down, biting down my disappointment as I raise a finger to hit the NO button, when Tom takes his hand off my foot and sets it on my wrist.
“Go ahead,” he says. “You can just have them deliver to the lobby.”
