Right alongside his.
I have stayed in my seat, looking up at him, respecting his space, but instinct makes me leap up and go to him. Touch him. He is impossibly hot and icily cold all at once, heat pouring off clammy skin.
“Your mother did not die because of you!”
He makes a keening sound and begins to pace. At least he’s not leaving. At least there’s that.
“Your mother died because of a freak, one-in-a-million accident that was so unfair.”
“One that was preventable,” he spits out.
“How? How was it preventable? Your parents did everything they could. They tested you. No one knew you had the same allergy. Your mom and dad and you and Declan did everything right—”
“Even when you do everything right people still leave you. You of all people should understand that.”
I am struck dumb.
“When people pick me, their lives fall apart. They lose everyone they love,” Andrew continues, his voice soft and quiet, the unsophisticated tone of a teen. He drops into a chair and holds his head in his hands, elbows on his knees. The back of his neck is vulnerable. A tiny hint of sweat darkens the hairline, making the edge of his hair curl. It’s boyish. Childlike.
Remarkably innocent. I can see the teen he once was. The emergent man. If only I could unwind time. Time is the one thing I cannot fix.
He lets out a long sigh, like the past is being pushed out, like memory being born and crossing from one life to the next. Andrew stands, the movement so abrupt my eyes flit from his neck to his waist to shoe laces, like a series of still images scattered across a cinema screen in rapid-fire sequence.
As I scramble to meet him, he turns away. His shoulders are squared, the fabric tight across the wide upper back. My eyes take in the white cotton cloth, how it hugs his ribs and waist, tucked in and rumpled, the flat lines of wrinkles at odd angles, as if the cloth forgot how to listen and behave.
And then he looks at me with eyes so wounded and ragged its as if they’ve been torn.
“Don’t pick me, Amanda. Don’t pick me.”
“What?” Suddenly, this conversation has nothing to do with the wedding. Not one bit.
“You heard me. Don’t pick me.”
“I—” With numb legs, I move toward him. So many words fill my mind. I want to reach up and wipe the crease of worry from his brow. I want to heal those eyes, to reach back in time and cradle his soul to my heart and let it find my rhythm. I want to breathe for him, just long enough so he can rest.
I want to make him know that my world will fall apart if I pick him, but not for the reasons he thinks.
And I’m ready to fall right along with it.
“Andrew, oh, Andrew, I’m falling for you and I don’t care about the wasps or the risks or—”
He steps back and shakes his head, eyes clear in the way that can only come from a deep abyss of despair.
His voice is full of regret and longing. “I won’t let you pick me.”
And with that he turns, long, determined strides taking him down the hallway, out of my sight, and out of my heart.
Leaving me out of my mind.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“The problem with having so many women all working together on this wedding is that we are spending a ton of time together. Too much time. So much time that our cycles suddenly, painfully, align themselves,” I lie to Marie, who has just arrived at Amy’s apartment to get ready to caravan over to the party Marie scheduled.
Remember how Marie tried to take over the bachelorette soirée and I found a fix?
Well. Here we go.
“Poor Shannon! My baby!” Marie descends on morose, aching Shannon with a level of motherly sympathy that triggers a massive guilt complex in me. I don’t like to lie. But if it fixes a problem...
“I am an entire week early!” Shannon screams as we ply her with ice cream and salt-n-vinegar potato chips and ibuprofen and heating wraps filled with lavender and aerosolized Xanax.
(Kidding about that last one, but wouldn’t that be awesome if it existed?)
“Amy, Shannon, Carol and I all have our periods. Everyone started today. We’re like lemmings, only instead of jumping off cliffs, we’re using tampons,” I say to Marie, whose face is scrunched in sympathy, eyes impossibly framed by lashes that could only be created by a penis enlargement device maker.
They’re that long.
“How could this happen?” Marie moans. “It seems so bizarre.” My mom is behind her, at the front door, and shoots me a look so skeptical she might as well rename herself Sherlock Holmes. Even Spritzy, dangling from her forearm, rolls his eyes.
Chuckles makes a hiss of warning at Spritzy, who starts to quiver in his bag and hunkers down.
“Yeah,” my mom says. “Statistically impossible, in fact.”
Uh oh.
Never try to pull one over an on actuary. I hadn’t counted on my mother being part of a drinking sexfest.
She comes over to me, gives me a longer-than-usual hug, and whispers, “What are you all up to?” in my ear.
As I pull back I play the innocent, wide eyes and all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I get a cocked eyebrow in return.
Huh. She looks just like me right now.
“See?” Marie crows as we sit around Amy’s apartment looking like a bunch of post-roller-derby players, curled into fetal positions with various cold and hot packs on our body parts, groaning in pain. “Finally, that stupid menopause comes in handy!” She glances at my mother and they share a look that makes me want to rip out my uterus and beat them with it.