Page 70 of End Game
“I’m not going to fight with you,” I tell him quietly. “If you want to… be there…” I sniff. I can’t even think the words, much less say them. And for him to offer this, to put his life on hold—for me? I just… I can’t.
He nods seriously. “I like your dad. He’s a nice guy. He’s gone out of his way to treat me well. He doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
Reaching across the table, he takes hold of my hand, and I squeeze his thick fingers for dear life. “There are a half dozen business schools my parents would accept in Massachusetts. It doesn’t have to be Harvard or bust. I’m not opposed to moving to Amherst.”
“You’re not moving to Amherst.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “It’s still up in the air.”
“Then it’s in the cards for me, too.”
“You’re not going to drive two and a half hours each way with no traffic from Amherst to the financial district. That’s insane.”
“I can come out to you every weekend, or work out a way to work from home, or whatever I need to do,” he says.
“I might not even move back home.”
He’s surprised at this. “You’re not?”
“My dad doesn’t want me to put grad school on hold. I’m staying local to New England, but I’m looking at grad schools in the region. I like this program at UMass Lowell, and it would let me go home on the weekends. The one at UNH might be a little farther, I wouldn’t be able to go home as frequently. And Northeastern is, like, my dream school, but I can’t afford it without a serious scholarship, and I don’t want to take out any more student loans than I have to.”
“That’s fair,” he says seriously.
“So don’t go making any plans based on me. I don’t know where I’m going to be next year.”
He squeezes my hand. “Wherever you are, that’s where I’ll be.”
I roll my eyes. “Get real. You can’t—”
“I’ve spent the last four years without you. Now that I have you back in my life, I’m not letting you go again so easily,” Barrett says.
Although I’m gratified to hear that I mean as much to him as he means to me, I don’t know what his intentions are here. What exactly does he think is going to happen?
“But—”
“We’ll get an apartment together somewhere,” he says. “I’ll have a car, so I can drive you home on the weekends, and we can—”
“Hold up. Wait a minute.”
He pauses.
I shake my head, a little stunned. “You’re making all these plans. Have you ever stopped to consider maybe I should be privy to these plans?”
Barrett laughs at himself. “That’s what I’m doing now. I’m telling you. So you have time to decide if it’s something you want or not. If you’re in grad school, I can cover the rent, and then—”
“I’m not going to freeload off of you.”
“It’s not freeloading if I’m offering.”
“Yeah, it still is.”
“Dee…”
I lay my cards on the table. “I’m not opposed to living together. We can get an apartment together, fine. That sounds like fun. But I’m going to pay my fair share, and we’ll have to find somewhere that fits my budget, not yours.”
