Page 80 of The Square

“You liked her back then,” I say.

Which makes Christine open her eyes to stare at me. “Yeah, well, that was before…”

But she doesn’t finish.

Doesn’t need to. Everybody knows everything now.

“Anyway,” I say. “That’s when I fell in love in with you, Christine.”

She makes a face. “I was seventeen. It took you all those years to fall in love with me?”

“I mean, I loved you before that. But that night, out there in that truck, watching those bears. The way all of us just… played along with your silly game. And how it was you who did that. It was you who got Alec to laugh and have a good time even though he never wanted to take that trip in the first place. Not me. Wasn’t me who did that. You were the glue. You were the center of my universe. There was no version of Danny who existed without Christine and that night I realized it. I wanted you.”

By now Alec has his eyes open too and he’s staring at me. “Why didn’t you take her?”

“Because she wasn’t mine, she was ours. Our world was held together by very thin lines of varying degrees of love. Yours was always strong. Mine was new, and only for her, and hell, I have no idea what Christine was thinking that night. I just knew that if I tried to take her away from you we’d end up like those bears. Fighting until we were bloody. Christine pacing back and forth with worry.”

He closes his eyes again. Drops his head back. Weary look on his face. But then he smiles. “You always were a selfless bastard.”

“Not always,” I say, looking at Christine. “You made me this way.”

She gets up, walks over to me, plops down in my lap, wraps her arms around my neck, and sinks against my chest. “You made me this way too.”

Alec is watching us. Pained expression on his face. Jealousy? Maybe. But I think he’s just sad. I think he’s sad because he thought, for all these years, that Christine loved him just as much as she loved me. And right now, I think he has doubts about that.

Doubt. That’s what that expression says. Doubt that the sharing we’ve been doing with Christine was ever equal. Doubt that we will ever work out the way he wants us to.

He has always thought that I was the one who wouldn’t go along and now he’s starting to realize that it was never really me holding things up.

It was her.

“So,” Alec says. He swallows hard, staring at me. “When did you start loving me?”

“The moment Christine shot you out in the woods.”

He sighs. Long. Loud. Resigned. “Pretty recent then, eh?”

I nod. “Yup. Took me a while, I guess. But I knew in that moment that there was no us without you.”