Page 107 of Bloom

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“He cheated on me!” she shouts. “He cheated on me with some bitch from Stanford!”

“Uh, Ginny, you cheated on him too,” I remind her.

“Yeah, but he slept with her!” she shouts. “That’s different! And I asked him if he would have told me if I hadn’t broken up with him and he said, ‘probably not’. He could have given me a disease!”

“Uh, Ginny, you slept with someone else too,” I say, trying not to laugh.

“Elle!” she scolds. “Jesus Christ, do you have to say stuff like that with my brother sitting right there?”

“I already knew,” James says with distaste. “You had the whole conversation outside my door, remember?”

Max steps forward with an odd, pinched look to his face. “You slept with someone?” he asks quietly.

She puts her hands on her hips, suddenly defensive. “So?”

“I can’t believe you’d do something like that,” he says.

For a moment I assume he must be joking. But his voice isn’t teasing. It’s rife with bitter disappointment, like a father scolding a child.

“Seriously?” she rounds on him. “You, the biggest whore in the Tri-State area, are acting disappointed in me?”

He rises. “I thought you had more self-control than that,” he says coolly.

“You spent the whole summer buying me sex toys and talking about how I needed to ‘bloom’ sexually!” she gasps. “So what’s with the attitude?”

“It was a joke! I didn’t think you were actually going to do it!” he seethes.

“Are you shitting me?” she laughs. “How unbelievably sexist. Why would you hold me to a different standard than you hold yourself?”

“Because I thought you were a better person than that!” he shouts. “I thought you were a better person than me.”

He walks out the front door, kicking over a photographer who has his lawn chair set up in our yard as he goes.

Ginny turns to us in shock. “What the hell is wrong with him? He never acts like that.”

I remember the time James practically ran out of the kitchen after we first kissed, and find myself quoting Max verbatim. “Yes,” I say, with a smile just like Max’s. “Isn’t that interesting?”

Chapter 59

Our last few days together are bittersweet. I’m as happy as I’ve ever been, as long as I can stave off the pressing sadness of leaving him. He’s happy too. I’ve never seen him so relaxed. I’ve never seen him laugh so much. He sleeps now, like the dead, and he no longer has that haunted look I saw so often before we got together.

I feel it coming, though, our impending separation. It pops into our conversations with increasing frequency. And as much as the distance bothers him, James is far more troubled by the fact that Ryan will be at Cornell with me all year, while he is not. “You know he’s going to be writing you songs and shit,” James grouses one day, looking even more glum than his words indicate.

“You act like he’s some kind of drug I can’t resist,” I tell him, plopping down onto his lap and kissing his neck. “You’re forgetting I was able to resist him even before I had you.”

“You didn’t look like you were resisting him during that concert,” he grumbles. There’s something awfully cute about an insecure version of James. I guess I just never dreamed it existed before this summer.

“It’s just one year,” I tell him, pressing my thumb to the lines in his furrowed brow and willing him not to worry. “And we’re only four hours apart.”

“But it’s not just one year,” he sighs. He’s applying to the FBI, which probably means he’ll be in DC after he graduates. No longer a quick train ride away.

“There are good schools in DC too,” I suggest.

His expression morphs from anxious to elated to earnest in two seconds. “You chose Cornell for a reason. You shouldn’t give it up for me.”

I laugh. “Yeah, and the reason was primarily because I didn’t want to be in the same city as my parents. Which clearly isn’t an issue anymore, since neither of them will be in DC by then. Do you really think there’s anything I wouldn’t give up for us to be in the same place?”