“You know, I’ve been getting that impression?” Sadie laughs. “Who’s your favorite author?”
Ian smiles bashfully. “I mean, how long do you have?”
It should be awkward. It should be awful. An impromptu double date with my ex and his new girlfriend? It’s like something out of a bad student play. But the longer we sit there—and the more pitchers of beer we order—the more surprised I am by how easy it starts to feel. Sadie is a big talker, full of stories about Notre Dame and the wilderness camp she worked at this summer and her four brothers back at home in Omaha, all of whom also have names that start with the letter S. Even Gabe warms up a bit, chiming in with a story about the two of them landing at Heathrow and riding six blocks in the backseat of a car before realizing it wasn’t an Uber.
“Once the poor guy figured out he wasn’t being carjacked I thought he was going to murder us,” Gabe admits, grinning; Ian is laughing so hard he’s about to snort his beer. “We basically grabbed our stuff and jumped out into moving traffic.”
It’s normal, sort of; more than that, it’s nice. Still, I know just sitting at this table is pushing my luck in a pretty spectacular fashion, and I mean to pull Ian away as soon as we’ve eaten—to head back to our rental or even another bar, a place that’s just the two of us. But right as we’re about to ask for the bill the jazz trio out in the courtyard is replaced by a rough-around-the-edges cover band, and before I know it the whole place is rocking with the sound of a slightly out-of-tune British Bon Jovi cover.
“Well, now we have to dance,” Ian says, in a voice like he’s delivering truth from a higher power, which as far as he’s concerned he basically is: Ian loves to dance. Already he’s moving around in his seat a bit, broad shoulders bopping up and down like a little kid in a bounce house. He looks across the table at Gabe and Sadie. “You guys? You in?”
Right away, Gabe shakes his head. “That . . . is a hard pass,” he says, sitting back in the booth; he’s smiling, ostensibly good-natured, but he’s also got his arms folded with a mulishness I don’t recognize. “Thanks, though.”
I raise my eyebrows, frowning at him across the table before I can quell the impulse. I’ve always thought of Gabe as incredibly game, the first guy to order a five-alarm chili burger or jump in the lake in the middle of January or run across campus in a pair of tighty-whiteys on a dare; the kind of person who’s always been confident enough never to worry about the possibility of looking dumb. I can’t tell if it’s the company—namely, me—turning him guarded and reluctant, or if there’s something else going on. Either way, I remind myself, it isn’t my problem anymore.
“Do you guys want to get the check, then?” I start to ask, but Sadie is already sliding out of the booth, all long limbs and maxi skirt, a worn-in pair of Birkenstocks on her feet.
“Oh, come on,” she says, holding her hand out for Gabe’s, “it’s vacation.” She gestures at me. “Molly thinks you should.”
Gabe’s eyebrows twitch, infinitesimal. “Is that what Molly thinks?” he asks quietly, then sighs and puts his palms on the table, making to get up. “All right,” he says, “twist my arm.”
We head out into the crowd on the patio, Ian’s hands warm and clumsy as he twirls me around on the densely packed floor. “You are a really, really bad dancer,” I tell him, laughing.
“Fuck you!” Ian says, pulling me closer and pressing a kiss against my mouth as the band segues into an old Coldplay song. He’s a little drunk, expansive and good-natured, his fingertips settling low on my hips. “I’m blowing your mind.”
“Oh, is that what you’re doing?” I tease, thinking of the loaded moment that passed between us earlier. I scratch lightly at his shoulder through his warm, wrinkly button-down, purposely not tracking Gabe and Sadie on the other side of the room. “I wasn’t sure.”
Finally the band takes a break and the four of us collapse back into the booth, the waitress dropping another pitcher of beer onto the table between us. “So what’s your plan for the rest of the trip?” Sadie asks, rosy-cheeked and a little breathless. “Where to next?”
“Ireland and then Paris,” I tell her. Then, to Gabe, “Imogen is in Ireland, did you know that? She got an art fellowship, she’s living in a convent or something and studying feminist art from the twelfth century.”
Gabe grins. “Sounds like Imogen,” he says.
“We were dying to go to Ireland,” Sadie puts in, tilting her blond head in Gabe’s direction. “Gabe wanted to see the house where his grandpa used to live. But this trip was so expensive as it is, it felt like a bad idea to tack an extra country on.”
“Where’s your family from?” Ian asks Gabe, taking a sip of his beer. He’s definitely a little drunk now, the tiniest bit of a slur to his vowels; his face is flushed pink and new-looking in the warm, humid bar.
“Well, my dad was born in New York,” Gabe explains; if he’s hit with the same twinge I always am at the mention of Chuck, who died when Gabe was a junior in high school, he doesn’t let on. “But his family was from County Kerry.”
“Wait, really?” Ian turns to look at me. “Did you know that?” I shake my head—I knew Gabe’s grandparents came over from Ireland in the sixties, but not the specifics of where—but Ian’s already turning back to Gabe: “That’s where we’re going.”
Sadie’s eyes go wide. “Seriously?”
Ian nods. “The convent is like an hour from Shannon,” he tells her. Then his expression changes, going thoughtful and alert, and suddenly—horrifyingly—I know exactly what’s coming. Don’t do it, I plead silently. Say anything, anything but—
“You guys should come,” Ian suggests.
I freeze, both shocked to the depths of my person and wholly, dully unsurprised: in fact, this is exactly like him. Ian loves both big groups and unexpected situations, is forever inviting some random kid from his James Joyce seminar out for a bowling night in Southie or organizing a party bus for a twenty-person trip to eat giant turkey legs at King Richard’s Faire. I found it charming, back in Boston. Right now, not so much.
“Really?” Sadie asks, sounding delighted.
“Really?” Gabe says, looking significantly less so.
“Yeah!” Ian exclaims. I can see him getting more and more excited by the idea, the ingeniousness of it coalescing in his mind. “Why not? It’s only a couple of days.” He turns to me. “I mean, if you think that’d be okay with Imogen?”
“Yeah, no, totally, it’s not that I don’t think it’d be okay with Imogen, I just—” I stop short, frantic as an animal forced to chew its own leg off in a desperate attempt to free itself from a trap. I can feel the same cold panic radiating off Gabe from clear across the table. There’s no way to explain why this is a horrible idea without outing ourselves, and it’s too late for that now; my carefully assembled itinerary—my neat, tidy plan—is dissolving in front of my face like so much cigarette smoke.
Still, through the soupy haze of hysteria in my brain I can’t deny the delicious lick of something unexpected, the opening chords of a song I haven’t heard in a very long time. It occurs to me that even after everything that happened, I’ve been waiting to see Gabe again since the day I said good-bye to him last summer.