Page 69 of These Secret Years

“You have to stay with him all month?”

“Yeah.”

“Where does he live?”

“Outside Detroit.”

“We’ll be driving through Detroit in a couple weeks, on the way back to school. If you want⁠—”

“No. You can’t visit. That would be a mess.”

“I mean, the twins would be with me. We could just hang out.”

“No,” he says again.

I back off. “All right.”

Upstairs, we find what must be the main bedroom. It’s enormous with a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall view of the lake. “Damn,” Sullivan says. “Is this the kind of place you’ll be able to have? Once you’re a big football star?”

“It better be,” I say grimly. “Minus the hot guy who appreciates the view, I guess.”

“You realize you said that out loud.”

I sigh. “Yeah.”

“Are you gonna miss me?” he asks.

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, I’ll miss you, too. If it makes you feel any better.”

It does, but I definitely don’t want him to elaborate on that.

“We should hook up in the fall,” he adds out of nowhere.

“Really? Like—hook up?”

He shrugs a shoulder. “If you want.”

“But you just made it sound like you’d want to. I was clarifying what you meant by it.”

He opens a set of French doors and steps onto the terrace. I follow him over to the rail where he leans on his elbows and looks out at the view. I do the same, but I’m looking at him.

Maybe it’s because summer’s really over for us, or he has a lot on his mind, but it only takes a second for him to keep talking. “Chelsea’s my best friend, but the more we’ve been talking this summer, I’m realizing she’s pretty fucked up. I mean—she doesn’t need to be institutionalized or anything, but we have some unusual things in common. I don’t want to tell all her business, but after I told her about what you and I have been doing—not naming any names, don’t worry, she sort of jumped on this idea of a more open relationship or whatever.”

I’m seriously confused. “Okay… But like…why call it a relationship at all if you’re both gonna be fucking other people?”

“I mean, there’s no need to break up officially.”

“Dude, I don’t get it.”

“I mean, there’s like the people you feel comfortable with—like want to be in a relationship with, and then there’s the people you want to fuck, right?”

“While you’re also fucking the one you’re in a relationship with?” I ask, not understanding at all.

“She had this opportunity come up. It was a little too good for her to refuse.”

“What kind of opportunity?”