It was meant to be a rhetorical question, but I answered anyway, unthinkingly. "I don't think he's seeing anyone."
She scoffed. "That's not the Finn O'Malley I know. That boy always has to have a girlfriend. He likes sex too much but has this thing about monogamy. He likes to think of himself as the good guy because he only sleeps with women he has relationships with, but they aren't relationships because that would require him to actually be emotionally vulnerable—which he isn't."
That did sound like Finn, unfortunately. Hadn’t he done that with me? Slept with me for the physical release and then turned me loose? Yes, he’d called after a couple of weeks. He’d texted and asked if we could meet, but I didn’t want to be hurt. Or maybe I wanted to reject him before he had a chance to reject me. I was confused about a lot of things including my desire to see him again.
"It sounds like you have strong feelings for him, still."
"No. Not at all," she protested. "Shit, anyone could date him. I wouldn't even care if you dated him."
It was so quiet in our room after she dropped that bomb that we heard the crickets chirping. It was quiet because I'd stopped breathing. And she noticed.
"Are you kidding me?" She sat up and turned toward me. "Do you want to date Finn?"
"No…I, ah," I stammered awkwardly.
"Holy shit. Do you still have that middle school crush on him?" She was incredulous but after a moment, I realized not angry.
"I was fourteen and in ninth grade," I responded weakly.
She flopped back on the bed and rolled her head from side to side in disbelief. "I knew you had a crush on him. He knew it too, but I thought you grew out of that."
"I just—he’s attractive. I mean, he’s interesting," I got out in an awkward jumble of words. "It doesn't matter anyway. Family first."
When I was ten, my mom took me aside and told me family came first. No matter what was thrown at us, you never, ever turned away from your family.
Ivy had always been good at that.
When I was in second grade, Eli Parsons, a snot-nosed, round-headed kid with a sharp tongue, asked me in the bus line if my face was flat because I'd fallen off the monkey bars and landed on it. I'd been too shocked and hurt to say something back, but when Ivy had seen me sniffling on the bus, I'd spilled my guts. She got on her bike, rode two miles to Eli's house, marched up to his front door and rang the bell. When he came out, she punched him in the nose and then got back on her bike and rode home.
Eli had to apologize, and he never said another mean word to me after that. Ivy's hand had swollen up, and she got grounded for a week because violence never solved anything, according to our mom.
"I'm so sorry," I'd whispered when I crawled into her twin bed that night.
"Nothing to be sorry about," she'd said, cradling her hand on her chest. "Actually I am sorry. Sorry that I didn't punch him in the eyes too."
She'd held me when I came home at thirteen after hearing my big crush Mike Van Elm preferred blondes. Sarah Jorgerson, who apparently also had a crush on Mike, told him I'd liked him. He'd pulled up the corner of his eyes and said he'd never date a chink.
And it was Ivy who gave me the perfect rebuttal to those stupid guys at parties who asked me if my vagina was slanted just like my eyes—an Asian version of whether the carpet matched the drapes. "If you don't know, you never will." I'd used that line more than I should've had to, I reflected. College guys were idiots. No wonder I was still single.
Ivy had taken the family first motto seriously until her addictions pushed her off the tracks. I would never forget how she stood up for me every single time.
She scrunched up her nose. "I don't care if you see him, but Winter, you deserve so much better than Finn O'Malley. He's one of those guys who seems nice on the outside but will tear you apart and won't even look behind him at the carnage. He doesn't have a heart. He's wrapped up in his own life, his own pursuits, and what is going on in your life isn't important. In all the years we dated, he never once said I love you."
She talked for another ten minutes on how Finn O'Malley was the worst guy I could ever date, but all I heard was I don't care if you date him.
5
FINN
"Have a good night?" I asked when Winter walked out of the strip club at three in the morning for the second night in a row.
"What are you doing here?" She peered into the dark night. Jimmy Risk had his parking lot dimly lit, possibly to disguise husbands paying a hundred for a table dance from girls they had no shot with.
I pushed away from the side of my truck and approached. What was I doing here? A good question with no good answers. All the ones that popped to mind were fairly creepy, from the I've been waiting to I just passed by this road leading north that holds only auto body shops and strip clubs to I wanted to spend a second consecutive night at a strip club.