Emmy & Oliver - Robin Benway Page 0,69

when I hit the street. Three years of surfing had its benefits, it turned out, including some pretty good cardiovascular skills, and I caught up to him in less than a minute. “Oliver, please!”

“Emmy,” he said, and he stopped so fast that I went running past him and had to double back. “Emmy, look. I appreciate you coming after me, that’s really nice of you but—”

“I’m not going back,” I said, and he just looked at me and started walking again. “Wait,” I said. “Stop walking, okay?”

“Just go back and stay with my sisters, okay? I didn’t mean to upset them.”

“I know. They know that, too.” His legs were longer than mine and I had to hurry to keep up with him. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know!” he finally cried, coming to another screeching halt. “I have no idea, Emmy, okay? I don’t know where the fuck I am or where the fuck I’m going! I probably couldn’t even find my own house on a map.” He ran his hands through his hair, balled it up between his fingers, then let it go with a huge sigh. “Sorry. I’m not mad at you.”

“I know,” I said again, because I did. I felt like I knew everything he was about to say, like that electric current that had snapped between his mom and him had snaked over and wrapped itself around me.

I ignored him, though, and led him to the curb. “Sit,” I said, and he plopped down next to the streetlight and leaned against it. I sat down next to him, then wrapped myself around his arm, holding him there. He took a deep breath, then let it out and rested his head against the top of mine.

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, our ribs rising and falling in opposite waves, like we were breathing for each other. His pulse was racing under his skin and I ran my thumb against the veins in his wrist, waiting for him to calm down. “What happened?” I asked after enough time had passed.

“I think you saw what happened,” he said, but there wasn’t any bite to his words. He sounded deflated, like the fight had sapped his energy.

“I mean before. Did you and your mom have a fight or something? Because that was . . . sort of out of the blue.”

“Not really, not if you live in our house. It’s been coming for a while.” Oliver ran his thumb over my knuckles, smoothing the skin. But his eyes looked wild, feral, like the coyotes that sometimes snuck through our backyard in the middle of the night. “I just can’t stand it sometimes, you know? Like, I know my mom suffered a lot. I know that and I don’t mean . . .”

“Why didn’t you tell her, though?” I asked. We were standing next to each other now and I reached out and took his sleeve in my hand. He just glanced away, looking so defeated under the streetlight.

“Because how do you tell your mom that you knew your dad took you away from her and you didn’t do anything about it?” He didn’t phrase it as a question. “What kind of kid does that?”

I pulled him over to the curb, where we sat down together, Oliver falling with a heavy sigh onto the concrete. “Fuck,” he muttered, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“You didn’t do anything,” I told him, fumbling for the right words. I felt like if I said the wrong thing, he would wither up like a flower, cave in on himself and disintegrate. “You were a kid, Oliver. It’s not up to you to fix what your dad did.”

“Yeah, but now I have to fix what I did,” Oliver said, then laughed to himself. “I get so mad at my mom for not realizing I’m not that seven-year-old kid anymore, but she’s not the same person she was, either.”

“None of us are,” I said softly.

Oliver kept talking like I hadn’t said anything. “I didn’t know what to do at first because I didn’t want to turn my dad in, y’know? Like, this wasn’t my perfect scenario or anything. But he had let me take this forensic science class through the local high school and we had a field trip to the local precinct and they asked for volunteers to do the fingerprinting and I . . . I thought if it was true, that this way I would be able to