I need to not think about that too hard.

“This isn’t just me getting my rocks off, Con. I care about her. A lot.”

“Jesus, Brody.” Connor’s head is down, but when it comes up, I see something in his eyes that shakes me to the core. Pity. “Dude. This is what I was fucking afraid of. This is why I told you to leave her alone. I knew one of you was going to wreck the other one and I’d have to pick up the pieces.”

“What are you talking about?” I demand.

“I’m talking about the fact that you are obviously in so deep here, and she’s just—”

He winces.

“What?”

“I heard her say something to her friend. On the phone. I didn’t put it together, because I didn’t know then that you were—” He hesitates again. “—with my sister. But now I know she was talking about you. And it was a while back, so maybe it doesn’t mean anything. But I just thought you should know. Maybe it’ll make it easier to walk away.”

I’m staring at him with a sensation in my gut like wet concrete. “She said it was her”—his hands come up in air quotes—“walk on the Wilder side.”

Walk on the Wilder side.

“She didn’t mean it that way,” I say.

“Maybe not,” Connor says. But he doesn’t sound convinced.

“When was that?”

“It was a while ago,” he admits. “Couple of weeks at least.”

“Things were different then.”

“Different how?” he asks.

“We hadn’t—we weren’t—”

But when I think about it, when I go to explain to him what’s happened, it melts away like sugar in water, insubstantial. We have spent lots of time together, but never, in all that time, did she suggest that she might want to drop the plan. She never said I was more to her than a good time or that she was weighing the possibility of putting Boston on hold.

So maybe it’s not so different now.

“I’m going to talk to her,” I say, trying to hold onto the confidence that I felt earlier today, when we put Justin in the carrier on her chest. Or the confidence I felt yesterday when I made her come with my mouth. “I’m going to ask her to stay.”

“Brody, no,” Connor says, sounding so alarmed that my heart grinds to a stop. He’s shaking his head. “Please don’t.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this serious about anything. Not even the time he begged me not to ask Julia Shree to the senior prom because he was—he claimed at the time—in love with her.

I didn’t.

He wasn’t.

But the point is, Connor is pleading with me.