Ryan was laid to rest among some of Chicago’s most notable figures. I’ll never know how his father managed it, but his gravestone seems out of place here. He was too young. An anomaly in the sea of scattered historic remains.

Visitors are scarce because it’s after dark. When I first started coming here, I was afraid of the darkness. I was afraid of being here alone at all. There was an eerie comfort in the presence of other somber souls wandering aimlessly through the weather-beaten stones. But as time went on, I learned to enjoy the solitude. When I’m alone here, I can think. I can process and feel and express myself openly.

Time has gifted me acceptance of his death, but it has never gifted me peace. When you lose someone you love, everyone becomes a philosopher. They will offer you words of comfort. Time will heal. He’s in a better place now. It will get better. These statements are false, but it makes them feel better when they don’t know what else to say.

The only absolute truth in grief is that everyone handles it differently. Some will remain stoic and proud and only cry privately. Others numb the pain with alcohol. And then there are those who just get really fucking angry. When I come here that anger unfurls inside of me like a venomous snake.

Then like a bad cliché, the sky opens up and pours fat, wet tears on me.

I won’t melt, so who cares. Besides, there’s the Jack Daniels to keep me warm. It was Ryan’s favorite. We always toast to him. Except today it’s just me. Daire is absent, and it isn’t like him. But after everything that’s happened between us, it’s impossible to say where his mind’s at right now.

So alone here I sit, thoughts blowing through my mind like tumbleweeds. The grass is squishy, and I’m covered in mud, but it doesn’t bother me. Ryan never cared what I looked like. At least, that was what he liked to say.

It was probably a lie too because if he didn’t care then I should have been enough for him. I think the thing that bothers me most is that I can’t ask him. There is no closure when someone dies abruptly. One minute they are there and you’re fighting with them, and the next they are gone. They leave you to ruminate on sour words and wonder about things left unsaid. I still have so many questions I want to ask him. We had conversations waiting for later that we’ll never get to finish.

There is no later in death, and I didn’t know that then. My answers died with him in the bright blue water of Lake Michigan. It seems that even Daire and Julian have sealed away the memories of that night, never to be spoken of again.

It’s another reason to hate him. Daire refuses to talk about it for purely selfish reasons. He will deploy every defense mechanism in his arsenal to avoid his own discomfort. I suppose that makes it easier to disengage himself from the fact that there are two headstones in this cemetery because of him.

I only found about the girl who was with him that night when the papers released her name. The news reports stated she met him at a party hours before. It’s an odd thing to hate someone you’ve never met. I really have no right to that hate because she was just a victim of Daire’s recklessness too. She couldn’t have known everything that transpired before she joined them on that fateful boat ride. She would have no idea that I’d just laid myself bare and broke myself open for Daire.

The truth is that anything I shared with either of the brothers before that night is irrelevant. What they shared with her is the most intimate thing anyone could ever experience together. Her and Ryan died together, amidst a tangle of crushed metal in Lake Michigan. I’ve always wondered if they shared words in those last few moments. If there was any connection at all. Or if Ryan thought of me for even a second.

I swipe the bitter, scorching tears from my cheeks and take a pull from the bottle of Jack. It’s warm, and it burns all the way down, just like my love for Ryan.

I’ve drank too much, and there’s a brief moment of time in which I question how I’m going to get out of here, but I wash that logic away with more Jack Daniels. Serves me right for thinking I could count on Daire for anything.

He decides to grace me with his presence when the moon is high in the sky, and I’m too far gone to be civilized. The breeze carries the scent of his cologne before I hear the squish of his footsteps in the soggy grass. We are wordless and empty when he sits down beside me, and the only thing I have to offer him is the bottle of Jack.

He takes it but doesn’t drink. His eyes are focused on the headstone that has somehow managed to sum up Ryan’s life into a series of brief words and a dash between the years that were too short lived.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

Daire turns to me, but I can’t bring myself to look at him. His eyes are on the side of my face, and I don’t need to see him to know that he’s angry. He’s always angry on this day. Angry at me. The whole world. Ryan. Himself. What I fail to understand is how he can be entitled to those feelings.

“You should know that I would be here,” he answers crisply.

“Should I? Because sometimes I wonder why we still bother.”

He goes rigid beside me, and it makes me feel good to be mean right now. I want to lash out at him. I want to express myself. For years, we’ve been going round and round, skirting the events of that night, but immortalizing it in our minds and calendars.

We have never celebrated the day of his birth. Now we only come here to remember the day of his death. Like that’s the thing to do. Like it will make any difference.

“You don’t have to bother,” Daire says. “You are free to leave and never come back if that’s what you want.”

His arrogance enrages me. I’ve always thought that Daire concluded he was a better brother than I was a girlfriend.

“This whole thing is fake,” I insist. “And Ryan would hate it. He wouldn’t want us coming here to talk about the same damn thing every year. People only want to remember the good memories when someone dies.”

“Lola.” Daire’s voice is a warning. He doesn’t want to get into this, but I don’t care. I’ve let him have his way. I’ve let him throw his childish tantrums and pick and choose the appropriate conversations we are allowed to have. I’m sick of this charade, and I’m sick of him.

“What is it exactly that I’m supposed to remember?” I ask. “It’s hard to choose from all the good memories I have of that night.”

Daire looks at me but doesn’t answer.

I start to count them off on my fingers. “I guess I could remember the way he lied to me and told me he was at dinner with his parents when really he was at the party with you.”

“Or maybe how before I had come to you that night, he was in his bedroom with his tongue down another girl’s throat. There’s something to keep me warm on a cold night.”

Daire’s eyebrows pinch together. “You saw that?”

“Like it was the first time,” I mock. “You thought I was such an idiot. You honestly believed you could tell me whatever I wanted to hear, and it would all go away.”

His eyes wander to the headstone, and he shakes his head. “It wasn’t like that, LB.”

“That’s exactly what it was like. You came to run interference before I ever got a chance to say anything to him. People always talk about the last words they said to someone before they died, but I didn’t get to have those because you took them from me.”

“I was trying to do the right thing,” Daire answers. “You couldn’t have talked to Ryan when he was in that state, and you know it.”

“That was my decision to make,” I sneer. “Not yours. But you just thought you could take control of everything the way you always did. Adrian Daire come to save me again. Looking at me the way you did and lying to me with your eyes. You were a gutless shitbag then, and you still are now. I humiliated myself. I betrayed him for… nothing.”

“You’re drunk, Lola.”

He wants to excuse my behavior because that makes it easier to accept. Only, there aren’t any excuses for what I have to say right now.

“You never liked me,” I continue. “I know you never liked me. You hated me from the moment we met. You were so jealous of me it was pathetic. You wanted all of Ryan’s attention because it made you feel better about being the bastard son nobody gave a shit about.”

Daire clenches his fists and works his jaw, his eyes lasered in on me. I want a reaction, but he isn’t giving me what I need. I need him to feel the way that I feel right now. It’s infuriating, and I can’t stop myself. I continue to prod him until he explodes.

“I know that you blame me,” I accuse. “You think if I hadn’t come along that night, he would still be alive.”

“That’s because he would be!” He growls. “Everything that happened that night happened because of you.”

The victory isn’t a sweet one. It’s the thing I’ve always known to be true, and he’s finally admitted it. He blames me. And suddenly, I’m stone cold sober. I scramble to my feet and take off running before he can see me break down. But I don’t make it very far before he grabs me from behind. His leg gives out during the struggle and we both crash into the mud together.

We tumble around, and I attempt to get out from under him, but he’s too heavy, and the fight is leaving me weak.

“Get off of me!” I scream.

He pins me down with his hands and forces me to look at him, clenching my jaw between his fingers. My chin wobbles and tears leak from my eyes, and I have never burned with so much rage before.

“I hate you! I hate you more than anything, and I never want to see you again!”

“You can hate me as much as you want, poppet,” he answers softly. “But you are wrong. About everything.”

“No, I’m not,” I sob.

His eyes are uncharacteristically filled with emotion. “I had no idea that you saw him like that. I never wanted you to see him like that, LB. I never wanted—” His voice cracks, and he closes his eyes. “I never wanted to see you hurt that way. Ryan was good to me, but he wasn’t good to you.”

At some point, I stop resisting, and Daire’s body is closer to mine now, weighing us both down in the mud. His fingers caress my cheek, and I hate that I take comfort in him, but I do.

“You can hate me for the choices I made that night,” he says. “But I don’t regret them, and I never will. Because if I hadn’t left you behind, then it would be you lying here in this cemetery instead of her.”

It’s the most candid admission he’s ever made, and it knocks my whole world off kilter.

“I never hated you, Lola. Even when I wished I could.”

“But you always—”

“Do you have any idea how it makes me feel?” he cuts me off. “That while Ryan floated lifeless beside me and my leg bled out, my biggest regret was that I never got a chance to kiss you.”

I cling to his biceps. “Is that true?”

His answer is to kiss me now, right here in the dirt. We cave in to our wants the way addicts usually do, overdosing on each other. Guilt forgotten, we wash away our sins with rain and cleanse our filthy bodies. We are a jumble of hands and mouths and legs and messy clothing and hard words.

Daire opts for ease of access, barely undoing his trousers and hoisting up my dress. His flesh pulses into me, stabbing at me with violent and jarring thrusts. The sounds coming from his chest are guttural, and he is more animal than man right now. I wrap my legs around him and kiss his throat, quietly clinging to him while he works out his aggression. It’s hot and fierce and dirty and the most intense thing I’ve ever experienced.

He fucks me until he comes inside of me, and even then, he doesn’t stop. He pumps until his dick is soft and his arms give out on him. He collapses and rolls to the side, limp and spent. It’s cold enough now that I can see our heavy breaths on the air, and my teeth are chattering. Daire tilts his head to look over at me, and I half-laugh, half-cry.

He laughs too before his fingers find mine, and he holds my hand like a man who really cares about me.

It’s a dangerous thought to have, but for right now, it’s mine.