“I thought it was obvious.” Josh let out a bitter laugh. “I’m in love with you.” He made the confession like a man on death row. Like it didn’t matter because tomorrow would never come.

Clara froze. She’d imagined this moment in spells of weakness, but never like this. The words that should have meant everything felt meaningless.

“What part of this is love?” Her fragile words rang out in the kitchen. Her pain made the question vibrate in the air. “I bet you’ve never stopped to consider the realities of a romantic relationship between us. Well, I have. And the first thing I realized is that if we’re together, Josh, then someone has to lose. Either my family or your career. Two things we love. Two things we’ve built our lives on. Two pieces of us that will never fit together.”

“I can’t believe you’re disqualifying me out of hand. Don’t I get a chance to plead my case?” He sounded wounded, but more than that he sounded like a man whose past has caught up with him. A man who always knew that he couldn’t win and wished now that he’d never tried.

“Josh, I’m not an idiot. I spend hours a day surrounded by your former lovers. I’ve seen your five-star videos. Even if you didn’t go back to performing when your contract expires next year, you’d get bored with me in two weeks, a month tops. I could never compete.”

“I can’t believe this. Listen to yourself. You’ve already made up your mind. You’re jumping to conclusions about things that may or may not happen a year from now when we haven’t even gotten a chance to learn how to live together as more than roommates. You wanna be right more than you wanna be happy,” Josh said, like a soothsayer.

Clara’s eyes burned. “I need to get out of here.” He’d once accused her of not living in the real world, but now he was the one painting a fantasy he couldn’t fulfill.

“Wait.” Josh’s voice sounded far away, like she’d sunk to the bottom of the ocean while he stayed on the surface. “Don’t run.” He reached for her hand and she saw the fear in his eyes.

She tucked her arms behind her back. “I don’t belong here.” Clara tilted her head back so the tears would pool in her eyes. “There’s nothing left for me in this house.”

For the second time that summer, she packed her bags.

Chapter thirty-four

IT HAD BEEN a while since Josh had driven down the highway, hating his life, but he fell into the old habit with ease. After Clara left, he couldn’t stay in the house. Every room pulsed with memories and phantom promises of what might have happened if he hadn’t inadvertently harmed the woman he loved.

He’d grabbed his keys and jumped in his car without a plan. Without a destination. Without realizing that driving now reminded him, as strongly as any room he’d left behind, of the person he was trying to escape.

Everything hurt. Never before had he registered that eyelids could ache. He couldn’t stop seeing Clara recoil when he’d fed her those lies about her future without him. When he’d spit the same vile stereotypes that Bennie had used on him back in her face. It didn’t matter how much her rejection stung. Lashing out like a wounded animal wasn’t acceptable.

Josh wished he could get purchase on some anger. At Bennie or Clara or even himself. Anger wouldn’t have carved out his insides like anguish until the only thing left of his body was a hollow shell. At least not at first.

Somehow he’d done it again. Josh had always had a rare talent for sinking every ship he ever stepped foot on. Replaying his conversation with Clara over and over, he tried to pinpoint, to the millisecond, the moment he’d fucked up. He lowered his window until the wind off the freeway smacked him in the face.

As soon as he’d found out what had happened, he should have offered Clara comfort, not chosen to indulge his ego. He could have gone after Bennie or at least made her a cup of coffee. Instead, he’d had a childish outburst because she didn’t appreciate being thrown into the world he’d chosen. Her fear and anger at her name going public along with Shameless had been another cruel reminder that Clara didn’t want to be publicly associated with him.

To add insult to injury, he’d picked the worst possible time to tell her he loved her. Really ruined that whole moment. Of course, she didn’t believe him. Mixed in with his remorse was a heaping helping of guilt.

While he hadn’t revealed her name, he’d thought about it. It had felt wrong during all of those interviews not to give her credit for her idea and involvement. Shameless wouldn’t exist without Clara. Neither he nor Naomi wanted all the credit, attention-loving as they were. But Josh wanted partners who would face the firing squad of society alongside him.

In hindsight, the silent in Clara’s request to be a silent partner was deafening. Had she ever really believed they could win? Or had she considered her investment, in both him and their venture, a lost cause all along?

Shameless represented everything he’d ever liked about porn. A celebration of sex and pleasure that didn’t make any apologies. Without all the stuff he resented about certain studios: overproduced, extreme narratives that confused fantasy with objectification, performers and crew treated like garbage so that the machine could drain them for all they were worth. But Shameless without Clara didn’t make sense to him.

Josh started to sweat as he pulled up in front of his parents’ house. He hadn’t meant to drive here. Not consciously. But it seemed a fitting punishment. Now he could see how far he’d fallen. Could catalog all the people he’d hurt. One by one. He killed the engine and let the silence of the suburbs engulf him.

Whether through the interference of fate or simply because of bad timing, his mother stood at the front door, bringing her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun as she bent to pick up the newspaper. Josh took a deep breath and stepped out of the car.

“You know, you look a lot like my kid.” Her words were just loud enough to carry across the lawn. The grass had that fresh-cut appearance, all the blades pushed linear, that only lasted for a few hours after his father dragged the old machine he refused to replace across the yard. Josh wanted to dive into it face-first. To fill his hands with the sharp warm blades until his fingers were painted green and he could pretend he’d never left.

Instead, he screwed up his face against the surge of tangled emotions that arose at the sight of his mother, at once familiar and painfully distant. “Hey, Ma.”

Her hair was up in a tight bun, the wheat-colored waves shot through with gray. She had on one of his dad’s fishing shirts and white capris, frayed at the edges. When she made her way toward him, she walked carefully across the pavement with the kind of short urgent steps that told him the driveway was like coals under her bare feet.

“‘Hey, Ma,’ huh? That’s all I get after two years?” She stopped in the grass a few feet from him. “You always did have an abundance of nerve.”

His chest ached to look at her. At her hands and her strong jaw and the freckles so like his own that splashed across her cheeks. He felt rotten, like the core of him had decayed and was spoiling everything from the inside out. Every reason he’d left home, every reason he’d run, seemed almost as stupid as it had been selfish.

“I missed you.” Josh had never found any particular talent for apologies.

His mom crossed her arms and didn’t give an inch. “You’re in trouble.”

“I know,” he said, surprised to find relief in the words. At least she was talking to him.

“Big trouble.” She raised her chin in the way she thought made up for the fact that he was over a foot taller than her. “I’m not exactly sure I know how to punish a twenty-six-year-old man who doesn’t live under my roof anymore but believe me, I’ll find a way.”

He wanted to smile at her but he knew she wouldn’t like it. “I don’t doubt it.”

“You look terrible,” she said, in that soft, gentle way that only mothers can get away with. That tone when it’s not judgment so much as reproach. How dare you not take care of my child? She ran her thumbs gently across the bags under his eyes. “Is this all for my benefit?”

Josh tried not to think of Clara. It was extraordinary that just holding her name in his mind made him flinch. Winning her back seemed unlikely. The most likely outcome of their fight was that Josh would spend the rest of his life thinking about this summer and trying to exorcise his regret. He was lost. In ways both literal and profound. And just like when he was little, he’d done the only thing that made sense. He’d tried to make his way home to the house with the blue shutters.

“I never should have stayed away so long.”

His mother stepped back, adjusting the way his glasses rested on his ears in a gesture that sent him right back to standing in the kitchen before the first day of fifth grade. “That’s true.”

“I hurt you.” It was written in the unblinking way she held his gaze.

“Yeah.”

The one word was all it took for him to lose it. He bent his arm to cover his face as he started to cry.

“Come here, you.” She wrapped her arms around him. “Looks like you got a head start on punishing yourself.”