“Oh, I don’t.”
“No?” His hands moved up my arms, so lightly, then back down until he was holding mine again. He pulled them up and locked them behind his neck.
“I don’t even like birds,” I said, and Sawyer laughed. I blushed a little, glanced down at the negative space between us. “I like you, though.”
“Well,” he said, and kissed me. “That’s good.”
I could still hear Coltrane. I couldn’t decide if I was hot or cold. Sawyer’s face against mine was soft, like an apology. He was standing closer now, impossibly close, and when I leaned back against the Jeep I could feel the metal through his sweatshirt. “You my girlfriend?” he muttered into my ear, so quiet. I laughed, loud and singing, to say yes.
31
After
Shelby’s sitting at a table in back when I get to the restaurant two days after my breakup with Aaron, wiping down the thick folders we use for menus and adding the inserts with tonight’s specials. “Don’t talk to me,” is all she says.
My stomach twists meanly. I hate the idea of fighting with her, of having screwed up the one great friendship in my life: I’ve been down this road before, and it’s lined with total suckage. “Shelby—”
“No,” she says, barely glancing up. Her red hair, curled today, falls into her face like a veil. “I need you not to talk to me for a little while. I’m pissed at you. And I don’t usually get pissed at you, Reena, I don’t have a whole lot of experience doing it, so what I need right now is to just sit here and wipe the crap off these stupid menus and have you let me be until I figure out what I’m going to do about it.”
“That’s not fair,” I protest. I sit down across from her against my better judgment, hoping at least to plead my case. “You said you weren’t going to get involved in whatever happened between me and Aaron—”
Shelby looks at me now, rolls her eyes like I’m being stupid on purpose. “I said I wouldn’t get involved in whatever happened between you and Aaron as long as you weren’t shitty about it, which—whoops.”
I have the strangest, sharpest flash of Allie just then, that night in front of her swing set a hundred years ago. You want to win this fight? Here I am all these years later, still fighting with my best friend about Sawyer. It makes me hate myself a little. It makes me hate Shelby a little, too. “Fine,” I say, cavalier as I can manage. “I’m a shitty girlfriend, and a shitty friend.”
“Okay, listen.” Shelby sighs noisily and sets the menus down on the table, an expression on her face like she didn’t want to do this but I had to go ahead and push her, so here goes. “I know you’ve had a rough couple years, Reena. And it sucks in an Alanis Morissette, isn’t-it-ironic kind of way that you were like, the least risk-taking person in the history of the world and all this shit still happened to you, but I feel like you did a pretty good job making a life for yourself in spite of that and now that Sawyer’s back you’re just acting like it’s junior year all over again.” She ticks off a list on her fingers, like potential side effects of some new, unapproved medication. “You fight, you make up, he’s your favorite person, you hate his guts, and maybe it’s out of character for you or maybe he’s the only person you can really be yourself around, I don’t know. That’s fine, that’s your business—as long as other people don’t get dragged down while you’re figuring it out.”
“I was trying not to drag Aaron down!” I argue, bristling. “That’s why I broke up with him in the first place.”
Shelby makes a face. “Oh, Reena, don’t even kid. You broke up with Aaron because of Sawyer, directly or indirectly. And that’s not—” She stops short, shakes her head. “I don’t want you to think I’m mad at you for dumping my brother.”
“Then why are you mad at me?” I explode. I glance around, self-conscious—there are a couple of businessmen drinking late lunches at the bar, an elderly couple or two eating early dinners. I lower my voice. “Seriously. Why are you mad at me?”
“I’m mad at you—” Shelby sighs again. “I’m mad at you because Sawyer got back here and you like, forgot that you’re kickass. It’s like now that he’s around again all the hard work you did doesn’t even matter. And it’s not anything against Sawyer, I don’t want you to think that, either, especially when everybody in your family thinks he’s the Antichrist—”
“Thanks,” I interrupt, and Shelby pushes out a noisy breath.
“I just feel,” she says crisply, “like you’re forgetting yourself over a dude.”
Now I’m the one who’s pissed. “What am I forgetting, exactly?” I demand. “That I live at home with my father who can’t even look at me most days because he legit thinks I’m the whore of Babylon? That I’m a waitress, and I’m probably always going to be a waitress? Or that I’m eighteen years old with a baby to take care of and no conceivable way of getting out of this stupid place?” God, where does she get off, honestly, Shelby with her college scholarship and brainy girlfriend and limitless doctor future, who gets to pack up at the end of the summer and fly thousands of miles from here? What on God’s green earth could she possibly know about how kickass my life here supposedly is? I shove my chair back noisily, grab my purse off the tabletop. I’m so sick of everyone’s opinions I could scream. “Thanks, Shelby,” I tell her, nasty as humanly possible. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”
*
Sawyer doesn’t give up, of course. I’ve spent my life reading his face like tea leaves, and there was something about the way he looked at me before I went tearing out of his parents’ kitchen the other night that let me know that, as far as he’s concerned, we aren’t done. By the middle of the week, it’s only a question of when.
He holds out until Thursday. I’m stretched on the porch swing with my laptop when his Jeep pulls up, and even in the orange half-light I notice again what bad shape it’s in these days: It was never a particularly nice car to begin with, and now it’s dented like a coffee can, rust speckling the doors. From the sound of it, the muffler is shot.
The hair on my arms perks up even though it’s still eighty degrees, and I close the laptop harder than I mean to, not wanting Sawyer to get a look at the screen: While all my magazine subscriptions have lapsed and I’ve taken my email address off the contact list of every travel website clear across the internet, I’ve still got a weakness for the blogs. I can waste whole nights clicking through: staring at the bright, hypersaturated images captured by women passing through San Diego or spending a year in Jakarta, reading stories about the food they’ve been eating and the people they’ve met along the way. It’s torturing myself. I don’t know why I go out of my way to do it.
So far, I haven’t been able to make myself quit.
“Hey,” Sawyer calls softly, making his way up the front walk. He’s wearing dark, holey jeans and a T-shirt, and he’s left his shoes in the car. His feet are pale against the concrete. There’s a giant plastic cup in his hand.
“Okay, I’ve gotta ask,” I tell him, squinting a little across the lawn. “What’s with all the Slurpees?”
Sawyer shrugs, tips the cup in my direction. “Cheaper than booze.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, wondering about the full story there, but in the end I just leave it alone. “Your teeth are gonna rot right out of your head,” I warn him; then: “What were you going to do if I wasn’t sitting out here?”
“Who said I was here to see you?” He smiles as he climbs the steps, then sits down sideways on the top one so he’s facing me, leaning against my house. It’s quiet inside, the windows dark. My father had a stress test this afternoon and went to bed early. Soledad followed not long after that. “I was going to knock on the door.”
I raise my eyebrows. “It’s late.”
“Ah. Woulda thrown rocks at your window then, maybe.” He nods at the laptop. “Were you writing?”
“Nope.” I shake my head neatly, taking some weird perverse pleasure in saying it. “I told you I don’t write anymore.”
“I
remember you saying that, yeah.” Sawyer looks at me carefully. “It’s a bummer, though. I thought maybe you were just giving me a hard time.”
“Because obviously everything I do is about you?”
Sawyer rolls his eyes. “Is that what I said?” he asks, no particular irritation behind it at all. It sounds like he knows he’s got to wait me out and is willing. “Seriously. Did you hear me say that just now?”
“Screw you,” I fire back, imitating his tone. His patience riles me up, makes me want to fight him. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you not to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t like me.”
I raise my head and look at him, sitting on the floor like a penitent. I sigh and I tell him the truth. “Sawyer, me liking you has never, ever been the issue.”
He smiles—I wish he didn’t have such a pretty smile—and changes tactics. “Come sit by me,” he says this time.
“Why?”
“’Cause I’m asking you to.” He bends over and grabs a handful of shiny white pebbles from the path leading up to the porch, begins to throw them onto the lawn one by one. They skip across the slick green grass as I shake my head.
“Sawyer,” I tell him. “No.”
“Why not?”
I don’t really have a good answer for that one—not one I can tell him, at least—so I get off the swing and perch on the top step. He slides down so he’s sitting below me, his chin about level with my knee. “That one is new,” I say. There’s a deep blue star on his bicep that wasn’t there before; it stands out against his skin like a brand.
“Got it in Tucson.”
I feel my eyebrows go up, that expression Shelby calls the Big Furrow, when she and I are speaking. “What were you doing in Tucson?”
Sawyer looks up at me, smiles a little. “I worked on a farm.”
“Seriously?”
“Soybeans,” he tells me, nodding once. “And in a pottery place.”
I laugh, I can’t help it. “You are out of control.”
“What’s out of control about that?” he asks, all innocence. “I ran the kiln.”
“I see.” Of course he did. Probably Sawyer could have any job, do anything, drive a forklift or a race car or turn water into wine. “Where else did you go?”
“Oh, man.” Sawyer considers. “Well. New Orleans, right when I left here. LA.”
Los Angeles is dirty and full of neon. You can’t drink water from the tap in Los Angeles. I know this: not because I’ve ever been there, but because like so many other things I read it in a book.
“Kansas, for a while.”
“Kansas.”
“Uh-huh. I’d never been. It’s flat there.”
“So they tell me.”
“Missouri. Flat there, too.”
I close my eyes and wonder how I am doing this, how we’re talking just like we used to. On the breeze I smell the ocean, close and endless; my pulse ticks like a bomb inside my throat. I hum at him a little, unwilling to commit either way.
“New Mexico,” he says, like a litany. After a moment his hand brushes my heel. “Austin.”
I try not to notice—I believe in accidents—but then his palm slides up the back of my leg, across the muscles that have settled there since he’s been gone. “Hey there,” I tell him, and I have to clear my throat to do it.
“Reena,” he says, and the sound of him saying my name is a murmur down my backbone that spreads like a flattened palm. He presses his index finger to the crease behind my knee. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You really are, though.” God, it would be so easy. How is it possible that it would still be so easy? I take a big breath and slide over on the step, away from him.
Sawyer lets go right away, reaches down for more pebbles to throw and, finding none, sets about pulling blades of grass from the cracks in the walkway. “Can I ask you something?” he says after a moment, not looking at me. His hands are very tan. “If I’d asked you to come with me, you think you would have?”
“What, when you left here?” I look at him curiously. “I was already pregnant.”
Sawyer laughs a little. “No kidding, princess. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you would have come.”
For a minute I don’t say anything and the silence is phosphorescent; it feels like the whole world is asleep. A small green lizard scampers by. I think of the maps folded up in my bedroom, the travel guides and atlases I’m never going to use. I think of my girl, who I love more than any breathing creature in this universe, and tilt my head back at the moon in a silent howl.
“No,” I tell him finally. “Probably not.”
Sawyer nods like I’ve given him something, confirmed what he suspected from the start. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”
In the morning I wake up and find a pomegranate on my doorstep: red and perfect, round as the world itself.
32
Before
Cade and Stefanie got married the weekend after the restaurant caught fire, standing up in front of God and everyone else and promising their lifelong love and devotion to each other, for richer or poorer, till death did they part. The reception was supposed to have been at Antonia’s but, since his kitchen was good and charred, Finch set up shop in ours instead. Soledad and I spent all of Saturday scouring the house, setting up tables in the backyard and filling giant vases with limes for centerpieces. Cade mostly paced.
Now, with only a few minutes to cake time, I was standing on tiptoes in my closet, rooting around on the top shelf for the shoebox containing the yearbook pictures my aunt Carin had to see right this minute, Reena, bring ’em down. I’d just pulled out the proofs when Sawyer wrapped his arms around my waist from behind, rested his clean-shaven chin on my shoulder. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” I grinned at my cardigans. I didn’t turn around.
“Hi,” he repeated, got me farther inside the closet, spun me around to look him in the face. He made for my mouth with no preamble, my back pressing into jackets and jeans: I smelled body spray and tissue paper, and laughed.
“Come to make out with me in a closet?” I asked, taking another step back. “That’s very classy, LeGrande.”
Sawyer shrugged, grinned a little. “We can make out downstairs, if you’d like.”
I snorted. “Tempting, but I’ll take a pass.”
“I knew it,” he said, faux-sulking. “I’m your dirty little secret.”
“Oh, you so are.”
He smiled. “I missed you.”
“I’m really popular at this party.”
“So I see.” He looked out the door of the closet, glanced at the walls. “Did you paint?”
I smirked, looking around. “Like two years ago I did.”
“Oh, man.” Sawyer laughed. “I don’t even remember the last time I was allowed up here.”
“I do,” I blurted immediately, then cringed. “That’s embarrassing.”
“Nah.” Sawyer sat down on the floor of the closet and took my hand, pulling gently until I came down beside him. His index finger traced the skinny strap of my dress. “Tell me.”
“No.” I pushed aside a stack of Budget Travel magazines from last year, the pages gone smudgy and curled with repeated handling. There was one issue in particular with an article about street markets in London that I could repeat almost word-for-word—just like I could remember every detail about the last time Sawyer had been in my room. “It’s dumb.”
“Holdout,” Sawyer teased, leaning back against the wall. It was dark down here: Jeans and dresses blocked out the light from the bedroom and it felt like we were pretending, like we were hiding in a fort. Balled up at the back of the closet was an old sweatshirt of Allie’s, red with a big white cross on it from the one summer she’d spent lifeguarding. I reached for it like an instinct, pulling at one of the strings on the hood. “Come on.”
“I don’t know,” I said, huffing a little as I
thought about it—the night he came for dinner with his parents, the summer after freshman year. “It was a long time ago. Allie was here with me.”
“Oh!” he said, remembering. “We played cards?”
I nodded. Rummy, I could have added. Allie borrowed my tank top and you told her she looked old for her age and I wished her away for the first time in our entire friendship while we sat here, thinking maybe you’d notice me after she was gone.
Sawyer must have seen my face change, because he grabbed me around the waist in a hurry, tugged me even closer until my head was in his lap. I could feel the muscles in his legs beneath his gray wool pants. There was hardly any give there at all. “Don’t get weird.”
“I’m not getting weird,” I protested, though I felt like I might be about to. I couldn’t get over the notion that Allie was the third person in this relationship, that wanting Sawyer and feeling guilty and missing her so much it ground my bones to dust was all bundled up together, the strings on a hoodie pulled as tight as they’d go. I looked at Sawyer to see if he felt it too—if he felt her, crammed into my messy closet right along with us—but he was looking at me mildly. Talking about it doesn’t change anything, I reminded myself. “Tell me something good,” I said instead.
Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “Anything in particular?”
“No, I don’t know. Anything. Tell me your favorite movie of all time.”
“The Godfather.”
“Really?” I made a face. “Predictable.”
“Oh, and what’s yours?”
I shrugged, muttered. “Some Kind of Wonderful.”
“Because that’s a bold choice.”
“Shut up,” I said, and he bent down to kiss me again—longer, this time, hands wandering. “Be invisible?” he asked, into my shoulder. “Or be able to fly?”
“Invisible, definitely,” I said. “Be deaf or blind?”
“Blind.”