“What happened?” I demand loud enough to wake the baby, fumbling to unbuckle my seat belt and climb out. “Stef.”
Stefanie holds her hands up, shakes her frizzy blond head. “Reena,” she says, before I can even get out of the car. “It’s your dad.”
36
Before
Ms. Bowen wasn’t thrilled with me for skipping our meeting. “That was really unlike you, Reena,” she chided, a way colder tone than she’d ever used with me before. She was wearing her glasses today, a smart-looking tortoiseshell pair. “Not to mention disrespectful to me.”
“I know.” I felt myself wilt a bit under her gaze. “I’m sorry.” On top of that, my AP Lit teacher was a hard-ass, and when I couldn’t produce a doctor’s note he docked me two full letter grades on the Tolstoy quiz.
I stared at the bright red C at the top of my make-up quiz, feeling sick. This definitely wouldn’t happen again, I promised myself, trying to avoid a full-on freak-out in the middle of the hallway. I couldn’t keep letting Sawyer distract me from what I was actually supposed to be doing if I was serious about graduating early.
My resolve didn’t last long, though: A week or so later and I was a third of the way through a busy-ish dinner service at the restaurant, heading back to the kitchen for another basket of bread for the carb-happy tourists at a two-top in the back, when Sawyer yanked me by the wrist into the office.
“Wha—” I started, eyes going wide, but he was busy shoving the door shut behind us and then pressing me up against it, a kiss like a leash of deer rushing fleetly through my chest. He tasted like chewing gum, and under that like beer. “So how’s your night going, honey?” I murmured against the sharp, sleek line of his jaw.
Sawyer grinned once, hard and bright, two warm hands against the base of my ribs where my button-down had come untucked (or, more accurately, where he’d untucked it). “My night’s great,” he said, and kissed me again.
I closed my eyes and sank into it a little, my fists opening and closing against the starchy fabric of his work shirt. Sawyer was a good kisser. He had one hand behind my neck now, fingertips in my hair and tugging my head back just the slightest bit so he could get to the pale, sensitive skin underneath my collar; he was working one knee ever so slowly between mine when the door to the office opened hard behind me.
I stumbled forward into Sawyer, then turned around. There was my father, eyes dark and angry, jaw clenched hard. For a second, all he did was stare.
“Um,” I said, hand flying to my mouth before I could quell the impulse, wiping with the back of my hand. Behind me, Sawyer cleared his throat. “We were just—”
“Don’t.” Two bright pops of color stood out against the skin on either side of his face. He opened his mouth and then shut it again, like it was taking every ounce of human restraint not to let both of us have it at the top of his lungs in front of the Holy Father and the seventy-five guests in the dining room. “Get back on the bar before I fire you,” he managed finally, looking at Sawyer. “Now.”
Sawyer nodded obediently, smoothed down the front of his shirt, and stepped around me toward the door. I moved to follow, my face even redder than my father’s, but he got a hand around my elbow, tight enough to hurt. “You,” he said quietly. “You stay.”
“Leo—” Sawyer started.
“Sawyer, I swear to God that if you don’t get out of my sight in another second, you’re going to see a side of me you’ve never seen before, and I promise you you’re not going to like it.”
Sawyer went.
My father shut the door hard behind him and turned to deal with me. “Are you kidding me?” he demanded. He only held my gaze for a fraction of a second, like it was hard for him to maintain the eye contact. He went to the desk and dug a bottle of aspirin out of the top drawer, swallowed two without the benefit of water. “I mean it. I honestly don’t know how to handle you lately. I really don’t.”
“Daddy,” I said, trying to keep calm, the way I’d been taught to deal with an irate customer. “We were only just—”
“You were only just what, Serena?” he retorted, literally throwing up his hands. The phone rang on the desk, a noisy jangle, but he acted like he didn’t even hear. His eyes darted to my untucked shirt. “Fooling around in my office and who knows what else? I’m not going to stand for it. I’m not.”
I fiddled a bit with the computer wires hanging off the edge of the desk. To be fair, the office was a colossally bone-headed location for us to have chosen—it was hard for me to keep a sweaty grip on logic where Sawyer was concerned. “I’m sorry,” I said, as sincerely as I could manage. I wanted so badly to calm him down. “That was dumb.”
“It was,” he agreed, rubbing at his tawny forehead, “but I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry. I’m tired of hearing that. I’ve treated you like an adult, Reena. I’ve trusted you even when it was difficult for me. I know you’ve had a hard time this year, and I haven’t forbidden you to see Sawyer so far, but I will if it’s the only way to get through to you.” It was getting dark; outside the window I could see the light changing, purples and blues. “I’m worried about you, Reena. Do you understand me? More than worried. I’m terrified.”
“Of what?” I demanded shrilly. “What exactly are you so worried about?”
My father stared at me like I was a child, like I honestly had no idea how the world worked. “Listen to me,” he said slowly, looking me in the eye for the first time since he’d walked into the office. “I’m your father. And I’m worried you’re going to make a mistake that I’m not going to be able to fix.”
I felt my spine straighten. I was tired of my father’s religion, of his judgment and his guilt and the oppressive smell of incense; I wasn’t a very good rule breaker, but I was tired of being so well-behaved. At times like this I couldn’t wait to leave for Northwestern, to be out from under his watchful, tyrannical eye—although that, of course, would mean leaving Sawyer, too.
“You are so beautiful,” my father told me, almost pleading. “And you are so bright. I cannot for the life of me understand why you’d want to risk throwing all that away for—”
“I’m not throwing anything away!” My voice rose dangerously. “I’m sixteen. I have a boyfriend. It’s normal. Not for me up to now, maybe, but for other people that’s normal. Can you please just relax and let me have some kind of a life?”
My father laughed at that, low and quiet and disbelieving. “Reena,” he told me softly, “that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”
I opened my mouth to reply but he was finished with me by that point, heading for the desk to get whatever it was he’d come for in the first place. “Go back to your tables,” he said, almost absent. “And for God’s sake, tuck in your shirt.”
*
I don’t know when it first occurred to me that my father wasn’t the only one who wasn’t crazy about the idea of Sawyer and me. Lydia was looking at us sideways, for sure. “Your mom thinks I’m an idiot,” I told him after one particularly awkward encounter in the parking lot of Antonia’s, Lydia offering me a ride home in a way that felt an awful lot like a demand and me fumbling my way toward admitting I was actually headed to her son’s. Sawyer laughed like he thought I was kidding. I wasn’t entirely sure.
“She’s a bully, that’s all,” Shelby said when I told her about it during the free period we shared—how tongue-tied I felt around Lydia, how’d I’d watched her bring a burly line cook near tears with a cool, sharp reprimand about the quality of our hollandaise and then found myself completely unable to string a sentence together when she asked me a totally simple question about the new spring schedule. How she’d shot me a bored, irritated look and walked away. “You just have to stand up to her. It’s like when you punch the meanest kid on the playground.”
I snorted so loudly the study hall proctor shot me an irritated glare, her enormous glasses slipping down her oily nose. I glanced down at the article about the jazz band’s spring concert I was supposed to
be writing, then back at Shelby. “You want me to punch Lydia LeGrande?”
“Oh my God, yes. With every fiber of my being, I want that.” Shelby laughed and reached forward across her desk, tugged my braid reassuringly. “Just watch, Reena. She’ll never know what hit her.”
*
I was sitting cross-legged in bed with my laptop and a spiral notebook alternating between my jazz-band article and a cover letter for an internship at South Florida Living that Ms. Bowen—who’d forgiven me, sort of—seemed sure I’d be able to get, when something small and hard cracked against the window frame behind my head. I jumped, sending my notebook sliding onto the hardwood, and got up on my knees, turning around and peering out the window just as a shiny white pebble smacked the side of the house next to my nose.
I pushed my hair back from my face and felt my stomach turn over—Sawyer was standing in my driveway in a T-shirt with baseball sleeves, one hand tangled in his shaggy hair. I sighed. Of course I would be in love with the kind of boy who threw rocks at windows.
I pulled the window open to a blast of hot, damp Florida air. The sky was dark, heavy purple-black clouds rolling in from the direction of the water, and the palm trees were already starting to bend a bit with the muggy wind. It smelled like rain. “What are you doing?” I hissed. I glanced behind me toward the open bedroom door, looking for any sign of life from my father and Soledad’s side of the hallway. After the scene in the restaurant office, the last thing I needed was for him to catch Sawyer at our house in the middle of the night.
“Hey,” he called back. “Can you come down from there?”
“What?” I said dumbly, even though I’d heard him fine. “Sure. Yes. Hang on.” I pulled a sweater on over my tank top and padded barefoot down the stairs. The kitchen was dark save the night-light under the microwave and quiet except for the low hum of the dishwasher on dry. He was standing on the back steps by the time I opened the door.
“Hi,” I said cautiously, still nervous we were going to get discovered. He kissed me for a long time without coming inside, like he was waiting for an invitation. He smelled warm like the earth, not entirely clean, and when he finally stepped into the kitchen, he tracked a little mud with him. “Sorry,” was what he said first, looking down. “Hi.”
“Hi. That’s okay.” I peered past him into the driveway, but his Jeep wasn’t there. “Did you drive here?”
“Nope. Walked.”
“From your house?”
Sawyer shook his head. “Was at a party.”
“Why?”
“Why was I at a party?”
“Why did you walk?”
“Wanted to see you.”
I squinted. “Are you drunk?”
“Only a little. “
“Are you just drunk?”
Sawyer made a face. “Can I sleep here?”
Jesus God. “Um,” I told him, hesitating. That was basically the stupidest plan in the universe. There was no way Sawyer could spend the night in my bed. I couldn’t even imagine how pissed off my father would be if he caught us—he definitely would tell me I couldn’t see Sawyer after that, and where would I be then? It was enormously dumb even to think about, a suicide mission, but: “Sure,” I heard myself saying. “Yeah. Of course. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I missed you. I’m dumb. You were probably sleeping.”
“Doing homework, actually.” I pushed his hair off his forehead. He needed it cut.
“Oh.” Sawyer’s face fell, just for one fraction of a second, just around the eyes. “If you’re busy, I can go.”
His voice killed me, so low and rumbly, cat purr and truck on gravel. I would have listened to him read the phone book, was the truth. “Don’t worry about it. Come upstairs. I can finish tomorrow morning.” I cringed a little as I said it, thinking of Ms. Bowen and my C in English, the promises I’d made to myself that I wasn’t going to do this exact thing. It was spring, with graduation on the horizon. I couldn’t afford to screw up. Still, I slipped my hand into Sawyer’s anyhow, pulling him closer. “Seriously, it’s fine.”
He hesitated, not moving much. “I don’t want to mess things up for you,” he said.
“You’re not messing anything up for anybody.”
“Yeah, tell that to my dad.”
“What did your dad say to you?” I asked, stopping to look at him quizzically. We were standing in the middle of the kitchen now, mugs for the morning’s coffee set meticulously out on the counter. Soledad never went to bed until everything was in its proper place. “When did you even see your dad?”
“I stopped by the house to pick some stuff up. I should shower.”
“Sawyer. What did he say?”
His teeth grazed the top part of my jaw, back near my ear. “You should come with me.”
“I’m already clean,” I replied, swallowing audibly.
“So what?”
“So, if my father woke up, he’d cut your nuts off.”
Sawyer tilted his head to the side like, fair point. “No shower, then.”
I giggled and tugged on his cold, smooth hand, pulling him out of the kitchen and through the dark hallway. The old stairs creaked and groaned. “Shh,” I hissed, heart pounding, fingertips curling around his shoulder to keep him where he was. God, we were totally going to get caught. I listened for a minute and heard nothing. “You gotta be so quiet, Sawyer, no joke.”
“It’s not me, it’s your house,” he whispered back. His hand snuck up the back of my T-shirt. Even drunk he was quick and stealthy, graceful like a hunted thing. I thought of Sherwood Forest. I thought of Robin Hood.
My bedroom was half-lit by the reading lamp on the night table, and I stayed close to the door and glanced around, trying again to figure out what he saw when he came in here. I looked at the crammed bookshelves, the photos on the wall—Cade and me at the beach when we were little, Shelby on the bleachers at school. There was a shot of my mom from when she was pregnant with me, big like a beach ball, head thrown back laughing; next to that was a big black-and-white of the Seine.
“Hey,” Sawyer said, exhaling, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. “Your bed is warm.”
“I was on it.” I locked the bedroom door to be safe, then crossed the room and knelt down in front of him. There were necklaces and bracelets wrapped around his throat and wrists, hemp and leather like a gypsy. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I should have just let you sleep.”
“I told you, I wasn’t sleeping. Lay back,” I instructed, and climbed in next to him. I listened to him breathe for a while, until he seemed to steady out a bit. I kept one ear cocked toward the hallway. He definitely wasn’t only drunk.
I scooted myself closer until I was right up against him, one of my legs slung over his, and tucked my chin down into the crook of his shoulder. The thin skin of his neck felt warm against my cheek. I wondered where he’d been and who he’d been with, if he had more fun when I wasn’t around. It felt like he could be a completely different person when he wanted, like he could morph before my very eyes.
He’s not what we thought he was, I remembered Allie saying, backyard light gleaming off her yellow hair on the very last night of our friendship. I wished I could talk to her now. Was he like this with you? I imagined asking her—the two of us perched on the swings we were way too old for, her mom making flaxseed muffins in the house.
“Do you think about Allie?” I asked suddenly. I blurted it, quick and quiet, before I could think enough to lose my nerve.
Just for one second, I watched Sawyer disappear, somewhere in his head where I couldn’t find him. Then he blinked and came back. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Maybe I didn’t.”
“Yes you did.”
Sawyer shrugged into the pillows on my bed. “I don’t know, Reena. I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Why not?” I asked, propping myself up on one elbow to look at him: muscles in his sho
ulders, hard knots of bone in his wrists. His skin was slightly shiny, a little pale.
He shook his head, stubborn. “Come on.”
“Me come on?” I frowned. “You come on. I’m just asking—”
“Reena.” He sounded annoyed, like I was bothering him somehow, like maybe he was regretting he’d turned up. “Look, I can leave if you want me to. But I don’t wanna talk about that.”
“Fine.” I flopped back down onto my back and gazed up at the ceiling. I felt achy and uncomfortable, out of sorts.
“You’re not going to like me anymore,” he said quietly. “If we talk about it.”
I sat up in bed. “What does that mean?”
Sawyer shrugged again, listless. “It means exactly what I said.”
“I could never not like you,” I protested, although suddenly there was a part of me that wasn’t entirely sure that was the truth. “We’re going to have to talk about it eventually, don’t you think?”
“Why?” he asked then, flat and simple. I didn’t have an answer for that. I thought of Allie’s sharp chin and clown feet—of long hours spent in the DVD section of the library debating what to watch that night and the way she could make me laugh from clear across the room with the most minute twitch of her face.
Because I miss her, I almost told him. Because I miss her like it breaks my stupid heart.
In the end, though, I just let it alone. I don’t know why, exactly—maybe I was afraid of what he’d tell me, that once it was out there he’d never be able to take it back. Like whatever we had was so fragile—breakable as eggshell, valuable as precious stone—that I had to protect it no matter what it cost.
“What’s one thing you think is really interesting?” I asked instead, curling my arms around my knees and looking down at him. “Not something obvious. Don’t say your guitar.”
Sawyer visibly relaxed then, his whole body uncoiling. He tucked one arm behind his head and just like that we were friends again. “Can I say chicks?” he asked, smiling a little.
“Don’t say chicks.”
“Can I say one chick in particular?”