by McLean, Jay
I approach with a cautious “Hey.” “In the Midnight Hour” by Wilson Pickett, one of her grandpa’s favorites, floats through the open door.
“You did a really good job on these railings,” she says, looking up at me.
I sit across the porch step, my legs crossed at the ankles. “They took all summer,” I tell her. “Delicate, intricate little things.” Just like you. “It was worth it, though.”
She nods as she reaches out, her gaze lost when she fingers the name etched into the wood. I know which one she’s tracing without having to look. Even if I hadn’t memorized the placement of each one, her eyes are pained enough to reveal the longing and sadness. Holden.
“Can you not tell my grandpa that I’m here?” she says, releasing a breath. “It’s just… if he knows, then he’ll come back, and I don’t want him to. I want him to have fun with whatever he’s doing.”
I lick the dryness off my lips and try not to stare at her. “Sure.”
“And, you know, same thing as last year… don’t tell anyone I’m here.”
I nod. “I won’t say anything.”
After a sigh, she says, her eyes meeting mine, “I don’t know if I’ll be staying,”
“Okay.”
Wilson Pickett’s voice is replaced with Ben E. King’s as he croons for someone to stand by him, and we sit in silence, let the entire song play out. Mia’s the first to speak, and when she does, I can hear the heartache in the breaking of her voice. “Have I changed, Leo?”
I shrug because I don’t know how to respond. Any answer would be volatile to her current state of emotions.
My non-answer is answer enough, and she shakes her head, looks down at her mug. “I don’t want to have changed.”
“I mean,” I start, then take a breath. “It’s just you look different, that’s all. Holden and I—we’re not used to seeing you like this.”
“Like what?”
I shrug again.
“No, tell me.” She puts the mug down and scoots closer. “I want to know how you see me.”
I hesitate, because I really, really don’t want to hurt her. “It’s just the fancy clothes and makeup, that’s all.” And the heels, which make her legs look insanely hot. I leave that part out, for obvious reasons.
She frowns as she looks down at herself.
I add, “People grow up, Mia… And where you live, it’s so different to how you grew up, so… I mean, it’s bound to happen, right?”
She inhales deeply.
And I keep going, “And if this change is what you want and you’re happy with yourself, then who the fuck are we to tell you otherwise? Assholes. That’s who we are. Forget Holden and me. We’re shitbags.”
A smile creeps across her face.
“We’re just not used to it, that’s all. We like the Mia we grew up with, you know? We struggle with change—guys—in general. We’re dickheads like that.”
She laughs once.
And because I like the sound of her laughter, I continue, saying, “Plus, Holden’s probably thinking about all the attention you’re getting from guys, and he thinks like a guy and probably hates every thought that he puts into those imaginary guys’ brains and he wants to protect you and he can’t because he’s not there.” I run out of air, replace it, and add, “He cares about you. That’s all.”
She chews the corner of her lip, and after a moment, she clears her throat. “What about you? Do you like my change?”
I tell her the truth. Every heartbreaking word of it. “I don’t see how it affects me.” Or why it matters what I think. She has a boyfriend, so she’s clearly moved on. Besides, I’ve barely spent any time with her, so I can’t judge. The things that matter to me can’t be seen. They’re not physical. They never have been.
The silence stretches between us, her eyes searching mine for answers, for truths. Finally, she looks away, and with glassy eyes, she mumbles, “I never want to grow into a person that my best friend doesn’t like.”
“I’m sure that’s not—”
“He changed, too,” she cuts in, her voice louder, clearer. “When he left, he became someone else. He was sleeping around, and I didn’t judge him on that.” Quickly, she adds, “Not that I’m sleeping around; I’m not. I’m just saying…”
I don’t respond because I have nothing to say.
“Has he said anything to you?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Nothing.” Because it’s part of the deal that came with our friendship: we don’t talk about her. Ever. “I’m not the one you should be having this conversation with, Mia.”
“I know,” she says, her exhale puffing her cheeks.
“Do you want me to take you to him?”
“I don’t think he wants to see me.”
“All right,” I say, getting to my feet. “I have homework to do, so…” I squeeze her shoulder as I pass, and stop in the kitchen, pull out my phone to send Holden a text:
Leo: I don’t know what happened with you guys, but she’s a mess, man. And I think she’s scared to talk to you. You have to be the one to fix this. I can’t fucking see her like this.
He replies before I can even shove the phone back in my pocket.
Holden: I’ll be there in five.
I wait by the kitchen window until his headlights pull into the driveway, and then I watch as he gets out and walks toward the porch, his head down.
I hear Mia say, “I’m sorry.”
And then Holden reply, “I don’t want you to be sorry, Mia Mac. I just…” I go up to the landing, where I sit on the couch with my laptop and textbooks all around me. I put my earbuds in, set the volume to high. Whatever they’re saying, it’s not for my ears.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Leo
It’s a whole three hours later when Mia enters the house. She stops at the landing when she sees me sitting in the same spot I’ve occupied the entire time she’d been talking to Holden. She’s smiling—the kind of smile that knocks all the air out of my lungs. I take one earbud out and raise my eyebrows at her. “Good talk?”
“Thank you,” is all she says, then starts for the bathroom. “I’m going to shower. Is that cool?”
“Uh-huh.” I nod.
Five minutes later, I realize how uncool her showering only a few feet away from me is. She didn’t bring a change of clothes with her, which means that she’s going to come out naked, dripping wet, wrapped in a towel.
And the worst part? I’ve seen what’s underneath that towel. With a groan, I look down at my lap, glare at the erection tenting my shorts. “Stupid body,” I whisper to myself. “Stupid, deceiving jerk!” I grab the nearest textbook, and, clearly, all blood’s rushed from my brain to my dick, because I don’t even think of the repercussions when I drop the book on my lap to hide the proof of my illicit thoughts. “Motherfucker!” I shout in pain.
“You okay?” Mia calls out. And I imagine her in there, suds of soap smeared across her pale flesh, and then her hands, touching that flesh, from her breasts to her—
“Leo?!”
“Yep!” I shout. “I’m good.” I’m so fucking not. There are tears in my eyes, and I don’t know if it’s from the pain of the junk shot or if I’m crying at the image of a soaking wet Mia that I’ll probably never get to see in real life.
I shove the book off my lap, and sure enough, my hard-on’s soldiered past the point of pain and is still there, looking at me, waving at me like “Haha. Sucks to be you.”
“I hate you,” I whisper, and I’ve officially gone mad.
The pipes clank when the shower turns off, and, like the little bitch that I am, I run to my room, close the door, dive under the covers and hide.
And then I listen.
I listen to the bathroom door opening, and then her footsteps as she goes upstairs to her bedroom. I hear her bedroom door open and close, and I count to ten before tiptoeing back out. I grab my phone, laptop, and books and bring them all back to my room, where I take a moment to let my pulse sett
le.
Sitting on the bed, my back to the wall, I try to focus on the words on my laptop screen:
Community protection, criminal justice assisting, criminology, legal system.
I read all these words out loud, and yet, something happens from my eyes to my mouth to my brain because nothing is sinking in. Suddenly, it dawns on me that my whole reason for coming here was so I could focus, undistracted. But now? Now that bullshit thing Lucy calls fate has thrown it all out the window and given me the greatest distraction of all.
There’s a light tapping on my door. “Leo?”
I close the laptop, throw it on the floor. There’s no way I’m getting anything done tonight. “Yeah?” I call out.
“Can I come in?”
I rub a hand down my face. “Sure.”
Mia peeks in first and then steps all the way into the room. Her hair’s still wet, the makeup gone, and she’s in those red plaid pajamas.
“Am I interrupting?” she asks, unsure, looking around the room.
She’s my Mia again.
And goddamn she’s flawless.
“No,” I tell her, sitting higher. “You okay?”
Her bottom lip tinges red when she clamps her teeth around it, nodding. She sits on the bed, her legs crossed, and what I wouldn’t give to clamp my teeth around those thick thighs of hers. I clear my throat, grab the bed sheet, and place it not-so-covertly over my lap. Her eyes trail every move, until she realizes what’s happening and looks away, her cheeks blossoming that beautiful pink that stains her pale flesh. “It’s so dark in here,” she mumbles, and I flick on the lamp on the nightstand.
“I like to work in the dark. No distractions, you know?”
Nodding, she says, “The talk with Holden helped a lot. We really needed it.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
Silence falls, and it’s… it’s almost comforting. Eventually, she moves to sit next to me, her side brushing mine. “You were right—about the whole me changing thing.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, kind of, but it’s more than that, too.” She scoots down until her head’s on the pillow, looking up at the ceiling. Her fingers splay across her stomach, tap, tap, tapping away.
I stay quiet.
“When I left last year and went back home, my dad set up a job for me in his company. He said it was good for college prep and transcripts.” Her eyes squint at the word “college,” but she doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask. “He put me to work with a bunch of paid interns, most of them in college. They were older and far more sophisticated, and they just seemed to have their shit together, you know?”
Not really, but I nod anyway.
“In the beginning, they didn’t include me in anything, and at first, I thought it was because I was the boss’s daughter. I felt like the biggest outsider. It kind of reminded me of being at your house.” She whispers the last part, as if she didn’t realize what she was saying until it was too late.
I press my lips tight.
“No offense,” she says, and again, I nod. “So, anyway, I started dressing like them and acting like them, and before I knew it, I had friends. And it wasn’t like the girls in the dorms who lived with me twenty-four seven and had no choice but to talk to me… I don’t know,” she chokes out, and the wobble in her voice has me sliding down the bed and lying on my side to face her. She drops her hand from her stomach, searching, and I take it in mine. “You know me, Leo. Out of everyone in the world, you know how much I’ve struggled with that stuff.” She turns to me now, her face only inches from mine. “I just wanted to feel like I belonged somewhere.”
“I know,” I murmur. “But I hate that you feel like you have to change to do that.”
She seems to process this a moment, then says, “Holden thinks I’ve sold out.”
“Sold out?”
She nods.
“How?”
“Because I use Dad’s money to create this… facade. He’s so filthy rich he doesn’t even realize the dent I’ve made on his credit card. Either that or he just doesn’t care.”
“How is that selling out?” I ask.
“Holden thinks that it shows that I’ve forgiven my dad. Like him throwing money at me makes the whole walking-out-on-his-family thing okay.” She takes a breath. “Like I’ve just accepted it and forgotten about it and moved on.”
“Is that how you feel?”
“I don’t know how to feel,” she answers quickly. “But I know that carrying around that…” she trails off.
“Hate?” I offer.
Her nose wrinkles. “Not hate, just disappointment, I guess. I can’t live the rest of my life with that in the back of my mind and expect to be completely happy one day. It’s impossible.”
I let a beat of silence pass before asking, “Do you like your dad?”
“I love him,” she’s quick to answer.
I shake my head. “That’s not what I asked. Do you like him? As a person. Regardless of genetics.”
She rolls onto her back, her eyes on the ceiling again. “I don’t really know him. He works a lot and—”
“You shouldn’t make excuses for him, Mia.”
“I know,” she almost shouts. “But I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
She turns to me now, her bottom lip jutted out. “That he’s going to leave me again.” She says it so quietly I almost don’t hear her.
When I bring her into me, it’s habitual. And when I feel her first tear soak through my shirt, it’s instinctive for me to say, “I’m sorry, baby.” I don’t realize what I’ve said until I feel her body tense and her breath catch. “Sorry,” I tell her, because I am. I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t even be this close to her. And I shouldn’t be fucking holding her, not when she’s not mine to have.
She wipes at her eyes and then pulls back to look at me. She’s so fucking close I could breathe in her exhale. I could hold my breath. Never let it out. Let a piece of her live inside me forever.
She says, voice soft, “It is so easy to forget while I’m there, who I am in here.” She taps at her chest, at the spot right above her heart. “I don’t ever want to forget who I am or where I came from. Don’t ever let me forget, okay?”
Eyes searching hers, I ask, “Who are you, Mia Mackenzie Kovács?”
She sniffs, nuzzling into me again, her arm going around me. “I’m the granddaughter of an immigrant dairy farmer, who grew up in pigtails, wearing overalls and rubber boots, and my favorite place on earth is exactly 130 feet in the air.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Mia
I’m pressed against a cloud. No, it’s too hard to be a cloud. Maybe it’s a boulder? A cloudy boulder. And it’s warm. So warm. And it’s around me, like a blanket. There’s a beeping—a fire alarm going off in my head. The hard cloud moves, and then it speaks. Clouds don’t speak. “Shut up,” it mumbles, and it hugs me tighter.
“You shut up,” I murmur, my eyes closing again. The beeping won’t stop, no matter how hard I try to get back to dreamland. I sit up, annoyed, and try to focus my eyes. “What is that?”
“Alarm,” the cloudy boulder mumbles.
“Where’s the fire?”
“What?”
There’s a light source coming from the nightstand, and so I climb the boulder and reach for it. I hit a button on the side of a phone. A phone? Why is there a phone on a cloudy bould—
I’m suddenly awake.
Too awake.
That warm, cloudy boulder is Leo Preston. And I’m sprawled on top of him, while his arms circle my waist, holding me steady. His mouth—his heated exhale—lands on my stomach, right where my shirt has ridden up. His lips part there, just above my belly button, and he kisses me once. Just once. My breaths are jagged, fiery little things that shoot out from my mouth and don’t ever come back. His hands shift, balls of heat against my bare back. I try to swallow, but the dryness of my throat prevents it. It’s still dark o
ut, so dark I can’t see a thing in this room. But I feel it all. Feel his hands cling to my shoulders, tugging me down. Wetness pools at my core when my body lowers against his, his mouth finding the tip of my breast, over my shirt, and he bites down gently. I let out a groan, my body arching against his. “Jesus, Mia,” he whispers, and he’s shifting me, one of his bare legs moving between mine, his knee pressed against my center. He lowers me again until I’m straddling his waist, his hardness at a place I’ve only ever dreamed about. He kisses his way up my chest and onto my neck, one hand going to my hair. His fingers curl, pulling gently while I grind against him, searching for my release. “Fuck,” he hisses, and he grabs a handful of my butt, squeezing tight, pressing down, putting more pressure at the parts we connect. He thrusts, again and again, and then he—
He stops.
It’s a quick movement.
So abrupt it takes a moment for me to realize what’s happening.
“Jesus fuck, Mia!” And then he’s rolling out from beneath me, cursing under his breath. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
The weight of my actions falls steady on my chest, slowly, gradually, until it hits me like a vice, wrapping around my heart. It’s suddenly cold, too cold, and the only warmth I feel is the guilt when it leaks out from behind my eyelids and catches on my cheeks.
What have I done?
“I should go,” I whisper into the darkness.
“Yeah,” Leo says, and I can hear the agony in his voice. “You really should.”
Leo
I run.
I run until I can’t feel my legs anymore. Or any other part of my body. I run until my lungs cave in, and my mind goes numb, and I can no longer remember what it feels like to have her on top of me, in my arms, my mouth on places I’ve fucking fantasized over for years. And then I collapse, face-up on the road, basking in the way the morning sun burns me alive.