Only the Pretty Lies

by Rebekah Crane

  “Don’t,” I say. I can’t handle him being this close.

  Jamison steps back. “If that’s really what you want.”

  “I don’t deserve what I want, Jay. I’ve messed up too badly.”

  “You made a mistake, Amoris. Do you really think I’d give up on you that easily?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Then you don’t know me at all.”

  Jamison turns his back on me. I can’t stand the sight of him leaving. I can’t stand the distance. I can’t stand letting him go, or letting him down again. I can’t let it happen.

  I grab him like I should have years ago, pulling him to me, pressing myself against him.

  “I’m sorry.” I say it over and over and over again. I’ll say it until he feels it to his core. “For everything. I won’t do it again. I know I’m self-destructive. I’ve been stupid and stubborn, but I’m changing. I broke up with Zach. I yelled at Wendy Betterman. I won’t hurt you again. Please, you have to forgive me, Jay. Please.”

  Jamison pulls away, and I think this is it. This is as close as I’ll ever get again. This is when he lets me go.

  But then his lips fall onto mine. We stand in the middle of the bridge, and my body responds before my mind can comprehend what’s happening.

  Jamison’s hands tangle in my hair, pressing my lips even closer to his. Before I can think straight, we’re in his apartment. We stumble to the couch, falling ungracefully, neither of us willing to let go. The pressure of Jamison on top of me is euphoric. My hips grind into his, begging for more, his breath on my cheek, on my ear, on my lips.

  I can’t stop and think. That would mean slowing down. Not now, when I finally have what I want.

  I reach down for the bottom of his shirt and begin to pull it off, but Jamison halts. His lips leave mine. Everything stops.

  He looks down at me. A thin stream of doubt winds its way into my mind. My brain catches up with my body, which is never a good thing when you desperately want to avoid reality.

  “You yelled at a customer?” Jamison asks.

  “She deserved it.”

  A delectable smile grows on Jamison’s face.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t text,” he says.

  “Me, too.”

  “Happy eighteenth birthday, Amoris.”

  “Happy eighteenth birthday, Jay.”

  Another second. A heartbeat. A hesitation.

  “Jay . . . are we doomed?”

  His eyes convey only honesty, merciless honesty. “Amoris . . . I truly don’t know.”

  23

  TAKE IT SLOW

  Go fish,” Jamison says.

  We sit on opposite sides of the table. It’s one in the morning. I pick up a three of diamonds from the pile between us and place it next to the other card that’s a three in my hand.

  “Do you have any queens?” he asks.

  “Go fish.”

  Jamison reaches for a card. The memory of his fingers tangling in my hair invades my senses. The smell of his clean clothes. The taste of his tongue on mine. The sound of our labored breathing.

  “Earth to Amoris,” Jamison says. “Your turn.”

  Jamison is right, I tell myself. We need to take this slowly. We can’t mess this up. Better to be cautious.

  So we decided to play cards. This might be our fortieth round of Go Fish.

  “Do you have any tens?” I ask with a yawn. Jamison hands me the ten of spades. I add it to my hand.

  “You’re tired,” he says. “Why don’t you go home? Get some sleep.”

  But I just got him back. I’m not about to leave. He’s handling this whole “let’s take it slow” situation much better than I am. It’s like Jamison flipped a switch. He’s sitting across from me as if, just a few hours ago, we weren’t on top of each other.

  “No,” I say. “I just need music. It’s too quiet in here.”

  I connect my phone to the Bluetooth speaker in the kitchen and find a playlist, upbeat but not too sexy. One overly suggestive song and I’ll lose my patience. As the music plays, I dance to the fridge for a soda. When I turn back toward Jamison, he’s staring at me.

  “What?”

  He clears his throat, collecting the cards on the table. “Nothing.”

  “We weren’t done with the game,” I say.

  “Time for a new game. Do you know how to play gin rummy?”

  “No.”

  Jamison smiles. “Sit down. I’ll teach you.”

  The soda is long gone. The playlist is on its second shuffle. The clock reads three in the morning. If my parents weren’t as free-spirited as they are, my being out late might be a problem. But then again, I’m officially eighteen. An adult. The law says I can make my own decisions, and tonight’s is the best one I’ve made in eighteen years.

  I slouch in my seat, my fatigue growing, but I’m unwilling to leave and end the night, especially since Jamison doesn’t appear to be tired at all.

  “Another round?” He collects the cards again.

  “Sure.”

  But my body betrays me, and I yawn. I jump out of my seat, declaring that we need another playlist. This one is officially overplayed. I scan my options and settle on “Songs to sing in the shower.” I turn it up, hoping the beats will revive me. With every hip shake and shoulder sway, I perk up a bit.

  “Come on, dance!” I attempt to yank Jamison from his seat, but he won’t budge. I give up and just dance, until my heart is pumping and my breath is short.

  The music suddenly stops. Jamison holds my phone.

  “I can’t do it,” he says.

  He’s changed his mind. That’s why he wanted to take it slow. He regrets kissing me.

  “Can’t do what?”

  He drops the phone and grabs me, fingers in my hair, lips on mine, kissing me as hungrily as he did the first time.

  “I thought you said . . . we need . . . to take it slow,” I say between breaths and lips and hands.

  “Fuck what I said,” Jamison whispers, his mouth warm on my ear. “I was wrong.”

  It’s been two days since we first kissed, and while we haven’t taken it slow, we haven’t taken it exceedingly fast either. Jamison and I are on the couch again. I’m watching a show on my phone, and Jamison is typing manically on his laptop. The deadline for his college application is bearing down on him, and in his words, he “can’t mess around.” He needs to focus. I’m trying to oblige his request.

  He swears I’m not a distraction, but I’m not convinced. He keeps glancing in my direction every few minutes. He sits on the end of the couch closest to the wall outlet. His laptop battery has gotten so bad that it has to be plugged in constantly.

  “That computer is a piece of junk,” I say.

  “Shhh.” Jamison hugs his laptop close to him. “She can hear you.”

  I chuckle. “You need to start dating a new laptop.”

  “I told you, I’m a faithful man,” Jamison says. “Till death do us part. Though I do hate when she shuts down on me without warning. And the E key has been missing for two years. But every relationship has its bumps. We’ve made it this far.” He turns the laptop toward me so I can see the missing key. Instead I peek at what he’s written, but he’s too quick and turns the screen back toward himself.

  “Can I read it?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not done.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I care.”

  “Will you let me read it when it is done?” I ask.

  “Maybe.”

  I groan and look at my phone again. “You suck.”

  Every few minutes, Jamison resituates himself on the couch, like he’s uncomfortable, and I can tell he’s deleting something.

  “What if you don’t get into the creative writing program at Western?” I ask.

  “I’ll go to one of my backup schools, I guess. Probably KU.”

  University of Kansas is a long way from Alder Creek.
/>   “It’s gonna happen, Jay,” I say.

  “How do you know? You haven’t read my story.”

  “I don’t have to read it to know it’s amazing. You’ve been obsessed with books your whole life.”

  “I’m glad you’re confident.” He sits back on the couch, massaging his neck. If he’d let me get close to him, I’d do that for him, but he’s put up an invisible wall between us.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “What if it’s all . . . for nothing? Changing schools. Living here. My mom changed her damn job for this. She left my dad and sister. They’ve sacrificed so much for me.”

  All for nothing? That stings a bit. What about this? Us?

  “Kaydene and Victor wouldn’t have done this if they weren’t confident that you’ll get in,” I say.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I am right. And when you’re a famous writer, you can buy yourself whatever laptop you want.”

  “No, I’m done with these. I want an old-fashioned typewriter. Something that doesn’t need a plug. That can’t die on me.”

  “Watch out. She might hear you.”

  Jamison apologizes to the laptop. It’s so dorky and adorable for a person so incredibly attractive, so focused and caring. I want to jump his bones even more.

  “Are you cold?” he asks me.

  “A little.”

  Jamison grabs a blanket and spreads it across my legs, leaning down to tuck it in around me, touching me for the first time today. I resist grabbing ahold of him, and he takes a seat back on the other end of the couch, eyes glued to his laptop.

  I go back to my phone, but the show I’m watching is nothing compared to the reality I’m living in with Jamison. We finally kissed. We’re finally together. And now the only girl he’s paying attention to is his laptop.

  I stand up quickly. “Popcorn?”

  Jamison nods, focused on the screen. “There’s the microwave kind in the pantry.”

  I hide in the kitchen as it pops, trying to get control of myself. I need to respect his wishes, or he’ll kick me out. When the popcorn is done, I add tiny marshmallows and chocolate chips and mix everything together. I set the bowl between us on the couch.

  Jamison takes a handful, noticing what I’ve added. Kaydene always made popcorn this way. A little salty and a little sweet, she’d say. I’d end up eating all the marshmallows and chocolate, leaving Jamison the popcorn. He’d get so annoyed.

  “You always went for the good stuff first,” he says with a handful of popcorn.

  “Why wait when I know what I want most?”

  “Patience is a virtue, they say.”

  “I’ve never been a very patient person.” I reach into the bowl for a marshmallow and pop it in my mouth.

  “No, you haven’t.” Jamison’s voice is strained.

  I go back to the show, but when I reach my hand into the bowl at the same time Jamison does, our fingers meet. I have to bite the inside of my cheek. The simplest touch has my heart pounding.

  “I need to work,” Jamison says.

  “You do.”

  “This is important, Amoris. It’s my future.”

  “Yes. Very. You should concentrate.”

  “I can’t get distracted.”

  “No, that would be bad,” I say.

  “Very bad.”

  “Epically bad.”

  “Right.” Jamison nods. “Back to work.”

  He starts typing again. I throw a piece of popcorn at him. It hits him in the nose, and I giggle. He picks up the popcorn and eats it casually. A few seconds pass. I throw a marshmallow this time, hitting him in the temple. He brushes it away, ignoring me. I hit his cheek with a chocolate chip. Then his shoulder with another piece of popcorn. And his chin with another marshmallow.

  Jamison calmly sets his laptop on the table. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” I toss a chocolate chip in my mouth.

  “Stop throwing food at me, Amoris.”

  “OK,” I answer sweetly. But the moment he resumes typing, I hit his cheek with another marshmallow.

  “That’s it.” He lunges at me. I yelp, and he’s on top of me in a heartbeat.

  He looks at me as I laugh, his body on mine, but I can tell he is holding back. Keeping his distance. Maybe it’s the stress of college. Dreams can feel lofty, but they carry a lot of weight. Or maybe it’s something else. I’ve thought about what he said—about why he kissed Ellis. That he was afraid of what she would do if he didn’t kiss her back. I saw the same look in his eyes in the hallway that day with Mr. O’Brien. Jamison was protecting himself. Like he did with Ellis. And he was right to be worried. But he doesn’t need to be worried with me. If it takes a lifetime of work, I’ll show him.

  When I softly touch his cheek, Jamison leans into the caress.

  “If you don’t get into Western, would this all really be for nothing?” I whisper.

  Jamison shakes his head.

  “Why do you want to write books so badly, Jay?”

  “So people will see me.”

  We kiss, and I promise I’ll never close my eyes to him again.

  24

  MAYBE

  It’s January second. The snow has melted. The sun is out. The cold wind whips at my face as I run home from my shift at the café. It all feels so good—the winter wind, the sun, my skin. A new year.

  I don’t care that school starts again tomorrow. If I get home quickly, Jamison and I can spend the next few hours together before Kaydene returns from vacation. She expects him to be done with his college admission material. That was the deal they struck.

  “I blame you for all of this distraction,” I said to Jamison last night.

  “Me? How do you figure?”

  “You really need to get your looks under control.”

  Jamison chuckled. “I blame you. I made that deal with Kaydene under false pretenses. You still had a Mack problem. I didn’t know what I was coming home to.”

  Breaking up with Zach feels like it happened in another lifetime. Life is weird that way. The moment we think we know what’s ahead of us is the moment it all turns upside down.

  “Fine. We’re both guilty,” I said. “What’s our punishment? Hanging? Death by firing squad? Burned at the stake?”

  Jamison thought and said, “Solitary confinement.”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said seriously.

  “For one afternoon. Or Kaydene might actually kill me.”

  I agreed, but only to save Jamison’s life. He promised to make it up to me. It’s the potential of that promise that has me skidding into my driveway, completely distracted, thinking of crashing my lips into Jamison’s in T minus two minutes. I’m on my way to break down his door and almost miss the lump slouched on one of the garden chairs. A very tan lump with long dark-brown hair.

  Ellis stands, looking oddly disheveled. She starts shouting before I can even think to speak. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been texting you, like, all day. What the hell?”

  Admittedly, I’d been ignoring those texts. My apron was abuzz all afternoon, and every time I checked and saw Ellis’s name instead of Jamison’s, I put my phone back in the pocket and made another cappuccino.

  “I’m sorry.” I try to sound compassionate. “It was busy at the café.”

  Ellis backs off with the third degree and collapses into the chair, sobbing. She’s shivering, her shoulders doing that uncontrollable shaking thing that verges on convulsions. I can’t just leave her here. Yet again, she’s interrupting my time with Jamison. But there’s a small voice in the back of my head reminding me that Ellis would never leave me sitting outside to cry by myself. She might be brutally honest and self-absorbed at times, but the last thing she would do is abandon me. Because she knows that feeling all too well.

  I help Ellis out of the chair and bring her to my room. If I can calm her down quickly and send her home, there might still be time to see Jamison before Kaydene arrives.

  Ellis fall
s on my bed dramatically, pulling her knees into her chest.

  “Shoes,” she says. I pull them from her feet. “I need music.”

  “Any requests?”

  “You know what I like.”

  Judging by Ellis’s state, Carly Simon is appropriate.

  “Was she the one married to James Taylor, or was that Carole King?” she asks, and then hiccups from crying. “I get those two confused.”

  “Carly Simon was married to James Taylor, but they got divorced.”

  Ellis groans. “Marriage is a fucking stupid institution that perpetuates archaic traditional feminine roles and squashes women’s independence, making them utterly reliant on their husband’s money. And it always ends in disaster. When will adults learn?”

  None of this makes sense. Just yesterday, she was sending Snapchats of herself smiling on the beach, and now she’s a tearful mess on my bed. I struggle to muster an ounce of caring, but nothing comes. She kissed Jamison. I’ve replayed it so many times in my head, trying to give Ellis the benefit of the doubt. She must not have known I liked him. But my gut says that’s a lie. She was living in my room. She saw me preening myself daily. Fretting over what to wear, how my hair looked, whether my breath smelled. I don’t know many fourteen-year-olds who hide crushes very well. I wasn’t unique.

  She must have known. Maybe. It’s all so confusing.

  Ellis lets out another wail. Now is not the time to bring it up. I don’t want to relive the past when the present is so good. I just want to get Ellis out of my room so I can go see Jamison. I can already feel the time slipping away from us. It might only be January, but all too soon we’re going to graduate, and he’ll go to college. It’s a gift to have him next door right now, and I just want to hold on to this time we have together. Last night, when we were lying in Jamison’s bed, it all hit me. My head rested on his chest. I could hear his heart beating. This thud, thud, thud, right in my ear. Like a bassline, holding a song together. The reason for the song. Without it, the song feels wrong, it falls apart. I grabbed Jamison tighter, holding him like he might dissolve in my arms and leave me lying in the bed alone, desperately lonely.