by Elena Monroe
I wasn’t ready to be any kind of mom, and that had terrified me. I never even told Oliver how I felt. I just let the space between us grow until it broke us. It seemed like a peaceful way to let things go, instead of some huge fight.
“You should go back inside,” I told him. “I already feel bad for Liz.”
He looked at me, trying to figure me out, but I had learned to keep myself less transparent. I was still see-through, just frosted over now, instead of so easily readable.
“‘Liz,’ huh?”
He noticed that I had never called her that before in college. I had only recently begun calling her that in the last few years, as we had grown closer.
Before I even had a chance to answer, Caden rushed down the stairs and crushed Oliver in his arms.
He squeezed him tightly and shook him. “Finally, came to the big bad city! I wore you down, huh?”
I watched Oliver’s unamused face focus on me. It was me who had enticed him out of Amherst, and he made sure I knew it.
Caden, slightly inebriated, made the perfect distraction for me to slowly slip away. I kept inching further away from the boys to unlock my phone and text Hunter:
I’m gonna grab a Lyft. I’ll see you later?
I don’t even know why I typed the last part without overthinking how it would sound. It was the opposite of casual, no strings, and fun. I sounded like a worried mother. It was fitting, since the only person holding his attention upstairs was Jade. No mom would trust her.
I waited for my Lyft only a few feet down from the boys, hoping they’d forget I was there at all. That was one plus about the city: you never had to wait long for Lyft, Uber, or even a city cab. I watched the pink light glow with the letters Lyft, before I opened the door, greeting the gentleman driving. He confirmed my destination. Just as he put the car into drive and began to pull away from the curb, the abrasive sound of knuckles against the window stopped him and scared me. I rolled down the window timidly, bracing myself.
Oliver leaned in and asked, “You still work at that bookstore downtown?”
I wondered how he knew that, right before I remembered how this group worked: There were no secrets. We were all still just as connected now, even without being on the same campus. Word traveled dangerously fast with the Sinners. With his elbows against the rolled down window, I tried to analyze his face for a reason why he was asking, before I gave up with a quiet nod.
“Good, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He grinned at me, stood up straight, tapped the top of the car, and backed up so that the car could proceed with driving away.
Tomorrow? For what? My scattered mind tried to focus during the drive home. I couldn’t even account for tomorrow yet. I knew I was supposed to work, but only a half day. My bridesmaid duties demanded I be at the bar at 5:30 sharp for wedding prep. You’d think she was on some crazy quick deadline; she wasn’t. She picked a date for the end of this year. She was at the mercy of the venue she fell in love with. The waiting list was a mile long and sauntering into the next two years. Everything about wedding planning was cutthroat. Nothing was glossed over with pearly smiles, and the cute gestures were planned down to a science.
I never fantasized about a wedding when I was little. I was busy being a superhero and saving myself from no immediate danger—something I forgot how to do after the incident in high school.
Once your armor gets pierced, it’s nearly impossible to keep thinking you’re invincible.
The next morning, I woke up alone in my bed. I wasn’t truly surprised.
I searched around for my phone in the caverns of my white, puffy comforter to read more than one message from Hunter.
Text me when you’re home.
Forgive him yet?
Seriously, Layla, two guys one night isn’t a winning look.
The last one prompted a disgusted expression to scold no one, just my phone screen. His insecurity soaked through the grey bubble floating angrily on my phone. I typed a quick response I knew he wouldn’t like, keeping my phone on silent as I got up to get ready for work.
Weren’t you busy with Jade?
He never confirmed or denied anything with Jade beyond friendship. It became my arsenal against his attitude.
There was never a rush. I was always up two hours, sometimes more, before work even started. I brushed my teeth, trying desperately to shake Oliver’s face from being imprinted in my mind, but nothing worked—not one song, podcast, or YouTube video. He was glued into my every thought, unyielding.
I pulled my closet open, trying to focus on anything… on anything other than his still chiseled jaw, his eyes I easily fell into, the tattoos I knew by heart, or that smirk he flashed me just before the car and driven away last night, like he knew he had won me over, even after all these years.
I wanted to be hard to get.
I wanted to be hard to read.
I wanted to be nonchalant, unfazed.
I wanted to be the Oliver I met in college.
While I got dressed, I even toyed with the idea of what giving in would look like. I didn’t let the hard questions seep in. I only allowed a quick montage of moments to play like a good dream. Us older, happy, content… Oliver being the opposite of his father and loving so fiercely it nearly smothered his son, Arson…
I pushed my hair into a neat bun on top of my head, while I examined my outfit in the floor-length mirror I had leaning against the corner. I told myself silently: Stay rational. Stay strong. Don’t be stupid. It was my mantra post-Oliver. It should have been tattooed on my forehead.
I didn’t follow my own advice.
I saw a ghost last night. I saw a ghost who was very much alive and clinging to the person I dubbed my enemy: Hunter. This ghost was like a stranger in a room full of our friends…
I hadn’t wanted to go to the party, but that same attachment and responsibility I’ve always had for this group crept up to my no-longer-dead heart. That shit, pumping blood to my body and making me feel whatever I avoided for years, was always making decisions now. I used to be rational and make decisions based on my wants and needs. Now I was a slave to my goddamn heart, like some kind of hormonal teenager.
Elizabeth was marrying Leon—an enemy I never asked for. Then, again, I was easy to hate back then. It helped not seeing each other after he graduated, while I was a freshman. This night wasn’t about him; it was about Elizabeth, who I still blindly protected. Putting on a suit and drinking on a rooftop was the easier part of the whole endeavor, yet I dreaded it with so much fucking angst I felt like a damn damsel in distress.
Great, I was straddling the line between hormonal teenager and damsel in distress.
Life in the real world was different than college. This was my real second chance—all the other attempts were bullshit, soaked in refusing to change unless I had to. That “had to” came our last night of sophomore year, at the end of the year bonfire, from the girl I pushed away for months. I thought I was protecting Layla from myself by keeping a buffer of distance between her and my demons. The distance sent her into a more curious state, and Hunter was all too willing to tell her my secrets.
I thought the secret he had told Layla was that I wasn’t sober anymore, after a year of trying to stay sober after rehab. I couldn’t have been more off. She dropped a different kind of bomb—one that had been radioactive and toxic for us all.
Jade never had an abortion.
Jade, my drug dealer and casual fuck, had my child while I was at rehab.
Jade… had my child.
I was an instant dad—just add panic and anger with the lid sealed down, as I boiled. Layla had the worst timing. I was finally standing on solid ground with my dad after fighting the urge to cry against his grip in his office—after nineteen years of hate, of misunderstanding, of pushing each other past the point of forgiveness…
I didn’t even wait until the next day to burn all our progress down. I always had this aching feeling he made Jade stay away after he pushed me be
hind the doors of rehab. I had given him every reason to make decisions for me, since I clearly couldn’t.
I ended up in his bedroom after getting trashed at the bonfire. I was already not sober and pouring alcohol on my problems never seemed like a better idea. Not feeling was my continuous goal. I leaned against the wall, watching him sleep, until he jolted up, scared of me. He was never scared of me. The reaction made me want to smirk, but my jaw was too tight to move. He confessed without any convincing, and my world was rocked.
I was a dad.
Jade.
My child.
My dad had known and had kept it all from me under the notion I needed to get sober. Apparently, so did my child. Jade wasn’t sober either, and it didn’t take long for the doctors to spot that. She handed down the urge, the itch, the high… to our kid. Arson, properly named by Jade, was in the hospital the first eight months of his life, fighting to be sober and healthy like his parents. The only difference was that my innocent son never asked to be high, never chased it, and certainly didn’t deserve detoxing at birth. It broke every part of me, kickstarting my heart.
My dad had arranged everything, like her rehab elsewhere and Arson under their protection. This was all while I was in a dark that I couldn’t get my eyes to adjust to.
Jade was easy to pull answers from; she was just as scared of me when I was angry. Her eyes always filled with panic like I had come to my senses and finally landed on cutting her out of my life. Her eyes would threaten to tear up, but never drain… not in front of me. Now I couldn’t even jokingly threaten to leave; it wasn’t even funny now. We shared a child, linked forever.
I didn’t even take any time to think or figure out what I was going to do. I immediately became a dad, juggling college and my son who hadn’t even met me after being a little over a year old. When I held him for the first time, he trespassed and set a fire to my vacant heart. I never asked her why she had named him Arson; I just knew that she must have felt something similar when she had held him for the first time too. Arson was the reason my heart suddenly was in the driver’s seat now. When he looked at me with his beautiful golden eyes, thick lashes, and bee-stung lips… there was no going back.
I did some self-loathing for a while after becoming a dad. I was absent from his life, and the resemblance to my father made me want to throw up every urge and itch for the garbage I put into my system to not feel. That same day, I got sober again, and that was it… for good. I now had a streak of five years clean.
I knew Jade wouldn’t miss going into Boston. We lived together, out of convenience, not affection. Sneaking around or keeping secrets wasn’t easy, but that was the point. It kept us both honest and accountable. She wanted nothing more than to move to the city, while I avoided it.
Before Layla and I ended, that was our dream, and now I couldn’t bring myself to do it anyways. Staying in Amherst and leaving a distance between us just felt right. Distance always played a supporting role in our relationship. I used it as a weapon, as punishment. Layla was comfortable putting distance between people and places to get away.
I couldn’t get my ghost out of my head, even the next day. I woke up on Caden and Aspen’s couch with my face pushed into the cushion and a small amount of drool dried into the crease of my lip. My hand smoothed against the arm of the couch, searching for my phone, while my opposite hand did the same against the hardwood floor until I found it. Before my right eye was even open, I had already sent the FaceTime request off to my mom. I sat up, listening to the incessant ringing until she answered.
“Arson okay? He awake?”
I skipped all small talk, and fielding unimportant questions, I got right to the point. Thankfully, this was the woman who raised me, and she knew exactly how straightforward I was.
“It’s 8 A.M., Oliver, he is completely fine. He’s eating breakfast. How was last night?”
“Let me see him.”
I ignored her question. We both knew she wanted to ask if I saw Layla. My mom was too polite to ask the hard questions. I waited for her to turn the camera, as I made my way to their kitchen in search of coffee. I laughed to myself, clutching my phone; Layla always made fun of me for hating using my phone in general. Now it was my lifeline to Arson every time I left the house.
I saw my little man appear on the screen, sitting in an oversized chair, eating Lucky Charms—his cereal of choice lately. I leaned down, with my elbows pushing into the slab of a counter, looking more closely, as I heard my mom announce I was on the other end. He was quiet, not oddly quiet, considering Jade spoke in manipulation and I spoke when I had to. I watched him look up, and I didn’t even realize I was smiling so big until the creases of my lips stung.
“It’s okay. Let him eat. I just wanted to see him.”
I set the phone down, determined to figure out this damn monster of a machine that produced the caffeine I wanted. I listened to my mom ask the empty questions I never planned on answering. Caden stumbled into the kitchen in the model way he did every time he was shirtless and showing off for no one—simply always practicing.
My phone was propped up against a jar full of cookies on their island as Caden got eye level with my mom rubbing his bare chest.
“Hey, Mrs. Abbott.”
I didn’t have to see her expression to know it was blushed in a light pink, scorching her cheeks. I wasn’t oblivious to the attention my mom got from men, regardless of the rock on her finger. I leaned around Caden and told my mom we had to go, quickly pushing my finger on the giant red button.
“Your mom still off limits?”
My head shot up in his direction, giving him a dirty look, as I texted Jade, quickly realizing I had no idea where she was, other than some educated guesses.
“As long as they’re married… yes.”
He laughed, turning on the machine and effortlessly manipulating the knobs into functioning.
“Damn. Let me know when that happens. I’ll help your mom cope.”
I hit his ribs with a soft fist, waiting for Jade to reply, even though I knew she wasn’t ever up this early unless she had to be. Motherhood didn’t change much about her. She was still selfish, manipulative, uncompromising, and a bad influence, even after the fire Arson started in her heart too. I keep telling myself some people aren’t meant for this, motherhood, but that didn’t help Arson understand his crazy mom.
Aspen came down a set of stairs rubbing his face with his palm and pulling a shirt on, like the decent human Caden wasn’t. We never talked about sophomore year blowing up at the end, his anonymous texts, or how he knew I wasn’t sober to begin with. I had blamed Hunter; when, in reality, it was someone in my own circle. We let it fester and keep us brutally aware of our sharp edges. Caden tried to mediate many times until we graduated, but I wasn’t willing to let go of one of my best friends pushing the very thick, heavy, permanent line drawn. Now we forced everyone to navigate around the tension.
Caden finally pushed a cup of espresso into my hand, while saying, “So, you and Layla were talking outside…”
“That’s not a question.”
“That’s not an answer,” he countered.
He stared at me long enough to annoy me and breakdown down my resolve as I drank my black coffee. “We talked. Hit the highlights. So, what’s the deal with Hunter?”
Caden looked up at Aspen for the answer instead. I looked at Aspen, but not for answers, for guilt that didn’t exist. He was justice, wholly and authentically. He didn’t care how it made him look or about the strain between us if it meant doing the right thing. He finally looked up from his boiled eggs to our stares.
“Hunter? What about him? We aren’t friends just because I see him around Maddison’s apartment.”
I stood up straighter, challenging his guilt. “You owe me what you know, don’t you think?”
With a heavy sigh, he stopped building his boiled eggs onto his toast. A small victory smile poured over my mouth as I bit my cheek to hold it back from spreading prematu
rely.
“They’re fucking. That’s what you wanna know, right? You don’t care that he might be good for her.”
Caden was still everyone’s protector and this kind of tension spiked his stress levels. His face looked tight, riddled with rust from not utilizing the peacekeeper skills since we didn’t spend twenty-hours a day together. We had each other in smaller doses. That didn’t stop us from hurting each other with our own brands of cruelty.
Aspen’s was honest.
I walked by Aspen sitting at the island squeezing his shoulder. “Hurting someone doesn’t mark them yours. Or does it, Aspen?”
My cruelty came back like muscle memory.
Maddison was his, despite putting her in the hospital for a year.
I grabbed my keys and wallet from the coffee table in front of the couch where I had passed out last night. I had better things to do then argue with Aspen about who was more cruel, who held a better grudge, or whatever it was we were doing. I knew I needed to get over it, let him off the hook, but this wasn’t the broken Aspen. He was all Hyde, all the time, himself again. I didn’t have to tip-toe or mind how fragile he was anymore. He could take the jabs.
My phone was snug in my back pocket of the joggers I borrowed from Caden, vibrating against me. Jade. Not actually who I wanted to text me after last night. I didn’t blame Layla. She had no reason to text me. Hating Hunter was a six-year-old feeling; it wasn’t inspiring anyone to do anything anymore.
Fell asleep at Hunter’s. Text me when you wanna go back home.
More like, fucked Hunter until she fell asleep.
I couldn’t blame her, I would have gotten off on Layla if the mental images of Hunter’s lips on her skin had faded away.
T he shop was busy, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I lived for these days—the ones that didn’t allow your mind to wander off and overthink the most minuscule things. Time evaporated instead. I lost days to auto-piloted routine before. I was exhausted from being mindlessly busy. It made being the girl who couldn’t get over her first love a lot easier. I humored the comments about being single still, the curiosity if I stopped smiling for one second, the inquiries about Hunter, and all the offers to set me up with their friend’s brothers or distant mutual friends, because anything closer was too much of a risk on the girl Oliver broke.