How to Love
Page 21
I didn’t like to think about Soledad when I was in those kitchens. I didn’t like to think about much of anything, is the truth, and so I played games to keep myself occupied: Count the Drunk People, or Things I Wish I Was Doing Right Now. Once, I brought a book and hid in the pantry to read it.
Sawyer always wandered back eventually, blissed-out and mellow, quite literally feeling no pain. He was always glad to see me, though my moods were a little more unpredictable: Sometimes I was so grateful he’d turned up that I’d be super friendly, winding myself around him before we even made it home. Other times I was tired and annoyed. Tonight Sawyer was sleepy-eyed and flushed when he ambled in from the living room, and me? I was ready to kill him.
I’d been perched next to the kitchen sink, kicking at the cabinets and listening to the party sounds as bodies drifted in and out of the room. I’d by mistake put my hand in something sticky on the counter and was rubbing my palm on my jeans when Lauren crashed through the door like a tidal wave. She was wearing a drapey blue shirt and a pair of cowboy boots I’d seen in a magazine, and she was grinning widely.
“Hey, Serena!” she said too loudly. It sounded like a slap. I flinched as she got closer, peered into my cup. “You still working on that same beer?”
I tried for a smile, probably missed. “Still working.”
“Good girl, good girl. Can I ask you a question?” She hopped up beside me on the counter, bumped her shoulder at mine like we were old friends. “Is it true that your family is, like, crazy religious? Is that why you don’t really party?”
“I don’t know that I’d call them crazy religious—” I began, wondering if Sawyer had, but Lauren plowed ahead.
“That’s cool, if they are. I didn’t mean to pry. I just always feel like Catholicism is one of those religions that makes girls either really frigid or really fun, you know?” Lauren laughed. “Anyway, I just left your boyfriend in the other room. He is fuuuucked up.” She tapped her nose and sniffed daintily. “Good luck getting him home tonight.”
Oh God. I closed my eyes for a moment. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what Sawyer was doing with the pills he’d started to carry with him more and more frequently—OxyContin produces a high similar to heroin when crushed and snorted, thanks for the tip, Wikipedia—but hearing it from Lauren, like it was a private joke between her and Sawyer …
I wanted to find him, to take us both out of here, step on the gas and figure out what to do after that. I remembered, suddenly, the nights I’d spent at Antonia’s when I was twelve and thirteen, sitting in a booth by the door, drinking coffee and reading while my father and Roger and Finch closed up. I wanted my father now, was the truth. The clock on the microwave said it wasn’t quite midnight, and I was thinking everyone would still be at the restaurant: Lauren was a straitjacket and I was trying to formulate an escape the likes of which would have impressed Houdini himself, but the truth is I was too slow and stupid, and Harry drowned to death in the end.
“You know,” Lauren was telling me, still chatting, an alcoholic lilt in her voice, “Sawyer and I used to come to parties here all the time, when we were together.”
No.
He’d told me no. He’d told me that he and Lauren had never been together—but somehow I’d known, hadn’t I? Otherwise why would I have asked?
I blinked. “That right?”
She was a little drunk, but not so far gone that the hard metallic glint was gone from her eyes. “Sorry. Is this, like, weird for you?”
“What?” I shook my head stupidly. “No. No, go ahead.”
“It was nothing. I mean, we were just kids. It was in high school. We were both pretty wasted all the time, and, like, sixteen. We were a mess. It was comical.”
Yeah, pretty damn comical. You should take that act on the road, really—brilliant stuff. I gripped the counter. I felt sick to my stomach. I had to get out of there.
Lauren’s phone rang and she fished it out of her back pocket, nearly dropping it twice. “Ooh, I gotta get this,” she said cheerfully, looking at the caller ID. She headed for the door, weaving a little; Sawyer wandered in as she went out.
“Can we leave now?” I asked him, before hello.
Sawyer wrinkled his eyebrows and came to stand between my knees. “Sure,” he said affably, and then jerked his head toward the screen door. “There goes your friend.”
“Right. You know, we actually had a really nice heart-to-heart while you were otherwise engaged.” I hopped down from the counter, picked up my purse. “I told her about where I applied to college, and she told me how she sells herself for drug money.”
“Ouch,” he replied, following me out into the yard, around the house toward the driveway. “Those are serious allegations from such a pristine individual. She’s not a crack whore, Reena.”
“I know. She’s the Virgin Mary.” It was the middle of April and wet everywhere; the grass was slick and stuck to my feet as I crossed the lawn. “Sleep in her bed, if you like her so much. Oh, wait.”
“Hey, hey.” Sawyer frowned, an edge creeping into his voice. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I like how the implication there is that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in me. Give me the car keys.”
“Is that Shakespeare?”
“‘Give me the car keys’? No, I pretty much came up with that one on my own.” I felt quick and sharp like the gleaming edge of a scalpel. I felt like I had taken something, too.
“Smart girl.”
“Give ’em.”
“What? No.” Sawyer opened the passenger side door and motioned for me to get in. “I’m fine.”
“Are you kidding? Give me your car keys or I’m calling a cab.”
“Seriously?” He rolled his eyes at me, but he handed them over. “Fine. Here. You know, Reena,” he said as I buckled. “It wouldn’t kill you to relax every once in a while.”
“And a good way for me to do that is to let you crash and kill me? Shut up, Sawyer.”
“What is your problem tonight?”
“They gave the dog beer.” I eased out of the driveway and onto the road, jabbing halfheartedly at the radio preset buttons: I was so irritated at both of us in that moment that I wanted to drown us out. “Did you see that? They were giving that dog beer in his water dish. They thought it was really funny.”
“They didn’t hurt the dog.” Sawyer snorted a little, like I was trying to be clever. “Out of everything that was going on at that party, you’re taking issue with the dog?”
“No, actually, I’m taking issue with Lauren von Ho-Bag giving me a detailed history of her sexual exploits while I sit in the kitchen of a house where I’ve never been before and you bliss yourself out. But the dog, I have to say the dog is what really pushed me over the edge. At least everyone else was obliterated of their own accord. The poor dog was just along for the ride.”
“Is that a metaphor?”
“Do you want it to be?”
Sawyer leaned his elbow on the windowsill, rubbed at his forehead like I was an unruly child. “Can we just not do this now, please?”
“Why?” I snapped. “Am I killing your buzz?”
“Is this about my buzz?”
“No, it’s about you telling me you never had sex with that girl when clearly you did!”
“Oh God.” He was quiet for a moment, leaned his dark head back against the seat. “With Lauren? Did she tell you that?”
“Among other things.”
I had sort of expected him to deny it, but Sawyer only shrugged. “It was way before you. Before Allie, even. It wasn’t important.”
“I asked you point-blank, and you lied.”
“You said it was going to upset you if I had had sex with her! You basically asked me to lie to you.”
“I absolutely did not,” I snapped, swinging a wide right turn onto Commercial. “I was being honest. I was expecting the same thing from you.”
“Reena, sweetheart, you don’t want me to be honest wit
h you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means …” He trailed off. “It means that you somehow got this idea in your head of who I am that doesn’t necessarily correspond to reality. And when I don’t act the way you think Sawyer LeGrande should act, you get mad. Like I haven’t learned my lines or something.”
“First of all, that’s not true.” Was it? “Second of all, I never asked you to act any way except to be up-front with me. Honestly, I think you’re the one who has a script of how Sawyer LeGrande should act. Like you have to be too cool for school one hundred percent of the time. You don’t. You just have to be a human.”
He shrugged. “I was just … I thought I was telling you what you wanted to hear.”
I thought of Allie for the hundred thousandth time. If you can’t handle flip cup with Lauren Werner… It was becoming a nasty little mantra in my brain. I felt so violated sitting in his Jeep with him, swallowing back the lump I felt forming in my throat. I wanted to curl up in a corner and never let anyone touch me again. “Do you still like her?”
“Reena.” Sawyer huffed a quiet laugh, disbelieving. “Is that why you hate her so much? Because you think I like her?”
“No, that’s why I hate you so much. I hate her so much for many other reasons.”
“Don’t say you hate me.” That got him, a little; his eyes narrowed like I’d landed a blow. “That’s mean.”
“So is lying.” I turned into the driveway of the house he was living in and slammed the brakes. “Go to bed, Sawyer. I’ll bring your car back here tomorrow.”
“If that’s what you want to do.” He got out of the Jeep and for a moment I thought he was going to huff into the house without saying good-bye, but he made his way over to the open driver’s side window. “Kiss me.”
Up close, he wasn’t looking so good: pale and almost waxy-looking, eyes bright as they’d been the other night in my room. He smelled like the inside of a bar. I pecked him on the lips, quick and antiseptic. Sawyer made a face.
“Are you serious?” he asked, shaking his head a little. “You’re not going to kiss me?”
“I did kiss you.”
“That wasn’t a kiss.”
“Sawyer …” I was struggling. “If you’d just eaten a whole bag of Doritos, I wouldn’t kiss you then, either.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“You know, Reena, I just think that maybe if you tried—,” he began, and just like that I was one hundred percent closed for business.
“Don’t you dare,” I managed, arms crossed in front of my chest like I was freezing, even though it was eighty degrees. “Do not.”
“Hey,” he said, hands up, taking a step back. “Hey. It’s me. Relax.”
“Well, don’t try to peer pressure me!”
He laughed. “I’m not trying to do anything to you. I just think everybody should try everything once.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s so boring, Sawyer.”
“How is that boring?”
“Why do you need me to validate you?”
“I don’t!”
“So do what you want to do!”
“So don’t act like I’m a piece of shit when I do it!”
“I’m not.”
“You are!”
“This is ridiculous.” I gripped the top of the steering wheel, rested my forehead on my knuckles. “Maybe I shouldn’t go with you anymore.”
“Maybe not.”
“Okay then.” I shrugged, threw my hands up. Blue light spilled over his face. I felt like this had gotten away from me somehow when I wasn’t paying attention. “Just … okay.”
Sawyer reached into the Jeep, running a hand through my hair and down my cheek. I turned my head and pressed my lips against his palm. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said slowly, but even then it felt like good-bye.
39
After
I’m not sleeping when the phone rings in the middle of the night—just lying in bed and worrying about my father, thoughts like a freight train hurtling stopless through my brain. I launch myself across the mattress to pick it up. “What?” I say immediately, voice panicky and shrill, demanding. “What? What? Tell me.”
“Reena,” Soledad says softly, and I think I’ve never been more afraid in all my days on God’s green earth. “Reena. It’s all right.”
It’s all right.
He’s okay, she tells me calmly. He came through the surgery, critical but breathing. For now there’s nothing to do but let him rest. “I love you,” she says before she hangs up, my hand pale-knuckled and sweaty around the receiver, chin on my knee in the dark. “And whatever else happens, sweetheart—your dad loves you, too.”
I hang up. I cry for a while. I sit silent in the center of the mattress, like it’s an island in the middle of the sea.
Finally I get out of bed.
I open my door and gasp: There’s Sawyer sitting on the floor in the hallway, head back against the molding and elbows on his knees. He’s taken off the button-down he wore to dinner—it seems like days ago that he walked into my house with Roger and Lydia, all stupid and brave—and the cross on his upper arm peeks out from the sleeve of his undershirt. “Hey,” he says, suddenly alert. “How’s your dad?”
“Okay, I think. Soledad says okay.” I squat down so that we’re at eye level, voice quiet so we don’t wake the baby. “Whatcha doing?”
Sawyer shrugs a little, half-embarrassed. “Keeping watch.”
“For intruders?”
“Basically for you.” He makes a face. “I’m sorry. That was a really lame thing to say. I don’t mean to freak you out.”
“You’re not freaking me out.”
“I’m freaking me out a little.”
I shrug. “My dad’s okay,” I tell him. “For now, at least.”
Sawyer smiles. “Soledad on the phone?”
I nod. I’m not surprised to find him out here, is the truth of it—like somehow this is inevitable, the natural course of things. Maybe he’s a homing pigeon. Maybe I’m his home. “Do you ever think that this is really not the right place for us?” he asks.
I squint a bit, not entirely sure what he means. “Every day,” I tell him. “But like I said before, where am I going to go?”
“Not you,” he says, urgent, like there’s something I’m not understanding. “Us.”
“Us?”
“What if we got out of here?” he asks. “When your dad is better, I mean. Just … what if we took the baby and went?”
I swallow my heart back down into my chest. “Where?” I ask.
Sawyer looks right at me and smiles, huge and simple as a map of the world. “Everywhere,” he says.
Everywhere.
“Sawyer.” Right away I think of all the reasons why it’s impossible, of the places I’ve never been and all the things I haven’t done yet. I think of a road stretching all the way across the country and I think of all the nights I’ve spent alone, and when I see he’s still waiting on an answer, I give him the only one that makes sense. “Why don’t you just come and sleep where you belong?”
A vertical line appears between his eyebrows; his eyes turn a deep emerald color, birthstones in the dark. “Are you sure?” he asks after a minute, and his voice is lower than I have ever heard it. “Don’t say it if you’re not sure.”
“Uh-huh.” I’m surprised at the steadiness of my own voice. His fingers clench and unclench; I take one of his fists and force it open, place my own hand inside. “I’m sure.”
I pull him to his feet and into the bedroom. Outside through the open window I can hear the rain starting to fall. The heat never breaks here, not really. My spine thuds softly into the sheets.
Sawyer hums a little sound into my temple: Beneath his soft, bristly hair the curve of his skull feels both familiar and strange. I get my arms around his neck to keep from flying apart at my joints and we’re holding on to each other like it’s t
he last day, when all of a sudden, all at once, Sawyer goes completely still.
“Say you love me,” he orders quietly. He’s not moving at all.
“Hmm?” I say into his shoulder. I look up. He’s balancing his weight on his forearms and I can see the freckles across his face as he hovers over me. “What?”
“Say you love me,” he repeats, and in the dark flash of his green eyes I can see this is very important to him, some kind of promise he’s made to himself. He doesn’t want me to make him do this without saying the words. “Reena.” He is almost pleading. “Say you love me.”
Don’t do this to me, I want to tell him. You can’t. I can’t. When he left I held that I love you tight in my sweaty palm, tucked into my shirt like a talisman. I love you. The one thing he gave me that I didn’t give him ten times over. The one thing I kept for myself.
“Sawyer,” I say, thumb skating across his eyebrow, trying to stall. “Come on.”
He looks right at me. “Say it.”
If I say it, and I lose him again, it might kill me. If I don’t say it, I might lose him right now. My heart is knocking away inside my chest. “I can’t,” I whisper finally, and I feel like the worst kind of coward. “I’m sorry.”
He closes his eyes for a second and I tense like I’m waiting for a blow, fully expecting him to roll away from me, to pull on his jeans and get the hell out of here once and for all. But then:
“Okay,” Sawyer says, on a long, quiet exhale. I can feel his ribs expand and contract against my chest. “It’s okay.”
“We can stop if you want,” I offer stupidly. “I get if you want to stop.”
Sawyer smiles down at me, quick and vanishing. “I don’t want to stop.”
So. We keep going.
It’s strange and heartbreakingly familiar to do this with him after so much else has happened: All at once I’m remembering a hundred different things I forced myself to forget about, the telltale hitches in his breathing and the scar at the center of his chest. The back of his knee is warm when I tuck my foot there. He looks at me the whole entire time.
When it’s over we lie on our sides facing each other for what might be days, gray light and the sound of the wind in the palm trees outside the window. I feel the weight of his gaze like something physical, a sheen of sweat coating my skin. Finally I can’t hold it in anymore; just breathing is like a hurricane. “Seattle,” I say.