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How to Love

Page 24

by Katie Cotugno


  “I can’t help it that I’m going away!”

  “It’s not about you going away!” he shouted.

  “Then what is it about?”

  He didn’t answer. “Well?”

  Still nothing.

  “Do you like this?” I demanded. “This stupid badass act that you pull all the time? Is it working out for you?”

  “You keep asking me that. Do you like always being the good girl? Does that do something for you?”

  “It’s not being the good girl, Sawyer! It’s being myself!”

  “Well, maybe that’s what I’m doing, too. Just being myself.”

  “That’s not you!”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Then I don’t know you.”

  “Maybe you don’t.” He sighed, opened the door of the Jeep, and slid out.

  “Do you anticipate quitting all this bullshit anytime soon?” I called out the window.

  He smirked. “What bullshit is that?”

  “You know what bullshit!” I wanted to hit him. I wanted to be as mean as I possibly could. “I’ll tell you, Sawyer, the novelty of you is really starting to wear off.”

  Sawyer recoiled, then got very still. “The novelty of me?” he asked quietly. And that was the moment I realized I’d gone too far.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t mean—I just—”

  “Forget it.”

  “Sawyer—”

  “I’ve gotta get out of here,” he said, almost to himself. He was on his feet, across the yard, almost before I knew what was going on. His hands were like white spiders in his hair. “I’ll see you around, Reena.”

  This time, he didn’t kiss me good-bye.

  45

  After

  I drop Hannah off with Stefanie and drive too fast to the hospital, a change of clothes and a bagel for Sol on the passenger seat beside me. She looks like hell, but my father looks all right, considering: He’s groggy and sallow, an IV taped to the back of his hand. I have fifty things to tell him but none of us says anything and I sit at the edge of the bed while we watch the Today show, an incredibly boring segment about finding the best summer produce. It makes me want blueberries. I fidget. I think of how disappointed he’d be if he knew I’d just spent the last twelve hours repeating every stupid mistake I ever made with Sawyer, or if those are just the kind of bad calls he expects from me after all this time. I feel so foolish on top of everything else, letting myself think I could make it work after everything that’s happened.

  “You scared me,” I tell him finally. I want to say I’m sorry but I don’t know where to start. “Don’t do it again.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He nods and leans back against the pillows, the skin beneath his eyes pale and gray. His cheeks are speckled with a day’s worth of beard. “Soledad already read me the riot act.”

  “I’ll come by later with Hannah,” I promise on my way out. I kiss him on the forehead and don’t cry until I get to the parking lot. I feel like a bad bruise.

  *

  Sawyer shows up at ten to seven to take over for Joe, who slips me a butterscotch Dum Dum for Hannah before he heads home to his wife. Sawyer grew up behind that bar, just like the rest of us, and right away he makes himself at home amid the SoCo and grenadine, setting up as if he’s never been gone.

  I try as hard as I can not to watch him, not to notice as he flashes an expert grin at a middle-aged woman in heavy makeup or chats baseball with a couple of suits in town for a conference. Still, we’re not particularly busy, and the restaurant isn’t offering a whole lot by way of distraction. I hide in the kitchen for a while, fill Finch in on what’s happening with my dad.

  By eight the place fills up enough that I can get into a strange, familiar kind of rhythm: split checks and olive oil, extra knives and plates. I ring my drink orders in from the computer in the back hallway and I don’t look at Sawyer at all.

  Eventually he notices me not noticing, though, catches my eye as I head toward the kitchen with a just-balanced armload of dirty plates. I don’t know what I’m expecting, exactly, but it’s not the bland newscaster smile he shoots my way. “Something you needed, Reena?” he asks.

  There is, actually; I just haven’t plugged it into the system yet. “Two Amstels,” I tell him, no preamble. It’s the first thing I’ve said to him all night.

  Sawyer raises his eyebrows, teasing me. “What’s the magic word?” he asks.

  I scowl. “Sawyer, shut up and get me the beers.”

  “Testy,” he says, sticking his tongue out. He turns around to grab the glasses, muscles moving inside his shirt in a way I do my best not to notice. I roll my eyes to cover, trying to sound as annoyed as humanly possible.

  “You know,” I tell him shrewishly, “if I were you, I’d be careful what I did with that tongue.”

  “That so?” His gaze flicks up and down my body, overt. “Where would be a safe place for it?”

  “Seriously?” My stomach twists so hard it almost hurts, like car parts scraping against one another. I’m still holding four dirty plates. “Shut up,” is all I come up with.

  Sawyer smiles. “Why do you always tell me to shut up?” he asks pleasantly.

  “Why do you always deserve it?” I fire back, and go to dump the dishes in the bin. I come back a minute later and find him leaning forward over the bar, both beers waiting.

  “Why’d you pick Hannah?” he asks, as if he’s picking up the thread of an earlier conversation, like we’ve been talking like old friends all the live-long afternoon.

  “Huh?” I snatch the bottles off the bar. “Pick Hannah for what?”

  Now it’s Sawyer’s turn to roll his eyes. “You know what I’m asking. What’s it mean?”

  “Grace of God.”

  He nods his approval, thoughtful. “Nicely chosen.”

  “I had a book.”

  “Efficient,” he says, then: “What about yours?”

  “Serena?” I shrug and deliver the beers, then come back against my better judgment. “Just what it sounds like. I was misnamed.”

  “Nah,” Sawyer says, shaking his head. He’s still leaning over the bar, dark head tipped close like he thinks I’m going to tell him some kind of secret. “Ever look me up?”

  “Nope,” I say; then, because that looked like it hurt his feelings—and honestly, what is that about?—I frown. “Okay, can you stop?”

  Sawyer frowns back. “Stop what?” he asks, as if he honestly doesn’t know.

  “Whatever you’re doing,” I say. I feel so stupidly close to the edge here, like anything could set me off. For some reason idle chatter seems worse than the nastiest of fights. “Asking about names. Being my buddy.”

  “I’m being civil.”

  “Well,” I tell him, “don’t.”

  Sawyer snorts. “That’s very mature.”

  “Do you even have feelings?”

  He stares at me. “Do I have what?”

  “Feelings,” I repeat, as if maybe I just wasn’t speaking loudly enough. “Do you have any? Or was there some kind of genetic fluke?”

  For a moment Sawyer just gapes, shaking his head slightly. “Okay,” he says finally, flipping up the wooden partition and stalking around the front of the bar. He grabs my arm, not gently. “That’s it.”

  “What are you doing?” I hiss as he pulls me down the back hallway, past the office and the kitchen. He flips the lock on the patio door and pushes it open. “Let go of me,” I tell him. “It’s raining.”

  “No shit. It’s Florida.” He turns to face me once we’re outside, half covered by the awning over the door. The air is hot and muggy; my right shoulder is getting wet. “You know, this is classic,” he says, like he honestly can’t believe we’re still having this conversation after all this time. “This is great!”

  “What is?” I ask, playing dumb. I don’t want to do this. Not now.

  “You, out of everyone, asking me if I have feelings.” He scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his
hands. “You know, I always thought it was messed up when people said you were an ice queen, like maybe they just didn’t know you well enough, but honestly, at this point—”

  “You’re not so sure?” I round on him. “Well, can’t say I didn’t warn you.” I shove past him, aiming for the door—I’m done here, done with him—but he catches my arm again.

  “Reena,” Sawyer says sharply. “Can you stop?”

  I shake my head. “Look, I’m sorry,” I tell him, trying to get away as cleanly as I can, as if that’s even a thing that’s possible with Sawyer. “Last night, all of it, I’m just—”

  “Don’t apologize,” he orders. “Look, I don’t—I just don’t want this to be another way for us to leave each other, okay?”

  Oh, come on. “Each other?” I look at him skeptically. “I’ve been right here.”

  “I know,” Sawyer agrees. “And now you don’t trust me as far as you can throw me, I know that, too. You’ve been pretty clear.” He bends down close to my ear. “But I think you’re glad it happened that way.”

  I snort derisively. “Oh, yeah, it was awesome.”

  “I’m serious,” he says, and I can tell by his voice that he really is. “I think secretly you love it because it gives you an excuse to be closed off to everyone and not give anybody the chance to mess with you.” Sawyer gets closer, both of us still under the patio awning, this place we’ve known all our lives. “But the truth is, you wouldn’t let me mess with you to begin with. You never let me that far in. And now you get to hold me at arm’s length and tell yourself I deserve it, and maybe I do, but that’s tough because it’s not good enough this time.” He’s got me backed against the exterior wall of the restaurant, right up in my space like he wants to make one hundred percent sure I know he’s not going away. “You hear me, Reena? I want more than that.”

  I shake my head again, wishing I didn’t have to hear him. “Shelby’s never going to forgive me,” is what comes out.

  “Goddamnit, Reena,” he says, voice rising; oh, I’m making him mad. “Can you please let me in for one second?”

  “Seriously?” I demand. I feel myself get a little bigger, my shoulders broadening out. “Let you in? The whole entire time we were together I tried to get you to talk to me.”

  That gets his attention. “About what?” he asks, sounding genuinely curious.

  “About everything!” I tell him. “About your family, about your friends, about Allie—”

  “I gave Allie the keys to her car.”

  “What?” It’s so sudden I think I’ve misheard him, and when I look at his face I can tell he’s surprised himself. For a second we only just stare at each other, recalibrating, but then he takes a breath and goes on.

  “The night she died.” It looks as if it’s physically painful for him to say it, as if the words taste like gravel or bone. “I had her keys. And I let her have them.”

  I don’t—It feels like he’s speaking Mandarin. “But we were together the night she died,” I say, still not understanding. “At the ice cream place.”

  “Before that.” Sawyer exhales, rakes his hands through his hair. All of a sudden the tenor of this conversation has changed completely, like it’s about so much more than just him and me. “Before I came to the restaurant. We were at a party with some people. Lauren and all of them. We didn’t drive together, but she gave me her keys because she didn’t want to carry a purse. She had that big stupid purse, you know?” Sawyer shrugs and heads across the patio even though it’s still raining, leaves the safe harbor of the awning for the glider at the edge of the yard. After a minute I follow.

  “We were there for like an hour,” he tells me, swinging just a little, picking reflexively at the seam of his work pants. “Maybe an hour and a half. And we started to argue.”

  “Okay,” I say softly. I perch beside him on the glider, same as the night just after Allie’s funeral. It makes it easier, somehow, not to have to stare him in the eye. I can hear the restaurant sounds just like I could the last time we did this, the same underwater sensation. “I’m with you so far.”

  Sawyer nods. “She said she was leaving,” he continues after a minute. My heart is thudding hard behind my ribs. “She yelled at me to give her the keys, and she wasn’t—she wasn’t sloppy, you know? It wasn’t like she was falling down. But she’d had a couple beers and there was that look in her eye, and—” He breaks off all of a sudden, shrugging helplessly. He looks about ten years old. “I never, ever should have let her go. But I did. I threw her the keys and I told her to get the hell lost, if that’s how she felt about stuff, and I—”

  “—and you came to the restaurant and found me.”

  Sawyer nods like all the breath has gone out of him. The rain is slipping down the back of my neck. “So,” he says eventually, eyes on the other side of the courtyard; Get the hell lost, he told her, and she did. “Now you know.”

  Now I know.

  For a long time neither of us says anything, rain spritzing down on the pavement. I think of Sawyer carrying that secret across the country. I think of Allie dying before she ever got to live. I cry for a while, sitting there on the glider, remembering the purple ribbon I didn’t wear in the weeks after the accident, like no pretty length of grosgrain would stretch around whatever it was I’d lost. Sawyer’s arm is warm and damp against mine. “What was the fight about?” I ask him finally.

  “You.” Just like that, no hesitation at all: Sawyer lifts his head to look at me, his expression wry and heartbroken and honest. “We were fighting about you.”

  “Me?” My stomach lands somewhere around my shoes. I can’t believe this was true the entire time we were together. I can’t believe he hasn’t told me this until now. “Why?”

  “She said you were in love with me.”

  There’s a sound, this quiet gasping whimper, and it takes me a minute to realize it’s coming from my mouth. “What?” I manage. “She said—what?”

  Sawyer shrugs. “You heard me,” he says quietly, a simple matter-of-factness in his manner that leaves no doubt in my mind he’s telling the truth. “She said you were in love with me even though you’d never admit it, and you had been for a long time, and she thought—” He shakes his head. “She thought I loved you back.”

  “What?” I say again, just the one word on repeat like a CD that’s gotten stuck. My first reaction is this totally irrational embarrassment on behalf of my fifteen-year-old self, although—what with our kid being big enough to walk and talk—it’s probably a little late to feel humiliated at the idea of Sawyer knowing I had a crush on him back then. Still, knowing that Allie sold me out like that, used my most private feelings for some kind of messed-up emotional currency in a drunk fight with her boyfriend—that stings. For the hundred thousandth time I wish she hadn’t crashed her car and disappeared forever, if only so I could tell her what a bitch move that was.

  Then again: I betrayed her, too. I think of the very first time Sawyer ever kissed me, on the hood of the Jeep outside the ice cream place on the very last night of Allie’s life. There’s no limit to the ways that we managed to fail each other as best friends, Allie and I. It makes me feel so colossally sad.

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t think she meant to hurt you,” Sawyer says now, watching my face as if he’s trying to read hieroglyphics carved there. “I think she was just … upset.” He shrugs one more time, honest and regretful. “And anyway, it’s not like she was wrong.”

  I stare at him. I blink. “Meaning … ?”

  “Are you kidding?” Sawyer looks at me like I’m deranged, like we’re still on two totally different sides of the river. “Why do you think I came looking for you that night, Reena? To see if it was true. I left my drunk girlfriend with her car keys and I came and I found you, do you understand that? Why the hell would I ever have done that if I didn’t care whether or not it was true?”

  “Uh-uh.” I shake my head stubbornly, refusing to believe it. “You never paid one speck of attent
ion to me before—”

  “No, you never paid one speck of attention!” Sawyer’s voice rises. “You were so worried about making sure I never knew you felt one way or the other about me so that you wouldn’t have to be embarrassed or vulnerable or whatever—” He stops and gets up off the glider. Turns around to look me in the eye. “Well, guess what, Reena? I never knew you felt one way or the other about me.” He shrugs a little, elegant shoulders just barely moving. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen him do. “So I guess you won.”

  We gaze at each other for a moment, the rain still hissing steadily all around us and my heart beating fast like moth wings, so small and whisper-quiet inside my chest. I know it’s my move here, that Sawyer’s told me the worst and most honest thing he can think of. I remember the fight I had with Allie that night at the party: You want to win this fight, Reena? It doesn’t feel like I’ve won anything at all.

  “It means woodcutter,” I tell him finally, wiping either rain or tears off my face with the back of one cold, damp hand. I don’t know why it suddenly feels like it matters.

  Sawyer physically startles at the sound of my voice. He looks at me, blinking. “Huh?” he asks.

  “Your name,” I manage after a moment. “One who saws.”

  It’s not what he was hoping for; the sag of his body makes that much unmistakably clear. Still, Sawyer musters a smile. “Makes sense, I guess,” is all he tells me. Offers a hand to pull me to my feet.

  46

  Before

  I dropped Sawyer at home after our miserable night in South Beach, drove back to my house, and beelined directly into the downstairs bathroom. I threw up everything I’d eaten all day.

  Everything.

  I sat on the tile for a long time after that, head against the wall, waiting for my stomach to settle, for my breath to stop coming so quick. I sobbed for a while, feeling pathetic. I thought my insides were actually in revolt. In the morning, Soledad brought me toast and tea and sat at the edge of the mattress reading novels in Spanish, thumb stroking absently along the arch of my foot while she listened to me try not to cry.

 

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