If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

  “It’s okay, Finny,” I say. “I’m okay.” He groans then for the first time and moves faster. I close my eyes and rest my cheek against his. I think about lying in this room with him, drawing on each other’s backs. I think about sitting next to him on the couch and watching TV. He moans and my arms tighten around him. I think of his hands over mine on the steering wheel. I think of us shining our flashlights in each other’s windows at night.

  It isn’t long before I feel him suddenly stiffen. He cries out once and shudders. Tears sting my eyes again. Finny lets out a long breath and begins to shift away. I whimper only when I feel him moving out of me.

  “Autumn?” he says. He looks down at my face.

  “I love you too,” I say. “I forgot to tell you.” The tears spill over now, and Finny begins to kiss my eyelids and my forehead again and again.

  “It’s okay. Don’t cry,” he says. His words rush together and blend with his kisses. He kisses my cheeks and my tears. “Don’t cry,” he says. “It’s okay.”

  “Will you hold me?” I ask. He rolls off me and holds out his arms. I wipe my eyes and lay my head on his shoulder. His arms fold around me and he presses me close.

  “Like this?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say. We’re quiet as our breathing slows to normal. I watch the light get brighter in the room. There are more birds singing now, a whole chorus.

  “I can’t believe that just happened,” Finny says. I almost laugh but somehow don’t. A strange feeling is beginning to fill me now.

  “Did you mean it when you said you loved me?” I ask.

  “Of course I did,” he says.

  “You weren’t just saying that because it’s what the guy’s supposed to say?” He doesn’t answer me after that, and my stomach drops. Finny lets go of me and sits up on one elbow. My breathing halts.

  “Come on, Autumn,” he says. He makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “I know that you know I’ve been in love with you for forever. You don’t have to pretend.”

  “What?” I say. He rolls his eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Finny says. “I’ve always known that you knew.” I sit up on my elbows too, pulling the sheet up to cover me, and look back at him. We frown at each other. I try to make myself understand what he’s saying.

  “What do you mean by ‘forever’?” I say.

  “You know. Forever. Since we were, like, what? Eleven?” he asks.

  “Fifth grade? The year you punched Donnie Banks?”

  “Yeah, you remember what Donnie Banks said.”

  “He called me a freak.”

  “He said, ‘Your girlfriend is a freak,’” Finny says. “And he knew that you didn’t want to be my girlfriend. And that I did.”

  “You liked me like that back then?” I say.

  Finny looks like he finally understands what I’m saying. He sits up all the way.

  “But isn’t that why you stopped hanging out with me in middle school?” he says. “Because you got tired of me wanting to be more than just friends?”

  “No,” I say. “I had no idea you wanted anything like that.”

  “But after I kissed you, you knew,” he says.

  “No. I didn’t know why you’d kissed me and it freaked me out. I thought maybe you were experimenting on me.” Finny looks at me again. His mouth is slightly open, his eyes hinting at a frown.

  “But this doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “If you didn’t know, then why did you leave me?”

  Now it’s my turn to look away from him.

  “It just felt so nice not to be the weird girl anymore. I liked being popular. We did kinda grow apart that year. I’m not saying it’s not my fault. I’m just saying I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  “You really didn’t know?” Finny asks.

  “No,” I say. “I really, really didn’t.”

  Finny flops back down on the bed. He stares at the ceiling.

  “And all these years I was terrified that you could tell I still…you know.”

  “Still what?” I ask.

  “Still wanted you.”

  “Really?” I say. He doesn’t answer me. He just stares at the ceiling with an expression that looks as confused as I feel. “What about Sylvie?” My voice has a hint of accusation in it, but I can’t help it. Finny surprises me by laughing bitterly.

  “The only reason I started hanging out with the cheerleaders after soccer practice was because I thought they were still your friends. I thought that maybe I’d have a chance with you then, that maybe I’d be cool enough for you to see me like that. Then when the first day of high school came, you didn’t even say hi to me at the bus stop. And I found out that not only were you not their friend anymore, but you hated them. And then you started going out with Jamie, and Alexis was asking me why I was leading Sylvie on and I didn’t even know what she was talking about—” His voice trails off and he is quiet again. I’m too shocked to say anything this time. He’s still staring at the ceiling. I’m starting to feel cold without his arms around my shoulders. “Don’t think that I never cared about Sylvie, because I did,” Finny finally says. “She’s not really like what you think. And she needed me to take care of her when you didn’t anymore. I loved her, but I loved her differently from the way I’ve always loved you.”

  “Oh, Finny,” I say. My voice is quiet, and I can’t find the words to say anything else. After a moment, he turns his face toward me but he does not meet my eyes.

  “You said—you said that you loved me too.” He’s blushing, and I feel like I might faint.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I do.” My voice is barely above a whisper and I cannot hide its tremble.

  “Since when?” His voice matches my own.

  “I dunno,” I say. “Maybe since forever too, but I didn’t admit it until two years ago.” He raises his eyes to mine and I collapse back down on the bed. He wraps his arms around me again and I curl into him. Finny hugs me so tightly that it almost hurts, and then I feel his whole body relax. I close my eyes and sigh. It’s so strange; it’s such a revelation, this feeling of skin to skin all the way down my body. I reach one hand out and try to find his heart. He lays his other hand on top on mine and strokes my knuckles with his thumb.

  “So,” Finny says, but doesn’t continue.

  “What?” I say.

  “It’s you and me now, right?”

  “Phineas Smith, are you asking me to be your girlfriend?” I can’t help giggling.

  “Well, yeah.” He shifts underneath me. “Is that weird?”

  “Only because it feels like we’re already so much more than that.”

  He relaxes again. “Yeah, I know. But it’ll have to do for now.”

  “You still have to break up with Sylvie,” I say quietly.

  “I know,” he says. “I’m going to. Tomorrow.”

  “You mean today,” I say. He looks over at his window.

  “Oh. Right.” He squeezes me again. “We should get some sleep, I guess.”

  “Yeah. I guess.” I close my eyes, and we are quiet. The room is still and silent, and outside, the sun has risen on a hot August day.

  82

  I wake many times. We shift and change positions together; he nuzzles me, I move up against him. He holds my hands, my neck, my face. I dream, I wake, I see him, I sleep.

  ***

  Finny’s cell phone rings. He tenses and sits up. I am still and confused for a moment, and then I bolt upright. It looks like early afternoon. Finny is standing in the middle of his room, picking his jeans off the floor and digging through the pockets. I fold my arms over my breasts as I watch him. He opens his phone, looks at it, and presses a button. The ringing stops. Still holding his pants, he turns and looks at me. I stare back at him.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Was that her?”

 
; “Does it matter?” He sets the phone on his nightstand.

  “Yes.”

  “It was,” he says. I look away, down at the covers on my lap. I hear his jeans hit the floor, and the bed creaks as he sits down. The blanket shifts as he climbs back in next to me. “Come here.” He pulls me down next to him and holds me the way he did last night.

  I think of Sylvie at some airport, excited about seeing Finny again soon. I think about how I laughed when Jamie told me he and Sasha had discovered they had feelings for each other. I realize how different this story must be from all of their points of view.

  “Do you feel guilty?” I ask. He doesn’t answer right away.

  “Yeah,” he says. “But I also feel like I’ve been loyal to something bigger.”

  His phone beeps. He has a text message.

  “You should see who it is,” I say.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “It could be The Mothers, and if we don’t answer, they’ll think we’re dead and come back early.” He sits up and looks at his phone. His back is turned to me as he types a reply. He doesn’t say anything when he turns back around. He lies back down on his side and I curl up next to him so that we face each other.

  “It was her again,” I say.

  “I told her that I won’t be meeting her plane. I’ll go see her after she has dinner with her parents.”

  “Oh. When?”

  “We have a few hours. Go back to sleep.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Me neither.” He reaches over and strokes my hair. I close my eyes but do not doze. His fingers are gentle on my scalp and I shiver once. “Do you regret it?” he asks after a while. I open my eyes again. He looks worried.

  “No,” I say, “but—” I lower my face so that I can’t look at him. “I wish it had been your first time too,” I say. He stops stroking my hair and his hand drops on to the bed between us. When he speaks, it is slow and haltingly.

  “The first time—we were both so drunk neither of us can remember it. And then it turned out—” he pauses and frowns “—that she couldn’t do it unless she was drunk. And if she was drunk, it felt wrong to me. It didn’t happen often or even go well when it did. So—I mean—in a lots of ways, it was a first for me.”

  “What do you mean she couldn’t do it unless she was drunk?” I ask.

  Finny looks away and mumbles. “Someone hurt her once.”

  “Oh,” I say. We are quiet for moment. I reach over and cover his hand with mine. He turns his palm facing up and our fingers twine together. Our eyes meet again.

  “I wanted something better for you,” Finny says. “That’s why I made you promise not to do it when you were drinking. But really, the idea of you ever doing it with anybody drove me crazy. You remember how you told me that you were going to after graduation, and then the day after you were sitting on the porch and you said you were waiting for Jamie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I went up here and punched the wall. I’d never done that before. It hurt.”

  “You thought—”

  “Yeah,” Finny says. He still holds my gaze, but his expression shifts into some mix of emotions I can’t quite figure out. “Then after I found out you guys had broken up, it was hard to see you miserable over him when I was so happy I wanted to pick you up and spin you around,” Finny says.

  “You were sad that time Sylvie broke up with you,” I say. “I was so angry at her for hurting you that I thought about pushing her in front of the school bus.”

  “I was sad,” Finny says. I can’t help the sliver of jealousy that pierces my stomach. “But it was my own fault,” he adds. “I told everybody that I didn’t like it when they made comments about you and Sylvie got jealous. She asked me if I had feelings for you and I told her to drop it and kept trying to change the subject. She could tell.”

  “Why did you get back with her?” I ask the question even though I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

  He pauses for only a second before answering. “You loved Jamie all this time too,” Finny says. “Didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Then why don’t you understand? I wanted—I tried to love only her. When I told you last month that I was going to break up with Sylvie, it wasn’t because I thought I had a chance of being more than just your friend. It was because loving you from a distance was one thing, but it wouldn’t have been fair to her if I were in love with my best friend.”

  I sit up and pull the blankets with me so that he can’t see my body. I can’t look at him. Everything he has said has made me so sad and so happy and more than anything else, I am so frightened.

  “Autumn?” I hear the bed creak as he sits up too, but I hang my head and refuse to look at him.

  “What if you see her and realize this was all a mistake?” I say.

  “That will not happen.”

  “It could.”

  “It won’t.”

  “If you love her—”

  “But if I have the chance to be with you—God, Autumn, you’re the ideal I’ve judged every other girl by my whole life,” Finny says. “You’re funny and smart and weird. I never know what’s gonna come out of your mouth or what you’re gonna do. I love that. You. I love you.”

  I raise my head a little. He’s staring at me with an expression I’ve never seen before. I watch his eyes study my face.

  “And you’re so beautiful,” he says. I duck my head back down and try to hide my face. My cheeks are warm. Finny laughs. “Now, I know you already knew that.”

  “It’s different when you say it.” He laughs again.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re so beautiful.” Finny puts his hand under my chin and turns me to face him. He looks me in the eye. “Last night was the best thing that ever happened to me and I would never think it was a mistake unless you said it was.”

  “I would never say that.”

  Finny leans his forehead against mine. “Then everything is going to be okay. We’re together now. Right?”

  “Of course.”

  Again, Finny laughs at me. I pull my face away from his and look at him.

  “I never, ever thought this would happen,” he says. “And then you say ‘of course’ like it’s the most natural thing in the world.”

  “Doesn’t it feel like it?”

  He laughs again, quietly this time, and the tone is different. “How did we ever get here?” he says. I don’t know what to say to that. So I just look at him. And then he smiles at me and pulls me toward him again and I sit on his lap with his arms around me and it is the most natural thing in the world.

  83

  Finny is supposed to leave in a few minutes. He’s in the shower, and I’m in his room, dressed and waiting. I made his bed and tried to cover up the blood stain, and now I’m sitting in the middle of it with my knees curled to my chest. The sky has clouded over, and even though it is still early evening, it looks almost dark out.

  I hear the shower stop; I rest my chin on my knees. It takes forever for me to hear him in the hall. He comes in fully dressed and rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He looks at me.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he says.

  “Can’t you wait until tomorrow?”

  “I want it to be over,” he says. “I want it to be just us.” He drops his towel on the floor. He takes a baseball cap off his dresser and covers up his wet head, then takes it off and runs his fingers through his hair. He turns back to me.

  “Walk me out?” he says. I nod, and he holds out his hand to me.

  I follow him to his car, and then we stand looking at each other.

  “I promise you,” he says, “I’ll come back as soon as I can. It may take a while though.”

  “Please don’t go,” I say. He puts his ha
nds on my shoulders and pulls me to his chest. “I have to do this,” he says. “You know that, Autumn.”

  I can’t answer him because I know he is right. He lays his cheek on the top of my head.

  “Here is what we’ll do,” he says. His voice is soft and light, as if we are making the sort of mischievous plan we made as children. “When The Mothers get home, you go to bed early, and when I get back I’ll sneak in your back door and come to your room. And then I’ll hold you all night.”

  I raise my head to look at him.

  “Okay,” I say. He smiles and leans down to kiss me. He kisses me once, and then I lean in for another. We kiss for a long time after that. I lean back against his car and he presses into me. Both of us are breathing harder. If I can just keep kissing him, then he’ll never leave.

  A car door slams. We both look up but we don’t separate. The Mothers are in the other driveway, unpacking cases of wine from the trunk. They are pointedly not looking at us.

  “Do you think they saw?” I ask.

  “Definitely,” he says.

  “Oh God,” I say.

  “I think my mother has a special bottle of champagne hidden away for just this occasion,” Finny says.

  “Oh God,” I say again. Finny looks down at me and smiles.

  “I’ll be back to help you fend them off.”

  “Okay,” I say. This time I resist the urge to tell him not to go. His smile slowly fades and he takes a deep breath. My arms drop from his neck reluctantly. He kisses my mouth quickly and takes a step back. He turns to open the car door and I take a step back too. He looks at me again, and just before he gets inside, he smiles again.

  “After this,” he says, “things are going to be the way they were always supposed to be.” Then he climbs inside and closes the door.

  He starts the engine without looking up at me again. I stand in the yard and watch his car until it is gone.

  It begins to rain.