by Dahlia Adler
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We have a month to make it through first, and before that, we still have another full day here, away from Radleigh and classes everything else I’d just as soon drop forever if I could reasonably do so. There’s plenty of time to stress about how difficult things will be when we return, but why spend time doing it on the last blissful day we have together?
I force my attention back to the album. My mom really did look like me back then, minus the glasses. But there’s more. You could tell she was good, and kind, a few other choice things I didn’t inherit. I think of what Connor said about Sophie, how she didn’t deserve me sleeping with her boyfriend. He’s right, and it kills me that I didn’t care on my own.
There’s a part of me that hopes being with him makes me a nicer person.
“Hey.”
I glance up from the album to see Connor sit up and reach aimlessly for his boxers, his longish brown hair disheveled, deep-blue eyes sleepy. You’re beautiful, I think. “Hey,” I say.
“Whatcha got there?” He locates his boxers, pulls them on under the blanket, then throws his undershirt back on before joining me on the couch. The fire’s been out for a while now, and he covers us both with the blanket.
“Just more pictures. Wedding album.”
“Getting ideas?” he teases, but despite the way he raises his eyebrows, it doesn’t sound like it’d displease him all that much if I said yes.
“I thought about it, but then I realized how terrible Lizzie Lawson sounds. Oh well.”
He laughs as I snuggle into the crook of his arm. “Elizabeth Lawson sounds nice,” he murmurs, kissing the top of my head.
“Give it up, Connor. You can save ‘Elizabeth’ for when you’re mad at me.”
His lips curve into a smile against my hair, and he turns the page. “Who’s that?”
“My mom’s cousin Espie. She’s the only one who came in from the Philippines for the wedding, but they lost touch after a little while.”
“Literally the only one? What about her parents?”
I snort. “Her parents stopped talking to her the day she announced she was marrying my father and staying in America.”
“You’ve never met them?”
“Never met them, never spoken to them, honestly don’t even know if they’re still alive. My mother tried straight up through when Tyler was born, even wanted to bring me to visit, but they wouldn’t have it.”
“So they don’t even know?”
“Wouldn’t know how to tell them even if they weren’t assholes.”
He sighs and hugs me tight around my waist. “Whatever happened to the whole ‘unconditional love of family’ thing?”
“We don’t choose family,” I say, curling into his warmth. “We’re born into it. It’s like…if someone else picked my clothes every day, there’s a chance I’d like some outfits, and there’s a chance I’d hate them.” Reaching up to cup his jaw and lower his mouth to mine, I add, “But it’s the clothing I choose that I want to wrap myself in every day.”
“Mmm.” His lips brush mine. “I’m very new to this whole fashion thing, but I think I approve of your metaphor.”
“And you’re okay with the fact that I’ve picked out clothing for you?”
He pauses. “Are we back to the flat-front pants or still on the metaphor and referring to your brothers?”
“I was still on the metaphor, but now I’m curious about both.”
He grins, kisses me again. “I’m happy with all the clothing you’ve picked out for me. Especially when I catch you staring at my ass in them. And yes, now I’m just referring to the pants.”
“I do not,” I lie.
“Yeah, okay.” His tongue teases the seam of my lips and I open up and let him in, falling back on the couch and taking him with me. It’s addictive, being with him, touching him, kissing him, and though a month didn’t sound like a big deal when he first mentioned it, now it sounds on par with climbing Everest.
“I’m gonna miss this,” I say, sliding my hands up the back of his shirt, feeling firm muscle and soft skin. “I might’ve been a little overconfident about that whole ‘month’ thing.”
He chuckles softly and rests his forehead on mine. “I’m already having a hard time knowing my bed won’t have you in it on Sunday night. You’d think I’d have learned not to overestimate my restraint when it comes to you.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have been in your bed Sunday night anyway,” I point out. “I can’t exactly leave the boys for a night to stay with you. Ever.”
“Right,” he mutters. “And staying at your place….”
“Probably not the best idea. No wall units,” I add with a rueful smile.
He lowers himself while rolling me over so now he’s lying on the couch and I’m on top of him, his arms holding me in place. “We really like a challenge, huh?”
“Do you?” I ask, tousling a wayward strand of hair. “Because we don’t have to do this. Jess—”
“Is not you,” Connor says firmly, lifting his mouth to mine. “We’ll figure it out, Lizzie. All of it. One way or another.”
Once again, his voice holds enough confidence and conviction to make me a believer. I shimmy down a bit to rest my head on his chest, and this time, when we close our eyes and fall asleep, we don’t wake up until morning.
• • •
Saturday morning breakfast is long and leisurely, with Connor doing the cooking for everyone as we huddle in the kitchen, wrapped in blankets and coming up with gross ideas for omelets using Thanksgiving leftovers.
Afterward, Ty and Max take Pete for a walk, Connor holes himself up in my room with some work he hasn’t yet touched this weekend, and I walk over to Nancy’s as we’d planned on the phone earlier that week. “Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I’m ready for this round of lessons on ‘How to Be an Adult.’”
Nancy grins. “You’re doing great, Lizzie. Do you want to start with balancing a checkbook, dealing with car payments and insurance, or paying off the mortgage? Or,” she adds with a tip of her head, “now that I have you alone again, do you want to explain to me how you plan to deal with the fact that your boyfriend—whom you neglected to reveal is extremely good-looking, by the way—is your Teaching Assistant?”
My cheeks flame at the question. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I mumble, as if Nancy doesn’t have a finely honed bullshit detector.
“Oh, really? So he drove five hours for a free dinner and some tutoring?”
“I mean, I guess he is, or will be….” I drop my head into my hands. “I have no clue what we’re doing, Nancy. Neither of us does.”
She reaches out and strokes my hair, so much like my mother used to do. “It’s not ideal, sweetheart. But you already knew that.”
“Yeah, but I also didn’t think it would actually happen,” I admit. “Even when we were…getting to know each other up at Radleigh, I just thought….”
“You didn’t think you’d fall in love with him?” she ventures gently.
I stare down at my hands on her kitchen tabletop, bite the insides of my lips, shake my head.
“But you did.”
I nod. I’m a fucking marionette.
“And he feels the same way about you?” She pauses. “Well, never mind. That’s a stupid question. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
I smile a bit at that, but I still can’t meet her eyes. I’m so stupid. So, so fucking stupid.
She wraps an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into her so my head is resting against hers. “Everything’s going to be okay, Lizzie.”
“How mad at me do you think my parents would be right now if they knew?”
She laughs lightly. “Your mother would not be thrilled. Your father…would at least be able to empathize a bit.”
At that, I jerk upright. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Oh, it’s nothing like this,” she says, a teasing tone in her voice, “but your father had such a crush on one of
our professors in law school. I dare say it actually made Manuella nervous, except there’s no way he would’ve acted on it. Nor would the professor, who turned out to be partnered to a rather lovely woman.”
“Whoops.”
“Very oops.” She tucks a piece of hair behind my ear. “Your brothers seem to like him, at least. And it would appear that is mutual.”
“It does appear that way, doesn’t it? Is that good? Bad? Does it mean I made this whole weird thing happen too fast?”
“Lizzie, darling, you didn’t make anything happen. It happened. That’s love. But have you thought about what you’ll do when you get back to school?”
“Not much we can do,” I say with a shrug. “Stay apart for the next month, then figure it out from there.”
“How stupid do you think I am?”
“Hey, I’m wishful thinking.”
She laughs and kisses my forehead. “Whatever you do, Lizzie, just be careful. His career is important, but so’s yours. I’d warn you about your heart, too, but somehow I have a feeling it’s safe with that one.”
“Somehow, I have the same feeling,” I say, my insides suffusing with warmth. “But forgetting about Connor for a second, I have to ask you—do you think the boys are doing okay?”
“They seem to be. Why, has Max had more nightmares?”
“No, but…I guess I want them to be more than okay. I want them to be happy. And I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen up there.” I lower my voice, in case the boys return. “I think they miss it here, and I’m afraid I’m being selfish, keeping them up at Radleigh.”
“Do you want to come back here?” Nancy asks.
I bite my lip. “Well, no, but…I don’t know. It’s not just about what I want.”
“Your parents didn’t ask if this is where you want to live. It’s what worked for them, for their jobs.”
“Yeah, but I’m not them. I don’t even have a job.”
“Going to school is your job. And anyway, what would it be here? Something at the mall?”
There’s no point in responding; we both know I don’t have better answers to this than when we first talked about it in September. “I just feel like there has to be some sort of happy medium.”
“There isn’t always. Sometimes, life just gives you cancer and a cheating husband and takes your leg, you know?”
My mouth drops open; I’ve never heard Nancy talk that bluntly about…well, any of that before. “Nancy—”
She laughs. “Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to be over all that. Some days I am. But most days I was, it was because I lived next door to my best friends.”
I squeeze her hand as tears fill my eyes. Sometimes, I forget that Ty, Max, and I weren’t the only ones who lost family when my parents died. “Maybe you should move up to Radleigh,” I joke. “We’d love to have you.”
She squeezes my hand back. “Pretty sure my college days are over, but it’s nice to have you three back again, even if just for a long weekend. And it’s nice to meet Connor, too. He really is a nice boy. Well,” she amends with a grin, “a nice man, anyway.”
A blush fills my cheeks again, but it’s a good kind of blush. A happy one. “How about you teach me that whole checkbook thing now,” I suggest, ducking my head, and when she laughs, I think, You may not be my mother, but I am so, so lucky to have you.
• • •
I do learn how to balance a checkbook, though I’m sure I’ll be calling her for refreshers, and I get pretty well versed in car payments, insurance, paying utilities for my parents’ house via internet, and a whole bunch of other fun things. It feels good, if a bit daunting, to finally be able to take some of the responsibilities Nancy’s been juggling. And while I’m sure I’ll screw up plenty, I’ve already screwed up plenty in the past, and I’m learning there’s not a whole lot you can’t come back from.
We decide to leave on the early side of Sunday, to make a fun day out of the long ride back to Radleigh. Both our car and Connor’s are packed full of stuff we didn’t bring back with us the first time around—warmer clothes, a few things of our parents’, and, despite my overwhelming objections, the notorious green album.
“Who’s riding up with me for round one?” Connor asks as the boys put on their coats while I take a final look around the house, making sure we didn’t leave anything behind.
“Can I sit in the front if I do?” Max asks excitedly.
“Definitely not.” I find his gloves and hat in the closet and make sure he’s fully suited up. “But I bet Connor would love listening to that song about the trains a couple hundred times.”
Connor raises his eyebrows at me, and I smile sweetly.
“Yeah, Connor?” Max looks up at him with those big brown puppy-dog eyes and I know without a doubt my boyf—whatever—is about to get suckered in.
As expected, Connor smiles. “Sure, buddy. Sounds great. You have the CD?”
“It’s in our car. I’ll go get it.”
“Ty, go with him, please. Make sure he doesn’t run into the street.”
“Yes, boss.”
The boys go out to the driveway, leaving Connor and me alone for our last few moments before everything changes again. “Sorry about that,” I say impishly, not really all that sorry. “I just can’t take any more of that thing.”
He laughs and wraps his arms around my waist. “Well, I really appreciate that you’re willing to subject me to the torture, then.”
“Always,” I murmur as my arms encircle his neck and I pull him down for a kiss. “Besides, it’s only for an hour, and then we’ll meet up at the bowling alley near Monticello.”
“Okay, but I should warn you. I’m probably going to judge your fashion sense the second you put on bowling shoes, just because I can.”
“Bowling shoes are cool,” I tell him as I lay one more soft kiss on his lips, just before the boys come slamming back into the house. “It just takes someone as hot as I am to pull them off.”
He looks me up and down appreciatively, but keeps his thoughts quiet as Ty and Max charge back over to us, that horrid album in hand. “All right,” I say, just like Dad used to. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
• • •
It’s late at night by the time we get back, both boys passed out in my car for the final leg of the trip, but I can’t imagine any of us have any regrets. We bowled near Monticello, went to the mall in Binghamton, bundled up together to watch the sun set at Sandy Island Beach, and went for dinner in Watertown. It was only there, twenty minutes from Radleigh, that I realized how much closer school is to Montreal than to Pomona. I didn’t say anything about it then, but after the boys are in bed and I’m washed up and ready to do the same, I call Connor.
“Miss me already?” he says with a smile in his voice.
“Yes, but that’s not why I’m calling.”
“Well, this sounds ominous.”
“It isn’t,” I assure him. “I don’t think it is, anyway. I just wanted to know—I know you don’t celebrate American Thanksgiving, but Montreal is only, like, three hours away from here. I can’t believe I forgot that, considering Frankie was always trying to get us to go for the weekend last year, but none of us had cars and we didn’t feel like taking the bus.”
“It is about three hours, yes.”
“So, why weren’t you going home anyway? Like, just to be home for the long weekend? You obviously could’ve driven there no problem.”
He’s quiet, and I wonder if I’ve ventured into too-personal territory.
Do we still have too-personal territory?
“You know what you said about how we don’t choose family?” he says finally.
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s just say that no one in my family chose me.”
The bitterness in his voice squeezes my heart. “But your mom called, that first week I was in your office—”
“She calls sometimes,” he concedes. “She’s usually drunk, or wants to know if I’ve heard from my si
ster, or both. Mostly I’m just the kid who ran off her boyfriend, and I always will be.”
There’s a horrible irony in that my parents, who would’ve loved us both enough for a billion parents, are gone, and his still walk the earth as cruel, heartless assholes.
But I don’t know if that’s okay to say—I’m still sort of working on the whole “tact” thing. And now that we’re back at Radleigh, I’m scared that everything that’s happened over the past few days was just some sort of Pomona-centric fairytale. Insecurity, especially over a guy, isn’t usually my color, and yet despite the fact that he’s told me he loves me, and we’ve spent a major holiday together, and had a lot of incredible sex, it all feels so…fragile.
“I still choose to wrap myself in you,” I say quietly, both because he needs to know someone does and because I need to know he feels the same way, still, even though we’re back in a scarier place to say it.
“And that’s why I’d drive five hours to you any day over three hours to her.” His voice sounds warm again, and it travels straight to my toes.
“Good thing you don’t have to do that to see me.”
“A very good thing,” he murmurs back. “Though my bed feels ten sizes too big right now without you flinging your arms in my face.”
“Funny, I was just thinking how quiet mine is without your snoring.”
His low, brief laugh makes my skin buzz with longing, which is only compounded when he says, “Goodnight, Elizabeth.”
“Goodnight,” I manage back, but when I hang up, it takes me far too long to fall asleep in solitude.
When I wake up the next morning after a restless night’s sleep, my first thought is that I need to see Connor again, need to know where we stand now that we’re back at Radleigh. But all of that slips out of my brain in a heartbeat when I hear moaning and realize it’s Max begging for “Mommy” from his bed.