Some Other Now

by Sarah Everett

  “You get me off?” he repeats. “That’s how you think I see you?”

  “I killed your brother, Luke.”

  “You didn’t kill . . .” He shakes his head, unable to look at me.

  “I’m the reason he’s dead,” I say, and it’s the first time I’ve been honest enough to say those words to anyone but myself. “I’m the reason you drove off, the reason he followed you, the reason he didn’t have his phone. It’s me, Luke. I did all this.”

  My voice breaks, and tears spill down my face.

  He doesn’t say anything. He can’t even deny it.

  “You didn’t mean . . .” he begins, but I don’t want to hear it.

  “Tell me you haven’t thought exactly that for the last nine months. Tell me you didn’t—don’t—hate me.”

  “I . . .” He can’t get the words out.

  “I’m not stupid, Luke. Maybe I don’t share your genius IQ, but I’m not a fool. I know what you think of me. I know part of you bringing me back to Mel was so you could hurt me. You want me to watch her die. You think I deserve to, after everything I’ve done.”

  Luke just looks at me.

  “Deny it,” I say.

  “Maybe I . . . at first, maybe that’s what I wanted. But not anymore.”

  “Why not, Luke? I’m still the same person. I still destroyed everything. But we kissed, so everything’s fine now? We both know that’s not true.”

  “I’m not going to deny that I was angry,” Luke says, his jaw tight, and I can tell that I’ve unleashed something in him. He’s about to tell the truth. “I was, and I am. Because my younger brother is dead. He’s gone, okay?”

  His voice breaks and his eyes well. “When he died, we were fighting over a girl.”

  It stings the way he says it; I’m a girl. I’m any girl.

  Not family, not one of their people, like Mel said a while ago.

  Just a girl.

  “He probably thought I hated him,” Luke said. “And I did. For a minute, I really, really hated him. He took you from me. He was fucking you right under my nose.”

  “We never—”

  “I thought you did. I see you in the water like that, what am I supposed to think?” he says. “And things hadn’t been bad with him for only that one night. They’d been bad for months, maybe even years, because of you.

  “But then you and I happened. You kissed me, and I liked it. And you know what the worst thing is? I fucking knew it. I knew how he felt about you.”

  I blink at him.

  No. That’s not possible.

  “Maybe I even knew before he did. Which is why that first night when you kissed me, I backed away. All that shit about trying to be a good guy? All a joke. I was the worst kind of person, and I knew it.”

  He looks at me. “But, God, I wanted to be with you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you or dreaming about you. And eventually I broke. I had to come and find you.”

  I blink hard, not sure what to make of what I’m hearing.

  “So when you say all this crap about how everything is your fault and you’re the reason and . . .”

  “I am the reason. You just said so yourself!”

  “You’re a reason. The other fucking reason,” he shouts, “is me. I’m the reason he’s dead.”

  I shake my head.

  “You know it’s true. I don’t steal his girl? None of that shit happens. I’m not at his party, or I’m there on time unlike the selfish prick I am? None of that shit happens. I see him with you and accept that you were always his? None of that shit happens.”

  “I wasn’t his,” I say.

  “Well, you sure as hell were never mine,” he spits back.

  “I was in love with you.”

  “Not enough.”

  It’s not true. I was just stupid and tipsy and horny and flattered and caught off-guard and stupid and stupid. But I loved Luke. I always did.

  “I’m sorry,” I say now because I’ve never said it to his face. “It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. And I hate myself just as much as you hate me.”

  He doesn’t deny that he hates me, that even the slightest bit of him hates me. “I could never hate you as much as I hate myself,” he says.

  He runs his hand through his hair and leans against the wall. We appraise each other for several seconds.

  “So what now?” he says with a small, tired smile. “Now that we’ve yelled at each other in front of the whole neighborhood and any illusion of romance is ruined.”

  I hate that the answer is on the tip of my tongue. I hate that I know what to do.

  “You go back to your life and I go back to mine.”

  “That’s what you want?” he asks.

  “That’s what needs to happen. We’ve ruined everything. We ruin everything.”

  I say we, but I still mean I.

  He just stares at me.

  “What did Mel think was the reason I stopped visiting her?”

  He brushes a hand over his face. “She said grief was hard to watch. That you couldn’t stand to be there for her when you’d just lost your best friend. And she wasn’t going to ask you to.”

  I swallow.

  God. Mel.

  Always thinking the best of me.

  “I have to tell her the truth about that night.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to,” I say, even though I feel sick at the thought. I’m about to lose one of the best people that ever happened to me—because people do happen, the way natural disasters happen and sickness happens and death happens. They collide for reasons outside of anyone’s control, and sometimes they love each other and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. They are not flesh and blood, not required to care in any way for each other, but they do. They become each other’s home.

  I owe it to Mel, after everything, to tell her the truth about how her son died.

  “You always had a hard time keeping things from her,” Luke muses, rubbing his jaw.

  “I used to feel like she just looked at me and knew. That she looked at people and saw everything true about them,” I say. “But I think all that really happened was that I talked and she listened.”

  We are silent a moment, and then Luke says, “When do you want to tell her? Naomi and Bobby are having her stay over at their place tonight. To get her out of her usual environment. She’s been going a little stir-crazy.”

  “Is she well enough for that?” I ask, worried.

  “I hope so.”

  “Can I come over later? When she’s out?”

  “Uh . . . okay,” Luke says, and I can tell he’s confused.

  “I won’t tell her then, obviously,” I say. “But there’s one last thing I want to do for her.”

  Before I’m out of her life forever.

  Before she never wants to see me again.

  “Okay,” Luke says.

  20

  NOW

  Now that I’m in the Cohen house, my whole idea feels stupid and trite. I stand in the guest room that is now Mel’s room and survey the bare walls, the hospital bed, the closet that is almost empty.

  “What do you need me to do?” Luke asks, standing in the doorway. It’s evening but still bright out, so light spills into the room.

  “I’ll need your muscles, if that’s okay,” I say.

  He follows me back up the stairs to Mel’s real room, the master bedroom she used to sleep in. It’s a hundred times warmer than the guest room. The comforter is white, with splashes of colorful paint. There are pictures all over the room of Rowan, Luke, Sydney, Naomi, and even me. Pictures from Mel’s time in Hungary during college. There are clothes she doesn’t use anymore. A bunch of them are too big now, but I decide we’ll take them anyway. Sometimes the most important thing about certain clothes isn’t physically wearing them; it’s seeing them and remembering who you were in them, where you wore them, who you kissed.

  I know I’m shameless now in the white skinny jeans that I love, the ones I was wearin
g when I kissed Luke that first night. I saw him notice them when he opened the door for me tonight, his eyes roaming the length of me and then trying to act like he hadn’t noticed. I didn’t wear them for his reaction; I wore them because this weekend has been crappy and I felt like putting on jeans that reminded me of something good.

  “Okay, so I don’t know if this rug will fit in there,” I tell Luke.

  He does some mental math and decides it’s worth a try. So we spend the next half hour shuffling this giant accent rug out from under Mel’s old king-size bed, rolling it up, transporting it down the stairs, and lifting everything off the floor in the guest room to see if it will fit.

  “It takes up nearly the whole room,” I say, biting my lip as I try to figure out what to do. “Should we take it back upstairs?”

  “Seriously? We could have made a trip to IKEA and been back by now,” Luke complains, but I can tell he doesn’t mind.

  “The whole point is that it has to be stuff she owns that we bring in here,” I say. “I just wish it fit.”

  He crouches down and starts to roll up the rug, when I change my mind again.

  “Hold on, maybe we can make it work.”

  He sighs. “I’m guessing we should cross interior decorator off your future careers list?”

  “Rude,” I say as I lead the way back up the stairs to Mel’s old room.

  I pile her clothes into some plastic storage containers while Luke collects pictures and knickknacks from around her room. We don’t take everything downstairs, but we try to take everything we know she likes or misses.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Luke says as he hangs up a picture of the three of them plus Sydney.

  I shrug. “She’d do the same for me.”

  And it’s true. She did do the same for me.

  The point of this is to take this sterile room that represents her sickness and make it into home for her. Make it a place she enjoys coming to, where she feels like herself, where she has good memories. Just like she did for me.

  It takes a couple of hours, but soon we are standing in a room that doesn’t quite look like Mel’s old room—it’s certainly not as big—but isn’t quite a dying woman’s room either.

  I take a moment to pretend to survey my handiwork, but really I’m saying goodbye to my memories of Mel. Her favorite brown sweater. Her purple house shoes. Her matching purple robe that is almost as ratty as the pajamas I was wearing when Luke came to visit me this morning.

  After I come back tomorrow night to tell her the truth, Mel will never welcome me into this house again. I won’t have a right to these memories, to her hospitality, to her love.

  Luke is watching me look at the room, and he rubs his neck once he’s caught. “We still have some cupcakes from last week,” he says. “If you’re up for it.”

  “I should probably get going,” I say. Now that we’re done with the masquerade, he doesn’t have to pretend to be nice to me anymore. He doesn’t have to treat me like someone who matters. Not like his girlfriend or his ex-girlfriend or his sister or his brother’s best friend. I’m “a girl” as far as he is concerned. Or I should be, anyway.

  “Mom’s not holding down her end of things, in terms of eating them. I’m only one man,” he says with a crooked smile.

  “One,” I concede. “I’ll have one.”

  “Coming right up.”

  I follow him into the kitchen, my bag still on my shoulder, my keys in hand. I watch as he pulls out a full container of cupcakes.

  “You weren’t lying,” I say as he offers me one, then pours us both glasses of lemonade.

  He shakes his head and takes a bite. “It’s pretty sad when you have nearly a dozen cupcakes in a house and no one to eat them.”

  I know it’s not intentional on his part, but sadness creeps into the space between us. Once, these cupcakes wouldn’t have lasted more than a day. Once, Ro and Mel and even Luke occupied space in this house. I occupied space in this house.

  “J.J.—” Luke says, drawing me out of my thoughts. I startle, not just at the name, but at the way he says it. Like we are the old Luke and the old Jessi. He says it like it’s the summer he loved me again, the best part of it and not the worst.

  I don’t know what he means to say, and I don’t know if he does either.

  Instead, our bodies are drawn toward each other, magnets that should repel but are attracting. He touches my hair, and I back up, running right into a wall. Luke closes the distance between us again, his hand finding my waist.

  In my head, I’m arguing with him. I’m telling him that I don’t belong here, in this house, with him. That I never did. I’m sliding away from his touch. I’m pulling my bag tighter over my shoulder and walking out of his house. In real life I am standing on my tiptoes, wrapping my arms around his neck, drawing him to me.

  His lips are soft and gentle against mine. I kiss him back, unhurried and loving and sad. His lips taste like frosting and lemon, bittersweet, like the end of something.

  We kiss and kiss against the kitchen wall for what feels like hours, and when we can’t possibly kiss anymore, we kiss harder. My tongue claims every spot in his mouth and his hands are starting to roam, starting to burn my skin. When the strap of my bag falls off my shoulder, I let it. In fact, I drop my keys next to it.

  After that, it’s all over.

  He presses me harder against the wall, and I let my feet leave the ground, let them wrap around his waist as he hoists me up. Then we’re walking. He’s kissing me and carrying me up the stairs.

  I haven’t been in his room in a year.

  It is still not neat, still covered in books, and his bed is unmade. He kicks the door shut with his foot and carries me to the bed. I reach for him, impatient, and pull him down with me. I dig my fingers into his hair and he starts undoing the buttons of my blouse.

  Then I’m in my bra and he reaches for the button of my jeans.

  “I fucking love these jeans,” he rasps.

  I surprise him by going for his shorts first, unbuttoning, pulling down. He’s on top of me, kissing me again, and it’s unfair because his shirt is still on.

  He laughs in the back of his throat at my frustration when I try and fail to get his shirt off.

  “Want me to do it?”

  “No,” I say, so he lifts his arms over his head like an obedient child and I yank it up over his head. As soon as it’s off, I paw at his chest, his abs, the happy trail going down from his bellybutton. As I’m doing that, he untangles his arms from me enough to reach into the drawer beside his bed for a small silver packet. Our hands and mouths are everywhere. It’s a far cry from “I won’t touch you” and the last time I was in this bed. I remember thinking that morning that I wanted to do everything with him, and tonight I do.

  After, we lie there tangled up in each other. My head on his chest, his hands in my hair. I fall asleep to his heartbeat. Wake up again and he’s still there, and it’s dark out now, so we go back to the beginning and hold each other in the darkness.

  I squint when he turns on the lamp, then shut my eyes against the light.

  “Sorry.” He plants a kiss on my forehead and gets out of bed. When I hear his footsteps again, I force my lazy eyes open.

  He smiles at me as he slips back under the sheets, and he’s wearing his glasses. I haven’t seen them in so many years, and I don’t know why it makes my eyes start to water. Maybe because it takes me back to a time when everything was simpler, when I thought we—Mel, Luke, Ro, and I—would have a happy ending.

  “Are you okay?” he whispers as he pulls me to him again. I nod, but he must feel the tears on his bare chest.

  In the morning, just enough light streams in through the crack in the curtain. Luke is fast asleep still, the sheets tangled up somewhere around his legs.

  I get dressed quietly, make my way downstairs, and find my keys and bag in the kitchen.

  I think about leaving a note, but I don’t know what else to say.

  We said everyth
ing last night and yesterday morning when he came to see me.

  It’s just after five when I step out the front door.

  I walk out of Mel’s house, knowing that everything will be different the next time I’m here.

  NOW

  I’ve barely entered my house when a door shuts and then my mom is hurrying down the stairs.

  “Jessi?” she says, as if she’s expecting someone else.

  “Hey, Mom,” I say, not meeting her eyes. I don’t know how other kids feel when they’re doing the walk of shame, but I feel like she can see everything scrawled all over my skin.

  “You cannot be serious,” she says, looking me up and down. I check my body for any inadvertent markings, any words, giveaways. As far as I can see, the only signs of where I’ve been are my bed-­tousled hair, my swollen kissing lips, and yesterday’s clothes. “You told me you were going to see Luke last night, you don’t answer any of my calls, and you just never come home?”

  “I’m home now,” I say sheepishly.

  “No, you’re home the next day. At five in the morning. Jessi, this isn’t like you.”

  Guilt spreads like fire over my body. “I’m really sor—” I start to say, but my mother speaks over me, her voice growing louder.

  “Five a.m., Jessi,” she hisses.

  I open my mouth to speak again, but she keeps talking. “You might be eighteen, but as long as you live under our roof, you do not get to stay out at all hours, doing God knows what with whoever you like.”

  “I was with Luke—” I begin.

  “I don’t care who you were with. I don’t know what other people’s rules are, but in this house we have a curfew.”

  I realize there’s no point in trying to defend myself. She won’t let me speak. Her hands are on her hips as she scowls at me, and despite the fact that she has a point, my remorse begins to morph into frustration.

  As she continues her speech, I try to push back the memories of Luke and what we did, how desperately I want to be back in my own bed, reliving each moment. Reliving the warmth and peace I felt in his arms, and the cold and vulnerable feeling that remains in its place. Does Luke feel the same way?