by Cassia Leo
“I’m so sorry I didn’t come sooner,” she says.
“That’s water under the bridge. The important thing is that you came back and that you never, ever do that to me again.”
This gets a small, congested chuckle and a smile out of Claire, but the pain she’s hiding from my mom quickly returns to her dainty features.
“All right, that’s enough,” I say. “Claire has to freshen up so we can get going.”
“Oh, poo. You just got here,” my mom complains as she glares at me across the kitchen. “You can’t leave yet. You two can hang out later. Let me have some time with my girl.”
Claire looks at me and I can’t help but gaze at her for a moment. I love that Claire has never been good at hiding her emotions. It took almost a year after she arrived at our house for her to allow herself to be vulnerable in front of anyone. But once I tore down those walls I fell irrevocably in love with her. She’s so hard on herself, but I’ve never met anyone more loving than Claire.
I know she gave up Abigail for both of us. I have no doubt that she believed she was making the right decision. But I can’t reconcile the girl I fell in love with—the same girl who made me wait more than two years to have sex with her—with this girl who fell in love with a guy she’s known less than two months. Is this guy better than I or did I just leave her heart wide open for him to get inside?
“Stop staring at her, Chris,” my mom says and I’m snapped out of my thoughts.
Claire looks down at the floor. She knows I’m thinking about something we can’t discuss openly in front of my mom.
“Sorry, Mom, but we have to go. I have to get Claire back to the dorm soon so she can study. I’ll bring her by another time. I promise.”
The disappointment on my mom’s face kills me. She nods, looking a bit defeated, then turns to Claire and grabs her hands.
“In case I don’t see you anytime soon—”
“I’ll be back. I—”
“Shh! I don’t want you to promise me you’ll be back soon. I know you’ve got classes and lots of studying and parties and all that college nonsense. I just want you to promise me you’ll come home for Christmas. It just wasn’t any fun without you last year. Right, Chris?”
Fuck. Knowing Claire, she’s going to think I put my mom up to this.
“Mom, Claire probably already has plans for Christmas. Let’s not put any more pressure on her.”
“Oh, come on. You were miserable without Claire here last Christmas.” She turns to Claire in full gossip-mode. “You should have seen him. He was a mess, brooding in the bedroom with his guitar for days.”
“Come on. She doesn’t want to hear that shit.”
Claire wipes the tears from her cheeks as she stares at me. She’s not thinking about how pathetic I am. She’s thinking of how sorry she is for not being here last Christmas. I want to tell her that she has nothing to feel guilty about, but I can’t speak openly about any of that stuff here.
She finally turns away to face my mom. “I’ll be home for Christmas if I have to crawl here.”
I try not to let this statement get my hopes up, but right now I’m just insanely grateful that my mom seems to be more convincing than I am. They embrace again and I give them a moment before I break up the love-fest.
“All right, all right. You guys can cuddle some more later. Claire and I have to get going.”
I place my hand on the small of Claire’s back, something I’ve done a million times, but this time I expect her to push my hand away or shoot me a severe look. She doesn’t do either. She allows me to lead her out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her old room where she can fix her hair and makeup. I open the bedroom door and wait as she stands at the threshold for a moment.
I take a few steps inside and turn around. “We didn’t change anything. It didn’t feel right since it’s still your room.”
She steps inside and gazes around. Her twin bed is still covered in the lilac comforter and white pillows. Her shelves are still stacked with dozens of fantasy novels. I haven’t even upgraded the ancient desktop computer on her desk. Everything is the same.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come here,” she whispers.
“Just brush your hair and we’ll get out of here.”
She takes a few tentative steps toward the white desk and sits down in the rolling desk chair. She slowly pulls open the top drawer on the right and pulls out a purple brush. I can’t help but feel nostalgic as I watch her run the brush through her soft, blonde hair.
I can’t stop myself as I spin her chair around and place my hands on her knees as I kneel before her. “I know that everything seems awkward and fucked up right now, but this is your home. Whether or not we’re together. Don’t let that Christmas shit make things weird. You know my mom is just being pushy.”
“It’s not awkward or fucked up and I think that’s what’s getting to me. I expected it to be weird, but it’s not. It’s just… home.”
She looks me in the eye as she says this so I know she’s telling me the truth. I want to kiss her so fucking bad that my whole body aches for it, but I can’t. Claire is not the cheating type and I don’t want to be the source of any more of her misplaced guilt.
“Hey, I know you’ve seen me play a million times, but I’m doing this jam session with Neil Hardaway at a blues club in Durham a week from Saturday. It’s the final stop on this ‘Home Sweet Home’ tour Xander set up for me. I know you have a boyfriend, but it’s fucking Neil Hardaway. You know this is a dream of mine and I’d love to share it with you.”
The pained expression on her face tells me she’s about to let me down. “I can’t. I’ll be with Adam that Saturday. I’m sorry.”
Just hearing his fucking name come out of her mouth, the same lips I’ve kissed for hours, makes me want to punch something. I take a breath to calm myself because this isn’t like me. Only Claire can get me this worked up.
“Don’t apologize,” I say as I let go of her knees and stand up. “Come on. We gotta get going.”
We make it downstairs into the hallway where I open the door to the attached garage and flip the light switch. The stale smell of gasoline and rubber is stagnant in the late summer warmth. She enters ahead of me and immediately walks toward the Porsche.
“Where’s Mr. Miyagi?” she asks, referring to our old Shiba Inu.
Mr. Miyagi got to go to Japan with me in April before he passed, but he was almost thirteen years old. He lived a long life.
“He’s gone.”
Claire looks like she’s about to cry.
“Don’t cry. Please. You’re gonna make me cry. I’m just starting to get over it.”
She bites her lip, trying to hold it together. “I should have been with him.”
“He died in May. I was with him. He went peacefully. I even took him to the dog park that morning. He just laid there real quiet, but he was smiling.”
She covers her face. “Oh, no,” she whimpers as she shakes her head.
I want to pull her into my arms, but I’m afraid she’ll push me away. I give her a moment to compose herself. Finally, she pulls her hands away from her face and looks at me with pure hurt in her eyes.
“We have to get going.”
She glances around the garage at my car and my mom’s Volvo for a moment before she steps down and makes her way toward my car. “You got a Porsche?” she asks incredulously as she gazes at the shiny, black hood. “Could you be any more flashy?”
“Hey, I don’t spend money on a lot of shit. I don’t even have an apartment in Raleigh. Let me have my cars and my bikes.” I make my way to the driver’s side of my mom’s Volvo. “We’re taking the Volvo. I have to at least pretend to be responsible.”
She tears her gaze away from the Porsche and we both climb into the Volvo. We sit for a moment in silence as I slide the key into the ignition and adjust the radio station.
“Pretend to be responsible?” she says. “But you are responsible, Chris. You don’t have to preten
d to be anything. I’m the one who should be worried about looking irresponsible.”
I open my mouth to refute this when my phone vibrates in my pocket. “Hold that thought.” I slip the phone out of my pocket and see Tasha’s name. “Hello?”
“Chris, I’ve got bad news.”
I let out a deep sigh because I already know what she’s going to say.
“They backed out?”
“Yeah, but this is normal. This is the way these things go. They’re good people, as far as I can tell, but she got cold feet. I guess she’s a big fan of your music and she got a little nervous about meeting you. Then her husband got freaked out about the whole rock star thing.”
“Fuck!”
“Hey, it’s just a minor setback. We’ll give them a few days to cool off then I’ll call and try to set up another meeting. Don’t get discouraged.”
“What happened?” Claire whispers.
“Thanks, Tasha.”
As soon as I say her name, Claire’s face falls. I tuck the phone into my pocket and we sit in silence for a moment. I don’t know how much more heartache Claire and I can take. All I know is that this was not the homecoming I had planned for today.
“Hey, did I show you this tattoo,” I say as I pull up the sleeve on my right arm and show her the shattered heart tattoo I got on New Year’s Day.
It’s just a two-inch red heart broken into a bunch of pieces, but some of the shards are colored black and spell out the one word I think of when I think of Claire: home. She gazes at my arm for a moment before she looks up at me.
“This is really hard for me, too,” she says. She doesn’t have to say anything more.
Chapter Seven
Adam
I PULL INTO THE PARKING lot at Spencer Hall and, as usual, there’s no parking on a Friday night. I pull back out and find a parking space in the lot on Franklin. I’m walking past the Chapel of the Cross, just a few hundred feet from the dorm, when my phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s my dad.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your mom needs you to come into the office tomorrow to help her with the Blackwell close-out. She’s having a problem reconciling the change order log. You need to be there by two.”
“I can’t. I’m not coming home until Sunday. I’ll go in early on Monday to look at it.”
“No, you’ll be there tomorrow. The auditor is coming on Monday morning and this shit needs to be done by then. Your mom has a church thing on Sunday, so it has to be tomorrow.”
My dad knows I can’t refuse now. Religion is a topic we no longer discuss ever since I stopped going to church when I was seventeen—after Myles’ death. I don’t know if I believe in God anymore. The universe seems to be too random and unforgiving a place to be part of any grand design. But a part of me wants to believe. I want to believe that there was a reason Myles fell to his death. I want to believe there’s a reason I fell in love with Claire. I want to believe there’s a reason for me to keep driving one hundred miles every weekend for a girl who doesn’t believe she’s worth it.
“I’ll be there at five. That’s the earliest I can make it.”
I hang up before my father can respond. I always thought it was strange how people in movies never seem to say goodbye to each other before they hang up the phone. Now I do it all the time with my dad. There’s an abruptness to our conversations, a sense of urgency that drives the words out of us until the second we hang up. All our phone conversations sound clipped and often, on my part, flippant. I can’t help it. He makes me feel like a fucking teenager.
If he didn’t hold such a big secret over me, I’d have quit years ago. I’m going to have to come clean to Claire tonight. This may be our last weekend together before my dad sends me to Hawaii to close the deal on the Barking Sands Training Center construction project.
I reach the front entrance at Spencer Hall and get lucky when a scrawny guy in a UNC hoodie comes out the door. I resist the urge to punch him for reminding me of Chris Knight. Being on this campus always puts me on edge. I always expect someone to magically know I just graduated from Duke—or “Puke” as they like to call it.
“Thanks,” I mutter as he holds the door for me.
I make my way up to the third floor to room 330B, ignoring the four girls who smile at me on the way up. But I can’t help but smile as I approach the door. Twelve days is too fucking long to go without Claire.
I knock on the door and hear a short scream followed by giggles coming from the inside of the dorm. I shake my head as I wait for someone to answer. The door opens and Senia is standing there, all five feet ten inches of her, with her perfectly penciled eyebrow cocked.
She nods toward the interior of the room. “Hurry up before she finishes getting dressed.”
I laugh as I step inside and see Claire hastily pulling a gray T-shirt over her pink bra. Her back is to me, but just the sight of her calms me.
Senia claps me on the arm. “I’ll leave you two to your plans. I’m going downstairs to hang with Isabel for a while.”
Isabel is the girl Claire switched dorms with so she could share a dorm with Senia this semester. I’ve never met her, but Claire claims she’s a huge slut with a heart of gold.
The door closes as Senia leaves and Claire finally turns around. She smiles hugely as she runs to me. She jumps and I catch her around the waist as she crushes her lips to mine. I slide my tongue into her mouth to taste her and she whimpers. I kiss her slowly, savoring the sensation of her warm lips on mine.
“I love you,” I whisper as I move down to kiss the smooth skin on her jaw. “I’ve missed you so fucking much.”
Her skin tastes clean as I kiss her neck, but I’m getting a hint of something else, something sweet.
“Why do you taste like that?” I whisper in her ear before I take her earlobe between my teeth.
She lets out a soft sigh before she answers. “Senia bought me some cotton candy flavored body powder.”
I set her down on the floor and look her in the eye. “Did you put it all over your body?” She slaps my arm and I laugh. “What? I just want to know if I’m gonna have to go on a low-carb diet when I leave here.”
She rolls her eyes as she strolls to the desk to grab her phone. “You’re always on a low-carb diet anyway.”
“It’s not a low-carb diet, it’s a training diet. And I’d go off my diet to feast on you any day.”
She tucks her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and glances around the room. “Do you want anything from the vending machine? I’m gonna go grab a bottle of water.”
“Yeah, get me a Gatorade or Powerade. Whatever they have.”
She shakes her head at me before she leaves. I would offer to go with her, but I had actually planned to ask her to get me something from the vending machine so I can be alone in her room for a moment. I quickly pull her gift out of my back pocket and stare at the slim, midnight-blue box for a moment before I place it on top of the stack of textbooks on the desk. I sit in the desk chair and pull my phone out to text Yuri while I wait for Claire.
Me: Hey. I have to be back in Wilmington tomorrow afternoon. Can we meet up tomorrow around noon?
Yuri always texts back right away. He’s one of my oldest surfing buddies who I’ve known since we went to high school together in Carolina Beach. He offered to meet me in Raleigh on Sunday to give me the trophy I left in the hotel room, but now I’ll have to text him to let him know we have to meet up a day earlier.
Yuri: That’s cool. I’m bringing my girl cuz she’s not leaving till Sunday morning. A long road trip will give her a reason to give me a road job.
Me: Cool. Tell Lena to save me some of that juice for later.
Yuri: Dude, I’ve got gallons of it on reserve for you.
I tuck the phone back into my pocket as Claire walks in with three bottles of Gatorade and one bottle of water. I shoot up from the chair to help her. She closes the door and locks it as I set the bottles on top of the desk next to the stack of textbooks. She appro
aches the desk and completely overlooks the box as she grabs her bottle of water. She unscrews the top and guzzles half the bottle in one long swig.
“Why did you only get one bottle of water and three bottles of Gatorade?”
“Because I can go back down and get water any time, but you have to stay in here all weekend. I heard some girls talking about you in the lounge, plotting to get their hands on you.”
“Really? So are you saying you don’t trust me to go to the vending machine by myself or you don’t trust those girls?”
I grin as I sit down in the desk chair again and pull her onto my lap. I swing her legs over mine and she wraps her arms around my neck.
“I wouldn’t trust those girls around you for a single second.”
She leans in to kiss me and I turn my face.
“Don’t you want to put down that bottle of water?”
She reaches over to put the bottle of water on the desk and she finally sees the box. Narrowing her eyes, she looks back and forth between the box and me.
“What is that?”
“A small token of my affection. It’s not a big deal. Just open it.”
She looks nervous. “You’re scaring me. What is it?”
“Open it and you’ll find out.”
She grabs the box and my heart pounds as she slowly lifts the lid.
Chapter Eight
Claire
THE SILVER LOCKET GLEAMS IN the lamplight and for a moment I’m stunned into silence as I trace my finger over the letter “A” engraved in the surface.
“The ‘A’ is for Abigail, not Adam,” he clarifies, and his voice wavers with nerves.
“I know,” I whisper as I pull the necklace out of the box.
I open the heart-shaped locket and find a picture of me on the left. The right side is empty.