by Eli Lang
And I did get it. “Yeah.” Bellamy had told me once that we had a responsibility. That when we put our music out there, or got up on stage, we were saying things in a hugely public space, and it was our responsibility to make those things count. I knew he thought about that more, since he was our singer, and he wrote the lyrics, the literal words of what we were shouting out to people. But any music could move someone, even if it was only a drumbeat. It could say something. I thought about that, at least in the back of my mind, whenever I wrote my pieces. What I wanted to say to someone who listened to us. I wanted to speak to people, as pretentious as that sounded. I wanted to give people something.
But I wouldn’t have said that out loud. Not to Cara. Maybe not even to Tuck. I thought it was brave of her. A simple thing, but a brave one.
“I think that sounds awesome.” I felt myself grinning. I liked her. I liked the way she thought. I liked the way she looked at me a little sideways, like she was doing right now, that made me think she was shy and trying to hide it. I liked the way she was so open. It wouldn’t be hard to fall for her.
I wasn’t sure what that thought did to me. Made me giddy with excitement and possibilities, made me feel lucky, made me terrified because this wasn’t supposed to be like that. This was supposed to be flirting and casualness and maybe if I was lucky a bit more, but nothing further than that. Fun for a few days and then I was leaving, because my life wasn’t here, would never be here again. And the reason my life was somewhere else was partially because I wanted to go back to Tuck, who I was in love with, even though he wasn’t in love with me.
Cara leaned against the building behind us and gazed up at me. “How long are you here for?” she asked, like she’d been staring right into my thoughts.
I shrugged, but the question tightened all the ideas that were forming knots inside me. “I don’t know. However long it takes us to clean out my grandmother’s house, get everything sorted. Probably two weeks.” That’s what I’d planned, although I’d also tentatively told my parents and Zevi that I could stay longer if I needed to. Coming here, I’d been crossing my fingers until they’d bruised, hoping that wasn’t the case. Now, I wasn’t quite as sure.
“And then you go back to making music?”
I nodded. “Yeah. We’ll start writing again when I get home. Tuck and Bellamy already are.” I wondered if Tuck had sent me the songs he’d told me about, wondered if I’d be able to lose myself in them for a little while tonight. It’d be nice if he had. I could use that.
She nodded too, slower, thoughtful. She was gazing down at our shoes, my black sneakers and her dark-blue flats, my toes almost touching hers. She looked back up at me when she spoke, though.
“Do you want . . . I had a good time tonight. And the other night. Would you want to get together again?”
I knew I should say no, because this had gone from being something that was fun to something I had serious interest in, and I knew the way my heart worked. I’d hurt myself if I kept this up, and maybe Cara would get caught up in that hurt, and I didn’t want that to happen. But I couldn’t make myself say anything but yes.
“I have to be at my grandmother’s tomorrow.” I held out my hand on impulse, and she wrapped her fingers around mine, the gesture automatic and comforting. “But I can call you when I’m done? If you’re free?” Normally, I’d have told her I’d call her in a couple of days, to make it seem like I wasn’t overly eager. But it wasn’t like I had time to burn, now. If I wanted to see her before I left, I had to hop on it.
“Okay. Good.” She stepped toward me, then back, kind of like she was swaying and kind of like she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, which direction she wanted to go in. Then she stepped in again, even closer than before, right up against me, so I could feel the fuzz of her sweatshirt and the warmth of her skin, and I could smell her shampoo and the lingering scent of basil from the pizza we’d eaten. Then her hand was on my jaw, her fingers resting soft against my neck, and she pressed her mouth to mine. The kiss was soft too, something gentle and sweet. I opened my mouth to it, not necessarily to deepen it, but because I was surprised and happy. I leaned in too, chasing after her, trying to get that tiny bit closer, and I felt her sigh like I’d done exactly what she’d hoped for.
I kissed her more deeply, and she went with me, so I could feel her body lined up all along mine. My hands hovered over her hips, and then I settled them down and tugged gently. I thought kissing would never get old. That surprising warmth, the weird intimacy of being so close to someone. Breathing together. The taste of her on my lips. And when it was Cara, it seemed . . . so much better, even though I was sure I’d probably had more expert kisses. Those kisses didn’t seem to matter as much right now.
It wasn’t what I’d imagined, probably because when I had imagined it, I’d been remembering all those recent kisses with strangers, how hurried and rough they were. Wonderful and exciting and sexy as fuck in their own ways, and not something I’d want to deny liking, because I did. But kissing Cara wasn’t hurried at all. It was slow and hot, and I liked the way I could feel her breath on me, could feel her fingers curling into my shoulder, could hear the tiny sounds she was making. And I wasn’t any less desperate than during those hurried kisses, either. Instead, I actually felt more desperate, felt like I couldn’t quite get enough, like I wanted to kiss her more and more, until we were both breathless and everything made sense and we were pressed as close together as we could get.
I pulled back at that thought, because it felt like too much, too heavy and too fast, even though as soon as I did, I wanted to kiss her again. We were still standing close together, and I looked at her, looked the tiniest bit up, since she was slightly taller than me, and caught her smiling at me, happy and maybe a little confused and uncertain too. I was definitely confused. That was one of the best kisses I could remember having—not because it was technically perfect, but because I just liked kissing Cara so much, because she was Cara. But the fact that it was so good scared me.
I took a step back, so I could feel cool air between us, and she wasn’t taking over all of my senses. She seemed almost disappointed. I didn’t want that. Not after that kiss. I reached out and ran my thumb over her cheekbone, and watched the color rise up where I touched her skin.
“I should go,” I said.
She nodded. She seemed a little dazed. I wanted to pull her back to me, hold her against me, kiss her some more. Maybe ask her if she wanted to come home with me, because my mind was all swimmy with how much color she’d bring to the plain white walls of my parents’ house, the sterile bedroom I was staying in.
The thought of it was too good, something I wanted too much, and I backed up again, and gave a half wave. I couldn’t ask her. It was too sudden, no matter how much I wanted it, or how much I thought she might want it too. “I’ll call.” I tried to make myself sound sincere, because I was, but I had to get out of here. My mind couldn’t keep up. I needed to think.
Cara nodded, and I turned and walked back to my car.
I went to bed earlier that night, and the next day I actually saw daylight before noon. My mom wasn’t in the kitchen when I came downstairs, and it took me a minute to realize that the silence in the house was because there wasn’t anyone home. I glanced around after I got my coffee—I had my priorities straight—and found a note from my dad on the kitchen table. They’d already gone to Gran’s to start helping Zevi.
I sat at the table and sipped my coffee and stared at the note. It was almost the most my parents and I had talked since I’d gotten there. I’d missed dinner with them yesterday, hadn’t even remembered to call and tell them where I’d be, and they hadn’t called either. I wasn’t sad about it, exactly. It wasn’t that I wanted to have dinner with them, particularly, although I didn’t not want to, either. I just figured there should be something more there. I thought I should miss them more, when we weren’t together, and I wondered if there was something broken inside me because I didn’t.
&nbs
p; They were still at Gran’s house by the time I got there. Mom was in the kitchen, and Dad had started on the upstairs with Zevi. My mom was put out because she’d wanted to tackle my grandmother’s room, and Gran had told her not to.
“She said you’re handling it,” my mom said, turning away from the kitchen utensils she was sorting. She had a spatula in one hand and a muffin tin in the other, but the image wasn’t even remotely amusing. Her expression was too stiff for that.
I still wanted to laugh. Just to ease the tension I could feel building. Just to see if she’d laugh with me.
“I am.” I tried to sound sure about it. Gran and I hadn’t talked about anything but the books, but I figured she’d be taking most of the other stuff in her bedroom with her anyway. It couldn’t be that hard, if I did get left doing it.
Mom set the muffin tin down, carefully, so it didn’t clatter against the counter. “Did you get the bagel? I left you a bagel for breakfast.” She said it quickly, and with a sharp bite to it that was close to exasperation, as if she was sure that I’d have ignored the bagel simply to rebel against her in one more way.
I nodded. It had been in the note. And there had been blueberry preserves to go on it. I wasn’t going to pass up something like that.
“Oh. Good.” She actually looked surprised. “And coffee? Was there enough in the pot?”
I nodded again. “It was fine. Thank you.”
She stared down at the muffin tray, then pushed it gently to the side with the spatula she was still holding. “Your dad and I were thinking maybe we could have dinner tonight?” She said it like a question, and it dawned on me that she was nervous. That maybe she actually imagined I would say no. I was surprised by the question, and then I wasn’t. Maybe they had been thinking about the same thing I had, at the breakfast table this morning.
“Yeah, Mom. That’d be nice.” I’d told Cara I’d call, and I wanted to. Wanted to tell my mom I already had plans. But I didn’t, really—I’d told Cara I didn’t know when I’d be done. And I didn’t want to be the type of person who picked a possible thing over their own parents.
My mom and I ended our weird little conversation, and I went and found my grandmother in her room. She was sitting in the hallway that connected her bedroom and the office, actually, books spread out all around her feet. She was still pulling them off the shelves, and she barely glanced up when I knocked on the doorjamb.
She pointed at a stack close to me. “I set those aside for you. You can take others, of course. But I thought you might like those.”
I steeled myself and picked up the first book. When you were a musician, everyone wanted to give you books about that. It was a nice idea. Something you were obviously interested in. I should have loved reading books where the main characters were rock stars or singers or whatever. And some I did. But mostly I found myself nitpicking them until I’d torn all the enjoyment out of them. I stayed away from them now, if I could, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to tell Gran that.
I didn’t have to. The book in my hand wasn’t about musicians at all. It was sci-fi—something I figured Gran would have me put in her space opera pile if I didn’t take it with me. It had a crazy cover, too many colors and faces of characters that appeared half-alien and half-human. But when I flipped it over and read the blurb, I realized it was a lot like some of the books I’d boxed up for myself yesterday. Sweeping and dramatic but still full of space stuff, traveling to different planets, humanity living on the edge of civilization.
I picked up the next book. An obscure fantasy, not something epic. Smaller scale than that. Fairies on the cover, but not the kind with wings and flowers. The kind with sharp teeth and proud expressions.
Gran had been paying attention.
“Did you start any of those books you brought home?” She was still focused on the books in her hands, slowly placing them on one pile or another.
“I did. I didn’t get too far yet. They’re . . .” I didn’t know how to explain it. The one I’d started wasn’t like anything I’d ever read before—not because of the genre, but because it was so strange. Strange and dreamy and ethereal and dark, all at the same time, and I was only a few chapters into it, but I thought I loved it. “They’re good.”
Gran nodded, as if that was all the explanation she needed. “I think you can start boxing up the sci-fi we went through yesterday, to go.”
That was a dismissal, but it was fine with me. I walked back into her bedroom, set my own messenger bag on her bed, and then sat on the floor, pulled an empty box over, and started putting books in.
I got totally absorbed in it, the same as I had yesterday. What should have maybe taken a couple of hours took me all day, because after I was done with packing up what we’d gone through the day before, I started on new books that had been pulled off the shelves. And like the day before, I got caught up in reading pieces, in wondering if I wanted to read the books myself, asking my grandmother about them and jotting down notes. I felt like I’d stumbled on a treasure I hadn’t known existed. The books had always been there, and I’d been fascinated by them, but mostly in an abstract way. I’d never really considered that they were there to be read, that I could be the one reading them. Maybe I’d been too young before. But now that they were in front of me and I had my hands on them, and I was old enough, I couldn’t get enough of them.
And the more I talked to my grandmother about them, the more I thought about what she’d first said, the day before, when she told me the books were her life. I hadn’t quite believed her then, but I was starting to. These books were pieces of her. The way she talked about them was the way someone talked about something they loved desperately. The stories she told about the books weren’t only about plot, but about the way the books made her feel, the ways they had changed her, where she’d been in her life when she’d first read them, and what they reminded her of. I didn’t want to lose any of it—not the books, and not the things she had to say about them.
At the end of the day, I looked up to where Gran had moved, over by her bureau. She hadn’t wanted to stop going through the books, but my mom had come in and reminded her that she probably wanted to start packing clothes if she wanted to have anything to wear when she got to the assisted-living place.
“I’m going to take them with me,” I announced.
Gran flicked a glance over her shoulder, and then back down, like she wasn’t interested. “What?”
“The books. If that’s okay with you.” I stared at the box I’d packed and carefully marked as sci-fi, with all the subcategories my grandmother thought were important written underneath. There was another sci-fi box next to it, and another. “I want to keep sorting them, and keep having you tell me about them. And then . . . I want to ship them home. I want to take them.”
She turned all the way around in her chair then. “Are you sure?” She definitely wasn’t uninterested now. She sounded cautious, though. Like she thought I was a little kid who had asked for two slices of cake instead of one. “That’s a lot of books. They take up a lot of space.”
“I’m not promising I’ll keep them all,” I said, because honesty was a good thing, most of the time. And there were an awful lot of books. I glanced around at them again and wondered if they’d actually all fit in my little house. “If I don’t like them, they’ll get donated. But . . .” Another glance at the boxes. No. I couldn’t leave them here. I just couldn’t. “There’s enough room at home.” I was already doing mental calculations about how many books could fit in the living room and the spare bedroom. “I think I can manage.”
She blinked, and I realized I was actually getting some emotion out of her, something other than exasperation and that straightforward, one direction, no-stopping way she looked at everything. “I’ve never seen your house,” she said.
It wasn’t quite what I’d expected. “I can show you?” I made to reach for my phone, because reaching for pictures was an automatic response. But I stopped myself, because I knew I did
n’t have any pictures of my house. Who took random pictures of their house and saved them on their phone for no reason?
She shook her head. “If you want.” She brushed her hand over her forehead, pressing her bangs back. “I’m happy enough to know you have a place you like, Ava. Doubly so if you can fit my books.”
That surprised me more than anything. I hadn’t figured my happiness really entered into her mind, let alone affected her own happiness.
“I do like it.” I loved it, honestly. Not necessarily because it was the best house ever, although I thought it was, even if the counter in the kitchen stuck out a little too far, and there was that spot in the floorboards in the living room that was a little uneven, and the floor in the garage was always mysteriously damp. I loved it because it was a place that was mine, a place to be myself, to be with my friends, that I had bought for myself, with money I made doing something I loved. For me, that was pretty fucking special.
She nodded, and that seemed to be the end of that. I worked for a little while longer, and then got ready to leave, to meet my parents at the restaurant my mom wanted to go to. I asked Gran if she wanted to go, and Zevi too. I was hoping for the support—for what, I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think Gran was really into offering tons of support anyway. But Gran told me, again, that she’d had enough of people for one day. Zevi took me up on it, however. He seemed to realize what he’d gotten into when I called to tell my parents he was coming. He tried to duck out, and I wondered if I’d screwed up, inviting him to this thing with them. But my mom said for him to come, and she seemed like she really did want him there. Maybe I wasn’t the only one hoping for a buffer.