by Eli Lang
“Hey,” I said into the phone, raising it to my ear as I pushed the button to answer. “I’m fine. We’re home.”
“What the fuck, Ava,” he said, but he sounded relieved. “I thought you’d call me back. I waited. I was worried.” I could almost see him shaking his head through the phone.
I felt myself smiling. God, it was good to hear his voice. Aside from that short conversation earlier, I hadn’t talked to him, or Bellamy or Micah or Quinn, since I’d sent Tuck the text message telling him I was bi. And I wasn’t really nervous about it. I wasn’t. But maybe there was a tiny part inside me that, within the relief of finally having that out there, had wanted to hear his voice to make sure everything between us was still the same as it had always been.
“Sorry.” I knew I was probably grinning like an idiot, but I couldn’t help myself. “You know how I am with blood. It wasn’t pretty.”
Tuck laughed, and we talked for another minute, him making sure I really was okay, and me assuring him I was. His tone was light and he kept making me laugh. And then he asked me when I was coming home, and he sounded so happy when I told him it wouldn’t be long. And I was happy too. I wanted to get back to him, in that second, more than I had all week. I wanted to go home and have things be normal, and his voice on the other end of the phone reminded me that they could be.
It was only a short conversation, but when I hung up, I was smiling and shaking my head at the phone. I raised my eyes and found my mom, my dad, and Cara, all standing there staring at me. I realized how I must look. Flushed and happy. And I realized what I’d said. How my end of the conversation must have sounded. How I’d talked about how glad I was to be going home. How I’d said it wouldn’t be long.
The smile slipped off my face, and now my cheeks were burning from embarrassment and not happiness.
“Sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I just . . . I was glad to talk to him.” I felt even worse when I said it. It didn’t make anything better.
I glanced at Cara, still standing beside me. Her eyes were wide, and she looked pale and as if she’d gone inside herself. She caught my eye after a second, and her own cheeks burned. And I knew that she knew. I just knew, somehow, that she’d heard something in my voice when I talked to Tuck that had given away how I felt about him.
My mom cleared her throat, and when I focused on her, she smiled at me, slightly, but enough to tell me it was okay. She reached for my hand, then paused and looked past me, to Cara.
Cara smiled, but then she turned to me and shook her head. “I have to get to work.”
My mom nodded and stepped back. I took a step toward Cara, uncertain and nervous but wanting to say . . . something. To explain Tuck, or to explain why I hadn’t said anything. Cara held up her hand, though, stopping me. She was smiling, but it looked fragile on her face, and I knew she was doing it to try to tell my parents that everything was fine. Doing it to stop me from saying or doing anything, to stop a scene from happening right here in my parents’ kitchen.
“Thank you,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.
She nodded. “Anytime.” She took another step forward, touched her hand, the tips of her fingers, to my shoulder. Then she nodded again, smiled at my parents, and let herself out the door.
I tried to act like it was fine. My father made coffee and plied me with cookies, and when I told him I’d clean up the kitchen, he laughed. He patted my hair back from my forehead like I was eight instead of twenty-eight, and told me to lie down and relax. And I found that I was exhausted, undone by the morning and the days before it, everything that I’d kept such a tight rein on for so long coming loose. Maybe his touch was the final straw, but I let go. I stretched out on the couch and flicked on the television, turned it to a nature show, and when he came back and draped a blanket over me, I didn’t protest. I let him take care of me.
For a while, I was alone, and I figured he was cleaning the kitchen. I didn’t know where my mom had gone, until she came into the room and sat down on the edge of the couch. She’d pulled her hair back, but little tendrils were escaping around her face, and she was flushed. I realized she’d been the one cleaning.
“I think I got most of it.” She smiled wryly at me. “What did you do, wave your arm around? You can make such a mess.”
I laughed, and that felt almost as good as her hug had earlier, like I was lighter, or like whatever was between us didn’t have as much weight anymore.
Then I sobered a little. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t mean for the kitchen, and she knew it.
“I’m the one who’s sorry, Ava.” She hesitated, her hand floating between us, and then she rested it on my ankle, a warm, steady grip through the blanket. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like you had to hide. I didn’t mean to make you feel . . .” She took a deep breath, and for a second, I was horrified that she was going to cry again, but she kept herself under control. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like you needed to move all the way across the country just to be yourself. I never wanted that.”
Then I was afraid I’d be the one to cry. “That’s not why.” My voice sounded horribly close to breaking. I told myself it was because I was hurt and tired, but I wasn’t really sure. “I just didn’t want to disappoint you. I couldn’t . . .” I couldn’t stay here and watch. I knew I could have done everything that I’d done, could have found a band and made music, could have been successful, could have fallen in love, all from here. It wasn’t this place that would have held me back. It wasn’t that one spot was better for this kind of thing than another, because really what it boiled down to was determination, and I’d always had that. No. It was that I would have felt my parents, my mother, watching me, and I had wanted to go somewhere far enough away that I felt like I was alone. Far enough that I didn’t feel the weight of their wants on me, because even when I’d known that what we wanted was different, and that was all right, I’d never been able to reconcile it. Never been able to not feel guilty.
But that was my fault.
“You don’t disappoint me.” Her voice was firm. She squeezed my ankle. “I’m proud of you. I’m so proud. We both are.” She glanced toward the kitchen. We couldn’t see into it from here, but I could hear my father whistling and clattering pans around, getting ready to make dinner. I looked to my mother, and she to me. “But I was afraid,” she said, her voice not much more than a whisper. “It’s so hard. All the things you want. I didn’t want you hurt.”
“I know.” And I did. I hadn’t understood it, before, how fear could make her want to keep me from the things I loved. But I’d seen it in her face when I’d walked in the door earlier. She’d been terrified. She hadn’t wanted me hurt. I knew I’d probably seen that expression on her face before, as a child or a teenager, but never quite like this. Never as an adult, and never with our last argument so fresh in my mind. It made everything look different. I still didn’t like that she’d wanted to keep me safe in that way, swaddle me in things that were easy and boring. But I did get it. Sort of.
She nodded, and I thought she’d say something more about it, but she just passed a hand over her face. When she looked up again, she was calmer, and there was a tiny smile on her face.
“That girl. Cara. Is she . . .?” She let the question trail off.
I felt like my breath was caught in my chest, and for a second, it was me who was afraid. Afraid that she’d . . . I didn’t even know. Question me or tell me I was wrong or that it was only a phase or any of the other cliché things people said. It was stupid, and maybe even irrational, but I couldn’t help waiting for it, bracing for something like that. But the smile was still there, and she looked hopeful, like she was trying to bridge a gap, not to create one.
“I met her on the plane,” I explained, my words slow at first, but she nodded, and I kept going. “We kept bumping into each other. I . . . I like her.”
“She rushed over here and got you to the emergency room,” she said, a hint of dry humor creeping in
to her voice. “I’m inclined to like her too.”
And that was that. As simple as that. Her hinted acceptance and her hand on my ankle, and I felt like laughing out loud with the relief of it. Maybe it wasn’t everything I’d wanted. Maybe it wasn’t close, or perfect. But it was enough, more than enough. More than I’d ever tried to reach for before.
“I think I messed up with her.” It tumbled out of me. I had romance problems and I wanted to tell someone. I wanted to tell my mom. “I know I did. When I was on the phone with Tuck. And before that . . .” I trailed off and glanced back up at her.
A tiny grin flickered over her face. “You sounded so happy when you were on the phone with him. I haven’t heard you that happy since you got here.”
I blinked. “I . . . I miss him.”
My mom took a breath. “Does Cara know how you feel about him?”
I must have been really obvious on the phone. I shook my head. “She does now.”
Her eyebrows drew together. “And him?”
My chest went a little tighter. “He’s in love with someone else.”
“Oh, sweetie.”
I wanted to protest at the endearment, because it made me feel like a toddler. But it also seemed to be able to find its way into the deepest parts of me, like it had sunk right in, and I found myself pulling in breath after breath and trying not to cry.
“You should tell him,” my mom said gently. “It’ll make you feel better. It’ll . . . It’ll clear things up, you know?” I nodded, although I wasn’t sure if I really agreed with her. “And you should tell Cara.”
I shrugged, but then I nodded again, and my mom let it go. She smiled again, soft and kind, and when I drew my legs up, she sat beside me and we watched the strange world of insects unfold in front of us on the TV. We didn’t talk any more, except for her to ask why on earth I wanted to know about the mating lives of ants. And although I was sad and hurt and tired and a little bit heartbroken, I felt light and alive and free too.
I didn’t call Cara. I thought about it, but it was even more fleeting this time. I texted her that evening, to tell her I was okay, and thank her again, and she wrote back just as formally, and that was that. The end. I told myself to be happy with that, to let it go and let her go and be done with it. But I didn’t want to let it. I wanted to do something crazy, like run to her studio and pound on that huge window and tell her I loved her, get her to run outside and into my arms. But those were crazy thoughts, and even if I thought I could love her—and I did; she was sweet, smart, and caring, and if I was going to love anyone, I didn’t see why it couldn’t be her—I was still in love with Tuck. And I was still leaving at the end of the week. It was as set in stone as a nonrefundable airplane ticket could be.
Instead, the day after, when I’d gotten tired of being waited on and had told my parents in no uncertain terms that I was fine, and they’d grudgingly allowed me to go with them to help finish up at my gran’s house, I called Tuck. I’d been thinking about it since my mom had mentioned it. At first I’d dismissed it, because I’d gotten along fine all this time without telling him, hiding it. But then I’d started to wonder if I really had gotten along fine, or if I’d allowed what I felt for him to become a thing that wasn’t beautiful or special, but something that ate me up from the inside out, that weighed on me, that I carried around like a chain. And I realized I didn’t want that between us. What Tuck and I had was special, even if it was never going to be the exact way I wanted it to be, and I didn’t want to poison it.
I was standing in Gran’s room, the last of the books around me, trying to figure out how to make them go as securely as possible into their boxes. Zevi had already taken most of them to the post office—I’d wanted to do it myself, but my dad had put his foot down on that, and Zevi had agreed with him, overruling me. I had a book in my hand—the one my grandmother had written that she’d said she wanted to take with her. There was a note on the front: I found another copy. Take this one. That was it. But I was almost afraid to read the back blurb, because this was the book she’d wanted to keep. It must have meant something special to her, something more, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know what.
Instead of slipping it into the box, I sat down on the bed—she’d gotten a new one, smaller, to fit in her new room—and, without thinking it over again, pulled my phone out of my pocket and hit the number for Tuck.
He answered right away. He didn’t always do that. He knew I’d call back if it was important. But he’d been doing it over the past week. He knew things were shaky for me, even if I hadn’t told him all of it. He was going to be there when I needed him.
“Hello, favorite girl,” he answered, the smile clear in his voice. He sounded like sunshine and ocean breezes and everything I missed about home, even over the phone. It was like it all came across in his words, the ease of them.
“I’m not your favorite girl,” I said, part teasing and part serious. He’d been answering the phone that way for a long time, and he’d never changed it after Lissa. And I’d let it go because hearing it had given me a pure jolt to the heart, a flash of hope and greed that tasted sweet and bitter at the same time.
There was a pause, and then he said, a little more serious, “You’re definitely one of them.”
I nodded, pressing the phone tighter to my ear. “Tuck.” I swallowed and closed my eyes and told myself I had to do this. I had to. This had gone too far for too long, and I couldn’t do it anymore. “I love you.”
The pause was even longer this time. I looked around my grandmother’s room while I waited. There were still some of her things here, things she had decided not to keep, and I was struck again by her lifetime. It was so long. So many years. Did her twenties seem like the distant past now, or were they still fresh in her mind, like they’d happened the day before? When I was her age, would this conversation with Tuck, this week and everything that had happened in it, mean as much to me as they did now? Would it fade into the past and become a watercolor memory? Or would it stick with me, the sights and sounds and feel of it all so present that I could never get rid of it, whether I wanted to or not?
“I love you too,” he said finally, but his voice was so low, and the pause had been so long, I knew he knew what I meant. I knew he was trying not to make this happen, as much as I was trying to make it.
“I mean,” I said, because I had to have this out, perfectly clear, “I’m in love with you.”
There wasn’t any pause at all this time. “I know.”
“Okay.” That was all I needed to hear, really. I just wanted to know that he knew, to have the truth out. That I wasn’t hiding it anymore, from him or from me. And my mom had been right. I knew it right away. I was . . . so light. Scared and nervous and worried that I’d screwed everything up. But goddamn if I didn’t feel better too.
“Ava.” He sounded muffled for a second, and then clearer, like he’d moved into a different part of the house or something. “I love you. But I don’t love you like that.”
“I know that.” I was surprised at how easy it was to say it. It still hurt. It would always hurt a little, I thought, because he would always be there, and I’d always love him, in some way. But I’d been doing this for so long. Holding this inside. Living with this. It was easy to admit how fucked up it was. It was a relief. “And I know you love Lissa. I like her too,” I added, because I thought I should. “She’s good for you. She’s . . . good.”
“Yeah.” He sounded lighter too, and I wondered how long it had been for him. How long he’d known, and not said anything, because I hadn’t been saying anything. How long he’d been pretending, for me, that everything was fine. “Why didn’t you ever . . . ask me?” he said. “Why didn’t you ever make a move on me?”
“Didn’t want to mess the band up.” It had been the line I’d fed to myself, over and over, and it wasn’t exactly false. But it wasn’t all the truth, either. “And I was afraid.” That was the truth. The rest of the truth. “Would you . . . Would th
ere ever have been a time for us, Tuck? When it would have worked?”
I could almost hear him shaking his head over the phone. The silence that wasn’t quite a silence, because it was so full. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah. Me either.” I didn’t. I wished I did. Maybe. Sometimes I thought we’d be so good together, because we were already such excellent friends. I loved Bellamy, and Quinn, and Micah, even, but Tuck was my best friend. The best friend I’d ever had. And all we’d have had to do was make that tiny little shift in our relationship, and it could have been perfect. It should have been easy.
But maybe it wouldn’t have been. Maybe we worked as friends but we’d never work quite right as lovers. And maybe if we’d tried, we’d have screwed everything up. I didn’t want to lose what we had. It wasn’t bold, and it wasn’t daring, but it made sense to me. Especially now, now that he’d found Lissa and it was so clear that they were good together.
He sighed, his breath rushing into my ear through the phone speaker. “Why are you telling me this now?” He didn’t sound put out. Just curious. Like . . . he wanted to know what was going on with me. And I was suddenly so relieved that I never had tried anything more with him, because this, what we had between us now, was rare and special and it was one of the best things that had ever happened to me.
I was still a little embarrassed to tell him about Cara, though. Talk about messing something up. “I met someone.”
“There?”
I nodded. He couldn’t see it, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“You don’t make things easy on yourself, sweetheart, do you?”
I laughed. “Nope.”
“A girl?” he asked, then corrected himself. “A woman?”
“Yeah. Cara. She’s . . .” I took a deep breath. I could still see Cara dashing through my parents’ front door, the panic on her face, my name in her mouth. “You’d like her. Definitely.”
“I figured that was why you texted me the other day. I’m happy for you, Ava. I really am.”