Love and Other Words

by Christina Lauren

  I pulled a face at this and he laughed uncomfortably, shrugging. “Jill is Christian’s cousin. She was visiting last December and we made out once. I haven’t talked to her since.”

  I dismissed Jill with a wave of my hand. “So you don’t like Emma, then?”

  “Not the way you mean.”

  I looked away, taking a minute to calm down. I realized it would have been dramatic, but I wanted to storm out and make him follow me and grovel for, like, an entire day.

  “I fooled around with Emma because she’s here,” he said quietly. “You’re in Berkeley and we’re not together and I’m in this tiny Podunk town. Who else am I supposed to kiss?”

  Something shifted in that exact moment, something that would never shift back.

  Who else am I supposed to kiss?

  I looked at his big hands and his Adam’s apple. I let my eyes linger on the muscular arms that used to be so thin and stringy, on legs that stretched, defined, beneath his torn jeans. I looked at the button-fly on the front of said jeans. I blinked away, up at the cabinets. Look anywhere but at those buttons. I wanted to touch those buttons, press my hand to them, and for the first time I realized I didn’t want anyone else touching them.

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled.

  “Then come over here,” he said in that same quiet voice. “You kiss me.”

  My eyes flew to his. “What?”

  “Kiss me.”

  I thought he was calling my bluff, but I was worked up from the Emma situation and the way he looked, leaning against the counter, watching me. I was warm from the way his hands seemed so big now, and his jaw so angular… and the buttons on his jeans.

  I walked around the center island and stood right in front of him. “Okay.”

  He stared down at me, a smile playing on his lips, but it straightened when he realized I was serious.

  I pressed my hands to his chest and moved closer. I was so close that I could hear every quickly accelerating inhale and exhale, could see his jaw twitch.

  Fascinated, he moved a hand to my lips, pressing two fingers there and staring. Without thinking, I opened my mouth and let his index finger slip inside and against my teeth. When he grunted quietly, I ran my tongue over his fingertip. He tasted like jelly.

  Elliot pulled it back sharply. He looked like he was going to devour me: eyes wild and searching, lips parted, pulse a hammering presence in his neck. And because I wanted to kiss him, I did. I stood on my toes, slid my hands into his hair, and pressed my mouth to his.

  It was different than I would have guessed. Different than – I could admit to myself – I had imagined it would be. It was both softer and firmer, and definitely bolder. A short kiss, another, and then he tilted his head, covering my mouth with his. His tongue traced my bottom lip and it felt like instinct to let him in, to taste me.

  I think that was probably his undoing. It was certainly mine. After that the moment dissolved for me into only sensation; everything else fell away. All the forbidden images of him, flesh and fantasy, secrets I kept even from myself, tore through my mind and I knew, somehow, that he was thinking the same thing: how good it felt to be this close… and everything else that touching like this could lead to.

  One of his hands moved up my back and into my hair, and it was the weight of that touch, I think, that kept me from floating off the floor. But when his other hand slid up my side to my ribs and higher, I stepped back.

  “Sorry,” he said immediately, instinctively. “Shit, Mace. That was too fast, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s just…” I hesitated, my mouth suddenly crammed with words that I didn’t want to be thinking, let alone say out loud. “Doing that might not mean anything to Emma,” I said, touching my lips where they tingled. “But it means everything to me.”

  now

  saturday, october 14

  S

  ean drops his keys in the bowl near the door and kicks off his shoes, groaning happily.

  “Hungry, Applejack?” he asks Phoebe, and the two of them disappear into the kitchen.

  I put their shoes side by side on the little shelf near the door and hang our jackets up on the hooks. Their voices echo back to the hallway; Phoebe is doggedly working on her dad to get her a pet, any pet – frog, hamster, bird, fish.

  I am honestly so unsure what to feel. Sean and I had such a whirlwind start, and we tumbled easily into a domestic routine, but that routine really only involves me sharing his bed and our schedules rotating around each other like well-oiled gears.

  I moved whatever I needed over from the Berkeley house, but it’s still mostly full, and entirely uninhabited, while I’m shacked up here. Sean tells me he loves having me in his bed. Phoebe always seems happy to see me. But I realize, watching him today, that I don’t actually know him that well. He and Phoebe have their own thing going. But if I want to be a part of it, I need to make myself part of it.

  “Want me to cook dinner?” I ask, coming in after them, and they both look up from where they’re digging into the fridge, staring at me blankly. “Pasta,” I say, feigning insult. “I think I can handle pasta.”

  “Are you sure?” Phoebe remains unconvinced.

  “I’m sure, you knucklehead,” I say, smooching her cheek.

  She squeals, running from the room, and Sean moves to the pantry, grabbing a box of pasta and some jarred sauce for me. “Need help?”

  “You can keep me company.” I nod to the breakfast bar, silently urging him to take a chair and talk to me. To help me assuage this feeling gnawing at my chest that he and I are never going to make it. We’ve never really had downtime together on weekends, and I have a clawing suspicion that this is why we’re essentially strangers outside of bed.

  He sits, reading through emails on his phone while I get water boiling.

  I want to marry this man; I want him to want to marry me.

  I like being around him.

  I like his ass in those jeans.

  “Did you have fun today?” I ask, keeping my voice light.

  “Sure.”

  Scroll, scroll.

  The jar of sauce opens with a satisfying pop, and marinara slops into the saucepan I’ve put on the stove. Sean looks up at the sound, mildly repulsed.

  “Did you like meeting everyone?” I ask. “They really liked you.”

  He blinks away from the stove and meets my eyes, smiling as if he knows I’m full of shit. “Sure, babe, they were great.”

  His tone is so offhand, so uninterested, I want to crack him in the forehead with the empty jar. I want to beg him to meet me halfway. Instead, I rinse it out briefly and drop it into the recycling bin. Irritation with him prickles at my skin like an itch. “Try not to sound so enthusiastic.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks, just the slightest bit sharp in defense. “It was fine, Mace, but they’re your friends, not mine.”

  “Well, eventually they might become your friends, too,” I tell him. “Isn’t that what couples do? Share things? Blend their lives?”

  I realize, in this moment, that we’ve never argued. I don’t even know how it looks to disagree. We overlap for a total of maybe one waking hour a day. How disastrous would it be to calculate the total number of hours we’ve spent together? Do we even care enough to argue?

  My phone buzzes on the counter, and I pick it up, reading the text there from Sabrina.

  I realize I shouldn’t be answering right now, but if I don’t take this tiny breather, I’m liable to say something to Sean I might regret. I inhale deeply and type out a reply.

  She answers with a string of heart-eyed emojis and I realize her apology opener was really just a ruse to soften me up to more of the same conversation. Her timing is, as ever, impeccable. Putting my phone facedown on the counter, I look back at Sean, determined to salvage this, make plans, do something.

  “How does your week look?” I ask.

  “Pretty light. Might take Phoebs to the Exploratorium. Was thinking about camping a couple nights, maybe.�
�� He shrugs, lifting his chin to the stove. “Water’s boiling.”

  “Don’t backseat-drive here, sir,” I say, trying to joke. “I got this.”

  “Do you want me to make a salad or something?” He turns his attention to the fridge, indicating there’s stuff to be found there.

  “Would it ease your mind to make it?”

  “Either way,” he says, looking down to his phone. “I don’t just want noodles and plain sauce for dinner, that’s all.”

  I stare at him for a few silent beats. I mean, a thank you would do wonders right now. “Of course not.”

  With that, I turn to get the lettuce and veggies out of the fridge.

  In bed later, Sean snuggles closer, humming into my neck. “Mmm, babe, you smell good.”

  I stare at the ceiling, trying to figure out what I want to say. I organized a picnic on my day off, giving him a chance to get to know my friends, and he barely talked to any of them about their lives, their jobs, their interests. We came home, and I offered to cook – he ate it wordlessly, huddled at the other end of the table with Phoebe, helping her draw a unicorn.

  Phoebe showed it to me, proudly, after dinner, but other than that, it was as if I wasn’t even there.

  Has it always been this way, and I didn’t notice because I was so happy to be included in their twosome, and I was so busy there was nothing else pressing on my mind? Was it such a relief to have something sorted, to not feel anything – not guilt or love or fear or uncertainty – that I just let this routine become my future?

  Or has something changed since Elliot came back into the picture, and no matter how much Sean denies it, it’s created a wrinkle in our easy, bland little life?

  Sean kisses his way across my collarbone and then up my neck. He’s hard, pushing off his boxers, ready to go, and we’ve said maybe three words to each other in the last two hours.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say.

  He nods but doesn’t stop his progression up my chin, to my mouth. “Anything,” he says, speaking into a kiss.

  “Are you excited to get married again?”

  He reaches between us, coaxing my legs apart as if he’s planning to answer this question after he starts having sex with me. But I shift away and he sighs, leaning into my neck. “Sure, babe.”

  I balk a little at this. “‘Sure, babe’?”

  With a groan, Sean rolls to my side. “Isn’t it what you want? I mean,” he says, “I’ve been married. I know what’s great about it, and what’s not so great about it. But if you want it —”

  I stop him, holding up a hand. “Do you remember how it happened?”

  He thinks for a beat. “You mean, the night we talked about it?”

  I nod, although “the night we talked about it” isn’t the most apt description. After a fun night out at the movies with Phoebe, we’d tucked her in bed, then Sean took me to his room, made a satisfied woman out of me, and then mumbled, “Phoebe thinks we should get married,” before he fell asleep between my boobs.

  He remembered the next morning, and asked if I’d heard him.

  Confused at first, I’d finally said, “I heard you.”

  “For Phoebe,” he’d said. “If we’re doing this, I want to do it full-on.”

  We didn’t have time to talk about it then, because I had to leave for the hospital, but the words seemed to loop in my head like a song all day. If we’re doing this, I want to do it full-on.

  Looking back, all I can really remember is the overwhelming relief I felt at the prospect of having that bit of my life sorted with such convenience. There was nothing messy or turbulent about it. There were no manic highs with Sean, but there were no angst-ridden lows, either. Sean was easy, and he and Phoebe were a family I could just… join. But in hindsight and in the stark contrast to the intensity of emotions I feel around Elliot, it almost seems insane that I came home later that day and gave Sean an enthusiastic yes.

  We certainly haven’t done a lot more planning since then. We still haven’t picked out a ring, probably because we both realized that Phoebe doesn’t seem to be that concerned after all about the woman in her house, and whether that woman is going to be her new mommy.

  The only person who consistently asks where we are with the plan is Sabrina, and she is the one person who has said outright that she thinks this whole thing is a farce.

  Sean runs a hand over my hip. “Babe, I think you need to figure out what you want.”

  I meet his eyes. “What I want?”

  “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “Me, Elliot, neither of us.”

  And who does this? Who is so unaffected by the potential loss of his fiancée that he can suggest I give this some good thought while casually stroking my hip, suggesting the relationship may end but the sex can still happen?

  “Does it matter to you that things are obviously so weird between us?”

  Sean moves his hand away, closing his eyes with another long sigh. “Of course it matters to me. But I’ve been through these ups and downs, and I just can’t let them rule me. I can’t control what you’re feeling.”

  And I get that what he’s saying is the ideal reaction to the situation we’re in – it’s the well-adjusted, textbook version of this difficult conversation – but is that really how the human heart works? You tell it to chill, and it chills?

  I stare at him now, with his arm across his eyes, and I’m trying to find that flicker of something bigger, of an emotion that consumes me. I do what I used to do with Elliot sometimes: I imagine Sean standing up, walking out the door, and never coming back. With Elliot, my stomach would react as if I’d been punched.

  With Sean, I feel vague relief.

  I think back to Elliot’s face when I told him I was engaged. I think about his face now: the longing there, the tiny sting of pain I see in his eyes when we turn to head our separate directions. Eleven years later, and he still aches for what we had.

  I’m terrified of what I’m feeling; I feel like I’ve just woken up. I thought I didn’t want intensity, but in fact, I’m desperate for it.

  I look over at Sean and it feels like I’m in bed with a one-night stand.

  Pushing up, I climb out.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “Couch.”

  He follows me out. “Are you mad?”

  God, this is the weirdest situation in the history of weird situations, and Sean is so… calm. How did I end up here?

  “I just think you’re right,” I say. “Maybe I need to figure out what I want.”

  then

  saturday, september 10

  twelve years ago

  E

  lliot was stretched out on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He’d been that way for a while now, his worn copy of Gulliver’s Travels abandoned on the pillow next to him. He seemed so intent on what he was thinking he didn’t even notice the way my eyes moved over his body whenever I turned a page.

  I was beginning to wonder if he would ever stop growing. Almost seventeen, he had shorts on today and his long legs seemed to go on forever. They were hairier than I remembered. Not too hairy, just a light dusting of brown over his tanned skin. It was masculine, I decided. I liked it.

  One of the strangest things about going stretches of time between seeing someone is all the changes you’d miss if you saw them every day. Like leg hair. Or biceps. Or big hands.

  In his update he’d said his mom asked him about having laser surgery so he wouldn’t have to wear glasses anymore. I tried to imagine him without his glasses, being able to look into his greenish-gold eyes without the benefit of black frames between us. I loved Elliot’s glasses, but the thought of being so close to him without them did warm, weird things to my stomach. It made him feel somehow undressed in my head.

  “What do you want for Christmas?” he asked.

  I jumped slightly, startled. I was pretty sure I looked exactly like someone looks when they’re caught staring at their best friend with less than innocent thoughts
. We hadn’t kissed again.

  But I really wanted to.

  His question echoed in my head. “Christmas?”

  Dark eyebrows pulled together, serious. “Yeah. Christmas.”

  I tried to cover. “Is that what you’ve been thinking about all this time?”