One Summer With Autumn

by Julie Reece

  18

  Caden

  Adrenaline zings through my veins, prodding me to move faster. I travel back and forth between the kitchen pantry and countertop. Rechecking the items I’ve placed in my pack, I make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. It’s ridiculous how excited I am about our camping trip. Three days in the woods alone with Autumn. No Quinn putting his foot in his mouth. No Jesse nagging me at every turn. No Dexter hanging around, dogging my every move—flirting with my intern.

  When I’d called him on his behavior last night, he’d been lounging around on his bed, reading stock values, and ignoring me. My volume increased to the point he finally lifted his head, grinning like a damn hyena.

  “You like this one, don’t you?” he’d said.

  “What?” My brow furrowed. “Don’t be an idiot. I’m just suggesting you tone down the leering. She’s an employee, dude. It’s inappropriate. And creepy.”

  “I’m neither creepy nor an idiot. I’m charming, only occasionally inappropriate. And sexy.” He crossed his ankles. “I can’t help it if girls like me. And I definitely like them.”

  “Could you not be an asshole for five whole minutes and listen to yourself? C’mon man, don’t mess this up for me, okay? Just lay off her.”

  Dex inched up, straightening himself against his headboard. “But she won’t always be an intern, will she? Autumn is fun. She’s says what she thinks like one of the guys. It’s refreshing. Her eighteenth birthday’s when, August? She’s legal in a month.”

  I blew out a breath. “Why are you always such a douche?”

  His grin widened, if that was possible. “Can’t handle a little, healthy competition, eh brother?”

  “We’re not competing! She’s a person, an employee.” My hands curled to fists. “Is everything a game to you?”

  “Whoa, hold on there!” A hand wrapped my bicep as I lunged for Dex, and I was pulled from his room into the hallway.

  “Quinn? What the hell?”

  Dexter’s laughter faded as my eldest brother dragged me around the corner, eased me against the wall. “Take it easy, will ya? Everyone knows Dex isn’t interested in Autumn, but he sees that you are. He’s messing with your head. In his own, jacked up way, I think he’s trying to help you.”

  “Help me?” I shook his hand off. “Give me a break. And I’m not interested in her. Not like that. I just think Dex should leave her alone. What if she takes his flirting seriously?” I willed my heartrate to slow, pushing a hot breath through my nose. Considering the source, Quinn was probably right. Dexter loves to stir shit up. But what if Autumn started to care about him? I didn’t say that out loud. I could hardly stand thinking about it, let alone admitting it to Quinn.

  “Come on, Caden.” He crossed his arms. “She’s smarter than that. However it’s worked out, they seem to get each other, and you can’t stop them being friends. But you might ask yourself this, little brother, if you aren’t into her, then why are you acting like a jealous boyfriend?”

  “I am not jealous.” Quinn taking Dexter’s side really pissed me off. It wasn’t the first time they’d ganged up on me, but Quinn was over the top, and Dexter was being … well, himself. “Everyone’s been on my ass to grow up and look after my responsibilities. I finally do it and still get shit.”

  “No, it’s not that, just … ” Quinn rubbed his beard. “Just think about what I said.”

  “Morning!” Jesse calls, jerking my thoughts back to the present. She steps to the island, and snoops around the items in my pack. “Gluten free crackers, peanut butter, almonds, there are a lot of vegetarian-friendly items in here, Caden.”

  “Silas, and so what?”

  She pulls a tumbler from the cabinet and sets it on the counter next to the container of orange juice I’d left out. “Just awfully thoughtful for a guy bent on punishing a reincarnated Hun.”

  I forgot I’d called her that. “It’s not like that anymore.”

  “No? How is it then?” Her all-knowing smile makes an appearance, then fades. “It’s okay to like her, Caden, she says, overfilling her glass with juice. “Dang it. Where’s the paper towels?” I nod to the roll near the sink. She tears several sheets and wipes her spill. “I know Mom pushes the Piper thing, but it’s not fair to either of you to force feelings that aren’t there.”

  “Mm. Mom’s not the only one pushing, you know?”

  “Yeeeah. Fair enough.”

  My head falls back until I’m staring at the light fixture. “Why does everyone feel the need to comment on every personal detail of my life?”

  “Cause yours has way more drama?” Her arms come around me, and she squeezes. “I love Piper, we all do, but I love you more.”

  Sheesh. The mushy talk won’t stop until I hug her back, so I do. Jesse wants to help, I get that, but her zeal makes it a damn crusade. Mostly, she’s great, but there are days, like today, when I’d happily strangle her.

  Jesse unwinds her arms from my shoulders and says, “Promise you’ll think about this. What happened to Piper was a terrible accident, but what happens when she finds out her boyfriend is only with her out of guilt?”

  “Back off, Jesse. You know it’s more complicated than that.”

  “Okay.” Her hands rise in surrender. “Parting words? Don’t be stubborn. The family will accept the truth when you do, so find Autumn and tell her who you are before your plan bites you.”

  Tell Autumn the truth.

  How did a girl I’ve only known a few weeks get under my skin so deeply? When we were together on the lake, she let her guard down. Cracks in her sour, amour-plated facade let me know a very different person lies somewhere beneath. One I want to know better.

  At this point, the whole deal-with-her-dad thing is off the table. I don’t want her punished. I want her happy, and whole. I want to see her smile and make her laugh. Quinn was right. I’ve been fooling myself and not very well. I act like a jealous boyfriend, because I’m so damn frustrated. Because I want her.

  Jesse means well, but she’s wrong. Growing up is accepting that no one gets it all. It’s about making hard choices, and sacrificing. If there’s any hope of fixing my jacked up past, earning Mom’s respect, un-breaking Piper’s heart, and choosing my own career, Autumn is the sacrifice. The someone I can never have.

  ***

  Miles wing past as we drive. “The kiss” sits between Autumn and me like an IED device neither of us are willing to go near. She commandeers the car radio once she learns I like country music, and sings with some band I’ve never heard of called Toad the Wet Sprocket. There are worse bands, I suppose, and I could listen to her clear, sweet voice forever. Then she asks me to sing along.

  I don’t sing well and have less than no desire to compete with her ex, but she bats her eyelashes, and I’m done for. We sing Ring of Fire, the one Jonny Cash song she knows until I’m laughing and we’re both hoarse. She never says a word about my pitchy-ness, God bless her. A smile curves my lips, and I think how that’s reflex now. I can’t help but smile when I’m with her. We talk about everything and nothing. The dialogue is easy and light. When did that happen?

  Autumn bunches against the window and grows quiet, watching the landscape change. As we pass a mileage sign to Hazel Nut Falls campground in North Carolina, I calculate the remaining distance. My family has camped here dozens of times. When my brothers and I were young, Dad taught us to build a lean-to, fish, hunt, and live off the land. He could have easily been one of those hermits they make documentaries about. The ones that move to Alaska, live in broken down buses, make friends with bears, and are never heard from again. But he met Mom at school instead. When her love for business met his passion for all things wild, Behr Mountain Sporting Goods was born. Quickly followed by three sons.

  Our childhood was the stuff of dreams. With polar opposites for parents, we grew up encouraged to try anything by our father and alternately sheltered from everything by Mom. We kids ended up more headstrong and free, like our Dad. About the time eac
h of us entered high school, Dad took a harder line, giving us more responsibility. When he died, Quinn was headed for college and had just met Jesse, Dex was entering his junior year of high school, and I’d barely started.

  With Dad gone, Mom dulled the pain with more work, and that demanded travel. Dex graduated, following Quinn to college. within a few years, it felt like the ground opened up and took everyone I loved away.

  “What are you thinking?” Autumn’s question jars me. I thought she’d fallen asleep and maybe she had. She rubs her eyes before peeping at me with a thoughtful expression. Pressing her socked feet against my dash in a stretch, her slender, brown legs stick out of a pair of baggy cargo shorts in contrast to the tight navy tank hugging her curves. She tugs a bag from the side compartment in her door. My pulse kick starts as she places a cherry Twizzler stick between her plump, peach-colored lips, swinging another in her other hand toward me. I shift in my seat, and adjust my pants. Everything she does drives me half-crazy.

  “Thanks,” I say, reaching for the candy.

  “So, where’s Mr. Chatty today? What are you thinking about so hard?”

  “Nothing,” I say, unsure I want to get into the family thing with her. Yet, no sooner do I answer, and I change my mind. “I was thinking about camping. And my dad.”

  “Sorry.” A line forms between her eyebrows that I want to smooth away.

  “Don’t be. I have a lot of great memories of him.” I push the licorice into my mouth and bite off a chunk.

  “The closest I’ve come to camping is getting stuck in your arachnid-potty at the shack, but I learned to like fishing.” Her smile is sweet. She doles those out so rarely, it’s like glimpsing Halley’s Comet, though that’s changing, too. “I have high hopes for me and camping.”

  “You’re going to do great,” I say, around the wad of red sugar in my mouth. Her brow lifts, but she doesn’t argue. More progress.

  We’re quiet again. She clips her bottom lip with her teeth. The line between her brows is back. “How did it happen?”

  I know what she’s asking, but I answer a different question. “You know after my dad died, I lost it a little.” I hear the hard edge in my laugh. “Okay, maybe a lot. Partied too much, grades went to shit, got lazy about football. Everything I cared about lost meaning without him, except camping.” I pull my cap off, threading my fingers through my hair. “My brothers wanted to murder me most of the time. I didn’t see why at first, or didn’t care, but one night, I came home drunk. I’ll never forget the look on my mom’s face. Red eyes, lines worn deeper in her forehead. She’d been up all night, praying for me to come home safe.

  “My brothers beat the crap out of me for it.” I force another laugh, but it still sounds brittle. “Time went by, and I got ‘better.’ Acted that way anyhow, to make my mom happy. I didn’t want to cause her more worry, but inside, I always felt this … pressure. Everyone wanted me to get over it and move on. But get over what, you know? Life without my father? Won’t happen. I can’t explain, but it’s like time stood still. I got stuck in a repeating time warp of not knowing what to do with myself.

  “And then, I told you about last summer, me and Piper went climbing with friends in Georgia. We’d been, not full-on fighting exactly, Piper won’t fight, but we were weird the whole way up. That morning we argued, When she fell, she hit her head … ” My throat tightens and fails. “It was my fault. One hundred percent mine. We were out pretty far, miles from help. She could have died.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “She was hurt, but no, we were lucky. No one knows better than I do how fast a life can be taken. Sometimes the ones left behind get so lost, it’s like they died, too. Not literally maybe, but the person they used to be, yeah.”

  “I can understand that,” she says. She’s still a long while, her head against the window watching the trees. Then she says, “If we have a choice, I think I want to die living.” Her words come out so fast and matter-of-factly, I’m not sure I heard her right. “I can’t pretend to know what it’s like, what you’ve been through. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about for myself.” She reaches out until her hand cups my bicep. Her palm soft and cool against my skin, and exactly what I need right now. My fingers grip the wheel tighter. I can’t believe the power she has over me. Or how alone I really was until a few weeks ago. It’s all I can do not to stop the car and pull her into my arms. Then her hand is gone, and so is the moment.

  She tucks her feet into the seat, sits crossed legged, and shoves a wad of gum in her mouth. Her silence gives me space. There’s no pressure for me to say more. Autumn admitted she can’t know what I’ve been through, yet on some level, I suspect she does. And it’s because she does, that I answer the question I know she won’t ask again. “The day he died, my dad was fixing a leak on the roof. Mom called him stubborn and begged him to hire a professional. But we all knew he enjoyed doing things like repairing leaky faucets or rewiring light switches himself. Dad usually won those battles.”

  She nods.

  “We think he slipped on the tar paper, and he fell.” I cough, forcing air from my closing lungs. This is why I never talk about that day. The thought of his suffering suffocates me, plants a fist in my throat. “There was a pile of rebar on the ground by the house … that he landed on.”

  She leans over. Her hand finds my knee and she squeezes so hard, I’m not even sure she’s aware of what she’s doing. “My God. Silas, I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” My eyes burn, mouth dries, and I cough again to clear a passageway. “Dad wouldn’t want me to self-destruct because he’s gone, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Time to get my shit together and toe the line.” She peers at me through her wind-blown hair. “Whatever it takes, I’m going to make him proud.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But he sounds like the sort of dad who would want his son to be happy, too.”

  I shift my hands on the steering wheel. The tear in my chest aches. After all this time, the place that holds his memory is jagged and raw.

  “My mom had an affair.” She offers this abrupt piece of information up like restitution for what I’ve just shared. I sneak a glance, but her eyes are downcast.

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “With a teacher. It was public and divided our whole school.” She continues as though I never spoke. “People gossiped and took sides. Kids teased me and Syd. I didn’t understand until later that they were probably parroting what they’d heard their parents say at home. Harassing us became a habit. Like a rite of passage or something to do when they were bored or felt small. I swear some kids single out the weak like a lion separates a gazelle from the herd for an easy kill.”

  Her feet come down off the seat, and she squirms. “So this one day, Sydney and me are in the eighth grade cafeteria when a girl named Kaycee Hill corners us in the lunch line. She called my mother a whore and laughed. She got in Sydney’s face, yelling slut over and over … When Sydney started to cry, Kaycee called her a slut baby and shoved her against the wall. Syd hit her head. Not that hard, but hard enough to hurt, you know?” Autumn won’t look at me, and instead picks at her chipped nail polish like it’s for a grade. “So there I am, staring down at my sister where she’s sunk to the floor in a heap. Her tray is sitting on her lap, sort of. Spaghetti sauce all over the place, staining her new yellow skirt. She freakin’ loved that stupid, skirt.” Autumn laughs. “You should have seen it. Pale gold with these ugly little flowers embroidered on it.”

  I nod, since it’s my only option to encourage, offer solidarity. Though it’s all I can do not to touch her.

  “You know how a person might fanaticize about doing something bad, but never actually do it? Well, I did. I mean, it’s all there in my head, but more like I’m watching a movie about someone else. I don’t remember feeling angry. I don’t remember feeling much of anything. I could have told my father, or a teacher, or dumped my bowl of spaghetti over Kaycee’s head, but I didn’t. I just reac
ted, and flung my food tray at Kaycee’s face as hard as I could. The edge caught her nose slicing straight through the cartilage. She held her gushing nose and screamed. Then everyone else screamed.

  “At the time, I didn’t know facial injuries could bleed like that. I thought I’d killed her. Turns out she got nine stitches, and two black eyes. I got suspended and six months of anger management therapy. No one ever messed with the Teslow twins again, though.

  “The weirder part is that somehow, Sydney was sainted by the event. She became this … I don’t know, this object of sympathy and shot to gold crown popularity status—unshakable and permanent until graduation, while I became a social pariah. Everyone either hated me or was afraid of me. I never did anything to change their opinion, so I guess part of me was relieved it went down that way. I guess.”

  The lost look in her eyes haunts me with its familiarity. My empathy stretches the distance between us and holds her close, not that she’ll ever know. “Guess we both have things we regret.”

  “Guess so.” Hands stuffed under both legs, she shuffles her feet back and forth on the floorboard like she’s getting rid of nervous energy. I have to physically will myself not to reach for her hand. “You were never afraid of me, though, were you?”

  I feel my mouth hitch up on one side. “No.”

  “Hmm.” Her eyes narrow toward the horizon like the idea is unfathomable. “Well, anyway, it doesn’t mean that who we were is who we’ll be. We have a choice, right?”

  It hurts like hell, but I smile for the sake of hope. My gift to her.

  “The past doesn’t have to define us … ”

  “Not us,” I say.

  She smacks my arm. “Okay, now you’re making fun of me.”

  “Me? No way.” She hits me again. “All right, maybe a little.” I laugh and rub my arm, pretending it hurts. “Just tell me when Autumn Teslow’s brain got switched with Pollyanna’s.”

  “Who?”