Wrong in All the Right Ways

by Tiffany Brownlee

  “He’s an idiot. Got to be to give up a girl like you.” As I look at her, I see that her blond hair has faded into a lighter shade of gray since the last time I saw her, and she has many more wrinkles in her skin, too, but her eyes are still as blue as the sky on a cloudless day. “Did you love him?”

  I say nothing. I don’t want to think of what I felt for Keegan. All that really matters now is Dylan. I shrug.

  “I remember when I first started dating your grandpa.”

  “Papa?”

  “Yes. It was hard for him to keep his hands off of me. He was a frisky one.”

  “Gran!” I try to delete that visual immediately.

  “We fell in love as teenagers, and our parents let us marry when we were only seventeen.”

  “Seventeen?”

  “Yep. Took some convincing, though. They said it was just lust clawing at our heels.” She motions for her glass of water, and I give it to her to take a sip. “They had no clue that we could feel something so deep for each other.”

  “So then how did they end up letting you get married?”

  “When they figured out that I was going to run away in order to be with him, they decided to give him a chance.” She runs the back of her hand across my cheek, and I see her smile weakly. “Adults think that love isn’t real when you’re young, but I know it is. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s this: Love is love is love. It has no limits. And from the look in your eyes, I think you probably know it, too.”

  Shaking my head, I set her straight. “Gran, I’m not in love with Keegan. I was never in love with him.”

  “Well, you’re in love with someone. I can tell.”

  But how? I ask her inside my head. I have no idea if I’m really in love with Dylan. How do you know?

  “Trust me, Emmy.” She takes another swig from her glass and hands it back to me. “I can tell.”

  * * *

  When I finally get a moment to look up at the clock, it’s time for our guests to leave. Being a show pony for my extended family is exhausting, so after I help my mom put the food away, I retire to my own room to relax. Dylan is waiting for me when I get there.

  “Well, hello,” he says as I enter. He still has his dress clothes on, and his hair is still slicked down, but now that everyone has left, he seems less tense. He, too, has started to return to his normal self.

  “Hey,” I say, distracted.

  Dylan grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just thinking about something my grandmother said to me after dinner.” Out of fear that he will ask me to elaborate, I change the topic. “Do you mind helping me with this stupid zipper? I haven’t taken a comfortable breath all night.” I turn around for him to unzip me, and when he does, I disappear behind my dressing screen across the room, pushing my grandmother’s words from my head. I pull a shirt over my head and slip on some pajama shorts, and then emerge to sit on his lap. “So what’s up?”

  “I just wanted to share one of my Thanksgiving family traditions with you.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Going around and saying what we’re thankful for.”

  “Okay. You first, and then me.”

  He picks up my foot as he begins. “I’m thankful for your ten little piggies, not only because they never smell bad, but because they are the tools that let you dance so gracefully. And, even though you hate the way that they look, they allow you to do something you love—dance—which puts a smile on your face and, in turn, mine.” He slides his hands up to my thighs and squeezes. “And your thighs, because … well, because I’m a guy and we like thighs. Same thing here,” he says, his hands skimming across the top of my butt with a gentle tap. “I love this part of you, too.” There’s that word again. Love.

  He continues to slide his hands up my body and stops at my waist and lower back. “I love your belly button and the little scar you have on your back from when you had the chicken pox, too. And then, of course, there’s your boobs.”

  “Because you’re a guy?”

  “Well, that, and because if I were to get stranded on an island with you, I know I’d always have a soft place to lay my head at night.” I giggle as his fingertips sweep across my arms and travel downward. “And then there’s your fingers. I am thankful for these ten extremities because they are always there to remind me that I’m not alone.” He kisses them, and then laces his with mine. “Not to mention the way you run your fingers through my hair when we make out. That’s kind of hot.”

  Thank you, Karmin, I say in my head.

  “And I’m thankful for your neck for always smelling so good and holding up this beautiful blond head of yours. It reminds me of the sand on a beach I once painted. I’m thankful for your cheeks for giving you the ability to blush in that cute way you do when you’re embarrassed or try to act upset. And then there’s your lips. I could kiss them all day.” He gives me one deep kiss before continuing. “Enough said, right?” I nod, and let him go on to compliment my hair and ears. “And finally, there are your eyes. God, those eyes. I am thankful for these sky-blue beauties because they allow you to see past all of the bull and into the real me. I’ve never seen eyes like yours, and from the moment I saw them, I knew they were something that I would never get tired of looking at.”

  He closes his eyes and kisses me once more before ending his list. “I’m so thankful that I have you in my life. You remind me of the happy person I used to be before foster care.” He pauses for a moment and frowns, and I imagine him reliving the memory that got him placed here. Then he looks up at me to finish his soliloquy of flattery. “I wouldn’t change a thing about you, Emma. You’re perfect in my eyes.”

  I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him close. That is the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me, and I just want him to hold me as I let his words continue to ring in my ears.

  “Your turn,” he whispers after my grip loosens.

  “What? No way, I can’t beat that. You set that bar way too high.”

  “Just try.”

  “Okay.” I clear my throat, waiting for the words to come to me. When they do, they don’t sound as beautiful as his, so I just keep it short and simple. “I’m thankful that you haven’t given up on us. I know our situation is complicated and that I haven’t been the girlfriend you deserve, but I’m glad you’re still in this. That means a lot to me. You mean a lot to me. And for all that you are, I am so very thankful.”

  “Not bad,” he says after a while. “I mean, you could have said something about my good looks, but not bad.” When I snarl in his direction, he bursts into laughter. “I’m just kidding, Emma.”

  “You better be.” I tousle his hair to let him know that I’m not serious.

  “But to add to what I said earlier,” he continues, “I just want to say that what I feel for you is not ruled solely by my physical attraction to you. There’s more to it. Something I can’t quite explain. The surrealism of it all actually makes me think that I’m falling—”

  I cut him off with a kiss. He’s going to tell me that he loves me. And I love him. Gran was right. I’ve wanted to hear these three words all my life, but I don’t want him to say it to me and ruin everything. I’m less than a month away from finding out if I’m going to stay here for college or leave, taking all of my feelings with me, and I don’t want to say it out loud and then give us an expiration date. That would be cruel. No, it’s better for the both of us if we wait to say those three magical words.

  So instead, I whisper, “Me too, Dylan.” It’s not exactly what he wants to hear, but for now, it’s going to have to do. “Me too.”

  chapter 20

  AS MUCH AS I want to spend time with Dylan during the Thanksgiving break, I can’t because I have to study for my English final. It actually kind of works out, though, because Dylan is busy with work and putting the finishing touches on his paintings for the showcase.

  When I exit my exam, I breathe a sigh of relief and head h
ome to wait for him in his studio. I find that he has displayed every painting he has finished all around the room. Instantly, I’m drawn to his most recent piece—the one of a girl reading a book in a bed of flowers. Dylan hasn’t openly said it, but I know the girl is me. I zero in on the book she’s reading. The glittering gold-edged pages give it away. Wuthering Heights.

  “I’m trying to figure out which ones I want to enter,” Dylan says when he sees me in his studio. “I have to email them my list so they can print the labels for tomorrow night, but I can’t decide. They’re all pretty good, but I need to enter the absolute best if I want to win. I’ll never hear the end of it if I lose.”

  “Want a second opinion?”

  “Sure. Let’s hear it.”

  “Pick the ones that mean the most to you. If you’re passionate about it in real life, then that means you were probably just as passionate about it when you painted it. Those are the ones that will help you bring home the gold.”

  “And here I thought you were going to scrutinize each one for detail and accuracy. But this,” he says, pulling me into a hug, “this is why I keep you around.”

  “Oh, that’s why.” He tries to kiss me, but I jokingly push him away. “No time for play. We have to pick your paintings,” I say, though I let him sneak one kiss in before we continue to go through his collection. In the end, we pick the one of him and his mother, the one he did of my eyes, the one with the girl reading Wuthering Heights, and two scenic paintings, one of which is the sunset at the lake house. “‘Everyone loves a good sunset.’” I quote my dad with a sly grin.

  “Yeah, but a sunrise is even better.” Dylan glances at the clock in his studio, and then motions to see my phone. When I hand it to him, I can see that his fingers are moving swiftly across the screen. “Sunrise is at six forty tomorrow morning, and let me tell you, it’s amazing to watch. But the moments before it rises, when you can see the light from beneath the horizon, now that is truly spectacular. It’s the overlapping—”

  “Of night and day,” I help him finish. “Where you don’t know if it’s morning yet or still night. It’s my favorite part of the day.” The Middle.

  “Mine too. Meet me on the balcony at six o’clock.”

  “It’s a date.”

  I toss and turn all night in my sleep, because I’m afraid that if I sleep too deeply, I’ll sleep right through the alarm and miss the sunrise with Dylan. This is the happiest that I’ve seen him in a while, and I don’t want to be the reason he slips back into a gloom phase.

  When my alarm finally goes off, I’m already awake. Outside, I notice that Dylan has set a ladder up against the house so that I don’t have to go inside and deal with the house alarm. He’s thought of everything.

  “Thought you overslept,” he says when I reach the top of the ladder and swing a leg over into the balcony. He’s set up two chairs at the edge for us to sit in.

  “No. I don’t break dates.” He gives me a look, which makes me add, “Anymore.”

  “That sounds more accurate.”

  I watch quietly as he pulls items from the bag near my feet. “So what’s all of this stuff?”

  “Oh, just the essentials: blankets and hot cocoa. Just some stuff to keep us warm. I don’t want you catching a cold in this cool morning air.”

  “Well, how very considerate of you.” I grab a blanket and one of the thermoses of cocoa and wrap my cold fingers around it to warm up my hands.

  “I try,” he says as he takes a thermos in his hands to warm his fingers up, too.

  Looking up at the stars, I remember something I heard my mom say after my grandpa—her father—had died. The stars are how the angels watch over us at night time.

  “She’s up there, you know? Your birth mom.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. Mom says that when we die, our souls get caught in the sky so that we can look down on the loved ones we left behind.”

  “Very nicely put.” He silently looks up at the sky, and I can’t tell if he’s saying a prayer, or trying to figure out which of the fading stars is his mother. “Are you afraid to die?” he asks without looking at me. What kind of question is this? I think to myself. How is anyone supposed to feel about dying and leaving your entire life behind?

  “More so of what happens after death than actually dying,” I say after giving it a moment of thought. “No one knows what happens to us when we die, so we make up theories to fill the void. Of course, there’s the whole heaven and hell theory and the reincarnation theory, but how are we supposed to know if those things really happen? We don’t have a dead person to ask.” I pick at my nails, not sure if I should redirect his question back at him. “Are you afraid to die?”

  “No. My mom used to say that if we fear death, then we’re already dead because we’re not really living.” God, he’s so smart. “So … no, I’m not scared of death. When it’s my time to go, it’ll happen, you know?”

  “That’s just it. How can you know that it’s your time to go? What if you don’t get any warnings?”

  “I’m sure there’ll be someone or something that will let us know. Whether it’s a doctor, God, or a pain in your upper chest. We’ll know.”

  “I’d like to think that there is a point in the middle of us dying where we can choose where we want to go in our afterlife. As in, do we want to be a ghost and stalk our loved ones, or become a star to protect them, or go to heaven or hell, or whatever you believe in.”

  Dylan removes his hand from his thermos and laces his warm fingers with mine. “I think that if you stick around as a ghost, you’ve chosen to live in the neutral ground. One foot in the real world, and one foot out of it.”

  “Neutral ground?” I ask as I tug at my ear in confusion. I’ve never heard that term before.

  “Yeah. I read this book once and, because it was set in New Orleans, they would use a ton of colloquial terms in it, one of them being ‘neutral ground.’ It’s what they call that piece of grassland in the middle of the road. You’re not supposed to drive on it, but some people do anyway. Most places call this the median strip, or middle ground, but in New Orleans, they call it the neutral ground. It belongs to neither the left nor right side of the road, but it’s its own entity.”

  “So, it’s like us?”

  Now Dylan is the one who’s confused. “Explain,” he says.

  “We’re stuck somewhere between siblings and lovers. Not belonging to either side fully, but rather somewhere in between them both. This territory is usually off-limits.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  “Yep,” I say, turning my attention back to the growing light below the horizon. “And here we are.”

  Dylan follows my lead, and we sit in silence for a minute. “Life is full of choices, Emma. Life or death. Right or wrong. Cake or pie—by the way, for future references, I’m pro–lemon meringue. It’s not always so black and white when it comes to choosing between those options. Take the colors, for example. There’s white, which is the absence of color, and black, which is the summation of all of the colors. You’re either painting with no color or all of them at once. But how boring would it be to paint with only black and white? What brings art to life is what lies between those two extremes. The different shades of red, blue, green, purple, yellow, and orange. It’s everything between black and white on the color spectrum.

  “This is the best place to be sometimes. Like us. We’re not right, but we’re not wrong, Emma. Our relationship lives and breathes in the off-limits, and I feel right being here with you even if everyone else thinks it’s wrong. I just can’t help the way that I feel about you.”

  “Dylan,” I whisper, a little choked up.

  “I really can’t.”

  Blushing, I glance down at my phone and see that it’s 6:32. “Less than ten minutes until this spectacular sunrise.” The sky starts to reflect the approaching sun; there’s a reddish-orange glow creeping up on the edges of night. “I think I like talking to you.” I smile,
wrapping the blanket a little tighter around my body.

  “I know that I love talking to you.” He reaches for my hand underneath my blanket and squeezes it a little tighter than normal.

  “But what’s going to happen to us if you get adopted?”

  “I don’t know.” He loosens his grip a little, making me think that I’ve done something wrong. “I’m not sure I know how to be your brother, now that I’ve been your boyfriend.”

  “Well, first of all, the kissing, holding hands, long stares, and sappy speeches are going to have to stop. That’s obvious. But that’ll only be an issue if my parents have a problem with us being together. Maybe things will be different after we get through high school.”

  Dylan releases my hand and folds his across his chest. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “It’s a possible reality, Dylan. We have to be prepared.”

  “If that happens, we’ll deal with it then. But I want to enjoy this right now.”

  “You’re right,” I breathe into the brightening sky. And he is. We don’t know when or if this thing between us will end, so we might as well enjoy the moments while we still have them. “Let’s do this again—just sit out here and talk under the stars. After the showcase tonight? Eleven o’clock?”

  “I’ll be here.” We pull out our phones and synchronize our alarms to both ring at ten fifty.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” he says as he hands me a box of cards. “I talked to Mr. Wright about my grade yesterday after school.”

  I try to hold back my excitement, but I can’t contain it. “What did he say? Did you pass?”

  “B plus,” he says with an ear-to-ear grin.

  For a moment, I forget how chilly it is, and I throw my blanket off my shoulders and wrap my arms around him. “I knew you could do it!”