Hide Me

by Lexi Scott

  I know Deo assumes I’m asleep, and, sometimes, the sound of his voice cuts through the simple sound of his heart beating.

  Like when he tells me how much he loves me, or how he’d do anything to make me happy.

  I’m a horrible person for not saying anything back, or even letting him know that I’ve heard him at all, but I just can’t. No matter how treasured and wonderful and perfect it makes me feel, I just lie there next to him, petrified with this crazy mix of perfect happiness and absolute terror.

  The terror I feel in his arms could maybe be measured if you took my fear of sharks, my horror at the shadowy loneliness of my apartment, and my nervousness about possible future pet cats eating my corpse when I die alone and squish them all together and multiply their ugliness by a trillion. And then you could stick me in a dark house with zombies bashing in at the windows as the terror cherry on top.

  “Seriously, what’s up?” Deo asks.

  “What are your plans for the summer. I mean, other than impressing me with your sexual prowess?” Which, for the silent record, is damn impressive. I’ll never tell him that, since his ego is already big enough as it is. But, man, that boy knows how to use what he was blessed with.

  Deo shrugs and evades, his usual tactic when I bring up anything more substantive than our dinner plans. “I hadn’t really given it a whole lot of thought.”

  I don’t know what Deo has planned for the rest of his life, but he’s shown me again and again how honest he is. He’s done so much for me—carrying me to safety in his arms, helping me face my night terrors, spending his savings to keep me in school.

  What the hell will he think of me when he realizes how selfish I’ve been?

  That’s why I’m here, on my own. That’s why I gave up the dream of living in the plush dorms at the University of Delaware, and, instead, settled for this crappy apartment, the most liberal college in the country, and a mediocre job (apart from Rocko) to help pay for it all.

  Except that I’m not actually all that independent.

  Because I had to accept Deo’s help, which totally goes against everything I thought I believed in. And, despite how much I appreciate what he did, and despite the realization that I’d be so screwed without his help, it’s also, strangely, one of the things that’s holding me back with Deo.

  I want to want him because I made the choice as an independent person. And I want him to want me for the exact same reason. I want a relationship that still lets me keep a piece of myself, and Deo and I run the risk of being all-consuming.

  I know what happens when a love is all-consuming, then gone.

  A big piece of you winds up gone, too.

  So I try pushing him to be more independent and less wrapped up in what I’m doing. I want him to have his own plans, his own life. For his own good and mine.

  I tell him the plan I’ve been trying to put in motion for him. “Because, my anthropology professor mentioned today that she’s looking for an assistant. Just someone to do some organizing and data entry, and I thought, since you were once in the service industry”—I wink at him, knowing he’s shy about his cabana boy days—“you’d be perfect for the job.”

  “And?” Deo presses, because he can tell by my coy smirk that there’s more.

  “So, I maybe gave her your number and she should be calling you tomorrow?” I say it like it’s a question, like it maybe didn’t happen.

  Deo sighs and rubs a rough hand over his tan face and seriously sexy five o’clock shadow. “Whit, I don’t need you to find me a job. I can take care of that on my own.”

  “I know that.” I kick my foot out and rub it up and down his calf, because he can never resist smiling when I pull that trick out of my bag. “I know. And I know that you don’t care about going to college, but I thought maybe just being around school might help change your mind. Maybe?”

  Deo pulls my foot on his lap and starts another one of his bone-melting massages. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “So you’ll talk to her?” I have a hard time asking the question without moaning over the way he’s handling my instep.

  His fingers continue to work their magic while he sighs and rolls his eyes. “There’s no quota on the lengths I’d go just to make you happy, doll.”

  I smile at him and he drops my foot and grabs my stool, sliding it across the floor to get me closer. He laces his fingers behind my neck and pulls me in. His lips glide over mine smoothly, his warm, sweet breath fills my mouth as his tongue traces over mine, flicking and teasing.

  My phone vibrates on the edge of the bar, and Deo pulls away with a slow, sexy groan.

  “Sorry, I’ll be quick!” I promise. I round the side of the bar to catch the phone before it jumps off the edge of the counter or goes to voicemail. I’m still waiting on a call to sort out all of this financial aid bullshit, and the sooner I get that taken care of, the better. Then, I can pay Deo back and not feel like I have this weight hanging over my head.

  “Is it that tool Ryan again? I thought you told him that he was done sampling the goods?” Deo tries to joke, but there’s a fierce flicker of jealousy in his eyes.

  I giggle and try to hold the phone out of reach, but Deo grabs it from me in an athletic swoop before I can answer.

  Ryan has been calling off and on, even though I did tell him we couldn’t keep up our arrangement anymore. More than likely, he’s just bored, or hoping to catch me when Deo and I are on the outs. Deo has been dying to grab the phone when he calls and give him a little good-natured ribbing. Or, I suspect, to properly mark his territory.

  “Rich and Paula?” Deo shows me the iPhone screen.

  My parents.

  “Give me the phone.” I practically leap over the bar to rip the phone from Deo’s hands.

  “Easy there, killer, I wasn’t going to answer it.” He shakes his head at my outburst.

  I silence the phone and toss it into my purse.

  “Seriously, Whit, I wasn’t going to answer your phone. You don’t have to hide it away.” Deo takes a few steps toward me to close the space between us and pulls me in by my shoulders. He presses his lips to the top of my head like he’s comforting me, but he has no idea why.

  “Okay,” is all I offer. Inside, I’m fighting the urge to recoil and tell him to leave. To stay away from me, because I ruin everything. Because I make brothers make decisions they shouldn’t have to, I make parents choose, I ruin things, I destroy lives. I leave.

  When things got too hard, I put two thousand miles between us and never looked back.

  “But, are you going to tell me who Rich and Paula are, at least?” Deo’s mouth is still pressed into my hair as he speaks. He knows I won’t be able to do both—look at him and open up.

  I shake my head, curling myself tighter to him when I do.

  “Whit…” he breathes into my hair. “It’s not going to change things with us, you opening up a little. You know that, right? You can open up a little. Let me know what’s going on. I’m not just here to cook you delicious food and rub your feet. I’m also here to listen to you gripe about annoying people you don’t want to talk to on the phone. And to keep cats from eating your face, just on the off chance that any of those furry bastards get any funny ideas.”

  The guilt of my inability to share this simple piece of information without him having to drag it from me while I kick and scream makes me feel like a coward and a fraud. I’m also well aware that we can’t keep existing in our current state of cohabitation. Every single day, Deo moves a little closer to my heart, and I try to block him with more defensive shields. One of us is going to press the other too far any day now.

  “It’s nothing. Rich and Paula are my parents. I’m just not in the mood to talk to them.” My words are cold and dull, like I’m some kind of robot.

  Deo stiffens for a second, his shoulders and arms suddenly tight. “Or about them. Or about anything that has to do with your life since you got here. All I know about the girl I share a bed with is that
you don’t sleep well at night, you hate to cook, you eat at the same dive almost every day, even though you don’t really seem to like the food when we go.”

  I feel my throat tighten. I want him to stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. But he won’t. Because he’s Deo. And he’s good, and thinks he’s doing and saying all of the right things.

  “You draw amazing tattoos, give even more amazing head…and that’s not good enough for me, Whit. I want to know you.”

  He runs his hands up my arms from elbow to shoulder and rubs my neck with quick, gentle pressure, the way he knows will make me goose-bumped and ready for him. “Not that I don’t also want to get head, because, and I think I may have told you this a couple thousand times, but I’ll say it again; you have a true gift. Seriously.”

  He slides his hands to my face and squeezes my cheeks until my face is so squished I can barely see his smile through my squeezed eyes. “But what else is there? I know like, five things about you, and I’m under your spell. Imagine if I knew seven or eight things! I’d be your slave forever.”

  I pull his hands down by the wrists, irritated by his goofiness and doubly irritated by my irritation at him. “There’s nothing to tell, Deo, okay? I had a super boring life before I moved here. I work for Rocko because the hours are perfect. I go to school because I want to have a kick-ass job one day. I live in this crappy apartment because I don’t want my parents’ money.” Just drop it, Deo. I can’t go there.

  I can’t tell him that I moved here to escape. That I’m here because here is so far from there, and here I don’t have to relive what I lost every damn day like I had to there, over and over until just the thought of getting out of bed and seeing reminders of him everywhere sapped all of the strength from my body.

  I couldn’t look at the damn poster of Eleanor Roosevelt above my bedroom door that he drew a moustache on and laughed about like a hyena, or the bathroom mirror he cracked when he threw a marble during a tantrum when he was seven, or the tree in the backyard he swore was safe to climb, but wasn’t, and left him with two broken ankles, or the Thunderbird he bought with four years’ worth of dog-walking and yard-raking money, rotting under the carport where we shared our first bottle of vodka, stolen from our parents’ liquor cabinet by him while I distracted them in the kitchen.

  I couldn’t look at any of it because I’d remember, and it was too raw and painful to have to accept over and over, every day, that he was gone. For good. No more. Eleanor Roosevelt and the bathroom mirror and the old tree and the Thunderbird and my parents’ vodka would never be disturbed by Wakefield again, because he was dead and gone, and I can’t even add “and buried” to that list in any real sense, because there wasn’t enough of my big, beautiful brother left to put in a box and send home.

  And, as if I didn’t find a million ways to torture myself missing him every damn day, the community we’d grown up in rallied to keep me in eternal misery whether they meant it or not. Every time someone back home saw me, they’d get this look on their face. First it was horror, like what had happened to me was somehow contagious, like you could catch having a dead brother. Then it was guilt, because my brother got blown to hell for their freedom and all that. Then it was one of two things. If I was really, super lucky, the friend or neighbor or former shop teacher would suddenly get really interested in a sale on peaches or concentrate on walking their dog or see someone they knew and had to talk to right away. If I wasn’t lucky, if the guilt was too heavy for them, they’d amble over with long, sad faces. Faces Wakefield would have laughed at. And trap me with stupid, bumbling words that made me sad and furious and tired and guilty all at once. Day after day.

  Wakefield would have hated it. Hated the whole thing. My brother had the brains and the looks in my family, lucky bastard, and, to top it off, he was a riot. Seriously, I cannot remember a holiday or birthday when Wakefield didn’t have me laughing so hard, I was snotting sparkling grape juice or cake icing out of my nose. Our parents used to complain that they couldn’t take us to movies or plays or church because we were always doubled over, giggling like two fools no matter what was going on the screen or stage or in the pulpit. I know most kids cried during Bambi, and I have no clue what Wakefield said that made a mama deer getting shot in cold blood hilarious, but that movie is still classified as a comedy in my brain.

  How the hell did he die?

  How did something so full of life suddenly wind up empty of life?

  And how have I managed to keep going now that he’s gone?

  My hands shake, my stomach churns, and my head swims. I know exactly how I managed to keep going. By pushing it all out of my head. By telling myself I was moving out here to finish living the life that he couldn’t.

  I drag my Wakefield memories into the middle of my brain, dump them in a huge chest, and slam the lid shut. That’s how it has to be. Period.

  I tug at the ends of my hair. I’ve managed to leave it alone the last few weeks, but now my gaze darts around the room—searching for the scissors.

  Deo pulls back from me and leans down so that our foreheads are touching. “You’re the only girl I’ve ever met that doesn’t have any pictures out. You don’t answer your phone when your parents call. You don’t ever talk about home. It all points to one thing, Whit. You’re hiding something. So what is it?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  DEO

  There’s something epically depressing about cooking a girl a romantic celebration meal and ending up alone in the kitchen putting the leftovers in questionable Tupperware instead of rolling around in the sheets with said girl.

  But that’s what I’m doing, because Whit doesn’t like people pawing around in her life and I’m like that cat that got all fucked up by curiosity.

  I guarantee that stupid curious cat wound up yowling from the top of some junkyard fence, lonely, with a raging set of blue balls. If he wasn’t dead. Or eating someone’s face.

  I shake my head to clear it of all cat-related thoughts and try to put together a plan. Whit said she needed “space,” which seems like a colossally bad sign to me. Isn’t “I need space” the universal couples equivalent of “I need you to pack your shit and get out of my life?”

  I have no clue, since I’ve never really done this couple thing.

  And, fuck, Whit and I didn’t exactly play by the rules. We dated, then hopped into the friend zone, stayed in that murky place for a while, then wound up playing house. I just kind of moved in, uninvited, and when things got serious, I was so damn happy I never wanted to put a label on it. Now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

  All I know is I’ve fallen for this girl. And I’m willing to do what it takes to keep her in my life.

  I’m winging it and brilliant plan number one is just to keep busy and hope she cools off and comes back. But there are only so many dishes I can wash or piles of junk I can move around before I start to get antsy and wonder where Whit went. She grabbed her keys and her wallet off the table, but left her purse, which has her phone in it. So she’s driving around, possibly pissed and upset, with no phone.

  I definitely hate all of this.

  Maybe she’s at the beach. But she’s scared of sharks, so she’s not swimming, and I told her how the cretin crazy-ass crackheads troll the shitty areas at night and to stay away. I wonder if she listened to me.

  Maybe she’s just cruising around, clearing her head. But her LeBaron gets dick gas mileage, and she doesn’t usually have money to waste on that.

  I get in my Jeep and think about taking a long, fast cruise along the twining ocean roads, but I don’t feel like bothering to fill the tank, and I’m exhausted anyway.

  Maybe she went to Ryan.

  For a minute, I lose my trademark calm and smash my hands on the steering wheel over and over, screaming like a deranged maniac. I don’t give a goddamn who sees me or what they think. This is about Whit, my Whit, out somewhere, possibly not safe, and I’m feeling so out of control, I don’t really know what to do.

 
I consider going to my grandpa’s house to revel in my codger-dom, but the only place that I feel like going to is Whit’s apartment.

  I know I made a mistake as soon as I open the door and walk back in. Without Whit, this is just an overcrowded, cluttered, dirty little depressing space. I pace back and forth, tempted to drive to my mother’s house, when I notice her laptop open on the coffee table.

  I don’t go through other people’s shit.

  I don’t do it because it’s disrespectful, and also because I don’t care to dig for information on people who just don’t matter all that much.

  But Whit matters. She matters more than anyone else ever has. And I care. So much.

  So much that I break my own moral code and click the machine on. It was in sleep-mode, so I don’t have to be a dirtbag and try to figure out her password. I can just be a dirtbag and spy on her shit.

  There’s an icon for a web browser at the bottom of her page, and when I click on it, some super boring anthropology article pops up. Blah blah wedding practices around the world. I open a tab and type in “Facebook.” I have a page I haven’t logged into or checked in a few years, but girls tend to like this stuff better.

  My intention is to log in as myself and search for Whit. But I’m not sure if I can even remember my password after all this time. And her username is already in. And the little password box is filled with asterisks, like the computer automatically saved her information. I click the log-in button like I’m having an out-of-body experience, and a picture of her with the long, wavy hair that she has in her ID photo pops up. She’s not really looking at the camera and not really smiling. It’s a picture that makes me sad for reasons I can’t put my finger on.

  I quickly find that Whit and I have one thing in common. Neither one of us checks our Facebook account often.