Lincoln’s toes tapped on the sidewalk as he hugged his knees to his chest and he rocked every so slightly side-to-side. Staring at him was all I could do, and had he been looking back at me, I’m sure my scrutiny would have come across as intense, but he wasn’t looking at me, so I doubted he noticed. I didn’t think he was looking at anything at all, actually. He was in his own version of blank over there, it appeared.
“Who has the right to you, Lincoln?” I interrupted after a bit.
Twitching, he shook off the strands of hair along his ears and tucked them up under his hat.
“Lincoln?”
“I don’t know that anyone does anymore.”
That was even sadder than the vet telling me Herb wasn’t at all well. I had no idea what to do with that amount of sadness from the happy boy with the constantly-there smile.
He swallowed. “I think I want it to be you, though.”
There were times when your soul anticipated an answer before your brain did. When it recognized the words before they were spoken, like maybe somehow it caught that in-between moment and read it like déjà vu, deciphering what was about to happen next. A premonition of words. So even if your mind was shocked to hear them, your heart was at ease because they knew they were coming all along.
Maybe that was called hope. Or maybe just wishful thinking. Whatever the case, my soul needed Lincoln to say that, and as senseless as it sounded when it entered my ears and into my head, it already made complete sense in my heart. And that’s all I really cared about.
“I want it to be me, too.”
His hand slipped out from where it crisscrossed around his legs and he dropped it onto my hand so his palm pressed to the back of it, like our hands were spooning. Then he slid his fingers in between each of the spaces of mine and gave them a squeeze.
“Good, because I think you’ve already earned that right.”
I squeezed back. “I’m just not too altogether sure I’m a very good rescuer, Lincoln. Look what happened with Herb.” Maybe it was too soon to say that, but I didn’t care.
“I think the true problem lies in the fact that you’re a crappy listener,” he corrected, laughing quietly. I adored the sound of that laugh. It was infectious joy bundled up and delivered in the most amazing sound possible. It was one of those sounds that you couldn’t help but imitate, just to see if it felt as good doing it as it did hearing it. I tried hard not to giggle along with him as he said, “It’s a little rude to so quickly dismiss the sage advice of the man who tried to tell you that you alone are enough.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But if that’s true—that each one of us is enough all on our own—then you really don’t need me at all now, do you?”
Lincoln lifted his head to look at me, wonder in his eyes. “I’m not one who settles for enough, Eppie.” That quirky smile was there again, making me forget what he could even look like without it clinging to his lips. “You should be aware, I’m all about exceeding life’s expectations to the highest degree.” Suddenly, he swung his arm around my shoulders and leaned into me. “Also, I figure your enough plus my enough has got to equal all sorts of incredible.”
He brought his face close to mine, so close that I couldn’t actually see what his lips were doing, but the way his eyes crinkled made me aware of just how large that smile was.
“That math confuses me,” I teased, just like I had during our texts about his family a while back.
“Not me.” His lips dropped to mine, swift and determined. After a kiss cut way too short, he said, “That’s pretty much the one thing in this life that I’m actually not confused about at all.”
***
I was terrible at guessing games.
“Surprise, our dog is dead?”
“Wrong. Well, not really wrong, I suppose, but not it.”
“Hmm... Surprise, you bought me a puppy?”
“Let’s be clear,” Lincoln began. “This surprise has nothing to do with once pets or future pets. Guess again.”
He was feigning impatience a little too well for my liking. He spun back and forth on the desk chair in his bedroom, the bedroom I’d never been in before, until this night. As should be expected, that reality made me nervous, to be in his room alone with him. Sure, we’d been alone in my room on multiple occasions, but that was my room. I knew that space intimately. But this space? Being here with him was infinitely more intimate.
Lincoln had been spinning in full rotations for a while, but after I’d admitted how I was getting some sort of transfer of motion sickness just by watching him, he’d slowed his full-on spinning down to just small swivels.
“Surprise, your name’s not really Lincoln and you’re actually a government spy trying to extract highly sensitive information from the townspeople of Masonridge about an impending alien attack?”
That statement deserved a full spin. Once he’d made it all 360 degrees around, even his eyes were rolling. “Why is it that something along the lines of ‘your name isn’t really such and such and you work for such and such government agency’ is always the go-to? I mean seriously, anytime anyone in any movie or novel or even a comic book uncovers some sort of hidden truth, it’s all about concealed identities and plots against humanity.” He was still shaking his head. “Sadly, I am just Lincoln and the only plot I’ve been hatching is the one in which I round second with you on that bed that you’re perched upon right now.”
The nausea continued, but not from the spinning. That unabashed admission set free the entire world’s population of monarch butterflies in my belly.
“I’ll give you one more guess.”
I was still too stuck in his last phrase to decipher anything in the present one he uttered.
“Damn, Eppie.” He launched from his chair and grabbed ahold of my wrist, dragging me out the bedroom door and through the hallway. “You’re truly terrible at this.”
We were suddenly standing in front of a closed oak door, the one that belonged to the room where their newest roommate supposedly lived. Lincoln was shaking his head at me—still smiling, of course—and lifted our interlocked hands to the door and knocked on it three times with all of our knuckles together.
When the door swung open, Lincoln, Dan, and Sam all sang out, “Surprise!” in an atrociously out of key chorus.
“I’m confused.”
“And what else is new, sister?” Sam laughed. She plopped down onto a bed that was clothed in Hello Kitty.
“Wait a minute... “
“Yep! Meet the newest roomie!”
“What happened to the pool house?” I asked, still a bit stunned.
“Evidently the storage of filters and chlorine tablets ranks higher than the storage of flesh and blood. I got the boot. Guess eighteen is the magical age in which parental love ceases to endure.”
Lincoln huffed out a laugh as though he were a sputtering horse. “I think you’re a few years off in that calculation.”
But Sam just spoke over his words, hardly hearing, much less acknowledging him. “No skin off my back. The boys had this open room and now all is well.”
“So you live here... With your boyfriend... In this house... With my boyfriend.”
“Oh Eps, isn’t it just perfect? To have all the people you adore under one roof? It’s remarkably convenient, am I right?” She tossed a glance to everyone in the room and we all smiled and nodded our hesitant agreement. At least mine was hesitant. Dan’s look was genuine enough. “We entertained the idea of asking Ol’ Philly to slum it on the pull-out couch in order to really consolidate all of your loved ones, but that felt creepy since he’s a grown man and all. Plus, something about asking a shrink to sleep on a couch felt all kinds of silly.”
“He’s not truly a shrink anymore,” I defended, for no other reason than to change the subject. Sure, I should be overjoyed at the fact that the three people closest to me were under one roof, but all that stood out was the fact that I slept under a completely different one. It felt stupid to be self-pitying so patheticall
y like this, but I couldn’t help it from taking place.
“Whatever.” She waved me off. “Seriously, how awesome is this?”
“Very awesome,” I nodded. Lincoln looked down at me. He knew me well enough to detect the lack of awesome in my tone. “Congratulations, Sam. Truly.”
Her smile was so huge and she was so happy that I had to feel some of that for her. Maybe it was the dead dog or the fact that in one afternoon they’d transformed this house into the happy home that I hadn’t been able to do with my own home for the past ten years, but I didn’t feel one hundred percent great about this. Maybe only fifty, which didn’t feel very great at all.
“Come on.” Lincoln’s head nudged toward the door. He knew I needed an escape.
I followed him out, and once back in his room, I honestly didn’t feel much better.
“You were right.”
I looked up at him, all the way up since we were both standing. “About what?”
“The fact that you hate surprises. You wouldn’t’ve been able to conceal the amount of distaste on your face even if it were covered with a Nacho Libre mask. And we have one of those. Dan went through a weird obsessive Mexican wrestling phase. I could demonstrate if you like.”
“I didn’t hate that surprise.”
“Yes,” he pressed. “You did.”
“No. It’s just that... I don’t know.” I sighed loudly. “Sam gets to be with you all the time now. She gets to wake up and you’re there, and when she goes to sleep you’re just down the hall in the other room.”
“Just to be clear in case there were some outrageously mixed non-existent signals, but I’m not at all interested in Sam. Like, the opposite actually. If there is an opposite for having feelings for someone, then I have those for Sam. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an eclectic gal with a big heart, but I’m oppositely attracted to her.”
“You’re repelled by her.”
“Well jeez, that doesn’t sound very nice, but if that helps, then yes. She repels me.” Lincoln’s fingers were in my hair. How had he become so good at doing that? Knowing how to offer his touch at just the right and appropriate time in the right and appropriate way? “Sam and I are magnetic forces flipped completely apart.”
“I appreciate your overboard assurance, but that’s not what I mean. It’s just that I’m completely jealous. Jealous of the fact that she’s here. Living life with you. On a daily basis.”
“Were you jealous of Dan, too? Because he’s been my roommate for much longer than the thirteen hours Sam has.” His head flicked up to the corner of the ceiling, leading my eyes to follow. “And see that hairy little spider over there? He’s inhabited that same spot for nearly a week. Hasn’t moved a muscle. You should have insane amounts of jealously over that slothful arachnid. He’s seen me naked.”
When I laughed into my shoulder, Lincoln pulled my chin up with his fingers, forcing my eyes to his.
“Honestly, Eppie, no one has ever cared this much about being close to me. I sorta don’t know what to do with it,” he admitted. “And though I’m completely flattered that you are envious of the physical closeness these roommates and bugs share with me, you’ve forgotten one thing.”
“What’s that?”
His words were doors, each one of them opening up another part of him, inviting me in.
“That your heart already lives here.” He picked up my hand and pressed my palm flatly against his chest, directly over his heart. “And you can’t get any closer than that.”
TWENTY-FIVE
I got used to the idea of Sam living with Dan who also lived with Lincoln pretty quickly. It turned out it actually was very convenient to have all three of them residing within the same 1,500 square feet. Our dinners were spent together, most of our free afternoons, too, and even the viewing of a few baseball games were all enjoyed within the comfort of one home.
The part that wasn’t so comfortable was the noises and sounds that echoed throughout that shared living space. Sometimes they’d come from Sam’s room, other times from Dan’s. And on really late nights when neither of them actually made it to their own bedrooms, it pounded against the common wall between Lincoln’s room and the family room like the freight train that traveled the tracks at the edge of town.
Sam was like that, I knew. And realistically, I supposed they’d been dating long enough to warrant that kind of stuff. I mean, it wasn’t like I expected them to wait until they were married for it. Seriously, I didn’t even know how to verbalize what it was they were doing without blushing.
Sex. There. They were having sex.
I couldn’t figure out why I was so embarrassed to actually acknowledge that truth. I think maybe it was that I was embarrassed to acknowledge that Lincoln and I weren’t having it.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. Of course I did. At least I figured that’s what I wanted. I’d never slept with anyone, but these impulses and feelings that tingled through me had to mean that I wanted him that way. I mean, ultimately, that had to have been what my body wanted, right?
And I figured Lincoln wanted that, too. But on more than one occasion he’d cut things short, saying it was late or that he was tired, though nothing about what we were doing made me any kind of tired. He effectively woke up every square inch of my being. He lit me up like a fuse—a fuse that never burned quite long enough to actually detonate. It was all sizzling, no fireworks.
Tonight was one of those non-sex nights for us. Sam and Dan were at it again, and even though it would be audibly obvious to anyone in the neighborhood just what they were doing, Lincoln didn’t acknowledge it at all as he sat at his computer, typing something onto the keyboard with clumsy index fingers. He was a hunt and peck-er, plunking out key after key. I’d been reading Catcher in the Rye, or at least attempting to, but I worried that all I would retain were fragments of story, filled in with inappropriately placed, “Yeah, just like that” and “That feels so good” add-ons. It was like sexual Mad-Libs in my brain.
After twenty or so minutes, giggles and grunts resonated down the hall, followed by Sam’s door shutting with a thud.
Lincoln looked up from his computer screen, the quiet finally surrounding us.
“Well, I’m sure glad that’s finally over,” he said. “I almost felt like I should’ve paid some kind of admission fee for just listening to it.”
I breathed my own cautious sigh of relief. “So I’m not the only one who lost all ability to focus?”
“Eppie, I think that focus during something that graphically loud is an impossible feat.”
“It sorta makes me uncomfortable to actually hear them do that.”
“Yeah.” He stroked his hand through his russet hair and leaned back in the office chair, a half-smile on his face. “Me too.”
That put me at ease, that we were kindredly awkward-feeling together.
“Methinks I need a drink,” he admitted, hands pushing on his knees. “Will root beer suffice?”
“Sounds good,” I nodded, and he scooted out of the room, a playful hop, skip, and jump added to his movements, as would be the expected pattern of walking for someone who just spoke like a leprechaun.
My back was killing me from sitting hunched over on the bed for so long, poring over my homework, so I stole his much more comfy leather chair at his desk and sank into its puffy material, already warmed by his body. I was just about to pick my book back up when my eyes locked in on the computer screen.
More accurately, they locked in on the webpage Lincoln had been browsing.
Even more accurately, they locked in on the title.
Eight-Year-Old Leaps from Bedroom Window,
Deranged Mother Heads to the Slammer, Then Loony Bin
My jaw came perfectly unhinged.
“My mistake. We only have cream soda.” Lincoln appeared in the doorway, two frosted, amber bottles in his grip. Like someone had pulled the plug on his face, all of his features went slack, loose and formless. His gaze landed on the screen. Then h
is hands with the bottles fell to his side, dropping next to his jean-clad thighs, clanging there.
“Why wouldn’t you just ask me?” I whispered, not truly meaning to whisper at all, but my voice had no power to it, no push.
“Eppie.”
Somehow, I found my volume dial and sent it out louder this time, “Why wouldn’t you just ask me?”
He delicately placed the two drinks onto the pine dresser along the wall like the glass in them would shatter unless he acted gingerly like this. I assumed it was to buy time. When he looked down at the floor, back up at the popcorn ceiling, and then down at his untied tennis shoes once more, that was also to buy time, I figured.
I wasn’t buying any time.
In a flustered rush, I yanked my messenger bag from the carpeted floor and tried to shove my paperback into it. Once, twice. Somehow it took three tries before I got it successfully tucked away. Nothing worked the way it should. My lower lip quivered and I bit into it, trying to scold it into submission, but in reality just hurting it so bad that it trembled even more from the unwarranted pain. My eyelids fluttered and tears clung to my eyelashes. Even my knees buckled when I pushed back hard from the desk and threw the strap of my bag over my shoulder.
Though he was standing in the doorway—the ultimate barricade—I shoved forcefully past. “I would have told you if you just asked me, Lincoln.”
He whirled around. “Eppie. Stop.”
Footsteps matching my quick heart rate, I didn’t turn around to verify that he was chasing my movements out of the house, because I clearly knew he would follow me, that I wouldn’t be able to shake him. There were so many steps to the sidewalk, and they were all slick with the rainwater that pummeled from the sky so I stumbled down every single one like I’d just learned to walk. Or maybe more like I was drunk. Or maybe just like I’d been heartbroken by a boy I’d been giving my hope to.
“Eppie!”
In any other time I would’ve thought this was inherently romantic, having someone call out your name in the pouring rain, running after you the way they do in movies.
Love Like Crazy Page 16