Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by Katherine Webber

  I’m so stunned that for a second, I don’t respond, but then I start kissing him back. Maybe this time we can treat each other better; know each other better.

  He pulls back and looks in the back seat. “I thought we could maybe pick up where we left off,” he says. “You know, for old times’ sake.”

  CHAPTER 56

  He pulls me against him, and then his lips are wet on my jaw, on my neck, on my collarbone. He runs his hand along the curves of my body. “I forgot how great your ass is,” he says.

  I flinch at his words and his touch.

  I remind myself that this is Seth. Seth Rogers. He’s happy and celebrating about UCLA. I helped him with that. He needs me. Everything is back the way it used to be. And I’m in control again.

  But.

  He feels like a stranger. It feels like when I kissed that guy in Morongo.

  And I don’t like it.

  I tell myself that I can do this, I can handle it, I can be in control. And suddenly, he is taking my shirt off, and my jeans, eyes not on my face, eyes on my body, eyes so big that they take up his whole face except for his mouth because his mouth is on me too. It’s like he’s nothing but eyes and mouth and hands.

  And something else, something in his boxers, because somehow between taking off my shirt and us lying down in the back seat, he’s also stripped down to his boxers.

  There is something urgent about the way he’s kissing me. Something desperate. I feel like he’s going to tear my skin off with his fingers, the way he’s pawing at me. The way he’s clawing at me, it’s like he wants to devour me. Like he wants to own me.

  I’m in charge, I’m in charge, I tell myself. It’s Seth. I’m always in charge with us. That is how it works. But it shouldn’t be about power.

  I try to straighten and push back, but he’s on me like a leech, like he’s trying to suck out my soul through my lips. This isn’t how people kiss. Or maybe this is how a person kisses when they have wanted something for so long and they are finally getting what they want. But it doesn’t feel like I’m in a car with a person. It feels like I’m trapped in the car with a fox or a raccoon, something with sharp teeth and claws. Something that looked kind of cuddly before but has turned into something else entirely.

  More pawing. More clawing.

  And then. “Stop, Seth,” I say, but it’s like he doesn’t hear me, like he doesn’t speak English. Like he doesn’t speak human.

  He is on top of me, writhing, and I’m under him, and I never noticed how heavy he was until this moment, until he won’t get off of me.

  His hip bones are digging into my own. I’m sure I can hear our bones grinding against each other, like teeth gnashing. He is the top of the jaw and I am the bottom and we are gnashing gnawing, and this was not how I ever wanted this to be, not how I imagined it would be, especially not with Seth.

  He finally takes a breath, and it is then that I shove him, hard as I can. I shove him off, and then I reach up behind my head and open the car door and I slip out, practically going head first, not caring that I’m barefoot and only in my bra and silk underwear. Flimsy as it is, tonight it feels like my armor.

  The sand is rough under my feet. The windows of the Jeep are so fogged up that I can’t see Seth. When he comes out of the car, he’s wearing his jeans and T-shirt. He’s taken the time to transform back into a human.

  “What was that?” he says, eyes searching. “What happened in there?”

  “Seth—” I say, but he slams the car door before I can finish the sentence. “I don’t have the keys!” I say, hugging my arms around my trembling body. I don’t feel cold, but I’m covered in goosebumps.

  “Oh, shit,” he says, looking at the car.

  “You shouldn’t have slammed the door,” I say.

  “You shouldn’t have … done whatever the hell you did in there.”

  “Whatever the hell I did? What about whatever the hell you did? I said stop, Seth.”

  He blinks, and every time his eyelids flutter closed, and open back up again, he is more and more human. More the Seth that I used to know.

  “You did?” There is genuine confusion in his voice, undercut by something else that I can’t place.

  “Yes! Why do you think I shoved you?”

  “I thought you were into it…” he says, hands in his pockets, eyes on the moon. “And it isn’t like we were, you know, actually…”

  “It doesn’t matter what we were actually doing! I said stop!”

  “You seemed into it at first,” he mutters, staring at his feet. “I mean, you were kissing me back.”

  “Yeah, at first. Sort of. But then I wasn’t.”

  “Well, that isn’t very fair, is it? How am I supposed to know when you aren’t into it?”

  “When I say stop!” I shout, so loud that my words bounce up into the night sky and back down to our feet and shatter in pieces all around us.

  He nods. “All right,” he says. But it doesn’t sound like he is all right with it. “But it’s me,” he goes on. Like because of what was once between us, because I’d been wanting him back, I now owe him more than I want to give him.

  We glare at each other for a minute.

  “Do you have any service?” I finally ask.

  “My phone is in the car.”

  “Mine too,” I say.

  “We’re such idiots.”

  “You’re an idiot. You are the one who closed the door.”

  “You are the one who got out in the first place.”

  “You are the one who made me get out.”

  A beat. “I’m sorry, Reiko,” he says. “I’m really sorry.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. And … I should have stopped when you said stop.”

  I rub my arms. I’m starting to feel the chill now. I don’t answer because I don’t know what the proper response is when your ex-boyfriend – who you thought you wanted to get back with – has to apologize for getting too aggressive with you in the back of a car. Seth broke my heart, and I’m wondering now if he broke my sanity a bit too.

  “Are you cold?” he says.

  “I’m not warm.”

  “Here,” he says, taking his T-shirt off and handing it to me. “Put this on.” Something about the way he does it makes me feel dumb, like it is my fault I’m standing out in the desert in my bra and underwear. Even though all of this − us being locked out of my car, him turning feral, him not listening to me, him not getting off of me, me pushing him − is his fault. And I know that. Still, I take the shirt.

  Because it’s cold tonight, even in the desert.

  We end up breaking the driver’s side window with a rock. I drive him back to his place, even though part of me wants to leave him out in the desert to fend for himself.

  “Reiko,” he says, as we pull up in front of his trailer where I’ve dropped him off countless times. “I’m sorry. I don’t know who that guy was.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I don’t know who he was either.” And as I stare at Seth, I wonder if I ever knew who he was.

  “Maybe we can go climbing tomorrow, like actually climbing?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so. But I’m sure I’ll see you around at school.”

  For a second, I think he’s going to say something else, but then he just nods. “Yeah, I’ll see you.”

  And as I pull away from his place, I know it’s the last time I’ll drive out here. But that doesn’t make me sad. I don’t need his goodbyes, or his apologies, or his well wishes.

  I don’t need anything from him.

  I don’t know why I ever thought I did.

  I don’t tell my parents what happened between me and Seth, because I don’t have the words. And even if I did want to talk about it, it isn’t the kind of thing I’d want to tell my parents. To explain the broken window, I tell them I think someone was trying to break into my car.

  “Strange,” says my dad early the next morning, “that they didn’t take anything.”
/>
  What’s stranger is that there isn’t any glass on the pavement, but nobody seems to notice that.

  I climb into bed, turn off my phone, and ignore everyone, even Mika.

  And I sleep.

  CHAPTER 57

  There is a persistent knocking at my locked door.

  I open my eyes, wincing in the bright light. The knocking has turned into more of a hammering. I stumble toward my door, and yank it open, expecting to see Dre on the other side. Or maybe my mom.

  Not my little brother, wearing a leather jacket, with his hair styled, guitar case slung across his back, glaring at me.

  “Where were you?” he says.

  “What?” I rub my eyes.

  “My audition? The one I’ve been practicing for non-stop for months?”

  “Oh no, Koji, was that today?”

  “Yes, it was today! And you missed it!” His voice cracks.

  “I’m so sorry, Koji, I really am.”

  “I needed you,” he says, and he sounds impossibly young.

  “I’ll make it up to you. I promise. How did it go?”

  “You weren’t there. I asked you to be there. I felt so stupid asking you, telling you about it, and then you didn’t even show up. You don’t even care. All you care about is yourself and what is going on with you.”

  “Koji, that isn’t true. I’m sorry. I just…” I can’t say that someone I trusted broke my trust again, that someone I thought I knew turned out to be someone different. I can’t put into words what happened with Seth and even if I could, I don’t want to tell my little brother that.

  But then Koji barrels on. “I should have known you were never going to go. And I know why.”

  “Koj, what are you talking about?”

  “You would have been there for…” And he stops just short of saying Mika’s name. “I’m still here, you know. Really here.” And it stings. And suddenly, Mika and Seth are all wrapped up together in a way I never meant for them to be and Koji is right, he’s here. He’s here.

  “Koj, honestly, it was a mistake.”

  “Everyone thinks that I don’t miss her because I was too little, but of course I do. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to have my own life! I can do music too and I can go to the beach. It isn’t fair, Reiko. It isn’t fair.”

  I want to say that it isn’t about Mika, that something else happened, but everything is always about Mika with me, and Koji knows it.

  I don’t know when he started to cry, but he is and I go toward him and I hug my little brother as he cries. He’s my height now. I don’t know when that happened.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” I whisper.

  “No, you won’t,” he says, pulling away from me. “You’ve never been there for me. I never ask you for anything. This was the one thing. And you couldn’t even show up.”

  “Koji, please, I’ll make it up to you. I swear.”

  He rubs his nose on the back of his hand and for a moment looks years younger. Then he looks up at me, defiantly.

  “It’s fine,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Koji, seriously. I will. Just … let me figure something out.”

  He shrugs. “If you say so.”

  “I will.”

  And I know something has to change, but I don’t know how to do it.

  The window is fixed the next day, but Seth and I can’t be. And I don’t want us to be.

  When I turn my phone back on, I’ve got texts from him, even voicemails. He’s finally chasing me again, wanting me again, but it isn’t like how I thought it would be. He isn’t who I thought he was. He’s changed. Or maybe he was always like that and I saw what I wanted to see, like he did with me.

  And I find myself weeding him out of my heart like you would weed an untended garden. I didn’t realize I’d let him grow so rampantly unchecked in there. I weed until my heart is recognizable again. Until it is completely my own again, with only one big crack down the middle – but that isn’t from Seth.

  I thought he had broken my heart, but now I know it’s been broken for years, and that is why it didn’t take much for him to make it crumble.

  It’s easy to break an already broken heart.

  CHAPTER 58

  When I get home from school the following Tuesday and check the mail, there is a thin envelope with my name on it. The stamps are from Japan. The letter is in Japanese and it takes me a moment to understand.

  It’s a rejection letter.

  I didn’t get in.

  I didn’t get into UCLA.

  And I didn’t get into the University of Tokyo.

  “Oh, well,” I say quietly to myself. “I didn’t want to go anyway.” But it’s not true. I’ve been looking at the scrapbook more and more.

  I don’t know how I’m going to tell my dad. He’s going to be crushed.

  I wait until after dinner that night.

  “Hey, Dad, want to play chess?” I ask, wanting to get him alone. I can’t tell him in front of my mom, since she never even knew I applied. It would break her heart to know I’d applied without telling her, and then disappoint her to know that I hadn’t gotten in.

  “Sure!” he says, beaming at me. “It’s been a while.” He doesn’t know how often I play with Mika.

  We go into his study and he gets out his old marble set. The figures are carved like Japanese Samurai.

  I take a deep breath. “I didn’t get in.”

  He looks up at me, his eyes kind. “I know, sweetie. You told us.”

  “No, not just UCLA,” I say, my voice cracking. “I didn’t get into the University of Tokyo.” I stare very hard at the chessboard. Just one more thing I didn’t do, couldn’t do, that Mika would have.

  “Oh,” says my dad, as I move my knight. I wait for him to say what he said about UCLA, that they are all idiots. Wait for him to reassure me.

  “Well, it is very competitive,” he says.

  I blink.

  “And they are very … traditional,” he goes on. “But that’s a shame.” Then he does this weird fake laugh. “Maybe Koji will get in.”

  I suddenly realize how much it meant to him for one of us to go.

  “I’m sorry,” he says and then all his words come out at once, as if he’s just realized what he should have been saying. “I don’t know what they were thinking. Rejecting you! My daughter! It’s madness, I tell you, absolute madness. Must have gotten stricter from when I went.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “You’ll get in somewhere wonderful. Somewhere great.” And I don’t know if it is my imagination, but he doesn’t sound as confident as he did the last time he told me that.

  I’m starting to wonder if I’ll get in anywhere at all.

  He moves his bishop and looks at me. “Reiko, is everything OK? You’ve not been yourself this year.” He gives me a sad smile. “Don’t deny it − your mother and I notice. But we thought letting you do what you need to do is best. But now I don’t know.”

  “I miss Mika,” I say, the whisper slipping out like a leaf falling, inevitable and fragile.

  If I’d said Mika’s name to my mom, it would have been like dropping a bomb, but my dad just sighs deeply, like he’s been waiting to let out that breath for ever.

  “I know, Reiko. I know.” He reaches across the chessboard and takes my hand. “We miss her too.” He takes a long breath. “But you can’t blame what happened for everything that has happened since then. And” − he squeezes my hand − “you can’t blame yourself.”

  I squeeze his hand back.

  “She’d be so proud of you, Reiko. I’m so proud of you.” And then: “But I think she’d want you to talk about her. And I think she’d want you to live the very best life you could.”

  I’ve been trying, I want to say. I’ve been trying so hard.

  But.

  I don’t know who I’ve been living for.

  Mika knows something is wrong, but she doesn’t ask me about it. Instead, she flutters around, rubbing my sh
oulder, playing with my hair. I wonder if she knows I talked about her for the first time in years with our dad. I look at her, look through her.

  I wish I could tell her about Seth and the college rejections and about missing Koji’s audition. I wish she was here-here, big-sister-here, instead of here like this. This is the kind of thing I want to tell nineteen-year-old her. A Mika who is older and wiser than me and who would have the kind of advice and the kind of comfort I need.

  Fourteen-year-old her isn’t much help. But I only have myself to blame that this is the version I have of her. And that makes my heart ache.

  She senses that I need something more than she can give me. “I think you should call Andrea,” she says.

  “Really?” I’m surprised because usually Mika wants it to be just us.

  “Of course,” she says. “I don’t think I can help you right now, and Dre can.” She smiles at me. “I love you, Reiko.”

  So I do what my sister thinks is best, and call Dre.

  CHAPTER 59

  I tell Dre almost everything

  I tell her about not getting into the University of Tokyo.

  I tell her about letting Koji down.

  And I tell her I saw Seth, and it didn’t go well. I don’t elaborate.

  “Oh, babe, I’m sorry,” she says. And then after a long pause, she adds, “You know this weekend is the Beach Band Bash?”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “It’s this big jam session down in Oceanside. Tori’s boyfriend is one of the organizers. I bet he could get Koji on the line-up. You know, to make up for you missing his audition.”

  “Wait, what? Really? That would be amazing!” Then her words sink in. “It’s … at the beach?”

  “Kind of in the name, Rei-Rei.”

  I think about what Koji said to me, about not making his music a thing, not making the ocean a thing.

  I close my eyes.

  I want to make it up to him.

  And this? Celebrating his music on the beach?

  It’s the perfect way.

  “That sounds great. If Tori’s boyfriend really can do that.”