Did I Mention I Love You?

by Estelle Maskame

  “Good,” I say.

  There’s an abrupt screech as Tyler pushes his chair away from the table and gets to his feet. He shakes his head at the food and scrunches up his face in disdain. “I can’t sit here. I’m heading back upstairs.”

  Ella’s smile fades from her face within a nanosecond, her hands resting on Dad’s broad shoulders. “But yours is just comin—”

  “I’ve got some stuff to do,” he cuts in as he advances toward the hall without giving me a second glance. “I’ll heat it up later.”

  Ella heaves a sigh and moves back over to the cooker to turn down the heat. “Well, that’s two kids down,” she murmurs.

  Chase obviously likes the idea of there being fewer people at the table, because he grins and yells, “More ribs for me!”

  Dinner ends up feeling pretty weird with just the four of us. Chase and I make small talk while Dad and Ella share more elaborate summaries of their days. When they’re not looking, I offer Chase a rib or two.

  And dinner as a whole runs relatively smoothly until the phone rings. We think nothing of it until Dad rushes back into the kitchen. He tosses the wireless phone onto the counter and grabs his keys. “That was Grace,” he explains quickly, his wide eyes on Ella as she warily stands. “Jamie’s fallen on his wrist. She says it could be broken. We better go.”

  Ella’s face distorts as she presses a limp hand to her forehead. “Not this all over again!”

  “He’ll be fine,” Dad tells her firmly. “Let’s go get him.”

  Ella rushes around the kitchen to check that everything is switched off, because she can’t have the house catching on fire while she’s gone, and then she pauses at the archway to the hall. She strains her neck around to face me. “Can you and Tyler please stay here and keep an eye on Chase?”

  I quickly nod as I stand up. “Go.”

  She offers me a thankful smile before fleeing out of the house and into the car with Dad. As the engine fades away into nothing, the only noise I hear is Chase slurping the barbecue sauce off his plate.

  I begin gathering all of the dishes into a pile as he finishes eating. “Good ribs, huh?”

  “Amazing ribs,” he corrects. He tosses the final bone onto his plate and smiles. “Mmm.”

  Rolling my eyes, I reach for his plate and add it to the stack before carefully carrying them over to the dishwasher. I almost throw the bones into the garbage disposal before noticing my mistake and dumping them in the trash instead. “So does Jamie break his wrist often or something?”

  “No,” Chase says. He’s suddenly by my side, opening up the dishwasher for me and beginning to place all the used cutlery inside. “Tyler does.”

  “Oh man,” I say, and then I smile to myself. “I thought he was tougher than that.”

  With Chase’s help, we get the kitchen cleaned up in the space of ten minutes, and then he heads into the living room to watch TV while I ensure the front door is locked. Now that Tyler and I are close to being alone in the house, I decide it’s the perfect time to try to talk to him again. I can’t tell if he’s mad at me or mad at himself, but either way he’s pretty furious, and I prefer to see him in a good mood.

  He’s sitting on the edge of his bed when I push open the door to his room. His head is low and his hands are interlocked in front of him, his room silent.

  “We’re watching Chase,” I say quietly, to let him know that I’m there. “Jamie’s maybe broken his wrist.”

  Immediately his eyes flash up to meet mine, and suddenly he’s getting to his feet. There’s panic on his face. “What happened? Where is he? Who?”

  I’m a little taken aback by his outburst, and his questions only confuse me. “What?”

  He clears his throat. “I mean, how?”

  “I think he fell on it,” I tell him. He looks like he might pass out, so I decide to lighten the mood and say, “I heard you’ve broken yours, tough guy,” as I wiggle my eyebrows at him. But it completely backfires.

  His eyes dilate with a mixture of anger and shock at my joke. “Who told you that?”

  “Um, Chase.” His sudden outrage surprises me, so I look into his eyes to get a clue to why he’s so mad. I can’t quite figure him out. “What’s wrong?”

  He drops his eyes to the floor and back up again. He takes a step toward me. “What else did the kid tell you?”

  “Nothing,” I whisper as his eyes pierce mine.

  Another step. “Are you sure?”

  “Stop freaking out.” He ignores me, not reacting as his fierce eyes scan my body. “I’m sure,” I quickly add.

  “You know what? I can’t deal with this,” he snaps. Shaking his head and breaking our eye contact, he turns away from me and heads for his bathroom. “I can’t deal with you and I can’t deal with Tiffani. I can’t deal with your dumb questions and I can’t deal with Tiffani’s whining. I can’t deal with any of it right now.” As though he’s out of breath, he exhales rapidly as he grabs onto the edge of the sink and stares at the faucet.

  “You’re getting so worked up,” I say as I approach him from behind, pushing open the door farther so I can stand inside the small bathroom with him.

  “Watch the door,” he mutters. “The lock is fucked.”

  It sounds like he’s on the verge of tearing the sink off the wall, so I gently place a hand on his arm in an effort to calm him down. But he only flinches and steps away from me.

  “I need a hit,” he hisses, his eyes flashing to the cabinet above. He flings open the mirrored door and reaches up to the top shelf, his hand grabbing a wad of cash. I notice the collection of prescription pills and tablets in bottles carelessly scattered along the shelves. But that’s not what I care about right now.

  Tyler slams the cabinet door shut again and turns around, but I quickly step in front of him and bump into his chest, blocking the door. “Don’t even think about it,” I warn through gritted teeth.

  “Eden,” Tyler says, leaning toward me as his wet lips hover by my cheek, his breath cool against my skin. “I. Need. A. Hit. Right. Now.”

  I glance down at the cash clutched tightly in his hand as I take a step back. My eyes flash back up to lock with his. “Because coke is totally going to fix everything, right?”

  “Eden,” he says again, his voice hoarse. “Move your cute ass out of my way before you really piss me off. I gotta meet Declan.”

  “I’m not letting you,” I snap. Now I’m furious. Of course he has to resort to drugs. It’s just so typical and just so pathetic of him. What is he thinking? I don’t want to deal with something, so let’s fix it by ruining my life? Drugs are for stalling.

  Tyler slams his palm flat against the wall by my ear. “It’s not fucking up to you!”

  But what he doesn’t know is that it is up to me whether he goes or not, because he inadvertently told me how to stop him. So as he presses his lips together and stares at me, I reach over for the edge of the door, fumbling before I finally get hold of it. And before Tyler can even notice what I’m doing, I swing the door closed, spinning around and shoving my weight against it until it stiffly clicks into place.

  The fucked-up lock, as Tyler called it, just became my best friend.

  Chapter 24

  The small bathroom falls into a tense silence. My heart is beating fast and hard. Under the fluorescent lighting, I can clearly see the range of emotions in Tyler’s green eyes. There’s a hint of surprise hidden in the outrage.

  “Are you kidding me?” He glances around the room as if looking for a window that’s never existed, like if he stares at the four walls long enough an exit will suddenly appear. But there’s exactly that: four walls and a locked door.

  “No,” I say, feeling impressed with myself for making a split-second decision, and making the right one. The right decision was to prevent Tyler from leaving. I don’t even mind that I’ve dragged myself into this claustrophobic complication with him and that we might be locked in here for hours. Perhaps the only way to unlock this door is to take it o
ff the hinges or ram it down. Perhaps we might have to wait it out until morning when the neighborhood handyman can come to our rescue. Perhaps I just don’t care.

  Tyler, on the other hand, does care. Getting out is his only concern, and the locked door is the one thing that’s in his way. He steps around me, his shoulder brushing mine as he nudges me to the side. His long fingers wrap themselves around the handle of the door and he vigorously shakes it, willing the lock to release itself, but his efforts achieve nothing.

  “Just give up,” I say as I study the way the veins in his arms tense as he yanks at the handle before finally accepting the fact that tonight he will not be meeting Declan Portwood.

  He places both hands on the back of his neck before straining to face the ceiling, letting out several slow breaths as he attempts to calm down. I like the way he sighs, the way his eyes shut for a moment as his shoulders and chest rise and drop back down, sinking low as the oxygen leaves his body. And when he has gathered his thoughts, he tilts his face down and turns to fix with me with an indignant, aggravated look.

  “I’m sorry that I actually care,” I tell him. He’s awaiting an explanation and perhaps a real apology, but he’s not going to get either. “You’re just going to have to find another way to distract yourself. An alternative. One that won’t kill you.”

  He glances around the room again, still hoping to discover a way out, but only ends up meeting his own eyes in the reflection of the cabinet mirror. He can’t look at himself for long, at the fire within the depths of his eyes, and soon he’s staring at the floor. “You were becoming my distraction,” he mutters, but his voice is not as gruff as it was several minutes ago. “But apparently I can’t have you.”

  I don’t know how to reply to him. Words rise in my throat, but I can’t speak. Instead, I take a deep breath, and when I finally form a reply, my tone is gentle and quiet, like we’re at risk of being overheard, even though we’re not. “Why am I a distraction?”

  Tyler looks up then. He stares back at me with apprehension, his head tilting to the side as though he has to remind himself what the answer is. But eventually he parts his lips to speak and carefully murmurs, “Because you make things a little easier. Because I get to focus on you instead of everything else.”

  I observe the curl of his lips as the words roll slowly off his tongue. They paralyze me, my body frozen in my spot by the shower, and it hits me just how real all of this is. “Then don’t stop,” I say with a slight tremble in my voice. I take a cautious step toward him, not quite sure where I’m going with this. It just feels right.

  He’s still staring back at me, his eyes still locked with mine, but he’s blinking fast and breathing heavier and I know that he still wants one thing and one thing only. I reach up to touch his jaw, and his skin is burning hot as the fire in his eyes.

  “Focus on me,” I whisper.

  “Then distract me,” he orders. He lifts his hand, delicately reaches for my fingers on his jaw, and moves my hand away. I flinch at the coldness of his hands in contrast to the warmth of his face. Two complete opposites. Like him and me.

  “We can talk,” I say. The atmosphere around us has shifted from tense to calm, loud to quiet, and I almost whisper for fear of breaking the comforting stillness. “We’ve never once just talked.”

  “Okay. Let’s talk,” he says. Carefully stepping around me, he presses his back to the shower door and slides down to the floor. He extends his legs and heaves a sigh, his head hung low, eyes closed. I wonder what he’s thinking about. Me?

  “Can we talk about Tiffani?” I ask this question with extreme caution, diving into the complicated topic as gently as I can. “Calmly this time.”

  The mere mention of her name creates tension, and it forces Tyler to look at me, as though he’s trying to figure out if I seriously just brought her up. I see an odd flash in his eyes, but then he glances away. “Fine,” he says through gritted teeth.

  I step over his legs and drop down onto the cold tiles, pressing my back against the door, pulling my knees up to my chest and hugging them to my body. “Why won’t you break up with her? You don’t even like her. You said so yourself.”

  Tyler trains his eyes on me. They slowly fall to my lips, to my hands wrapped around my knees, and then return to mirror my gaze once more. I wonder if he’s considering whether to give me an honest answer or if he’s just trying to buy time while he invents a lie. “I can’t break up with her.”

  “But why?” His reply only irritates me more. Unless she’s holding him at knifepoint, I see no reason he can’t just end the useless relationship that he clearly cares little to nothing about.

  Tyler shakes his head and places a hand on his face, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger before groaning loudly. “Tiffani’s really good at acting like she’s the nicest girl around. But she’s not. The second you do something wrong to her, she turns into a psychopath. She knows too much about me. I can’t risk it. At least not right now.”

  “Psychopath?” I lift my head and look at him, perplexed. “What does she know?”

  “It’s…” His words taper off, and he looks uncomfortable, almost pained. He places his palms flat on the tiles by his side. “Okay. Example: back in January, she heard I’d been hanging out with this girl during lunch period every Tuesday, which I totally hadn’t, and she went crazy. I slaved over an essay for English lit for two weeks straight, because I had to get my grades up, and she told my teacher that she wrote it. My entire grade dropped, and I got suspended for cheating, which is so dumb. The same day she used her mom’s email to email my mom, telling her that she was concerned for my well-being because I was smoking joints in the school basement. That part is true, and Tiffani’s the only one who knew. Mom didn’t talk to me for almost a month. I would have dumped Tiffani back then, but she made it clear that I shouldn’t ever go there. So I never have. Breaking up isn’t an option. There are so many more things she can do, because she has the upper hand in all of this.”

  There’s a brief silence, and then I ask, “What else does she know, Tyler?” I’m trying to absorb his words, attempting to make sense of them. I try to imagine Tiffani doing those things, and at first I can’t, but then I remember the look in her eyes this morning when she told me she knew I was lying. She terrified me. Somehow, I believe Tyler. She definitely has the potential to do those things.

  Tyler isn’t quite meeting my eyes. “Do you remember the first day of summer?”

  The sudden change in topic, from Tiffani’s controlling nature to the start of the summer, takes me by surprise. “Yeah. Dad was annoying and the barbecue sucked and you rudely stormed into it.”

  “Yeah, that.” I’m waiting for him to laugh. He doesn’t. In fact, he just looks even more uncomfortable than he already was. “I was super pissed off.”

  “Why?” I remember eavesdropping on his argument with Ella that night, but I don’t remember them discussing why he was mad in the first place. He looked furious when he pulled up outside the house.

  There’s another silent pause. “I was mad at Tiffani,” he finally admits. By now he’s not even looking at me. He’s just staring at the tiled flooring. “I’ve been thinking about getting involved in something for a while, and she found out that night,” he explains, but his voice is quiet and a little raspy, and I realize he’s not going to tell me what it is he’s thinking about getting involved in. I can tell it isn’t something he can be proud of. “She said she won’t tell anyone as long as I stay with her until graduation. That’s why I was sucking up to her for a while at the start of the summer. You know, in American Apparel and stuff…” His cheeks flush with color in sheer embarrassment of having to talk about it, but I don’t mind. I’m just glad he’s being honest with me. “As long as she’s happy and I don’t break up with her, she won’t tell, because that’s what she does, Eden. She likes to blackmail people into doing what she wants, so that she can look cool and stay on top of the rest of us.” He exhales and shakes his hea
d. “She told me she used to get bullied when she was younger, so I guess when she started at our school, after she moved here with her mom after the divorce, she wanted to make sure no one stepped over her. She wants to be better than everyone, cooler than them all. Having me by her side helps boost her ego. That’s why I’m stuck in this mess.” When he stops talking, he groans. “I hate this.”

  “Wow,” I say. It’s all I can muster up right now. Tyler’s been right all along. He really doesn’t want to be with her, and he’s not just saying that to make me feel better. He is genuinely stuck in a complicated situation, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve made it worse for him. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I’m not breaking up with her,” he says gently, finally glancing back up to look at me. He looks sad. It makes me feel sorry for him, because I honestly don’t know what advice to give him. “Not yet, at least. I can’t risk it right now.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” The floor is cold against my skin, but I try to ignore it, focusing my attention on the person across from me as I try my hardest to understand him.

  Tyler fixes me with a stern stare. “I just don’t want to make anyone suspicious,” he tells me.

  “Suspicious about what?”

  “Us,” he says firmly. With another sigh, he unfolds his arms and runs a hand back through his hair, tugging on the ends, and I notice the familiarity of the action. It’s something he does unconsciously, a sign of his anger or distress, something that offers him some comfort for a split second. “We need to just act normal for now until we figure this out. That’s another reason I can’t break up with her. People would wonder why. So for now, she has to stay in the picture, because Tiffani is my normality.”

  “But it’s wrong to do this to her,” I say quietly. I envision her tear-streaked face again this morning as she sobbed uncontrollably against her comforter, releasing the brunt of the hurt she felt. We inflicted that upon her, and although it feels so long ago, it’s only been a matter of hours. Maybe she’s still distraught, and right now Tyler and I are hovering on the edge of a dangerous line that should not be crossed. Tyler might be in a relationship with Tiffani that he can’t get out of and she might have forced him into that, but it doesn’t give us the right to cheat.