Did I Mention I Love You?

by Estelle Maskame

  “Nooooo!” Rachael protests. “Stay with us!”

  “I need to keep an eye on him after what happened last year,” she says with a shake of her head.

  I narrow my eyes at her, my laces still tangled around my fingers, and I blow some hair out of my face. The evening sun is scorching. “What happened last year?”

  Tiffani only glances sideways at me with an annoyed and disapproving look in her eyes. “Eden, please stop waving those things around.” She reaches for my shoes and pulls them away from me, pulling a face at the lyrics written along the side before sighing and handing them back to me. “You look stupid, so try and act a little normal. Now have fun, you two.”

  Rachael gives me a drunken shrug as Tiffani elbows her way out of the crowd. She’s out of breath and so am I.

  “What happened last year?” I ask again once my breathing is restored. Rachael’s outline is slightly blurred, so I squint at her in order to see her better, but it doesn’t help. My body feels like it’s rolling from one side to the other, like the ocean.

  “Tyler took some sketchy stuff,” she says quietly into my ear as she leans in, careful that no one hears us, even though everyone is too busy partying, “and then he passed out and we all thought he died, but then he had a seizure and we were like, ‘Oh shit, he’s not dead,’ and yeah. We all dragged him back to Tiffani’s place and she cried all night about how he made her look stupid in front of everyone. She locked herself in her bathroom and wouldn’t come out, so the rest of us stayed over to make sure he was okay and he ended up being totally fine. It was super scary at the time, and now Tiffani’s paranoid that he’ll do something like that again.” She’s out of breath again by the time she stops talking and so she takes a dramatic gulp of air and then exhales.

  I know for a fact that if I were sober, I’d be concerned and I’d probably go and look for Tyler myself, but I’m too drunk to do any of that right now. I might also be mad at Tiffani for caring more about her reputation than Tyler’s life, but I just pull a face and return to swaying, and eventually Rachael does too.

  The thing about being drunk is that you seem to lose not only your senses but also track of time. It feels like it takes only ten minutes for me and Rachael to force our way to the front of the stage, but when I look up and see the darkening sky, I realize much more time must have gone by. I’m sweating by now, and when I look to my right, I realize I’m suddenly alone. Rachael has disappeared.

  “Oh,” I say. A laugh escapes my lips, and I turn around and begin to dance my way out of the crowd, feeling slightly claustrophobic now. People are looking down on me with odd expressions. It’s so obvious that I’m half a decade away from being old enough to be here.

  Away from the stage, people are milling around on the sand, some socializing and others trying their hardest to pick up girls. The crowd of people is thinner back here, so I stop and take a moment to breathe. I don’t feel as energetic anymore, and the booze high that I seemed to be on is wearing off as the night goes on, but I’m still past tipsy and I’m still enjoying every second of it. A fight breaks out near me, and the security guards come bounding over, barking demands and breaking up the scuffle, dragging the two troublemakers away from the event.

  I think that’s when it hits me that I’m alone. Alone, and still slightly drunk. In that split second, a flood of panic drowns my body and I instantly reach into the pocket of my sweater to fetch my phone. There’s only one problem. It’s not there.

  I check my other pocket, and then I check my bra, and then I check my shoes. No phone, and no cash either. Everything is gone. I don’t know if everything has fallen out of my pockets and is now buried six feet under the sand, or if I’ve been robbed. Either way, I have no means of calling anyone. Now, just like everything else, if I were sober, I would be smart enough to realize that it’s not the end of the world, that the house is only a forty-minute walk away. But I’m not sober and so it is the end of the world.

  Tears well in my eyes and I try to blink them away, but my lips begin to quiver and soon they’re rolling down my cheeks. I pull my sweater around me and stare at the sand. I’m scared people notice me crying here like the dumbass sixteen-year-old that I am. I’m too young to be out here drunk and alone and mugged.

  “Damn it, Eden,” a voice mutters, and the warmness and familiarity makes me stop weeping. I glance up through tear-blurred eyes to find Tyler approaching me.

  “Tiffani is looking for you,” I sniff. I pull the sleeves of my sweater over my hands and dab at my eyes, careful not to smudge my mascara any more than I already have. “Your girlfriend.”

  “What the hell are you crying for?” He ignores my words, steps directly in front of me, and lowers his head, looking up at me from beneath his long eyelashes. The emerald in his eyes reminds me of seaweed.

  “Everyone left,” I tell him. My eyes are starting to sting and swell up. I sway to the right. “Tiffani, Meghan, Rachael… My phone’s gone.”

  Tyler grasps my arm and steadies me, but he also looks me up and down. “How drunk are you?”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Not anymore.” He presses his lips together as he thinks for a moment. Leaning forward, he untangles the laces of my shoes from around my fingers and then drops my Chucks to the sand. “Put them back on. There’s trash everywhere.”

  When I tear my eyes away from him and glance down, I notice that he’s right. The beach is littered with food packaging and crushed soda cans and lighters. I’ve been dancing on top of all this crap, I think. Quickly, I slip on my shoes, and the sand inside them feels uncomfortable again. But I feel safe now that Tyler is here, so I grin at him despite my blotchy makeup.

  “Your dad is going to kill you,” he mutters, but not exactly to me. He heaves a sigh as he scratches the top of his head, trying to figure out what to do.

  I don’t intentionally set out to make it difficult for him, but I’m feeling recharged and ready to have fun again, so I twirl away from him. I come to a stop ten feet away and turn back to face him with a playful smirk on my lips. His eyes narrow with concern as he watches, waits. People keep walking through the gap between us, but the moment it’s clear I throw myself onto the ground and forward roll my way back to him. It doesn’t work too well. I end up on my side, my legs tangled around each other, my shoulder possibly dislocated. I hear people around me laughing.

  “Get off the ground,” Tyler orders. I feel him grab my body and yank me upright. “What did I just tell you about the trash?”

  “I loooove this beach,” I drawl slowly. My head feels heavy and I topple to the left, but Tyler quickly catches me and holds me upright by my shoulders. “I’m going to come back next summer just for this party!”

  “Are you coming back next summer?” He looks down at me with a solemn expression and urgency in his voice, and in that split second, it’s like all the alcohol in my bloodstream suddenly evaporates.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It depends if my dad wants me back or not.”

  “I hope he does,” Tyler murmurs, his hands still on my body, still holding me. “I know I do.”

  My brief sober moment doesn’t last long and I’m back to swaying against his embrace, not quite doing anything purposely. His words barely register in my mind. My swaying develops into an attempt at dancing, but I’m vaguely aware that I just look like a complete fool.

  “You’re drawing attention to yourself,” Tyler hisses against my ear as his hands tighten on me, so tight that they restrict my movement, which is exactly what he’s trying to do. “You’re gonna get us kicked out.”

  “But I’m twenty-one!” I yell at him, laughing through my words. I wiggle under his grasp, and it only makes me giggle at myself even more.

  “Oh my God,” Tyler groans under his breath. He turns his face to the side and stares at the sand, his jaw clenched, eyes shut. He takes a deep breath, lets go of my body, walks around me, and, in one swift movement, bends and pulls me onto his back. “You need to sober
the fuck up,” he mutters as he starts to walk.

  My arms are slung around his neck and it’s possible I’m choking him to death as I cling onto him. His firm hands are under my thighs, my legs are wrapped around his waist, and he’s walking so effortlessly that the thought of me not weighing much gives me a moment of satisfaction. I rest my head on his shoulder and blow air against his neck as he continues to carry me across the beach.

  “Troy-James,” Tyler calls out, and the unfamiliar name makes me lift my head in curiosity as Tyler comes to halt.

  There’s a small group of people, three of them, standing in front of us, and they all spin around to Tyler’s voice. There’s two girls and…TJ. The guy from Dean’s, the guy that’s the cornerback. Troy-James. I mentally piece the obvious together and I feel exceptionally clever when I do.

  “What’s up?” Troy-James, or TJ, says. The hard expression he wore earlier is long gone, and he looks like he’s having fun. This is understandable given the fact that there are two clearly older girls hovering by his side. They both offer me sympathetic smiles.

  “I need your apartment,” Tyler says straightaway. “You’re still on Ocean Avenue, right?”

  “Bro.” TJ blinks for a while and then exchanges a quick glance with the girls he seems to have charmed. He settles his eyes back on Tyler. “What are your plans, man?”

  Tyler shrugs as he flicks his eyes over his shoulder at me, the movement causing me to jolt against his body, and he says, “Sobering her up. Her dad’ll kill her if she goes home like this.”

  “Dude, you’re kind of messing up my plans,” TJ mutters in a strained voice. He pulls a face and squints at us.

  “My place is free,” one of the girls comments, and with that, TJ reaches into the pocket of his shorts and tosses Tyler the keys to his apartment. Just. Like. That.

  “Leave ’em under the doormat,” he says.

  Tyler manages to squeeze in a thank-you before TJ and the girls head off. I feel him sigh again as he tightens his grip on my legs and starts to walk again, walking and walking until I realize that we’re heading away from the party.

  “Why are we going to his apartment?” I mumble into his shirt, because it’s almost impossible to keep my head up now. “Why does he even have an apartment?”

  “Because you’re just embarrassing yourself out here,” he says with a chuckle, and it makes me wish that I could see his face right now, so I could look at his eyes and wonder what’s going through his mind. But I’m still too tipsy for that. “And his parents are, like, millionaires. They bought him an apartment down here for his sixteenth birthday. Who the hell does that?”

  “Millionaires,” I reply. He laughs again.

  I don’t mind leaving the party. I’ve already lost my phone and my money and my friends back there, and now that the alcohol is wearing off and the sun is beginning to set, I just want to go home. Of course, going home isn’t an option right now. Dad thinks I’m at the movies, watching some mediocre love story, but really I’m being carried away from a party because I took too many shots earlier. I’m just thankful that it’s Tyler who ended up coming to my rescue. If Jake or Dean or even Meghan had tried to escort me away, I would have put up a fight.

  “You can put me down, you know,” I murmur after ten minutes of nonstop walking on Tyler’s part. I’m worried I’m hurting him.

  “What, so you can get hit by a car? No way,” he says curtly as he pauses on the edge of the sidewalk. He throws a quick glance in both directions and drifts across the avenue. I can still hear the music from the stage.

  “You’re missing the rest of the party,” I say, but he doesn’t reply.

  He carries me over to the row of apartments and condos and hotels on Ocean Avenue, the buildings that I’ve jogged past on so many of my runs, the ones overlooking the beach. We slow down by a four-story building, and Tyler carries me up the steps and pauses outside the entrance. Carefully, he slides me off his back. My legs feel like jelly when I try to stand.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks without glancing up, too busy fumbling around with the key and the lock.

  “Embarrassed,” I admit. I’m gradually sobering up after my last drink, almost three hours ago, and I’m starting to become more aware of how ridiculous I’ve been acting. I vaguely remember spitting all over Dean’s parents’ car.

  Tyler finally gets the door open, and he reaches back for my arm to pull me over the threshold and into the lobby of the condo building, which is bright with polished flooring. “We’ve all been there,” he muses, trying to comfort me.

  “Like you last year?” My tone sounds almost contemptuous, but I don’t mean it to. I’m just curious. Always curious.

  Tyler stops walking, abruptly halting in the middle of the lobby. He cranes his neck to stare back at me, his expression immediately hardening as he narrows his eyes. I bite down on my lower lip and wait for his outburst, for his aggression to take over, but it never does. He just shakes his head and yanks me into the elevator.

  “206,” he says quietly as he presses the button for the second floor, and he barely looks at me in the seconds that it takes for us to get there. His fingers are still wrapped around my wrist.

  Unit 206 is at the front of the building. I stare down at the doormat beneath my feet, finding it more interesting than it actually is, studying the pattern. Normally I wouldn’t care, but it appears tequila is creative and enjoys the art of doormats. I only stop when I’m pulled into the condo.

  And God, it’s really pretty.

  The living room is basking in the glow from the sunset that’s shining in through the floor-to-ceiling windows around the room. Everything has a deep orange cast to it and it looks really beautiful. It’s the type of sunset that you only ever see in photos, and most of the time they’re photoshopped. But up here in this condo with the huge windows overlooking the beach, it captures the essence of real beauty. I stare at it for a while.

  “Here,” Tyler says softly from behind me, catching my attention. I finally tear my eyes away from the windows and look at him. He’s holding a glass of water, which he forces into my hand. “Drink it. Now.”

  A smile toys at my lips as I lift the glass and take a long swig, only now realizing how dehydrated I am. It feels refreshing and cool against my throat, so I end up drinking the entire thing in a matter of seconds.

  “Sit down,” Tyler orders. He takes the empty glass from my hand and nods in the direction of the couch behind me. When I don’t move immediately, he presses his hand to my shoulder and directs me over.

  “It looks so pretty,” I say once I’m safely perched on the couch. I stretch out and get comfy, my body slumped back against the cushions, my eyes focused on the windows. If I listen closely, I can just about hear the faint pumping of music. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Sure it does,” Tyler says from a few feet away. I rotate my body to face him, crossing my legs and watching him in silence as he fills up the glass again by the faucet. He brings it over to me, his hands wet, and then he dries them off on his jeans once he’s passed the glass to me.

  The quietness of the room contrasts with the noise of the party across the street, but there’s something relaxing about it all, about the faintness of the music and the brightness of the sun as it dips below the horizon. Tyler sits down on the edge of the couch, several inches away from me, and just stares while I drink my second round of water.

  “You need to sleep this off,” he tells me. He’s still looking at me in disapproval, and it feels odd having our roles reversed. Normally I’m the one dealing with him. “Come on.” Reaching for the glass in my hand, he takes it away from me again and places it on the coffee table. He moves his hand back to mine. I flinch, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Delicately, he pulls me up onto my feet as he stands, his other hand grasping my waist to prevent me from losing my balance. “You good?”

  “Good,” I confirm.

  He turns around then, but he doesn’t unlock our hands, only squeezes his fin
gers around mine while he leads me through the kitchen and into a hall. We stop outside the door at the very end, and Tyler shoves it open to reveal a small bedroom. He pulls me inside.

  I slide off my shoes and kick them to the side, almost unconsciously, and make a move toward the huge bed that’s occupying most of the floor space, but Tyler slides his hand under my knees and scoops me straight off the ground and into his arms instead.

  His face is only inches from mine, so the only thing I can do is stare at him. There’s nothing else I can do. His eyes are so beautiful, so intriguing, that it’s impossible not to find yourself drawn to them. He’s not even looking back at me, but I can feel his heart beating through his chest and the way it’s speeding up. And then, almost as quickly as he picked me up, he’s gently laying me down on the bed and pulling back the sheets.

  “I’ll go get your water,” he murmurs, almost shyly, and bites his lip as he turns and leaves the room.

  I glance around me while he’s gone. There’s a mirror on the wall to my right, and the second I lay eyes on my blurred reflection, I gasp. I look horrific. My hair, which I spent over an hour straightening, has returned to its natural wave and feels knotted and gross. The same goes for my makeup, which Rachael slaved over. One of the fake eyelashes she applied is missing. I quickly reach for the other and pull it off, sticking it to the bedside table.

  “Here,” Tyler says, and I jump, a little startled. He’s filled the glass back up to the brim again, and he sets it down on the table, right next to the eyelash I’ve just torn off. “Water and sleep: the only way to sober up and minimize your hangover as much as possible.” He laughs a little as he moves around the bed, heading over to the window and pulling the curtains shut.

  “You should take your own advice sometimes,” I comment, but I’m only teasing him. I’m still feeling a little buzzed. “Next time you’re drunk, I’m just gonna chant, ‘Water and sleep, water and sleep.’”

  When he turns back around from the window, he’s biting back a smile that’s fighting its way onto his lips. He just shakes his head and nods at me. “Get some sleep, Eden.”