Ben and I talked about the movie for a while, and then the hot chocolate, which was positively sinful compared to the sludge they sold at the chain coffee place in Oakfield. That evolved into a conversation involving the importance of supporting local businesses over large corporations. Once we’d exhausted that subject, Ben steered the conversation to my friendship with Nolan.
“You’ve known each other a long time, right?” he asked, sliding his empty mug to the side of the table.
“Since we were four,” I replied, wondering where he was going with this. Nolan was an odd topic of discussion for a first date. Or any date, really.
“You guys have never gone out?”
I shook my head. A curious, tentative kiss when we were twelve did not count as going out. “We’re just friends.”
The frown from earlier made another appearance. “So he just sort of... drops in at your house? Whenever?”
“Sure,” I said with a shrug. “We drop in and hang out at each other’s houses all the time. Like I said, we’re friends. He has a girlfriend,” I added when Ben’s frown deepened. I nudged his knee with mine and smiled. “What, you don’t believe a guy and a girl can be just friends?”
“No,” he said, his gaze steady on mine. “I don’t.”
My smile held on, quickly turning plastic. “We were just friends for two years,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but you said you were attracted to me the entire time. See what I mean? I don’t think males and females can be friends without at least one of them wanting more. Usually it’s the guy who wants more from the girl though.”
“I’ve never been attracted to Nolan.”
The corner of his mouth lifted into a slight smirk. “I can understand that, but I’d bet anything he’s at least a tiny bit attracted to you. I mean, look at you.” His eyes traveled from my crossed legs to my cleavage to my face, which was probably tinged with pink. “Just because I’ve never asked you out before now doesn’t mean I didn’t admire your”—he cleared his throat—“uh, attributes.”
I laughed and flushed harder, letting his opinions on male-female platonic relationships—opinions I disagreed with wholeheartedly—slip by without comment. We’d have plenty of time for debating later. At the moment, all I wanted to do was get the hell out of the crowded coffee shop.
We slowly made our way through the light rain back to Ben’s car, not talking much. A cacophony of honking horns, loud voices, and screeching brakes filled the quiet spaces between us, making our frequent pauses seem less awkward. At the car, Ben unlocked the doors and held mine open for me, always the gentleman. As I brushed past him to get inside, I purposely let my “attributes“ skim along his arm. He paused, noticing, and I was sure he was going to grab me right then and there and mash his mouth into mine. Instead, he waited for me to get in the car and then shut the door behind me.
He didn’t say a word as we left the city behind and veered onto the highway that would take us home. I didn’t say a word either, not then and not when he suddenly turned off at the wrong exit and pulled into the parking lot of an elementary school, dark and deserted for the weekend. There, he shut off the car and, still not saying a word, leaned over the center console and kissed me.
And it was . . . nice. He was a good kisser. No, a great kisser. Even so, everything about it was sweet and chocolaty and nice. No fireworks, no heat, no magnetic, uncontrollable pull between our bodies. Just a normal kiss with a respectable boy. Just like I’d always wanted.
When I looked at it that way, it was easy to convince myself that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Chapter Sixteen
My father and I had been emailing each other for a little over a month when he broached the possibility of a phone call.
At first, I was reluctant. Hearing his voice, talking to him, would make him seem even more real. Email felt safer. But curiosity trumped my denial once again, and on a Friday evening in mid-May, while I was at the Bruces’ house and safely out of earshot of my mother, I shut myself up in Nolan’s room with my cell. Exactly at seven o’clock, the time we’d agreed upon in our last email, my phone buzzed with a long-distance call.
“Lexi?” His voice sounded as clear as if he was in the next room instead of three thousand miles west.
“Hi,” I said, sitting down on Nolan’s bed. “It’s me.”
“It is you. Wow, I can’t believe—you sound like a young woman.”
I laughed nervously and reached over to pet Hugo, who was curled up in the middle of the bed on a discarded sweatshirt. “Well, I am.”
“True,” he said, laughing, too. “It’s just the last time I saw you, you were learning how to print your name and ride a tricycle. That’s how I remember you, I guess.”
I swallowed. It was so weird. He remembered lots of things about me but I had only a vague recollection of him. As he spoke, I listened for something in his voice, a certain tone or inflection that might strike me as familiar. But he just sounded like some man I’d never heard before, a stranger whose DNA happened to match mine.
“Are you—?” I said at the exact same moment he said, “I’m really—” We both stopped talking and laughed again.
“Sorry,” he tried again. “I’m really nervous. What were you going to say?”
A bead of sweat rolled down my back, reminding me that I was nervous, too. Extremely. “I was going to ask if you were busy with work. I know it’s only four there.”
“No, not really. I mean, I’m always busy with work, but my partner Gil is running things this afternoon. I’m at home, actually, by myself for once. The kids . . . they’re in a million after-school activities, it seems like. Willow’s at dance class and Renee took Jonah to soccer.”
Hearing that, I felt a strange, almost-jealous pang in my gut. He knew where those kids were at all times. He was their dad, and had been their dad all their lives. They had no idea what it felt like to not have him around, paying for classes and sports and just being there, at home, waiting for them. In fourteen years, had he ever cared where I was? When did he stop waiting for me to come home?
“Lexi?”
His voice brought me back to the present and Nolan’s messy room. I focused on the poster on the closed closet door across from me. Batman in comic book form, his black cape billowing out around him. I looked at his muscular arms, his pointy black ears, the familiar symbol emblazoned across his huge chest. Easy distractions to override the hot anger simmering in my throat.
“Lexi,” Eric repeated when I failed to answer. “Look, you don’t have to say anything, okay? I know this is a lot to take in. Talking to me after so long.” He sighed. “You have every right to be angry with me. I missed a huge chunk of your life. The most important chunk. But Lexi, you need to understand something. In the year before you moved away, things had gotten so bad. I was . . . my addiction ruled me. I wasn’t fit to be a parent. Your mother did the right thing, taking you away from me.”
That surprised me, but I stayed silent and waited, listening to the tiny crackles of static on the line as he thought about what to say next.
“I missed you,” he went on, his voice thick. “Every day, I thought about you. But no, I didn’t fight it when your mom moved you so far away. I didn’t deserve to be your dad. Even after I got sober and met Renee, I still felt the same. Like it was too late, like I’d lost you for good and it was all my fault. It took Renee almost two years to talk me into having more kids. I was so scared it would happen again. And when they were babies, all I could think about was you at that age. Especially when Jonah came along, because he looked so much like you.”
Batman turned blurry and I closed my eyes, wishing the deep, sorrowful voice would just stop. Stop talking, before I said something I might regret. But he didn’t stop, and I kept listening.
“That you reached out to me even after I screwed everything up . . . blows my mind every day. I feel selfish asking for more, but it would mean a lot to me if you’d give me the opportunity to ex
plain my side someday. Not today, but someday. Soon. I’d really appreciate the chance to be in your life again.”
I opened my eyes and tried to focus, but all I saw was red. “I didn’t reach out for you,” I told him, resentment seeping into my voice. “I did it for me. So I can get some answers. That’s all.”
He was silent. Obviously, after all those civil, almost-formal emails, he wasn’t expecting me to be so bitter.
Finally, after a long, awkward pause, I managed to say, “I have to go.”
“Oh. Of course. Well, you have my cell number. Feel free to call or text anytime. Okay?” His voice took on a hopeful, careful tone. “I’d love to hear more about your college plans and this new boyfriend you mentioned in your email a few days ago.”
Over email, it had been so easy to tell him about Ben and my recent college acceptance. Eric’s delight over both pieces of news had left me with a quiet, pleased feeling. My mother, who I lived and interacted with in person on a daily basis, hadn’t been nearly as interested or proud. But on the phone with my father, with my head whirling with everything he’d just said, hearing his pride and interest was like one more drop in an already overflowing bucket.
He had no right to act like a proud father. He’d done nothing to earn that role.
“I have to go,” I said again and hung up before he could say anything else.
I stayed in Nolan’s room for a long time, stroking Hugo’s silky fur and going over the entire phone call in my head. I knew Nolan was out there, waiting to hear how it went, and that Ben would be at my house in forty minutes to pick me up, but I couldn’t seem to move. My body felt sapped. Heavy.
A few minutes later, Nolan knocked on the door and then stuck his head in the room. “How’d it go?”
I was still sprawled on the bed, cell phone back in my pocket. I sat up, dangling my legs over the side of the mattress. “Fine.”
When I didn’t say anything more, he came into the room and shut the door behind him. At the sight of him, Hugo rolled over onto his back and started to purr. Nolan gave him a brief scratch on the belly as he sat down next to me, his gaze never leaving my face. “No, really, how’d it go? You’re white as a sheet.”
“It was fine,” I repeated. Then, remembering I was talking to someone who never took fine for an answer, I added, “Kind of weird. I think I’m more pissed at him than I realized. It’s going to take me a while to feel comfortable with him, you know?”
He nodded and wrapped his arm around me, squeezing my shoulder with his hand. It was a gesture he’d made a thousand times before, in comfort or just because, and it had never once bothered me. But for some reason, this time it made me feel uneasy. I thought of Ben and the conversation we’d had on our first date, the one about Nolan and me, our friendship. It was a topic that had been revisited a couple times in the two weeks since, and Ben’s position hadn’t budged. My relationship with Nolan, he insisted, was odd. Now here we were, Nolan and I, sitting on his bed, alone in his room with the door closed. And all I could think about was how it would look to Ben.
What would Ben think? was a question I’d been asking myself a lot lately. If I hung out with Nolan at his house, if I wore a top that showed too much skin, if I had a few drinks at a party, if I talked to this guy or that guy, if I didn’t take school seriously enough, if I didn’t live up to his expectations . . . what would Ben think of me? Would he come to his senses, realize he was too good for me, and dump me like trash?
Ben’s disapproval, subtle as it was, made me extremely anxious. I could not afford to mess it up. With Ben, I felt important. Respected. Even envied. We did nice, normal couple things, like going to movies and bowling and out to dinner with other couples. He held my hand and opened doors for me and kissed me on the cheek after walking me to my classes. He drove carefully and always kept his cool. He didn’t smoke or get drunk or do drugs. He was smart and ambitious and well-liked. All these good qualities more than made up for the few faults I’d uncovered. He could be moody sometimes, and critical, and maybe even a tiny bit arrogant. And after two weeks of steady dating, making out with him still hadn’t progressed past nice.
Still, the possibility of upsetting him stressed me out so much, I found myself becoming hyper-aware of everything I did and said. Even at times when he wasn’t anywhere near.
“Wow, it’s getting late,” I said, glancing at my watch as I slid out from underneath Nolan’s arm. “I’d better go get ready. Ben’s picking me up at eight.”
“Okay,” Nolan said, seemingly unaware of my discomfort. “I heard there’s a party at Dustin Sweeney’s house tonight. You going?” When I nodded, he smirked. “Try not to pass out in the laundry room this time, okay?”
“Don’t worry. My days of passing out in laundry rooms are over.”
By the time we arrived at Dustin’s house an hour later, I was in dire need of a drink or two. The mental exhaustion from my first phone call with my father compounded with the pressure of being with Ben was almost too much to endure while stone-cold sober. Honestly, I wouldn’t even have been at the party if Ben hadn’t insisted on going. It seemed like we were always in public, seeing people, being seen. Sometimes I just wanted to hang out at my house and watch a movie or something, but that kind of thing didn’t interest him. He was exceptionally social. Pretty much the only time we were ever truly alone together was when we were in his car, going somewhere. But I’d never complain.
“Stay put. I’ll be right back,” Ben told me, leaving me in the kitchen with Emily, who was sitting on the counter by the sink, pounding back a bottle of neon-blue cooler.
With each swallow, she shivered at the sweetness. “Lexi, you have to help me drink these. I bought way too many and if I drink them all, I’m going to be puking blue all night.”
“Um.” My last party at Dustin’s house had not ended well. Then again, rum coolers were much less potent than tequila.
“Oh come on.” She glanced in the direction in which Ben had disappeared. “Forget Ben. He’s my cousin and everything, but he’s a freaking stick-in-the-mud sometimes. Always has been.”
I laughed. I liked Emily best when she had a few drinks in her. It loosened her up, made her more fun to be around. “Just one,” I said.
She cheered. “They’re in the fridge, bottom shelf on the right.”
I squeezed by a group of girls who were hugging each other and squealing and yanked open the fridge. The interior, virtually free of food and bursting with bottles and cans of all colors, suddenly reminded me of my own fridge. When I’d opened it earlier in the evening to get grape jam for my PB&J dinner, I’d been greeted by some old friends. A box of wine, already half gone, sat on the bottom shelf beside several bottles of beer and an unopened bottle of Bailey’s. Mom’s drinking again, I thought as I got my jam. She was drinking and she was still with Jesse, a recovering alcoholic. What the hell?
A hand slid across the small of my back. I jumped, almost dropping the bottle of cooler on the ceramic tile.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked as I straightened up and shut the fridge door.
I repeated my earlier words. “Just one.”
“Hope so,” he replied, narrowing his eyes at the bottle in my hand. “I’m not really in the mood to peel you off the floor again.”
He kind of smiled after he said it, but I still felt like I’d been chastised. Then again, after what happened last year with Shelby and Evan, I could understand why Ben was wary of his girlfriends drinking at parties. The last thing I wanted to do was run the risk of embarrassing myself—or him—so I sipped the syrupy cooler slowly, making it last.
Ben and I spent most of the night on the couch in the living room, talking to Dustin’s friend Colin Hewitt and Colin’s longtime girlfriend Mara, both of whom I didn’t particularly like because they acted like a boring old married couple. But I didn’t dare get up and leave. While not exactly clingy, Ben preferred to have me nearby while we were around our friends. I didn’t mind, of course—how many t
imes had I envied Kyla or Tori or whatever girl was by his side?—but sometimes I felt like I was on stage, auditioning for a part in a play. Ben’s girlfriend, as portrayed by Lexi Shaw. Let’s see how she stacks up against the actresses before her. Let’s see if she falls on her face.
Luckily, I’d already had years of practice at pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
That solitary cooler did nothing to relax me, and by eleven I was feeling more than a little on edge. I wanted to go outside, but all I could think about was the last time I’d roamed around Dustin’s yard. All night I’d felt paranoid, wondering if Tyler was going to show up at some point with his baggies of pot. What would he do when he saw me with Ben? The way he’d been acting lately, I wouldn’t put it past him to expose our secret relationship in a fit of rage to the entire party. Seeing me with Dustin had made him angry enough, and I’d never crushed on Dustin or even dated him really. But Tyler knew how I felt about Ben.
“Let’s go in the hot tub,” I suggested once Mara and Colin moved off and Ben and I were semi-alone on the living room couch. I felt claustrophobic, desperate for fresh air, and the back deck was the only place I could think of to go without worrying about Tyler lurking nearby.
“I don’t have a swimsuit,” Ben said.
“I have mine. I brought my bikini.”
That intrigued him, and he actually looked like he was considering it for a second, proper swimwear or not. Then he shook his head. “No. Let’s just stay here.”
My mind flashed on my last party at Dustin’s and seeing Tori standing beside Ben in the kitchen, looking totally pissed. At the moment, I could almost relate. “Fine,” I said, standing up.
Ben raised his blond brows at me.
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