Hold Me Like a Breath

by Tiffany Schmidt

  “—And that’s why, even though I’m seventeen and it makes me ridiculous, my favorite movie is still the cartoon of Sleeping Beauty.” And Enchanted, but that reminded me of Garrett and I couldn’t think of him while sitting here. Not without my smile cracking and my mouth turning sour with the taste of betrayal.

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it,” Char confessed.

  “You have to! I love fairy tales. There’s something so charming and comforting about the idea of fairy godmothers and magic and happily ever afters.” I touched his wrist and we both froze, blushed, smiled. When he moved like he might cover my hand with his own, I pulled back and put mine in my lap. “So what’s yours?”

  “Um, I like documentaries more than movies. I know. It makes me weird. I’ve never really been a magic, or fantasy, or even fiction person. Give me a good biography or science journal any day.”

  “Really?” Carter would’ve had such a field day with this moment: his head-in-the-clouds baby sister on a date with a data junkie.

  Our waitress stopped by to refill our waters again and drop off my dessert.

  “Should you eat that?” Char asked, then immediately looked contrite. “I know it’s not any of my business.”

  I looked down at the brownie, then back up at him. “Are you calling me fat?” This would be a deal-breaker. I knew I wasn’t, that I needed to gain back the weight I’d lost post-collision, but even if I was, he had no right to comment on my diet.

  “No.” He leaned away from me, palms up, eyebrows too. “Are you kidding? Not at all. It’s just … You’re diabetic, right?”

  “Why do you keep asking me that?”

  “When I hit you, you asked for orange juice, not water—because you needed the sugar, I assumed. And even before we crashed into each other, your eyes—they were so unfocused, it was like you didn’t even notice I was there.”

  “You saw me? And still hit me?”

  “I didn’t see you until it was too late; I was distracted by the TV in the store window. When I looked up, you were right there and I couldn’t stop in time. I’ve known a few diabetics, and that’s what you looked like, unfocused eyes, the shaking—like you were having a hypoglycemic episode.”

  “Oh.” I weighed the value of this lie in my head, debated whether trading one vulnerability for another made sense—but then again, Penelope Landlow was known for being idiot-pathetic, not diabetic. “What was so interesting about the TV?” I asked.

  His gaze slid down and away. “Oh, just an old rerun of one of my favorite sitcoms.”

  I’m not sure why he’d lie about watching the news, maybe because it was too macabre to mention on a first-date-type thing, but if he could lie, I could too.

  “Yes, I’m diabetic.” I pushed the brownie away with a pout. “It’s a new diagnosis. I’m still trying to figure out what I can and can’t do and how to get my blood sugar right. I miss chocolate.”

  “Do you need to check it? Do you have a monitor with you? The brownie probably isn’t even good. It looks dry, definitely not worth throwing your insulin levels off. Never mind the long-term eye, kidney, nerve damage stuff …” He trailed off. “Sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox. I’m sure you know this. You don’t need a lecture from me.”

  I might have been too hasty with this particular lie. “How do you know so much about diabetes?”

  He shifted in his seat. “It interests me. One of my best friends has it—type 1. Last summer we designed an app—well, with help from some other people—but it will keep track of your blood sugar and help with diet planning and exercise and stuff. Do you want me to download it for you?”

  I’d definitely been too hasty with this particular lie. “My phone’s not ‘smart’ enough for that.” I smiled apologetically and sent a silent prayer of thanks to whatever government tech guru had told Bob I’d be safer and more off-grid with a no-frills phone. “You can have the brownie if you want, at least then it won’t go to waste. And it won’t be sitting on the table tempting me.”

  “I can go throw it away.”

  “No, please eat it. Unless you don’t—” but he’d already picked up the fork and taken a large bite.

  “So, were you low that day?” he asked. “When I walked into you?”

  It was time to follow one of Mother’s best conversational tactics—perfect for nosy, non-Family women who asked too many questions—and turn the topic back on him. “Wow, you’re really into this. Are you premed?” He’d mentioned college earlier, that he’d be a freshman at Georgetown in the fall.

  His face fell. It was the first time since the sidewalk outside my apartment that I’d seen it slip from hopeful and happy to something defeated. Even his shoulders seemed less square. “No. I thought for a while I might be. Undergrad I would’ve focused on biochem, or bioengineering … but I’m not.”

  “Why not?”

  “My father didn’t even want me to go to college. He wanted me to stay home and work for him.”

  “I know a bit about family businesses and expectations,” I said bitterly. The sour mood joined our table like an uninvited guest.

  “You do?” he asked, leaning forward. I wondered if he could read the panic on my face or see the shape of my heart as it pounded against my ribs. “What’s your family like?”

  “Where are you from?” The question was far too loud, the words blurring together in my rush to change the subject. I forced myself to take a deep breath before continuing. “There’s no New York in your accent, and you mentioned an airplane earlier.”

  “West,” he said. “The Midwest.” He shifted back in his chair, rubbing his fingers through his hair in a way that pulled his shirt tight across his muscles.

  It was the movement of someone relaxing; the topic change had worked, had brought a smile back to his face. I wanted to know what he was thinking about: his Midwestern home, or here, now, me?

  I looked at his shoulders again. What would it take to get shoulders like that? Wide and square and defined. They looked as if they could carry the weight of the world. Or at least hold up the drama of my crazy life. And the way they tapered down to his waist … Mick and Hugh and Jacob were big, muscular, but they were big everywhere. This wasn’t weight-lifting muscle.

  I wanted to trust him, but I didn’t know nearly enough about him.

  “Do you help out on a farm?” I asked.

  He snorted his water. “What?” I loved his laughter. It was unguarded, infectious. It made people turn; it made people smile. “Now that’s a random question.”

  “Well, Midwest, your shoulders …”

  “My shoulders?” He laughed again and I wanted to crawl under the table, except not really. There wasn’t any mocking in the laughter. More than crawl under the table I wanted to drag him under it with me.

  “You’ve got … muscles.”

  Now he was blushing. It looked good on him. Almost as good as his T-shirt would look off him. I was blushing too.

  “I swim,” he said.

  “Oh. Like on a team?”

  Char nodded, and I wondered what that would be like. To have a team, a group of friends working toward a common goal—not all that different than a Family, but my age? And to race? Not just swim aimlessly back and forth. Competition was an unfamiliar idea—no one had ever viewed me as potential adversary. No one ever saw me as anything but fragile.

  “So your family doesn’t have a farm?” Apparently I’d swallowed the stereotype that all Midwesterners were farmers. Then again, he didn’t fit the American farming stereotype—on TV they all had blond hair, blue eyes, cowboy boots, hats, Wrangler jeans, and plaid shirts. But if TV was to be believed, then, depending on which Lifetime movie you were watching, the Families were all mafia thugs or medical Robin Hoods, and I was either a blond bombshell or a bedridden invalid.

  “Sort of a small ranch,” he answered.

  “Why are you in New York?” It was starting to feel like Twenty Questions—but also starting to feel like he didn’t want to
play. He was sitting up again, folding a straw wrapper. Looking away from me, around the restaurant, at the door.

  I wanted his attention. All of it. I hadn’t realized this was what I’d had all day until it became divided.

  “In some Aboriginal cultures, when a man comes of age he goes on a walkabout.” His answer was aimed at the door, his eyes and mind on something faraway, something other than me. “It’s a sort of journey alone to prove his manhood.”

  I looked at him skeptically; reached out to touch his hand, get his attention. “You’re Australian Asian American? That’s a mouthful.”

  He laughed, but it wasn’t honeyed this time. “No. Chinese American. That was just the closest example I could come up with. I think my parents expected me to call them my first night in New York, crying and begging to come back home.”

  “And because you didn’t, you’re a man?”

  “Something like that. My father is big on me proving my independence. It also doesn’t help that he can’t stand to look at me right now.”

  “Why?” I asked, then, watching his face grow stonier and stormier, I wished I hadn’t. “Never mind.”

  He cleared his throat and poked a fork in the last few bites of my brownie. “What do your parents do?”

  “My parents …” I swallowed. Talking about them in present tense felt dangerous, like given any chance, I might convince myself they weren’t actually gone.

  Char leaned forward, smiling again, nodding, encouraging a charade that was far too tempting.

  “My mother’s a housewife. She’s stayed home since she had my brother, then me, but before that she was an administrative assistant. My father’s, actually—how cliché is that?”

  This was all true, all real. And it felt good to talk about them with someone who could talk back. To think about them outside the pages of my notebook.

  “My father … he’s in, um, acquisitions? I don’t actually know all that much about his job—something my family likes to tease me about.” I forced a careless shrug. “He works in an office. He travels a bit, but not a ton. And I’m really lucky because he’s home for dinner most nights, so it’s not like he’s a workaholic.”

  “What’s your brother like? Besides someone who clearly doesn’t recognize your artistic talent? I’m jealous. I always hated being an only child.”

  My make-believe was shattered like a blow to the stomach. Carter. I couldn’t pretend he was … Not when I’d seen …

  I gagged and tried to cover it with a cough.

  “You’re not close?” Char guessed.

  If I nodded it would be the end of this conversation, but that was a lie I wasn’t willing to tell.

  “I want to hear more about your ranch,” I said instead. “What do you raise? Is that the right word? Do you ‘raise’ animals? Herd them? Keep them?”

  “Raise works.” Char wasn’t looking at me. He pointed at the clock above the bar, which had gotten crowded while I wasn’t paying attention. “It’s getting late. I should probably let you go—otherwise I’m going to be that guy who beat you up, stalked you, kidnapped you, and held you hostage through boring farm tales.”

  I was going to protest that he hadn’t told me any boring farm tales. Or that I held equal blame in the beating up of myself, but what was the point? The subtext in his statement was he wanted to go. And this was probably for the best. Dancing along the line between truth and fiction was going to lead to a misstep. Either revealing too much or getting caught in a web of deception too tangled to keep straight.

  And since I liked him, I didn’t want to see if he liked the invented girl I was only pretending to be.

  Disappointment crawled across me, clinging to my skin, climbing in my ears to change the way his voice sounded, and over my eyes so that I only saw his detachment. It wanted in my mouth, down my throat, so it could curdle in my stomach, spoil the day, and spill out over my lips with words of dismissal and farewell.

  “Fine. You’re right.” Stiff. Sharp. Short. It matched my posture. Matched the angles and jerkiness of my movements as I shoved my phone in my pocket and threw down cash to cover my half of our check.

  I was out of my seat, out of the restaurant, out of my mind with frustration that I cared this much. He was scratching at all the cracks in my composure.

  “Maeve! Maeve! Wait!”

  I heard him but didn’t stop walking. My steps still didn’t match the rhythm of the city, but I’d gotten good at dodging and weaving through crowds. I was putting people between us, distance, so that maybe he wouldn’t catch up, or I wouldn’t cry. One or the other. Not both.

  But it wasn’t okay that my first tears that weren’t mourning would be for a guy. One I’d just met. One who couldn’t mean this much to me. He couldn’t mean anything to me. There was no place in my life for a romance.

  He disappeared from sight, or I did. I was the one moving away, so maybe I was the one who disappeared. My choice. A painful choice, but a necessary one.

  Chapter 26

  Before I opened my eyes the next morning, I made a wish that it wouldn’t be raining. I needed to get out from between those walls, out of that building, and outside of my wallowing. I needed to get back into the something-like-normal I’d established before I’d been thrown off-course. Coffee. Dog park. Breakfast. Museum. Maybe some window shopping. Maybe some actual shopping. A cheap laptop or tablet or some way of connecting with the world wouldn’t be a bad idea. Except it would need Wi-Fi, Bob would disapprove, and it would use up most of my dwindling cash supply. Okay, it was a bad idea, but my new cell phone wasn’t web-equipped and there wasn’t even a TV in the apartment—not all that surprising given that Carter could only be pinned down to watch sports, and he’d preferred watching those in a pub with drinks courtesy of his fake ID.

  The night before would have been a million times more bearable if I’d been able to distract myself with fashion blogs, YouTube cat videos, or CNN’s newsfeed. Even infomercials or Spanish soap operas. I would’ve welcomed any outside noise that competed with my racing thoughts. If Carter owned a vacuum I would’ve tried Mother’s coping method.

  I refused to think of Char. I’d left all that longing on the other side of midnight, and in this new day where sunshine turned the wall shades of pink and possibility, I wasn’t letting him invade. But still, when I walked out the door of my building, I couldn’t stop my eyes from skipping over to where he’d waited yesterday—

  Where he was waiting today.

  “So here’s the thing—” Char stepped off the sidewalk, barely even glancing to see if there was a car coming, hurrying toward me at nearly a run. “I’m not a creeper, I promise. If you tell me not to, I’ll never wait outside your apartment again—” He paused on the edge of the street, the toes of his gray shoes touching the curb of the sidewalk in front of me. “That sounds like a creeper sentence, doesn’t it? I’ve been out here for an hour, and I was up pacing my hotel room all night. You’d think with all that time I’d be able to come up with a better line than that. And after … On the plane I vowed I’d be better at taking chances and going after the things I want … Not that you’re a thing.” He clenched his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I hope “smooth” wasn’t on your list of desirable qualities, because I’m not.”

  I shook my head. Nodded. Not sure what I was agreeing with or if I should be disagreeing. I covered my mouth with both hands, trapping a near sob of relief and a smile.

  “You never have to see me again. I just wanted to—I don’t know—see you. Yesterday, wandering and talking with you, I felt more like myself than I can remember. Like who I am and who I want to be had finally met. I don’t know why you ran away, Maeve, but you are the best thing about this whole city. I’m sorry if that’s too much … It’s too much, isn’t it?” He sighed and hung his head. “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  “Stay.” My word was soft—like a cotton ball dropped in the middle of his maelstrom, but it had the effect of a blanket on a fire—extingu
ishing his outpouring and leaving me wondering what had happened to all the oxygen on the street. We stared—measuring honesty and fear and surrender in each other’s gazes.

  Carter had said, “Fight to the death for the ones that matter.” Char was following my brother’s advice. Would I? Should I?

  “Why did you run?” he asked.

  “We were saying good-bye anyway.” It was a cheat of an answer; he’d given me honesty and I couldn’t bring myself to admit the truth. Because you scare me. No, that’s not it: because I scare myself around you.

  “For the day, not forever.” He looked at the ground, then at the roof of the buildings. Inhaled so his shoulders climbed toward his ears, then exhaled a sigh that settled them back to normal. “No, that’s not quite true. I was pulling away. I thought I could. I wanted to see if I could … Maeve—”

  “I know,” I said. Because I did. Because this guy was the only thing that numbed the hollowness left behind when my life imploded. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about him, even while unconscious. And because even standing in front of him, I could already feel the ache that would descend the moment we said our next farewell. Because seventeen years of being treated like a princess and reading gilded fairy tales hadn’t prepared me for the happiness I felt when he said my name—which wasn’t even really my name at all. “I know, Char.”

  His smile felt like an embrace. His actual embrace felt like heaven. The place where his hands rested in the center of my back felt as if it had been molded just for him. I could feel all ten of his fingertips mirroring each other on either side of my spine. He pulled me to him, but not too hard—just enough that the soft fabric of his slate-blue T-shirt whispered against my cheek and I got a hint of his smell. I might have a set of fingerprint bruises, but maybe not … He was holding himself back, trying not to hug me with an eagerness that matched his voice in my ear. “Are you real?”

  I wondered the same thing. Was anything about my life real anymore?

  I let my hands flutter up for a quick squeeze, but when I let go, he released me instantly. It took me a moment to find my breath and manage a “good morning.”