Hold Me Like a Breath

by Tiffany Schmidt

  Nothing in my life had readied me for the intoxication of casual touch. The fact that I could reach over and run a fingertip down the back of his hand. And that when I did, he’d light up and twist his palm, making his hand available for mine to hold.

  I didn’t. That seemed like too much.

  Like greediness or self-indulgence. Or like it would overwhelm me completely, making it impossible to walk and talk or even just remember how to inhale and exhale.

  It was the perfect promise of a moment.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said.

  It shattered in a shiver that left my voice frosty. “No. No surprises.”

  On the estate I’d lived for surprises. Just the word had made me smile. Anticipation of something that Carter, Mother, or Father had devised to amuse me was enough to make hours pass with borrowed sweetness. They’d been great about coming up with various unexpected treats. Mother left paths of rhyming riddles that ended with a handbag or new nail polish. Father just hid things and played hot/cold. Carter’s surprises had been the best. They almost always involved passing through the gates.

  I didn’t want to be surprised now. Not just because of the memories, but because surprises didn’t feel safe. Surprises meant letting someone else control my life, and that wasn’t acceptable. Not even a Midwestern rancher’s son. Not even for a moment.

  Char may not have understood the why of the emotion in my voice, but he clearly heard its panic. “Sure. No surprises. No big deal.”

  He stepped in front of me, held both of his hands up like he was making a vow—like we weren’t standing on a filthy street being watched by curious eyes of people going about their daily routines. “I keep scaring you off. I don’t mean to. Is there anything I can do or say to make you less skittish?”

  “Let me lead.” It went against the relationship dynamic my parents had modeled; it went against seventeen years of obedience to others’ orders. I didn’t care.

  “Sure,” said Char. “So, what do you want to do today?”

  “Ever tried caramel pecan coffee?” I asked. When he grinned and shook his head, I held out my hand, held my breath.

  Even bracing myself didn’t stop the sensation of his fingers sliding through mine from sending shivers across my skin. Didn’t stop the smiles from spreading across both our faces as he swung our entwined hands and said, “Lead the way.”

  Words I’d never had directed at me.

  I liked them, quite a bit.

  Coffee first, which I ordered with sugar-free raspberry syrup while cursing my fake diabetes. I saw Char sneaking longing glances at the cake pops and glazed muffins. “Go ahead,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

  He shook his head, smiled. “No, it’s fine. My sweet tooth is out of control; this is good for me. You’re good for me.”

  Next the dog park and watching the Pom-hund couple cuddle like I’d missed weeks of furious courtship instead of just a few days.

  Their happiness at seeing me: “So you’re not just a matchmaking fairy godmother! We were worried you’d disappeared.”

  Their grinning welcomes to Char: “He’d better be a dog person.”

  And the way he didn’t flinch at the level of commitment that implied. Instead, he raised the hand he hadn’t let go of yet—not through ordering coffee, paying for it, adding his milk and sugar, or walking through the streets—and brushed the back of my fingers across his lips. “I’m allergic to cats, but anything else: dogs, fish, turtles, hermit crabs, these pet pigs I saw a documentary on once—they’re really smart. Pretty much any other animal is fine with me.”

  “No worries. There are no cats, or any other animals, in the apartment,” I said. But more and more, I kept imagining him in there. In my life as more than a temporary injection of bliss. As a permanent fixture. As someone who knew me. Someone I could confide in, talk to. Someone who understood.

  He made me feel alive—reminded me that despite the fact I’d had a funeral and had a gravestone beside my parents’ and Carter’s, I was alive. And that I should spend the time I had living, not cowering and waiting. Carter had said as much: Fight to the death for the ones that matter. My grandfather’s version had been, When you see an opportunity, take it!

  These past few days were my nod of agreement; I just wished I could hear Carter say, “I’m proud of you.”

  Chapter 27

  Char and I spent the day in conversation, in another walk, like a lazy game of Ping-Pong, drifting back and forth down streets. Finally, we parted in front of my building after dinner.

  We’d exchanged numbers, me fumbling with how to locate mine or enter his, especially after he commented, “That’s a different phone.”

  “I, um, dropped the other one. In water. In the sink. I was doing dishes. And watching TV. And talking on the phone with my aunt. She told a joke and I laughed. The phone slipped and whoops.”

  Liars always included too many details; Al Ward had taught me that. I hoped no one had told Char.

  He just smiled. “Is the lesson you shouldn’t multitask or I shouldn’t tell you jokes?”

  “I guess we’ll have to try both and see.”

  “Good night.”

  Upstairs in the apartment, I frowned at the note for Garrett that still sat on the coffee table. Each time I saw it my chest tightened and I froze for a moment—trying to remember what it felt like when his eyes had made me flush and stammer, how I used to feel safe and proud with him by my side. Out of habit I poked the note with the tip of one finger. I’d spent days nudging it this way and that, as if its angle would make a difference. Now I picked it up and crumpled it in my fist. He wasn’t coming. And maybe that was a relief. Maybe he’d be a cruel reminder of my life before. Seeing him would shatter my current charade and be a painful reality check.

  I dropped the note in the bathroom trash. Scowled at the fading bruises I saw in the mirror as I changed into my pajamas—try as I might, there were aspects of my old life I couldn’t escape.

  My phone rang as I was brushing my teeth. “Miss me already?” I teased.

  “I did.” Char stated it as a simple fact, unashamed, unembellished.

  I climbed into bed and pressed my giggle into a pillow before I took a deep breath and said, “So, tell me about your day.”

  “Not going to lie, it was kind of surreal. I spent it with the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever met and she’s not bored with me yet.”

  “Not at all,” I replied. “She’d walk the whole city as long as you were next to her.”

  “Likewise. Though I need to remember to wear different shoes tomorrow, because ow, blisters.”

  I quickly learned I didn’t want to multitask when his was the voice in my ear. I was too busy collecting his words and cheesy jokes, weaving them into a web of facts and connections that bound us together.

  “Fears,” Char challenged around midnight. “Tell me one from your childhood and one from now.”

  I rolled over onto my stomach and propped the phone on a pillow. “As a child? I was terrified of dragons.”

  “Wait, there’s a dragon in Sleeping Beauty! I, um, might have watched it last night.”

  “Really? And, yes, my fear and that movie were definitely related. My brother and his best friend used to build these elaborate ‘dragon traps’ in my closet and in the hall outside my room. The problem was I couldn’t leave my room or get dressed in the morning until they came along and unassembled them.”

  Char burst into laughter and the sound made me brave enough to add, “And now, my big fear is being useless.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Can you explain?”

  “Like, no one expecting anything of me. Never achieving anything that matters. I want to matter.” These were the type of things I could only whisper at the darkened ceiling, never say to his face.

  “You matter to me,” he said softly.

  “Thanks.” I flushed from his words, though that wasn’t what I meant. “Now tell me yours.”

  “As a ki
d? Bullies. I was a nerd in a community that wasn’t all that nerd-friendly.”

  “You, a nerd?” I teased. “This coming from the guy who just spent twenty minutes explaining how caffeine affects the nervous system, and how decaf coffee isn’t really caffeine-free? I’m shocked.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “You were probably bored. You’ve got to just tell me to shut up.”

  “I wasn’t bored at all. I love your nerdiness—”

  I dropped the phone on my bed and squeezed my eyes shut. Too much, too soon. I hadn’t meant to imply anything so serious. Still wincing, I picked the phone back up.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “Um, what’s your now fear?” I asked, wanting to put so much distance between myself and that accidental four-letter word.

  “I guess … that I’ll change without realizing it. Wake up one morning and be the person my dad wants me to be instead of who I want. I feel like I keep getting pushed farther down that road, and there’s got to be a point of no return, right?”

  “I hope not.” I’d been thinking about that idea lately, knowing full well I was getting dangerously close to a point of no return with Char, a place at which it would hurt so much to have to let him go … even though I knew I couldn’t keep him.

  We spent the whole night talking, taking turns drifting off to sleep, then startling awake with “Don’t hang up, I’m still here.”

  It was the first night I hadn’t cried myself to sleep. The first I hadn’t crashed from one nightmare to the next.

  And despite the lack of closed-eye time between sunset and sunrise, I felt more rested.

  And guiltier.

  I stared at the window, watching the glow change from garish nighttime signs to sunrise clear, and listened as Char told me about working in the garden with his mother, accidentally weeding an entire row of mint plants and trying stick them back in the ground before she noticed.

  “Char, I’ve got some things I need to do.” Showering was one, and I desperately needed to use the bathroom—I hadn’t figured out a romantic way to request a pee break—but after that I needed to spend some time with my notebook. Reassure myself grieving wasn’t any less painful or important, and making new memories with Char didn’t mean I was forgetting my family.

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Thanks for keeping me company all night.”

  “I feel like I should be saying that to you.” He laughed.

  “Breakfast?” I asked. “Want to meet outside my place at ten?”

  “Perfect. Good-bye, Maeve.”

  I was already opening my notebook as I said good-bye. Skimming my last words before I set down the phone and planning my next ones while I took a quick shower and got dressed. When I sat back down with the notebook, my hand flew, a flood of memory pouring out as my shower-damp hair dripped down the back of my sundress.

  Carter ran away once when he was twelve. It was during a bad spell, when my body was destroying platelets as fast as we infused them. He’d tried cheering me up by drawing smiley faces on my skin—and had been rewarded with a thunderous reprimand. He was feeling ignored and angry—and Magnolia Vickers had dared him to during an ill-fated visit. The same visit where she broke my tea set and he broke his arm because of another one of her dares. In fact, I think it was her last visit to our estate. So he was in a cast—which made it easy for Al Ward to track him.

  “Have you seen a tall, blond boy with a camouflage-print arm cast?” is a pretty easy yes/no question. And it’s not like the townspeople didn’t know who he was or who our Family was—he was probably more supervised in town than he was on the estate. They quickly ratted out his escape route from the ice-cream shop to the comic book store to the bakery where Al found him halfway through a box of doughnuts.

  After he finished puking up his sugar overload, I expected Mother to hug him and cry and Father to yell, but it was Mother who went frosty and Father who intervened in her lecture. He led Carter outside for a man-to-man talk. I watched through the window as Father put his arm around Carter’s shoulder and they strolled around the property.

  Carter never would tell me what Father said, or how he got past the guards and gates and all the way into town.

  I guess now I’ll never know.

  I felt better after writing down that memory. Sadder, but that’s how I was supposed to feel. I wiped tears from my cheeks, fixed my makeup, braided my damp hair, then watched the swinging tail of the cat clock. Ten a.m. was when we’d agreed to meet, but I headed out my door at 9:45 and wasn’t even a little surprised to see Char already waiting on the sidewalk spot I’d started thinking of as his.

  I couldn’t prevent my smile—a face-stretching grin that made it nearly impossible to mouth the word “hi” against his neck when he curled me into a greeting-slash-embrace.

  “Hi, yourself.”

  I inhaled his smell, then made myself step away from him, from his potential bruises. “Coffee? Maybe coconut?”

  “Actually, may I meet your parents?” He looked over my shoulder at the apartment building, and I was grateful for that half second because I needed it to compose my face.

  “What?”

  “I know it’s old-fashioned, but it’s how I was raised. If they’re home, I’d like to meet them, let your father know you’re in good hands. Honorable intentions and all that.”

  It was probably Midwestern values. I could imagine him sitting down in some other girl’s family room, talking to her father before taking her out on a date—I wondered if he drove a truck. I wondered where he took other girls. If they had felt about him the way I did. But I couldn’t afford to wonder—I needed to lie.

  “They don’t live here,” I said. “I’m apartment sitting for my aunt—the one from the whole phone-dishes caper. She’s out of the country for the summer. In, uh … London. For business.”

  “Wow.” He shook his head. “You’ve got to have the most trusting parents in the world. Who lets a seventeen-year-old apartment-sit by herself?”

  The question hung open-ended because it would take too many lies. But it’s not like he’d really offered anything about his family either, not the first time I’d asked, not in any of our conversations since.

  “Almost as big a show of trust as a walkabout.” I’d intended it as a tease, but it came out as a challenge. I met his eyes with searing contact. “Why are you in New York? Really?”

  “This is my father’s grand concession.” Char’s face changed, the smile dropping like petals off a flower—leaving an expression as vulnerable and naked as a bare stem. I fought the urge to look away, study graffiti, boarded and barred windows, weeds growing between buildings, and cigarette butts, gum spots on the sidewalk—anything ugly, anything less painful than the look on his face.

  I didn’t want to ask. And I could have pushed him back to grins and glow with a snuggle or a safe comment, but I slid my fingers between his instead. He squeezed them, but this truth, this moment, was worth a bruise.

  “Tell me.” The words might press him farther from happy, but if he shared this story—his pain—it would take us someplace deeper.

  “He’s not really one for compromise, my father. We had an argument at my graduation party—I was stupid enough to say something about med school to a friend’s mom and he overheard. It was ugly. Like, he got so angry, he thought he was having a heart attack. This month of go-to-New-York-and-sow-your-wild-oats-or-do-whatever is a bribe. I get thirty days of freedom, time and space to let go of my dreams, and he gets the rest of my life.”

  Char touched my wrist. Dragged a finger down the blue lines of my arteries, making the blood inside rush and tumble back to my heart, which was skipping beats and breaking with my inability to fix this.

  “Was that one of the opportunities you missed out on? Premed?”

  He nodded. “I kept thinking he’d come around, but I let him shut down the topic whenever it came up and I never talked about it directly with him. I was scared and stupid—and his face when he over
heard me at the party … His heart’s not great. I could’ve killed him.” Char’s face was pale; drops of sweat stood out around the edges of his hair. “If I’d just sat down and had a conversation with him—anytime this year—things wouldn’t have blown up like that. And how can I possibly ask him to change his mind now?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks, but can we change the topic? I don’t want to be thinking about that right now. Not when I’m here, happy, with you.”

  I nodded. Wondered what the other missed opportunity was, then allowed the question to be swallowed by a bigger concern. He only had thirty days. Thirty minus six since we’d met. Minus however many days he’d been in New York before then. I wasn’t brave enough to ask for the difference.

  “I believe you mentioned coconut coffee,” Char said. “I don’t think I’m courageous enough for that combination, but I could use some caffeine after last night, what about you?”

  “Coconut scares you? Then I guess you won’t even consider kiwi. Byron will be so disappointed.”

  I thought we were safe. Away from conversational land mines. Especially when Byron pulled out a new case of fall flavor syrups for us to “taste test.” Even I had to admit that sugar-free caramel apple and pumpkin pie sounded more appealing than tropical fruits.

  But while we waited for our order, my eyes caught on the back page of the newspaper a man in a Yankees cap was reading and I was trapped by the headline and photo—the same one from our collision day. Mother’s favorite. But with bull’s-eyes superimposed over everyone but Father.

  GRIEVING FATHER OR COLD-BLOODED KILLER?

  I flinched when Char touched my arm, getting my attention so he could hand me my cup.

  “It’s so sad.” He nodded at the paper. I’d only just pulled my eyes away and now they followed his gesture back. One small part of me was grateful to this salt-and-pepper man for covering my face in the photo with his pointer finger, but most of me was just trying not to cry. “I don’t believe that for a second,” Char said.