Always Something There to Remind Me (12 page)

I missed the idea of him more than he himself.

That was probably it.

Or at least I felt
fractionally
more comfortable when I told myself that.

Chapter 9

October 1986

“Pete Hagar has the hots for you,” Theresa said to Erin at lunch.

Erin looked up from her food. They called it “Benson Hash” and she wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Some sort of chopped mystery meat. Possibly with onions involved. “Says who?”

“Says
him
,” Theresa said triumphantly. “I asked him during history.”

“Oh, my God, did you tell him I said he was cute?” Color flooded hotly into Erin’s cheeks. Yeah, she thought Pete was cute.
Everyone
did. He was new and seemed normal and drove a cool car. All three of those things were rare at Benson Prep.

“Relax, no.” She looked like she was lying. “I just asked him, hypothetically, if he’d like to go to the park with us on Sunday. And at first he said no, so then I said, ‘Well, do you want to go to the park with us on Sunday if Erin is going?’ and he was, like, ‘Yes, I love the park’ so…”

“
Really?
” Erin looked across the room to where Pete was eating. For a moment their eyes met, then she looked down. “Shit, he just caught me looking at him.”

“Good.”

“Good what?” Jordan asked, slipping up to the table behind them. She’d just had a conversation with the headmaster about why she didn’t think she should be forced to say a prayer aloud before lunch, since every day one person was asked to lead grace and all the prayers were specific to God and Jesus, whom Jordan was just not that into. “What’s going on?”

“Pete Hagar,” Theresa said.

“Oh.” Jordan nodded and sat down in front of her plate of meat. “This is gross.”

“The mashed potatoes are okay,” Erin volunteered, adding more butter. “And the rolls.”

“I wish we could bring our own lunch,” Jordan said.

“If you can’t bring your own God, you can’t bring your own lunch.” Erin laughed. “But maybe you should have a talk with the headmaster about that anyway. Did you get anywhere?”

Jordan shook her head. “He just said it was only symbolic and that I shouldn’t worry so much about it.” She rolled her eyes. “Really helpful. But I don’t have to recite it anymore.”

“Well, that’s pretty much what you wanted, right?” Theresa asked.

“It works.”

“So he asked for your number,” Theresa said to Erin.

“Who?”

“Pete,” Jordan supplied. “Come on, you know how Theresa works. She doesn’t do things halfway.”

“He did?” Erin’s stomach went on edge. “Seriously?”

“Yes!”

“But … Nate!” She just couldn’t bear to think about Nate. Pete was cute, she was kind of interested, but she didn’t want to hurt Nate or give him up. And, unfortunately, there was no way she could just put him on hold—freeze him like some scene from
Bewitched
—and come back if she wanted to.

This could be the end for them.

“Nate will get over it!” Theresa waved a forkful of mashed potatoes, then popped them in her mouth.

“I don’t know.…” Jordan looked concerned. “Poor Nate.”

“Ugh, don’t
say
that!” Erin objected.

“You just did!”

Guilt tightened around her chest. She didn’t want to make Nate feel bad. But, jeez, they never went anywhere anymore, never did anything in particular apart from hanging out at houses (hers, his, Theresa’s, Jordan’s). She was only going to be a teenager once, right? She wanted to know what it was like to be a normal teenage girl, with dates and everything, particularly since she was going to such a tiny, weird private school.

She had to grab normality wherever it presented itself.

And if Nate wasn’t interested enough to try and keep her by treating her like he valued her, why should she just sit around and give up her youth on him?

“So did you give it to him?” she asked Theresa, determined to ignore Jordan’s concerned looks. “My number, I mean.”

“Of course!”

Erin met Pete’s eyes again, and this time she smiled. He smiled back.

It was a very nice smile. Good, white teeth.

She was all about good teeth in guys. A great smile could make up for a lot of other flaws.

“Good,” she said, raising her chin defiantly. She could do whatever she wanted. She didn’t need to feel guilty! She was only sixteen, for God’s sake!

Suddenly some small part of her felt an uncomfortable question wedge its way into her mind. Was she stupid to be spending so much time during these, her prime teen years, with just one guy? Yes, she loved Nate, but how could she know if it was
real
love, the kind that was supposed to last forever? She had nothing to compare it to. Things with Nate were so comfortable—wasn’t “in love” supposed to be a constant thrill, pounding heart, quickening of the breath?

Maybe she wasn’t “in love” so much as she “loved.”

Because that was one thing she knew for sure: she loved Nate.

For just a moment she sank into that feeling. She loved him. He
did
make her heart pound a lot of the time. She
did
catch her breath still when she saw him. Sometimes. She didn’t ever want things to be any different than they were now. But maybe that was just the problem—maybe she really needed to get out and see what else was out there so she didn’t someday have regrets that would last forever.

Maybe the only way she could have
forever
with Nate was if she had
now
with a few other dates.

“Then I hope he calls.” And she would ignore the nagging guilt and apprehension that already played at her psyche.

*   *   *

They dated for exactly a month.

She did have the decency to be honest with Nate about it in advance. She told him she wanted to date someone else, though the feeling she really had was that she wanted to be able to date someone else and see if it was good while still having the same thing going with Nate. There was no way to phrase it that way, of course, but they were so close that, in truth, she couldn’t imagine
not
being close to him no matter what happened.

Nate was a constant in her life.

Surely he’d
always
be a constant in her life. Though it had been hard to ignore the deep pain in his eyes. He might have understood her need to try something else, but he didn’t like it. It hurt him.

She didn’t want to hurt him.

But she needed to get out there and date a little, didn’t she? How could she say she wanted to
marry
Nate if she never even knew what it was like to be with someone else?

She couldn’t!

And Pete was a perfectly nice guy. Yes, she had to pretend to like heavy metal at first and she couldn’t really play her mix tapes in his car like she could in Nate’s because his tastes ran more toward hard rock. But mostly she struggled with a matter of him never quite feeling familiar, the way Nate did.

She gave him a chance, she thought. A month was long enough to start to get used to someone. Or, alternatively, to see if you started to feel weirder with him.

In this case, she began to feel weirder with him.

Plus, she was in constant touch with Nate. It was like they were still together, really, but he was turning away and pretending not to notice when she went out with Pete.

As a result, she felt like Nate was still her boyfriend and Pete was, increasingly, a kind of boring friend with a cool car who paid for her dinner out and movies and stuff.

Finally one night after they went to see a movie, she faced the fact that what she was doing wasn’t fair to him
or
Nate, and she wasn’t really having any fun at it herself. So she had A Talk with Pete in the car when he brought her home.

“I don’t think we should go out anymore,” she said, when he pulled the car to a stop in front of her house.

He looked shocked. “
Why?
”

How could he be shocked? At first she’d let him kiss her, but she hadn’t even done that for almost two weeks! “Well”—she couldn’t tell him there was someone else, especially the Someone Else who had been there first, because that was just too insulting—“I just don’t really want to go out with
anyone
right now.” It was a limp lie, but not the first one she’d told and it wouldn’t be the last. She could only hope he’d let her off the hook with it.

“Is there another guy?” he asked. Bingo! “Are you going to go out with Bennett?”

Bennett Laraby was the school Bad Boy and, yes, cute, but not someone Erin would
ever
go out with. “Absolutely not!” she said with complete conviction. “No
way
. It’s really just me. Don’t take it personally.”

He gave a little scoff. “Kind of hard not to.”

Of course. She’d feel the same way, in his shoes.

“It’s that other guy, isn’t it?” he said suddenly. “That guy you went out with before.”

She swallowed and put her hand to her chest. “It’s just
me
,” she insisted.

Why had she gotten herself into this mess? It had never felt right, not once. The newness—the
foreign
ness—of him had been interesting at first, but only because Nate had never felt new or foreign to her.

He’d always felt like home.

She should have realized that was good, not bad.

But at her age, she wanted to shake it up. Or she thought she had. Now she thought she was a little old lady who didn’t want shaking at all, but who wanted the easy, comfortable boy she could see herself in her nineties with someday.

“I’m sorry,” was all she could say. At this point, she really wanted to get out of the car. She didn’t want to have this conversation anymore. He was never going to understand. But she’d done what she’d needed to do, said what she’d dreaded saying, this should be over.

“Fuck it.” He slammed his hands against the steering wheel.

Okay, so … did that mean she was dismissed? “I’ll just go in now…?” she said tentatively, one hand on the door handle so she could make a run for it if necessary.

“Fine.” He kept his gaze fastened straight ahead.

She glanced at the clock. It was eleven thirty on a Friday night. She didn’t have to be home yet. Good. “So … I’m sorry,” she said again, opening the door. “Really.”

He didn’t answer, just gunned the motor when she closed the door, and she stood there a moment, watching him blaze down the street.

Then she glanced at her house—the lights were out, her parents were probably already asleep. Plus, she had till one
A.M.

So she started to run.

She ran down the street, then stopped at the corner and took off the stupid leather shoes that had been killing her feet all night. She just left them on the neighbors’ lawn, she didn’t care if she ever saw them again. It was still warm enough, in early October, to go without them. So, bare feet pounding against the cold sidewalk, she ran almost a mile until she got to Nate’s house.

His light was on, she saw as she stood in front of the house in the grass, trying to catch her breath. He was there.

She looked around for something to toss at the window to get his attention, and picked up a handful of landscaping gravel. But there was a screen on the outside of the window, so even if she was foolish enough to try and throw the gravel at glass, it would bounce off and probably hit her in the forehead noiselessly.

“Nate!” she called quietly, then waited.

Nothing.

Crap.

What was she going to do?

“Nate!” she tried again, a little louder.

Still nothing. Not a single movement in the room.

“Shit.” She threw the gravel back into the garden.

“Erin?”

She whirled around, shocked to see Nate himself where she expected no one, and no one where she expected to see Nate.

Suddenly she was nervous. “Hey,” she said, lifting her hand weakly. “How’s it going?”

“What are you doing?”

There was no way to play this cool. “Yelling at your window.”

“What did it do?”

“It ignored me.” She smiled, but she was afraid he wasn’t going to care. “What are you doing out here?”

“I was looking for something in my car. But I still don’t get what
you’re
doing here.”

She sighed. “Well, I went out, and it ended early, and I was thinking about you, and”—tears started to burn her eyes—“miss you and stuff. And”—she swallowed—“I wanted to see you.”

“Should I want to see you?” His voice was hard. Cold. “Don’t you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” she said quickly. She swallowed, downing her pride and everything else except the lump in her throat. “I mean, I
hope
so, but it’s…” There was no clever way to say what she’d done. “You.”

“You want me to be your boyfriend,” he repeated flatly, without moving toward her. She was the one spotlighted by the streetlamp, but she could see his face well enough to tell his eyes were narrowed. His mouth was a tight line, his jaw clenched. “When you’ve just spent the last month with someone else.”

“Yes,” she said in a small voice, and a sob caught in her throat. He might say no. He’d be completely within his rights to say no.

He looked at her for a long, steely moment in silence.

Then he just shook his head and strode over to her, pulling her into his arms and kissing her hard.

She kissed him right back, instantly delirious in a feeling of relief and all being right with her world. It was amazing how quickly it took her over, this feeling of dizzying love and need that only he could—and would—fill. How had she ever done without it? Why had she ever thought she wanted something else?

They moved into the shadows, away from the watchful eye of the streetlamp, fumbling at each other in the darkness, urgency replacing ego and apologies and even forgiveness. Because every action he took showed her that he loved her even though she didn’t know if he’d still talk to her tomorrow.

That wasn’t what mattered right now.

What mattered now was that they were together, locked in the night, soul to soul in a moment that felt like it would never end.