Faking Perfect (27 page)

“What?” I said, gingerly sitting in the chair across from her.

Her hands dropped from her face, revealing a red nose and wet cheeks. “I wanted to do it on my own. Raise you, I mean. Without him or anyone else. But I couldn’t. I had no idea what I was doing. I was too scared. I needed Teresa, even after I’d saved enough money to leave their house. That’s why we moved across the street instead of to another town or city or whatever. I couldn’t take you away from the people you loved. Not again. And I trusted Teresa to raise you right.”

My mother looked so small, curled up into herself like Piper had been earlier when she lay in my arms. Keeping me near the Bruces was probably one of the most caring things my mother had ever done for me, aside from removing me from a drug house.

“Teresa misses you,” I said quietly. “She wants to be your friend again.”

Mom grabbed a napkin from the holder on the table and wiped her nose. “What Teresa wants, she already has.”

Me,
I thought.
She means me.
It was crazy how many ways a situation or intention could be perceived. To Mom, it was like Teresa had hatched an evil plan to steal me away and undermine her as my mother. But the way I saw it, she’d simply been there for me, providing the love she knew I lacked.

I focused on my mother’s face, which had been wiped clear of all her artfully applied makeup. Without it, she looked every bit her age. “If that’s what you really think,” I said, “then get your act together and fight for me like my dad did.”

I wasn’t sure what shocked me more, that I’d challenged my mother to be my mother or that I’d used the
d
word in reference to Eric. In any case, my legs felt weak with tension as I stood up and started toward the door. “You know where to find me.”

I walked out the door and back across the street.

Chapter Twenty-five

S
ince I’d come home from Alton, Tyler and I had been spending every spare minute together. In the evenings, after his various painting jobs, he would drive over to see me at the Bruces’ house. At first, I worried he and Nolan wouldn’t get along, that Tyler would see him the same way Ben had and things would get weird. But when I broached the subject to Tyler one night, he simply shrugged.

“If we can’t trust each other, then what’s the point?” He knew what Nolan meant to me and accepted our friendship. He understood.

And once Nolan realized that Tyler didn’t feel threatened by him, they got along just fine.

The only thing we were lacking was time alone. My room at the Bruces’ house had a window, but just the thought of sneaking Tyler in felt disrespectful and wrong. Instead, I kept my ears and eyes open whenever I was at my own house, hoping I could somehow nail down a time after six o’clock when the house would be empty.

One Saturday in mid-July, I got my chance. When I went over at around seven to feed Trevor, my mother was all glammed up and gabbing on the phone to one of her girlfriends about their forthcoming night on the town.
Jackpot.

I didn’t even bother going back across the street after she left. I texted Tyler, who came straight over. And not to my bedroom window, either. For the first time ever, he entered my house through the front door.

As I led him down the stairs to my room, I wondered—just for a moment—if the sexual chemistry between us would suffer now that our relationship was out in the open and he’d lost some of his mystery and danger. But I shouldn’t have wondered. If anything, it intensified.

“Tyler,” I said much later as we lay twisted together on my bed, half asleep.

“Hmm?”

“I need to talk to you about something.”

His chest rose and fell under my cheek. “Okay.”

I swallowed. How did I bring this up without sounding all girlfriend-like and presumptuous? But I had to. The farther we got into summer, the more I started thinking about college and what would happen to us when I left. I’d be hours away, only coming home for major holidays. Would he be okay with that? Would
I
? Could I really ask him to wait for me? No, I couldn’t, at least not right this second.

He was waiting for me to say something, so I did. “Promise me you’ll never do drugs.”

“Uh,” he said, confused by the random request. “I’m afraid that ship has already sailed. You’ve even sailed with me a few times, remember?”

“I’m not talking about a bit of weed here and there. I mean the heavier stuff.”

“Ah.” He rolled to the side and pulled me against his warm skin. For a moment, I forgot what we were discussing, then he said, “In that case, you don’t need to worry. That stuff scares the shit out of me. I’ve seen
Intervention
.”

I gave him a half-hearted smack. “I’m being serious.”

“So am I,” he said, moving on top of me and nibbling my earlobe. “Very serious.”

For a minute, I just closed my eyes and let him distract me. Then, just like that night in Dustin Sweeney’s yard, I snapped out of it and pushed him away, only gently and without the kick to the shin.

He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “I have to say something else.”

“What is it?” he asked, sensing my apprehension.

I sighed. “I’m leaving for college soon.”

Tyler looked at me, waiting.

“In six weeks,” I went on.

“Yeah . . .”

“And I don’t plan on coming home very often.”

He blinked and looked away, finally getting it. “Right. I figured.”

I touched his forearm, running my fingertips over the faded splotches of paint that clung to his skin no matter how hard he scrubbed. “I’ll understand if it’s . . . too much.”

“Too much what? Time apart?”

I nodded.

“Lexi,” he said, holding my chin so I’d look at him. Not forcefully like Jesse had held it that awful night in the kitchen, but soft and light, so if I wanted to—which I didn’t—I could easily break free. “It’s okay. I mean, it sucks that I’ll hardly ever get to see you, but I know how much you want to get away. It doesn’t matter what I think or what anybody else thinks. Just go. Start fresh.”

All I could do was stare at him in amazement. Back in September, when I’d seduced him for my own selfish reasons, I’d barely given a thought to how he felt or who he really was. All I’d seen was the image he projected to the world—the petty criminal, drug-dealing badass who slept around. But the more I got to know the real Tyler, the more that old image became distorted, evolving and changing until finally, a brand new one took its place. This new one never ceased to surprise me.

I bit my lip. “So, you’ll be here when I come home?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

He dropped a kiss on the bridge of my nose where my freckles were the most concentrated. “I know exactly what you mean. Like I said, I’m not going anywhere.”

I smiled. Somehow, in spite of our unconventional beginning, Tyler Flynn had become something more. I wasn’t a normal girl in a normal relationship with the boy everyone loved, but then again, I never had been.

An hour later, we got dressed and I walked Tyler outside. When we reached his car, which was parked in my driveway for the first time ever, I turned and leaned my backside against the hood. My cheeks burned, and I was suddenly grateful for the darkness obscuring my face. “Tyler, when did you realize you had, um . . . deeper feelings for me?”

He moved in front of me, so close I could feel the lingering warmth from my bed radiating off his skin. “You mean when did I fall in love with you?”

Since breath was necessary for speech and I’d just lost both, all I could do was nod idiotically.

“December,” he said.

I studied the shadowy outline of his face, trying to remember something significant that had happened between us last December. Nothing. In fact, we’d barely seen each other that month. All the holiday parties had kept him pretty busy.

“It was the last day before Christmas break,” he continued, running his fingers over my bare shoulder and down my arm, making me shiver. “I remember because everyone was in a good mood, even the teachers, and they let us leave twenty minutes early. On my way out, I saw you standing by the library with your friends. You were wearing that dark blue sweater that makes your eyes look almost purple and I couldn’t stop myself from watching you. Anyway, that ass-wipe Ben was talking to someone at the other end of the hallway and you were gazing at him like you were starstruck or something. Like there was no one else in the world but him. And all I could think was I wish she looked at me like that.”

Some kind of insect was draining the blood from my left ankle, but I barely noticed. My brain was too focused on the realization that Tyler Flynn had his own layer of armor and it was just as brittle as mine. “You never said anything.”

“Of course I didn’t. Can you blame me?”

No. I couldn’t. After all, I’d made my intentions pretty clear from the start. Avoid each other in public, keep our secret, and most important, do not get attached. Obviously, my
Lexi Rules
were all null and void at that point. “If you felt that way about me, why did you stop caring when I started dating Ben? Why did you give up?”

“I didn’t give up. I backed off. There’s a difference. And I never stopped caring.... I just thought you’d be happier with someone like him. He was better for you.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“Yeah, I realize that now.”

For a moment, all I could hear was the rustle of the leaves in the lilac bush and the occasional car on the road beside us. I was sure people were looking at us, intrigued by the teenage couple embracing in public for all to see, but I no longer cared about who might be watching or what they might think of me. For once, I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

“So,” Tyler said in a lighter, slightly teasing voice. “When did you fall in love with me?”

Another car rolled past, its headlights illuminating his face and giving me a clear view of the devious, cocky smile I somehow knew would be there.

I grinned right back. “Just now.”

On the first day of August, the doorbell rang while Teresa and I were cleaning up the kitchen after dinner.

“That’s Tyler,” I said, bolting out of the kitchen and down the stairs to the front door. When I swung it open, my smile froze and then melted away. It wasn’t Tyler on the other side . . . it was my mother.

“I just came over to give you these,” she said, handing me a shopping bag filled with what looked like unopened mail. “They’re not all there, but it’s most of them, I think. Everything I managed to save.”

I reached into the bag and brought out a square blue envelope. My name and address was scrawled across the front in a handwriting I vaguely recognized. Then I looked at the return address. My father. That was when it hit me—these were the cards he’d sent over the years, the ones my mother had kept from me. “Oh my God.” I looked back at her.

She was standing nervously on the steps, staring at the house like it was haunted.

“Um,” I said. “Are you coming in?”

She shook her head quickly. “Not quite ready for that yet.”

Fair enough
, I thought, and stepped outside, letting the door close behind me. I sat down on the top step and tore open the blue envelope. A Christmas card, going by the winter scene on the front. When I opened it, two pictures and a check fell out onto my lap. The check, made out to me for a hundred dollars, was dated three years ago. The pictures were of Willow and Jonah, their names and ages written on the back. They’d been there all along, hidden away like treasures, begging me to find them. If only I’d known to look.

Mom sat down next to me as I ripped through the rest. There were about twenty cards, each with a check for a hundred dollars, some with pictures and some not, all signed by my father.

“Thanks,” I said, putting them back in the bag.

“Better late than never, right?”

I could feel the tension in her body as she sat there, like she was bracing herself for another fight. For a moment, I felt like giving her one, blasting her right off the steps for keeping it all from me, keeping my family from me, but for some reason I held back. Yes, it was her fault for letting me believe my father had abandoned me, but maybe I should have pushed harder. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to believe I was easy to forget.

“So,” she said, biting her lip the same way I did. “Do you think you’ll move out there someday?”

To
Alton
? A town so small and secluded it only had one traffic light and the nearest college was a zillion miles away? I stifled a laugh. “No. My home is here.”

Her slight smirk told me she knew exactly what I was thinking. After all, she’d never gone back, and she never once mentioned missing it. “Is that old dive on Pike Street still open? Ziggy’s?”

“Yeah. Eric told me you used to work there. He said that’s where you met.”

When she smiled, the lines on her face disappeared completely and I could see what Eric meant when he’d said, “She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.”

She nodded. “Yep. I never could resist those bad boys.”

As if he was just waiting in the wings for the perfect opening, Tyler drove up then in his dusty black Impala, music blaring and cigarette dangling from his lips, the personification of every parent’s nightmare. He cut the engine, ditched the cigarette, and got out, exhaling smoke into the evening air. When he saw me sitting with my mother on the steps, he barely even flinched. He just kept going, across the walk and up the steps, nodding at me as he passed as if to say
I’ll be inside if you need me.

My mother followed his movements until he was in the house, then she turned to me and said, “Isn’t that the boy who tried to strangle Jesse?”

The casual way she said it, along with the absurdity of that whole situation, made me burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. “Yeah. That’s Tyler. He’s not perfect, but he loves me.”

“Well.” She stood up and brushed the dirt off her shorts, glancing back at the house again like she might actually make it inside one day. “That’s all any of us can hope for, right?” With that, she clomped down the steps and headed for home. She hadn’t exactly come over to fight for me, but she
had
come over. It was a start.