How to Love (21 page)

“New Mexico,” he says, like a litany. After a moment his hand brushes my heel. “Austin.”

I try not to notice—I believe in accidents—but then his palm slides up the back of my leg, across the muscles that
have settled there since he’s been gone. “Hey there,” I tell him, and I have to clear my throat to do it.

“Reena,” he says, and the sound of him saying my name is a murmur down my backbone that spreads like a flattened palm. He presses his index finger to the crease behind my knee. “I’m not doing anything.”

“You really are, though.” God, it would be so easy. How is it possible that it would still be so easy? I take a big breath and slide over on the step, away from him.

Sawyer lets go right away, reaches down for more pebbles to throw and, finding none, sets about pulling blades of grass from the cracks in the walkway. “Can I ask you something?” he says after a moment, not looking at me. His hands are very tan. “If I’d asked you to come with me, you think you would have?”

“What, when you left here?” I look at him curiously. “I was already pregnant.”

Sawyer laughs a little. “No kidding, princess. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you would have come.”

For a minute I don’t say anything and the silence is phosphorescent; it feels like the whole world is asleep. A small green lizard scampers by. I think of the maps folded up in my bedroom, the travel guides and atlases I’m never going to use. I think of my girl, who I love more than any breathing creature in this universe, and tilt my head back at the moon in a silent howl.

“No,” I tell him finally. “Probably not.”

Sawyer nods like I’ve given him something, confirmed what he suspected from the start. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”

In the morning I wake up and find a pomegranate on my doorstep: red and perfect, round as the world itself.

Cade and Stefanie got married the weekend after the restaurant caught fire, standing up in front of God and everyone else and promising their lifelong love and devotion to each other, for richer or poorer, till death did they part. The reception was supposed to have been at Antonia’s but, since his kitchen was good and charred, Finch set up shop in ours instead. Soledad and I spent all of Saturday scouring the house, setting up tables in the backyard and filling giant vases with limes for centerpieces. Cade mostly paced.

Now, with only a few minutes to cake time, I was standing on tiptoes in my closet, rooting around on the top shelf for the shoebox containing the yearbook pictures my aunt Carin had to see
right this minute, Reena, bring ’em down.
I’d
just pulled out the proofs when Sawyer wrapped his arms around my waist from behind, rested his clean-shaven chin on my shoulder. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” I grinned at my cardigans. I didn’t turn around.

“Hi,” he repeated, got me farther inside the closet, spun me around to look him in the face. He made for my mouth with no preamble, my back pressing into jackets and jeans: I smelled body spray and tissue paper, and laughed.

“Come to make out with me in a closet?” I asked, taking another step back. “That’s very classy, LeGrande.”

Sawyer shrugged, grinned a little. “We can make out downstairs, if you’d like.”

I snorted. “Tempting, but I’ll take a pass.”

“I knew it,” he said, faux-sulking. “I’m your dirty little secret.”

“Oh, you so are.”

He smiled. “I missed you.”

“I’m really popular at this party.”

“So I see.” He looked out the door of the closet, glanced at the walls. “Did you paint?”

I smirked, looking around. “Like two years ago I did.”

“Oh, man.” Sawyer laughed. “I don’t even remember the last time I was allowed up here.”

“I do,” I blurted immediately, then cringed. “That’s embarrassing.”

“Nah.” Sawyer sat down on the floor of the closet and took my hand, pulling gently until I came down beside
him. His index finger traced the skinny strap of my dress. “Tell me.”

“No.” I pushed aside a stack of
Budget Travel
magazines from last year, the pages gone smudgy and curled with repeated handling. There was one issue in particular with an article about street markets in London that I could repeat almost word-for-word—just like I could remember every detail about the last time Sawyer had been in my room. “It’s dumb.”

“Holdout,” Sawyer teased, leaning back against the wall. It was dark down here: Jeans and dresses blocked out the light from the bedroom and it felt like we were pretending, like we were hiding in a fort. Balled up at the back of the closet was an old sweatshirt of Allie’s, red with a big white cross on it from the one summer she’d spent lifeguarding. I reached for it like an instinct, pulling at one of the strings on the hood. “Come on.”

“I don’t know,” I said, huffing a little as I thought about it—the night he came for dinner with his parents, the summer after freshman year. “It was a long time ago. Allie was here with me.”

“Oh!” he said, remembering. “We played cards?”

I nodded.
Rummy
, I could have added.
Allie borrowed my tank top and you told her she looked old for her age and I wished her away for the first time in our entire friendship while we sat here, thinking maybe you’d notice me after she was gone.

Sawyer must have seen my face change, because he
grabbed me around the waist in a hurry, tugged me even closer until my head was in his lap. I could feel the muscles in his legs beneath his gray wool pants. There was hardly any give there at all. “Don’t get weird.”

“I’m not getting weird,” I protested, though I felt like I might be about to. I couldn’t get over the notion that Allie was the third person in this relationship, that wanting Sawyer and feeling guilty and missing her so much it ground my bones to dust was all bundled up together, the strings on a hoodie pulled as tight as they’d go. I looked at Sawyer to see if he felt it too—if he felt
her
, crammed into my messy closet right along with us—but he was looking at me mildly.
Talking about it doesn’t change anything
, I reminded myself. “Tell me something good,” I said instead.

Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “Anything in particular?”

“No, I don’t know. Anything. Tell me your favorite movie of all time.”

“
The Godfather
.”

“Really?” I made a face. “Predictable.”

“Oh, and what’s yours?”

I shrugged, muttered. “
Some Kind of Wonderful
.”

“Because
that’s
a bold choice.”

“Shut up,” I said, and he bent down to kiss me again—longer, this time, hands wandering. “Be invisible?” he asked, into my shoulder. “Or be able to fly?”

“Invisible, definitely,” I said. “Be deaf or blind?”

“Blind.”

“Because of the music thing?”

“Uh-huh. When are you going to let me read your essay?”

I grinned; it was a joke between us now, Sawyer saying he wanted to read the words I’d sent off to Northwestern and me feeling too shy to let him. “Someday,” I promised. “We’ll see.”

We made out for a little while longer, ten hidden minutes with my jeans and my sneakers, the Northwestern T-shirt my father had ordered off the internet despite my protests that I wasn’t even in yet. Sawyer ran his fingers through my hair. His free hand drifted down and I tensed for just one second, but in the end he just squeezed my knee, glanced up at the contents of my closet, and nodded. “You’ve got a lot of space in here,” he said, barest hint of a grin. “I wish my closet was this big.”

“To accommodate all your ironic concert T-shirts?”

“Think you’re smart, huh?” he asked, fingertips seeking my sides. I scrambled up before he could tickle me, grabbed his arm to pull him out of the closet. “Come on, Slick,” I said, smiling. “I need to go back downstairs.”

“Mmm,” he said, not moving. “No, you don’t.”

“I really do. My father is going to come looking for me.” I grinned. “With his shotgun.”

“Your father doesn’t own a shotgun.”

“Sure he does. He uses it on guys who try to make out with me in closets.”

“Duly noted.” Sawyer grinned back, and moved on. “Biggest pet peeve?”

I sighed, crouched down again so we were at eye level. “People who mispronounce the word
nuclear
.”

He laughed. “English nerd.”

“Favorite book?”

“
The Sound and the Fury
.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not completely illiterate, you know.”

“No, of course not.” I blushed. “I just thought you were going to say, like—”

“
Catcher in the Rye
?”

“Well,” I said, embarrassed. “Yes, actually.”

Sawyer leaned toward me. “I’m not that predictable. First kiss?”

“Elliot Baxter, at the eighth-grade dance. What did you really pick up from your drummer that day?”

Sawyer frowned. “Okay,” he said suddenly, up off the carpet, attempting to climb over me and out the closet door. “You’re right. Time to go back downstairs.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” I dropped Allie’s sweatshirt and let him pull me out with him, slightly dizzy. We stood up in the light of my bedroom, sudden and bright. “Painkillers, right?”

“I—” Sawyer raised his eyebrows, surprised, and I knew I wasn’t wrong. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I have eyeballs,” I told him. Also, I had Google. “I’m not dumb.”

“I never thought you were.” He didn’t apologize, or try to deny it. Instead he wrapped both arms around my shoulders and squeezed, friendly and familiar. “I don’t do it a lot,” he promised. “Every once in a while.”

How often is
that
? I wanted to ask him. I thought of Lauren Werner and long nights at the Prime Meridian, of the intervention shows Shelby liked to watch. From what I’d seen in movies and on TV, Sawyer didn’t
seem
like an addict—someone who sweated all the time and stole his parents’ DVD player. Still, here were such huge swaths of his life I didn’t know anything about—whole paragraphs blacked out of wartime letters, movies modified to fit this screen. Who
are
you? I wanted to demand, but instead I only nodded, tucking this piece of information, and everything it might mean, into the back of my head for further consideration and trying to ignore the sinking sensation in my stomach. I needed him not to be too good to be true.

“Oh Jesus,” I said then, catching a glimpse of my hair in the mirror above the dresser, photos and jewelry box and deodorant scattered across the surface. Forty-five minutes’ worth of Soledad’s careful handiwork was completely and totally undone. “See what you did?”

He watched as I repaired the worst of the damage, kissed me on the forehead, and smiled. “You’re pretty cute.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “All right, you drug-addled hair-wrecker. Let’s go.”

“Right behind you, you language-obsessed intellectual elitist.”

I waited five more minutes after Sawyer went downstairs, snuck down as unobtrusively as I could manage. He wasn’t a secret, I told myself, dirty or otherwise, but this was Cade’s day, and I was happy. The last thing I needed was another grave, disappointed look from my father, the nagging feeling of something not right behind my ribs.

I grabbed a slice of wedding cake, made my way through the yard. Carin grabbed my arm as I passed by. “Reena,” she said curiously, an expression on her face like I’d changed inexplicably in the thirty minutes since she’d last seen my face. “What happened to the photos?”

Fighting with Shelby makes me totally miserable. I keep going to text her—for all kinds of different reasons, stupid regular stuff, to let her know that
Center Stage
is on cable or to complain about the new Taylor Swift song lodging itself deep inside my brain—before realizing we aren’t speaking and flinging my phone back onto the couch. I sulk. I remember this feeling from the year before Allie died, the weird emptiness of not having a best friend to tell things to. How it’s lonelier than any breakup could ever be.

We work the same busy dinner shift at Antonia’s one night, two big eight-tops and a party back in the banquet room. I catch her by the wrist by the bar during what’s as close to a lull as we’re going to get, my fingers curling
around the half dozen bracelets she’s wearing. “Shelby,” I start, then completely fail to follow it up in any kind of meaningful way.

Shelby raises her eyebrows, an armful of napkins and a look on her face like whatever I have to say, it better be good. “What?” she asks shortly.

I hesitate. I want to ask her how her week’s going; I want to get the latest Hipster Cara updates. I want to tell her I’m sorry, that I feel like one of those horrible girls who can’t make friendships work with other girls, that I miss her a crap ton and I didn’t mean to screw with her brother and I’ll do anything she wants to make it up to her. I want to fix this in the worst, stupidest way, but I don’t know how to do it, and in the end I just shake my head. “Forget it,” I say, chickening out at the last possible second. “Never mind.”

“Okay.” Shelby rolls her eyes at me like she both expected this and finds it colossally lame. “Have it your way, Reena,” she says finally, and after a second I let go of her arm.

*

The week creeps along. I’m restless and edgy; Hannah and I cruise the highway for hours every night. “You’re wasting gas,” Cade points out, but I just shrug, handing my credit card over to the pale, skinny attendant like a crack addict looking for a fix. The road rumbles under my feet:
keep going, keep going, keep going.

I drive.

Five o’clock on Sunday and Soledad is cooking; the
kitchen smells delicious, a big pot of yellow rice simmering on the stove and the counter strewn with ingredients I know she pulled from memory. Soledad never makes anything from a book. “Are you going to be around for dinner?” she asks as I pull a bottle of water from the fridge. “The LeGrandes are coming over.”

I tense. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” she asks, looking at me oddly. “To eat.”

“No, I know.” It was an idiotic question. Roger and Lydia still come to dinner from time to time, though usually Hannah and I do our best to scoot out the back door before they get here—it’s always seemed cleaner to do it that way, and it’s not as if anyone’s ever encouraged us to stay. I have no earthly clue what they talk about.