How to Love (22 page)

“Are you not seeing Aaron this weekend?” Soledad asks me now, her expression all practiced-casual as she pulls a covered dish out of the oven, and I do my best to match it in return. He’s left a couple of messages on my cell phone since I broke up with him. So far, I haven’t called him back.

“Um, nope,” I say, fussing a little with the magnetic letters on the fridge.
REENA
, I spell, red and green and yellow.
HOME
. “We’re taking kind of a breather. Can I help?”

“Here, keep stirring this. It’s sticking.” She moves so I can have the stove to myself, a whiff of lilacs and vanilla as she passes by. “What do you mean, ‘a breather’?”

“Hmm?” I ask, stalling, banging the wooden spoon
around in the pot with more force than is strictly called for. “I don’t know. Just, like, some time apart.”

“Really? That’s too bad.” Soledad throws some cherry tomatoes into her wooden salad bowl, then sticks one in her mouth and one into mine for good measure. “I like Aaron,” she says, swallowing. “I think he’s good for you.”

“No shit,” I say, then, “Shit. Sorry. Just, you know, you and everybody else.”

“Ah.” She doesn’t say anything after that. The silence hangs suspended, a drop of blood in a bowl of milk. I wait, though, patient, and finally Soledad sighs. “Reena, about Sawyer.”

Right away I don’t like where we’re heading. “Sol, please, I don’t want to—”

“I know there is a certain kind of …
romance
in him being here. Like a movie. But I just need you to remember what the last few years have been like, all right?” Soledad has moved on to onions now. Her thin, graceful hands chop and dice. “For everyone. For your father.”

“For my
father?
” I blink at her.

Soledad works steadily, the efficient sound of steel on wood. “It’s been hard on everyone, is what I’m saying. And we all might have done things differently, and—” Her face softens and she is looking at me with compassion, which is why I am so surprised when she says, “Please just
think
this time, sweetheart.”

I just stand there for a moment, dumb like an ox. Then
my eyes widen. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I ask quietly, and I am sure she’s going to scold me for my dirty mouth, but instead she just puts the knife down on the counter and shakes her dark, beautiful head.

“No, Serena,” she answers calmly. “I’m fucking not.”

*

I’ve gotta go.

I don’t know where—Shelby’s, maybe, if she’ll even talk to me, or the highway, or in my car right off a cliff—but out of this house is the first step. I pluck Hannah from her playpen and am rooting around in the couch cushions for my keys when the doorbell rings, and when Roger and Lydia come inside, Sawyer is right behind them.

Wearing a
tie
.

I stare for a minute, like the baby does when she’s trying to make sense of something she’s never seen before. I laugh one short, hysterical laugh.

“What happened?” he asks, before hello.

“Nothing.” I lie as a reflex. “Hi.”

Sawyer isn’t satisfied. He nods at the keys in my hand. “Where are you going?”

Roger and Lydia are looking at me expectantly; Soledad is coming through the kitchen door. “Nowhere,” I say, and it’s final, like the sound of something slamming. I put the keys back down and follow them inside.

I was walking to school one sunny April morning, totally lost in my own brain, trying to untangle a particularly stubborn knot in my headphones and planning the article I was going to pitch Noelle that afternoon, about teen travel tours for summer. When a horn honked behind me, I jumped like crazy, iPod skittering to the sidewalk. I whirled around, spooked, and there was Sawyer’s Jeep parked at the curb.

“Did it break?” he called from the driver’s seat. He’d pulled over a half block from my house, right along my usual route. He was wearing sunglasses, but even from over here I could see that he was laughing. Sawyer had a really excellent laugh.

I scooped the iPod up off the ground and examined it
for permanent damage, but other than a couple of scratches it seemed okay. “No harm done,” I called back, shaking my head as I made my way over to the driver’s side door. “Did I just walk right past you?” I asked, embarrassed.

“Uh-huh.” Sawyer reached a hand out and kissed me through the open window, warm morning sun gleaming off the chrome on the Jeep. He was wearing a faded blue T-shirt that looked like it had been washed a million times, as if it might pull apart like cotton candy if you tugged on it even a little. “You,” he pronounced, fingers laced through mine and squeezing, “are tightly wound.”

“I am not!” I protested, holding up the headphones and shifting my weight a bit to accommodate my backpack. I had to bend at a weird angle to lean inside the Jeep. “I was concentrating.”

“Clearly.” Sawyer laughed again, his face tipped close enough to mine that our noses brushed together when he moved. I could feel sweat starting to prickle pleasantly on the back of my neck. “So here’s the thing,” he said, this quiet confidential voice like he was going to tell me something really exciting but I had to promise to keep it just between the two of us. “I woke up thinking about waffles.”

I snorted. “Is that a code word?” I asked, teasing.

Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “Do you want it to be?”

I shrugged and got a little closer, nudging the sunglasses down the bridge of his nose with one finger. Inside the car it smelled like him. “Maybe,” I admitted.

“
Maybe.
” Sawyer tilted his chin in my direction, brushing a row of kisses along my bottom lip. He smiled and I could feel it in my teeth. “Get in and find out.”

God, I wanted to. My stomach swooped sideways with the force of how much, but: “I can’t,” I told him, shaking my head. I exhaled a little, like breaking a spell. “I have homeroom in, like, fifteen minutes.”

“So?” Sawyer asked. His mouth followed mine as I pulled away, still grinning. “Skip it.”

I laughed, straightening up all the way and wiping my suddenly clammy hands on the back of my jeans. I was still holding my iPod. “I can’t just skip it,” I said—lamely, sure, but I really couldn’t. I had a quiz on the first half of
Anna Karenina
and an appointment with Ms. Bowen to talk about internships for the summer, plus the newspaper meeting and a lab report to turn in. I needed to get to school—and soon, actually, if I didn’t want to be totally late. “I can’t.”

Sawyer, apparently, was in no hurry at all. “Sure you can,” he promised easily. “Here, I’ll show you. Just get in the car, and then I’ll hit the gas, and then boom: waffles.”

I wrinkled my nose, bright sun and the headphones tangled up in my fingers, worse than they had been to start with. “Just like that, huh?” I asked.

“Just like that,” he agreed.

I didn’t doubt that for him it was exactly that simple: When Sawyer wanted to do something, he did it. End of story. He didn’t stop to think about everything that could
possibly go wrong. I wondered what it was like to be that kind of person—the kind that wasn’t always worried about what might happen, about what people might think or every disaster that could potentially befall him a dozen steps down the road. He just … acted.

I thought again of my internship meeting and the newspaper article I’d been so psyched to pitch barely five minutes ago, but I could feel my resolve weakening the longer I stood there and looked at Sawyer’s face. Even after dating a full month, it was thrilling to have him show up like this, knowing that he’d been thinking about me enough to come and seek me out. That he thought I could be the kind of person who just acted, too.

“You’re a bad influence,” I said finally, feeling a guilty, delighted smile spread across my face as the idea of spending a full,
secret
day off with Sawyer started to firm up in my mind. I glanced over my shoulder, then down at my feet, so he wouldn’t see how excited I was. “I mean it.”

Sawyer nodded ruefully. “I know,” he said. For a minute it looked like maybe he felt legitimately bad about that, like he thought he was dragging me down in some way. Then he grinned like the Fourth of freaking July. “Get in.”

*

It turned out waffles did actually mean waffles. We went to a trashy Denny’s on Federal Highway and ordered big plates of them covered in whipped cream and blueberries, a giant side of bacon between us. Sawyer’s warm knee pressed
into mine under the table. We sat there half the morning surrounded by a bunch of senior citizens, a couple of moms with noisy kids in a sticky-looking booth by the window. Cheesy Michael Bolton music piped in through the speakers. Being here at such a weird time felt like vacation, like we were a lot further from home than just fifteen minutes: It was as if this was some great trick we were pulling off together, him and me against the world. I knew that was stupid—it was cutting school, not bank robbery or international intelligence gathering—but still, it wasn’t exactly an unattractive fantasy.

“So, how many people in here do you think are spies?” Sawyer asked, taking a long gulp of orange juice and grinning like he’d read my mind. “It’s the perfect cover, right?” He dragged a piece of bacon through a puddle of syrup. “Nobody would ever suspect.”

“Except you,” I pointed out, laughing. I was hugely full but I wanted to keep eating anyway, to hang out in this crappy diner for the foreseeable future. To drink so much coffee I began to vibrate.

“Well, and you, now.” He nodded at an old lady at a table not far from ours, flowered housedress and bright orange Crocs. “Take her, for instance. You think she’s just sitting there minding her own business eating her Grand Slam, but the whole time she’s a special operative for the CIA.” Sawyer raised his eyebrows ominously. “I’m just saying, she could be into some real crazy James Bond shit.”

“Oh, yeah?” I leaned in close across the table. “What’s her alias?”

“Moons Over My Hammy,” Sawyer replied without missing a beat. He nudged my leg with his under the table, hooking one ankle around mine. “Duh.”

Once Sawyer paid the bill we headed back to his place without really talking about it, like we both sort of knew that’s where we’d end up. Purple-green weeds sprang up from between the cracks in the walk. Inside it was quiet and empty-seeming, all his various roommates out or asleep, that vaguely abandoned feeling houses get in the middle of a weekday. The air smelled a little close. There was a half-finished bag of Doritos on the grimy-looking futon and beer bottles scattered on the coffee table, plus one that had toppled over without anybody bothering to wipe its contents up off the floor. Sawyer grinned guiltily. “I, uh. Didn’t clean this time,” he admitted.

“It’s fine,” I said quickly, although in truth it bummed me out a little to think about him living here day in and day out. I thought of Roger and Lydia’s airy, immaculate Craftsman, full of refurbished antiques and plush area rugs that squished pleasantly under the soles of your feet. I wondered if Sawyer had a long-term plan.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to mull it over, though, because in the next second he was wrapping his arms around me from behind, kissing all along the place where the back of my neck met my shoulder. I shivered inside my
gray tank top. “You still like me?” he asked quietly, mouth tipped down low right next to my ear as he walked me in the direction of the staircase. “Even though I live with a bunch of slobs?”

And—yeah. I really,
really
did.

Afterward we napped for a while, Sawyer’s body warm and solid under the covers and both of us in and out of sleep. He traced the freckles on my shoulders with one gentle thumb. I wanted to wrap him up inside the comforter and keep him for days and days, for the two of us to just hang out here forever; I was terrible at napping, normally, but with Sawyer everything felt easy and relaxed.

We were making out again, sleepy, Sawyer shifting his weight back on top of me and the slow slick of his mouth along my jaw, when his bedroom door banged open: “Yo, you home?” Iceman asked loudly, then: “
Whoops.
Sorry, kids.”

I froze, hugely, hideously embarrassed, and let out a startled gasp. I’d put my tank top back on a little earlier to get some water, so it wasn’t like he could see anything, exactly, but still. Sawyer’s shirt was off; my hair was probably a disaster. We were definitely in the middle of something pretty specific. I felt my face flush hot and red.

Sawyer, though, seemed basically unbothered. “Hey, dickhead,” he replied, rolling over and peering at Iceman like they’d run into each other in the kitchen or on the street. “Who used all the toilet paper, huh?”

Iceman snorted. “Oh, yeah, sorry, that was totally me. Here, I can make it up to you.” He dug into his pocket for a minute and produced a baggie like the one I’d found in Sawyer’s shoe the night I stayed over, maybe half a dozen pills inside. Tossed it on the bed. “S’what I came up here to give you in the first place.” He waved to me then, like maybe it was just occurring to him how enormously awkward it was for him to be standing there looking at us like a couple of zoo animals. “Hi, Reena,” he said.

“Nice,” I said to Sawyer once Iceman was finally gone, rolling my eyes and throwing back the covers. I felt vulnerable and kind of gross, like whatever snow globe I’d spent the day inside had been unceremoniously shattered. For the first time since I’d gotten in Sawyer’s car this morning, it occurred to me that maybe I should have gone to school after all.

“What?” Sawyer frowned up at me, still lying on his back with one arm tucked up behind his head. “Don’t be upset. He didn’t know you were in here. It was an honest mistake.”

“He stayed and chatted for like twenty minutes!”

“He did not.” Sawyer smiled up at me, winning. Held a hand out for me to take. “Okay, he kind of did. I’m sorry, you’re right. I should have told him to get lost right away.”

I huffed out a noisy breath, but I took his hand anyway. Sawyer tugged until I was sitting down on the bed again, tucked against the angle of his body. I picked up the baggie that was nestled in the sheets. “How long will it take
you to go through these?” I asked, counting them out with my index finger through the plastic. I was strangely curious about them—they looked so innocuous, like aspirin or Altoids or something—but at the same time just being in the same room with them made me nervous. I’d never seen Sawyer use. “Hm?” I prodded. “How long?”