Life by Committee (4 page)

My chest is tight with desire and joy and that other thing too. Guilt? Fear? Worry? I try to push it down, so I can enjoy the way his hands rub my back and the insistent pressure of his lips and tongue. It doesn't exactly work—I'm positive I can feel my heart shrinking and expanding with terrifying speed—but the physical confirmation of how much I adore Joe wins out for a few minutes at least.

“What are we doing?” I say in between kisses, but I know the answer. What I want is for him to say it's over with Sasha Cotton and that we are marking the start of our new, committed, totally legitimate and morally palatable relationship. This is not going to happen, but asking makes it feel like I am doing my moral duty.

Joe pulls back, and we have the sort of extended eye contact that could make me do something terrible, which is exactly what I'm doing.

“You're so beautiful,” Joe says, and tucks my hair behind my ear. He kisses my neck, and I let him, because we've been chatting almost every night until two or three in the morning for the last month and I'm not friends with his girlfriend, Sasha Cotton, anyway, and being against him is better than any other single feeling I think I've ever had.

“Thanks,” I say, and blush hard. I push Sasha Cotton out of my head and focus on the certainty in Joe's eyes.

“I really want to just be here with you,” he says, moving his face so close to mine that our noses touch. Then my hand is on the back of his neck and my lips are locked on his and I'm basically saying, with my mouth and my hips and the swing in toward his body,
I trust you
.

When we finally break apart, Joe holds my face in his hands and I grin so hard it hurts.

“What are we gonna do?” he says.

I think he should leave Sasha Cotton and become my boyfriend, but short of that I think we should keep kissing. Of course, I can't say that. I'd sound like some old corny movie, and I'm simply not willing to be that person around him. So we sit and stare at each other for the longest five seconds in the history of the world. I think of when Joe and I first started talking in the parking lot, after school or practice every afternoon. He teased me about the way I braid my hair when I'm nervous or spacing out, and he laughed hard when I made fun of him and his hockey friends, imitating the loud grunts and hypermasculine energy they have on the ice. I told him he was the only stoner-hockey player I'd ever met and that my dad would love it.

He joked about smoking up with my father.

“Stoner Jock Joe! The least useful but hungriest of all the jocks!” I said, and he laughed along with me and told me he'd never met a girl as funny and hot as me.

I'm thinking about that right now. About the fact that he basically said he likes me more than Sasha Cotton.

I kiss him again, pressing as much of my body against him as I can. I put a hand on his face, and he makes a happy noise into my mouth.

“You have to decide what we're gonna do,” I say when he moves his lips from my mouth to my neck. He takes another break to look me in the eyes, and I can't hold back a ridiculous smile.

“You're so freaking pretty,” he says. He is a little high and I am a little drunk on the way it feels to be around him.

When his phone rings, I know it's Sasha. He could ignore it, but he doesn't, and his voice goes soft on his “Hello?” which hurts since I've still got a leg over his leg and a slight breathing problem from how deep and ceaseless the kissing was. If she strained, I bet Sasha could hear the unmistakable shakiness and rhythm of my breathing even over the phone.

All of a sudden, I want to throw up.

“I'll be over soon,” Joe says. “Are you okay? Can you
stay where you are for ten minutes? Don't move. Don't do anything until I get there. Hug the bear I gave you, turn on the TV, and I'll be there before you know it.”

He hangs up and we have to untangle our limbs. He clears his throat and I wipe my mouth. The kisses were good, but not neat, not expertly delivered. They were messy, which is exactly what Joe is. A huge mess. He stands up fast so I stand up too, but he sort of shakes his head at me like I shouldn't have gotten up, like he's not gonna even hug me good-bye. Which is crap, 'cause I know, I
know
he'll be online in a few hours telling me how badly he wanted to stay.

“I have to go,” he says without looking at me.

“Sasha,” I say. There are implicit quotation marks around her name.

“Don't say it like that. She's really . . . fragile. I told you, she has, sort of, problems. Like, depression and stuff. It's bad.” I hate when guys say the word
fragile
like it means hot or lovable.

“But what about what happened today?” I say. I am fighting the urge to hold him down and physically make it impossible to leave.

“She's having a panic attack. A really intense one. She was hyperventilating, Tabby. And she's, you know, I do love her. She needs me.” He pauses, and there's
expectation in the wordless gap. Like I'm supposed to give him permission. Like I'm supposed to tell him it's okay and I understand and to go, go, go. But my jaw drops and my eyes well up and it hurts, not only in my heart but also in my blood, in my muscles. “Look, I don't have time to talk about this,” he says, not really looking at me or my teariness. “My girlfriend's sitting on a couch breathing into a paper bag, and she just has me and some weirdo online friends to help her out, so you know . . .”

I can still taste the berry from his lips. But I cannot compete with an anxiety attack and a year-and-a-half-long relationship and mile-long legs and hair that looks like sparrow's feathers. So I allow myself one more grimace and don't make him hug me good-bye.

If I did, I wouldn't let go. My arms would lock around his neck and refuse to loosen up. Everything in my stomach twists and turns, which I guess I deserve. It's not like I didn't know what I was getting myself into. This is basically exactly what someone like me deserves.

“If everything were different—” Joe says. He hasn't stepped out the door yet. If he really loved her, if he really thought she was in
peril
, he would be sprinting to his car and running red lights. I take note of this and store it as a reason to sign on later and let him chat with me.

“Everything could be different,” I say, and make my eyes go as wide as they can, which isn't very. They have a tendency to squint when I'm smiling or nervous. So, always. My shirt's slipping off one shoulder, and
God
I hope that looks sexy. I may be a terrible person, and Joe may be complicated and confused, but I am vowing to make this work. Him and me.

“I need you to try to understand—” Joe says. I will not, under any circumstances, tell Elise that he said this. In fact, I may not tell Elise anything about tonight at all. She won't understand. I'm not sure I understand. I swallow and shrug and shake my head all at once. Anything,
anything
to keep from howling with sobs.

Joe adjusts the gold chain around his neck. Plays with the little gold cross. I asked him about it once—the cross sort of freaked me out, and I wondered if it meant he was really into Jesus or something. I knew he was Italian Catholic, but wearing a cross seemed more serious than that. He said it was his grandfather's, given to him from his deathbed. Is it weird that that made me fall even harder? Stoner-Jock, Grandfather-Loving, Kinda-Catholic Guy. His phone's ringing again, and then he does actually leave, runs out of my house, and I listen to his car turn on, his ridiculous rap music blast and then fade out as he drives away from my house.

I touch my own shoulder, the way he might have, and
try not to think about the sweetness he uses when he touches her, versus the desperation when he grabbed at me. I give myself a moment to let the tears spill out, and then I spend an hour closing my eyes and breathing deeply to deal with the reality that Joe and I finally kissed.

He doesn't come online the way I predicted he would. I sit in the computer room and stare at the screen, willing the computer to flash with his name and a flirtatious message about the taste of my lips or his hands on my back or how doing the wrong thing felt so right. I occasionally look away and text Elise because a watched pot never boils, so I delusionally believe maybe if I talk to Elise about something else I'll forget he exists, and then he'll chat me, and the gray, damp feeling in my chest will turn golden and sparkling and alive.

It doesn't appear to be working.

“Tea?” Cate says around ten, when my eyes are burning from the light of the screen.

“I'm not thirsty,” I say with a small smile. She knows better than to leave me alone, though.

“I meant to say it not as a question. We're reading. We want you there. I brought cookies from the Cozy. We can't risk you becoming some weird tech-obsessed video game kid or, like, chat room lurker, you know? You have
a sister on the way.”

“Saving me from myself, huh?” I say, and I can't imagine what it would be like to have normal parents of normal ages, instead of Cate and Paul. Cate shrugs, and I laugh and shut down the computer the way you are supposed to pull off a Band-Aid: too quickly to notice how much it hurts. There's a hiccup of pain that comes with leaving the computer and the possibility that Joe will say something awesome to me tonight. But Cate's right. Every minute that passes with Joe not signing on is more depressing than the moment before.

“I'm not a techie weirdo, by the way. I'm a book weirdo,” I say, because joking with Cate and Paul makes the actual world hurt a tiny bit less.

“Good. Let's keep it that way,” Cate says.

Paul has started up a fire and is bundled up in hiking socks and Cate's purple Snuggie, which he has taken to using way more than she ever did. Cate's got an old quilt and one half of the couch, so I take up the other corner and sneak my feet under the same quilt. Our toes touch, and she wiggles hers against mine and I don't stop wanting Joe to text me
right this second
, but something small in my heart releases from being near them.

I open up my copy of
The Secret Garden
, but I'm barely reading the actual story. I'm mostly going margin note to margin note and spending extra time on any
underlined passage. Luckily, the person who owned this book before me took a lot of notes and underlined a lot of moments. They made an excited squiggly line under one of my favorite passages: “She had never felt sorry for herself; she had only felt tired and cross, because she disliked people and things so much. But now the world seemed to be changing and getting nicer.”

Sometimes it just takes one tiny thing to make the world seem right again
, the note taker writes.
Mary's garden and the way new perspective and experience bring hope. The way a few roses are the difference between ecstasy and depression. Which is great. Because how easy is it to find a few roses, right?

I effing love this girl. I have decided it's a girl. Mostly because guys don't really read
The Secret Garden
. But also because I am falling for Joe, and I don't have room to be madly in love with a red-pen-using, children's-literature-reading dude, too.

“Not too many more nights like this,” Paul sighs out. “Once the baby comes, I mean.” I don't know what he read in his book or tasted in his mug of tea that made him say it, but it breaks the perfect comfort in the room, and my stomach drops.

More things changing.

What if change were the greatest comfort?
the Red
Pen Note Writer writes in the margin, and my shoulders jump from the creepy relevance. This is why I love books. They so often address exactly what I'm going through at that precise moment.

I close my eyes and try to decide if I agree, that change could be comforting. Maybe I could. I'd like to.

“Bedtime for me,” Cate says, and tucks me into the quilt alone.

“Me too,” Paul says. He gets up and kisses my forehead. He smells like chocolate and honey and aftershave.

“Stay with me,” I say. I almost never ask either Cate or Paul for anything. I've never really had to. “I'm having a—I'm feeling sort of—” I feel my voice shaking, and the threat of tears rushing from my throat to my nose and probably inevitably to my eyes. But if I really lose it, I'll have to explain myself to them, and I'll let it slip that I am hooking up with a guy in a long-term relationship, and I'll lose two of my last three allies. I can't afford any more people thinking I've
changed
and I'm
boy crazy
and I'm
making bad decisions
.

So I won't tell anyone. I'll let Elise and Cate and Paul keep seeing me as good, even though I know I'm also a little bad.

I shake back the desire to open up with a nod of my head and a few painful swallows, and tell Paul I'm
actually probably going to go to bed soon anyway. He looks relieved to not have the burden of sitting with me and talking about my problems. He looks relieved to get to go to his bedroom with his wife and their unborn kid, and I think:
This is how it's going to be
.

I'm nearing the end of
The Secret Garden
. I savor the last few pages and last few amazing observations in the margins. I'm a little heartbroken to not know this stranger. I want her to be someone I can call up and talk through my problems with. I want more books filled with her thoughts. I'm not ready to let go of another friend. Not right now.

I flip through the book, hoping there's something I've missed and trying to memorize the best notes, the ones that make me feel like I could actually be okay. The notes that make me feel like I'm not alone and like maybe I'll get some of the things I want: love and the one million other things I'm missing. Maybe it's tiredness, but I feel a little giddy.

On the last page, there's a website link. Written in her pretty red script, all numbers and random letters, and below it the following words:
My own garden of secrets
.