Rock N Soul (39 page)

I imagined that kiss in my bed on a Sunday afternoon, both of us warm from the blankets and with ruffled hair from the more energetic kisses that we’d been drowning in earlier, Chris pulling back and staring at me with the same happiness from this morning and none of the fear that had crept into the rest of the day. I would throw my leg over his hip and press myself against him, our bodies lining up and fitting together like they’d been designed to align perfectly, and we could just lie there, kissing slowly and learning and relearning each other’s skin. And maybe we would have sex and maybe we wouldn’t need to, but either way, the world could end in a fiery apocalypse right outside our apartment and we probably wouldn’t even notice, and it had never been like that for me with anyone before.

“Nobody has ever kissed me like you do,” I told him, whispering, and normally I would have never admitted something like that, but the thought of losing him made my entire esophagus hurt, from my mouth all the way down to my stomach, and so fuck appearances.

He searched my eyes for a few seconds, and I took that time to memorize the patterns in his irises. Finally he leaned forward again and brushed his lips across mine. “Same here,” he said, quietly.

I remembered the way Gabriel had kissed him in the video and how the intimacy of it had made me click away when not even their ejaculations had seemed that private. “Did you love Gabriel?”

“No,” he said. He laced our fingers back together and held my hand pretty tightly. “I mean, I cared about him a little. Maybe I even had something like a crush on him. But I didn’t love him, no.”

“You seemed . . . close,” I said. “In the video. When you were kissing.”

He shrugged. “Gabe’s a good kisser, and I was projecting.”

I paused, then cautiously asked, “Eric?”

“It was always Eric,” he said. “All my life, it was him. And it shouldn’t have been.”

“Because he didn’t love you back?” I wondered if it was okay to talk about this, but we’d said no secrets and no lies. And even though talking about Eric still sort of made me want to punch something, I wanted to know.

“Because love should make you happy,” he answered. “And loving Eric never made me happy. It was always this desperate, awful thing, this void in my life that he just kept hacking at with a chainsaw, and once I realized that he
knew
I was in love with him and he was hurting me anyway, it was even worse. I would see love stories in the movies and on TV and in song lyrics, and I wouldn’t be able to connect with them because I didn’t know what love was like when it didn’t have a serrated edge.”

“And now?” It was a selfish question and I knew it, but I had to hear the answer.

He smiled a very small smile and tightened his arm around my shoulders. “I’m letting go of him and all the bullshit baggage that came with him. He never made me happy, and you do. So this is what I want. For however long I have left.”

“And it’s not just because I’m your only option?” I picked at a string on the hem of my shirt.

“Tyler . . .” He touched my chin. “I would have gone to rehab for you. And I wouldn’t have checked myself out.”

“Fuck, man,” I said, smiling a little. “That’s serious.”

He leaned over and kissed my nose. “Yeah, well, I mean it. You make me want to be better, you know? For you.” He reached up and brushed some of my hair back from my forehead. “I guess I’m just lucky that I don’t have to go through withdrawal as a ghost.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” I fought back a good shiver at his touch and almost suggested taking this to the airplane bathroom, but there was something sort of heartwarming about cuddling for a while without sex being a factor, so I snuggled into his side and tried to ignore the way the salt kept creeping closer to the corners of my eyes with each passing mile.

When the plane landed late in the afternoon, I carefully untangled myself from Chris’s arms and was surprised at how cool the air was when I wasn’t pressed up against him. LA had been warm, but now we were back in the Northeast, and it was going to be cold, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to warm up again. Chris kept his hand on my lower back as we filed out of the plane and down the jet bridge. Once we got into the airport itself, I put my earpiece back in and reached for Chris’s hand.

He let me lace our fingers together, but he raised an eyebrow at me. “In public?”

“Hi, Mom,” I said, loudly, for the benefit of the people around me. Then, to Chris: “Yeah, I want to.”

Chris smiled. “I guess it’s not that obvious. Maybe you just have a weird claw hand or something.”

“Shut up.” I hefted the guitar case up and started heading for the exit. “I want to hold hands with my boyfriend, okay?” I didn’t say
while I still can
, but both of us knew it was implied.

“I’m cool with that.” He tightened his grip on my hand and damn, that was weird. Girls always expected me to be the strong one with the iron grip and the ability to, I don’t know, club a saber-toothed tiger, and the last time someone had gripped my hand this tightly was back in fourth grade when Rob Lewis nearly broke my wrist because he was
really
into not losing at Red Rover. This was significantly more pleasant than that had been.

We went to the taxi platform and got in line for a ride. Chris put a hand on my arm. “Are you sure we have to go now?”

I shrugged, not meeting his eyes. “There’s no use in waiting, is there? Not if we’re going to be forced into it anyway. At least now it will sort of be our choice.”

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Surely a pit stop for food would be okay with whoever’s in charge of this thing.”

I paused and took an inventory of my body, searching for hunger and the icy dread that I’d gotten when we considered putting Allison off indefinitely. Neither feeling was there, although I was fairly sure I’d be hungry if this whole situation wasn’t keeping my stomach filled with acid. So I nodded. “Yeah, I guess I could eat.”

He slid an arm around my waist, which felt pretty weird since his arm had gone through my backpack. “I don’t want to go,” he said, softly.

“Yeah, no,” I said, frowning deeply. “We’re not talking about that in public. Not in the taxi line, Chris. I can’t do it.”

He nodded and let his arm drop away from me. “All right.”

“Actually,” I said after a moment, “I don’t think I can eat right now.”

Chris laced his fingers back into mine. “I understand. I just want more time.”

“Me too,” I said, eyeing the taxi that was approaching the line. “But we should probably . . . you know. Go see her.”

“I know,” he said, so softly that I almost didn’t hear him. We climbed into the taxi after a struggle with the guitar case, and I relayed the address Chris gave me to the taxi driver.

It was still winter, so the sun had set when we pulled up to Allison’s house, but there was some residual light on the horizon, an orange line that quickly faded up into the deeper blue above. Allison’s house was a respectable two-story on a respectable street, and the windows glowed and made the whole house seem warm and inviting.

We stood on the sidewalk and looked at the house and not at each other for a long time. I put my backpack and the guitar case on the grass in front of us.

“Is this when we’re going to talk?” Chris asked quietly.

My natural instinct was to be bitchy and tell him that we’d talked on the plane, but we were past that now. “Yeah,” I said, and held up a pinky finger. “Solemn vow that we’re suspending the Cool Points Tally for the time being and we will not rag each other about being sappy right now.”

Chris smiled softly and hooked his pinky around my own. “It’s a little late to be worried about being sappy. But agreed.”

When we’d finished shaking, I lowered my hand slowly to my side. “Chad said that Lucas stayed for a bit after he finished his business. So once we’re done talking to her . . . try and stay. Just for a while. So I can be the last one.”

Chris moved backward so that a large shrub blocked us from the view of the house, and when I didn’t immediately follow him, he put his hands on my arms and gently tugged me with him. I didn’t resist it. I wasn’t even sure that I
could
resist it. “Tyler,” he said, and then didn’t say anything else for a few seconds.

I sighed. “I don’t want you to go.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“You’re going somewhere better, though,” I pointed out. My voice sounded strange, like cracks on the sidewalk where weeds could grow. “I don’t know where that is, but it’s got to be good.”

He put his hand on my cheek. “Here is good,” he said. “Boston is good.”

I smiled a wavery smile and raised an eyebrow at him. It probably wasn’t convincing in the least, but it was enough to help me survive a little longer. “You’re saying that you’d rather be in my shitty apartment with the beat-up TV and the saggy couch than in
heaven
,” I said, then I paused and grimaced. “Don’t answer that. You’d just say something gross.”

Chris laughed, a low rumbly baritone laugh, and then he raised his other hand so that he was holding my face and gazing into my eyes. “If I go, I’ll wait for you. They won’t be able to drag me through the gates without you.”

“That’s disgusting,” I told him, but my lips were shaking.

He smiled. “Maybe, but it’s true.” His eyes got oddly intense, and I couldn’t have looked away if a nuclear bomb had gone off down the street. “Can I say it now?”

I nodded, mostly because I was pretty sure my voice would have cracked if I’d tried to say an actual word.

His hands were still on my cheeks, and I leaned my face into one of them without breaking eye contact with him. He rubbed his thumb against my cheekbone. “I love you, Tyler Lindsey.”

The words ripped my heart out of my chest and made me want to curl up in the fetal position and never stop sobbing. I tried to focus on how fucking amazing it would have felt to hear him say that to me if it wasn’t so close to the end of all of this. I put my hands on his upper arms, then moved forward so that our foreheads touched, squeezing my eyes shut. “I love you too.”

He let out a tiny sigh and slid his hands up into my hair. “I want you to be happy,” he said. “Promise me you’ll be happy.”

I snorted and pulled back. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to promise that right now.”

“I don’t want to move on and not know that you’ll be okay,” he said. “Don’t make me do that. Please.”

I sucked in a deep, shaking breath. I couldn’t imagine ever being happy again, not without him there giving me shit about my toothpaste choices or the way I cut my sandwiches or whatever. But he needed to hear it, and I would figure it out somehow. Once he was gone. “Yeah,” I said after a moment. “It’ll take a long time. But I’ll make it.”

“Good,” he breathed, smiling at me with quivering lips. “I don’t want you to forget me, but I don’t want you to be alone for the rest of your life pining for me, either.”

“Chris,” I started, but I couldn’t come up with the words for what I wanted to say, so I just closed my eyes again and shook my head.

“Find someone.” He touched my lips with two of his fingers, and I pulled away from his touch. “Find someone and be happy.”

“You can’t fucking tell me what to do,” I said, giving him what I hoped was a snarky bitch-face but was probably a watery-eyed tragic stare. “If I want to pine for you forever, I’ll do it, and you can’t do shit about it.”

He smiled, even though I was only sort of joking. “You should go back to school too.”

“I don’t want to go back,” I said, but it was the automatic answer that I always had ready to go in case Grandma brought it up sometime.

“Yes, you do,” Chris said. “You can’t lie to me. I can tell when you’re lying. You do a thing with your nose.” He flicked it with the tip of his finger and smiled softly. “And you do want to go back to school.”

I sighed. “I do. I don’t know how I’d afford it now, though.”

“Maybe they’d give you your scholarship back, since you left instead of flunking out.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it. Those things are pretty prestigious and pretty picky.”

“You could ask,” he pressed.

I nodded, resting my forehead against him again. “I could ask.”

We stood there like that for a long time, leaning against each other. I had to remind myself every few seconds that I needed to breathe. Chris didn’t seem to be bothering, because his body was firm and unmoving against mine. I didn’t ever want to let go of him.

It was getting cold out, though, and even the warmth of Chris’s skin couldn’t keep the tips of my ears from turning into ice, so we reluctantly stepped back and stared at each other with desperate, shining eyes.

After a beat of silence, he asked, “Listen . . . you have my ring, right?”

“Yeah.” I slowly pulled the necklace out of my shirt and unhooked it, dropping the ring into my hand. “I was going to give it to her. Eric said this was the only thing she wanted of yours.”

He kissed me, his lips trembling in a way I would have made fun of in any other circumstance. “Don’t give it to her.”

I swallowed hard around the softball in my throat. “What?”

“My mom gave that to me after Dad died,” he said. “I always wore it on my right hand, and I figured I’d switch it to my left one day. It’s mine. It’s not Allison’s.” He touched the side of my neck. “Wear it. Please. For me.”