Sweet Forty-Two (26 page)

“Maybe.” I shrugged, glancing up at Regan’s face.

“Why haven’t you opened it? The real reason.” He leaned sideways against the counter and crossed his arms in front of him.

I wanted to make something up. But, given the events of the day that had him crying in front of me more than once, lying to him seemed particularly horrendous. I couldn’t get in to it with Bo and Ember here, though. They were surrounded by hippies all day and took no issue with weeping in front of strangers. It wasn’t that I planned on crying, but I’d have to be more honest with them than I’d ever even intended on being with Regan in the first place.

“We can wait till they leave, if you want. But, I want you to talk about it, okay?”

I hadn’t realized I’d been staring for so long at the loving couple until Regan spoke.

I nodded. “Yeah. When they go. Go hang out with your friends. I’ll clean up in here.”

I bought myself some time. Time to come up with a story. One that would have been a lot easier to come up with had I not curled up on the couch with him, and inhaled the saltiness on his skin that made me miss home. And his lips. God. It had been so long since I’d felt lips against mine, I was certain they’d burst with eagerness.

Looking out at their booth, I caught Regan mid-smile and it honestly took my breath away. Hours earlier he’d been the saddest human being I’d ever seen in the flesh. How could he turn it around so quickly? How could he move forward—so open and not boxed in by his pain?

Maybe I wanted that. That was the only explanation for why I was turning over in my mind ways to keep him around.

After another half hour, Bo and Ember said their goodbyes to Regan and me. Bo made sure that I was serious about sending baked goods to the studio tomorrow. I assured him I was and laughed as Ember poked at Bo’s rock-hard stomach and begged him not to get soft. I’d soften him up just to spite the skinny bitch. I said I no longer wanted to claw her face, not that I was going to sympathize with her ever running into the issue of bringing something into a dressing room, only to find out it’s too big.

Regan locked the door behind them, without me asking him to, and came back into the kitchen, leaning against the counter with his hands in his pockets and smiling like I was holding a camera. “Thank you for letting me just bring them down here like that. I wasn’t really thinking...”

I was about to make a snarky comment about his supposed thoughtlessness, but when I looked up, he was looking away. Not down, not off into the distance, but to somewhere no one else around him would ever be able to see.

“It’s okay. I was afraid they’d be upset about you being in my apartment, or something.” I realized how stupid it sounded as soon as I said it. We were two adults and we weren’t found in bed, so to speak. And, really, even if we had been, what would anyone say?

I was too unsure of the ghost of Rae to know exactly what anyone would have really said.

Regan shrugged, allowing his vision to come back to the present. He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it once before opening it again. Then, he took my hand. “Come in here and sit for a minute.”

I followed without argument, because you follow someone who looks that sad when they ask you to. As a matter of practice, someone should really always just follow someone around who looks that sad. He brought me over to the booth he’d been sitting in with his friends. A few cupcake wrappers and errant crumbs were young fossils of the happiness that briefly inhabited this space.

In the looming greyness that tomorrow would bring, those crumbs gave me hope.

“So,” Regan started, “I’m sorry if it was weird for you up there in your place ... all that crying and stuff. I didn’t know if I was going to show Bo the card, and I certainly didn’t plan on doing it in your apartment.”

“It’s okay.” I shrugged. “It was a little jarring, obviously, since I haven’t had that many people in my place, like, ever, and certainly not for anything so emotional.”

“Do you always keep to yourself because of your mom?” His question was as direct as his eyes were. Unflinching. Bold.

“It’s not really like that.” I shifted in my seat, picking up the crumbs one by one and placing them on an empty cupcake wrapper.

“What’s it like then?”

My eyes shot up. “What’s with the inquisition, Regan?” I stood, but he lurched across the table, capturing my hand.

“Sorry. Please sit?”

I sat, but only because I swear I could hear a flicker of Irish accent in his voice, and I wanted to hear it again.

“Let me try this again.” He cleared his throat. “What I meant to say was thank you for being so cool. Upstairs with Bo and Ember, and earlier today with me.”

A few seconds ago I was uncomfortable with what seemed to be an interrogation, but that swiftly morphed into me viewing his own uneasiness. Then I felt like a giant ass for assuming it was about me at all. Regan picked at something invisible on the table, looking down, and lost again.

I put my hand on his to stop the maddening noise. “Hey, it’s okay. She was clearly really special. Rae, I mean.”

He released half his mouth into a smile. I needed to give him more.

“Tell me about her.”

He looked up, seemingly startled. “Really?”

I nodded. “Really.”

For the next several minutes, Regan told me the story of his star-crossed romance with Rae Cavanaugh. He had a dumbstruck grin on his face, but the wear around his eyes highlighted the unhappy ending that awaited me. I always read the last page of books first, anyway; it gives more guts to the story. It was no different here. Knowing the ending made Regan’s smiles brighter. Tragedy has a way of amplifying the good and smudging the bad. When he finished the story of his spunky, tough as nails girlfriend, he sat back and took a weary breath.

“I like her,” I whispered.

“I loved her. And,” he cleared his throat but that did nothing to stop the tremble in his voice, “I never told her.”

Regret is ugly. A pus-filled boil ready to break open on the face of your soul. As soon as I saw it forming, I stood. “Come to the kitchen with me. I need your help for the stuff I’m sending with you to the studio tomorrow.”

“Really?” His eyes lit up and the boil faded into hiding.

“Really.” I chuckled, mocking our identical conversation from minutes before.

Tomorrow I would tell Regan anything he wanted to know, because I knew he wouldn’t forget to ask. For tonight, though, I’d let us get lost in the sweet escape of this confectioner’s wonderland. A place where nothing was sour.

Regan and I had stayed up well past midnight making a mix of cookies, cupcakes, and muffins for him to bring to Blue Seed Studios with him the next day. While he’d seemed excited at the prospect of helping me, we completed the project in near silence. It wasn’t heavy, by any means. It was more meditative. We didn’t ask questions of one another; rather, we just seemed to enjoy the company and the silence.

I’d received a text message from my mother, reminding me to pick her up at ten in the morning to take her to her first ECT treatment. Regan asked what was wrong when he saw me check my phone, but I brushed it off as nothing. Just work, I’d told him, making sure I was okay. It was a small lie, but we’d had so much heavy crammed into one day, I wanted to spare us both from the “mom getting her brain electrocuted” conversation.

Once the goods were done, cooled, and wrapped, I sent Regan back to his apartment with bags filled to the top and I sank myself into a restless sleep.

The truth is I’d spent several days trolling the Internet for information on the effectiveness of Electroconvulsive Therapy. As I sifted through the horror stories and testimonies of support, I learned that the treatment had come a long way since the days of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo
’
s Nest,
and the reality was—my mother was the perfect candidate.

Years of successful pharmaceutical and talk therapies carried her this far, and there was literally nothing left to try on those two fronts. With the ECT she even had a chance of lessening the medication she was on. She also had a chance of forgetting large chunks of her life. Typically, the risk of memory loss surrounded the days and weeks preceding the treatment, but risks of darker holes in memory remained.

Frankly, I wouldn’t blame my mother if she welcomed some of that memory erasing power. There were some hard years that dotted the score of her life like bullet holes. As I drove my mother to her appointment, I felt myself hanging onto every word she said as if I were the one at risk of forgetting everything. I couldn’t figure out why I wanted to hang on to any of it, though.

“Georgia,” my mom cooed from the passenger seat. She always had a therapist voice. Sing-songy and soft. Like a blanket.

“Sorry, I was just daydreaming.”

“About that boy?”

“What boy?” I asked out of procedure more than necessity.

“The one with the penny-colored hair.”

“Copper.”

She rolled her eyes. “Same thing.”

“Well, he’s not six, so let’s use a grown up word,” I teased. “Penny-colored sounds like something said to or about a little kid.”

“For goodness sake. Fine. The copper-haired breezy boy. What’s his name again?”

“Regan. Not like the president. Like there should be two E’s there, but there’s not.”

“I don’t want to discuss the formation of his name, dear.” She grinned and tucked her hair behind her ears.

I took the exit for the hospital, my heart starting to race. “What do you want to know?”

“How he manages to make you smile like you used to when you were a little girl.”

“He doesn’t.” I couldn’t have sounded more offended if I tried. I drew my eyebrows together and bit the inside of my cheek to combat the Regan-esque sensation overcoming my lips.

“You act like smiling’s a bad thing.”

“It’s a lying thing,” I mumbled.

“Pull over.” My mom’s voice was sharp.

I looked at her and she wasn’t joking. Her eyes were on me and her finger was pressed against the window as if I didn’t know where
over
was. Without a fight, I pulled over along the wide shoulder and put the car in park.

“What?” I looked around, trying to find the source of her sudden panic.

“Don’t do this, Georgia.”

I opened my mouth to accompany my sudden need for more oxygen. “Do what? Take you? We can go—”

“No.” She put up her hand. “Don’t throw away whatever is happening with Regan.”

“You made me pull over for this?”

“You need to stop and listen to me. And to yourself. I know what you’re doing.”

“I’m not
doing
anything, Mom.”

I sighed and put the car in drive, merging back into the thickening traffic. Everyone in the area worked at the hospital and the road swelled like grease-fed arteries during the day. I was annoyed at having left my spot in the line of cars to listen to her chastising.

“I just think—”

“Stop!” I cut her off, the stress of her impending appointment boiling over into my speech. I took a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m just trying to focus on you right now, okay?”

My mom sat back and crossed her arms in front of her. “For such a tough little shit, you sure let fear drive your decisions an awful lot.”

My throat tightened. I tried to swallow it open, but it didn’t work. I knew my mom was probably as nervous about her appointment as I was, and I’d just yelled at her so I couldn’t very well do it again.

Even if she was right.