This Is What I Want to Tell You (11 page)

That’s when I saw them.

Just across from the bus stop there’s a restaurant that Lace took us to once for her birthday. An old-fashioned lamp hooks yellow light over the doorway. As I came up the street a couple was standing under the light. They were wrapped around each other, kissing, wound up so it was hard to tell where one body stopped and the other one started. The woman pulled her head back. She was laughing. Her hair fell down her back under a white hat. Her hair was long and caught the light—gold.

Keeley.

As she tipped her head back and the two bodies separated, I saw both of their faces.

Keeley. Nadio. Keeley and my brother.

I think I stopped breathing for just a second. Or maybe I was numb. Or maybe there was not a single thought in my head.

And then all at once I thought I wanted to throw up.

And then my eyes were filled with tears.

And then I raged with anger.

And then I ducked into the closest alley.

I leaned back against the cold wall. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was like I’d been running.

What did I just see?

I wiped at my cheeks. The tears felt cold and stung and I was furious at them.

What was happening? I couldn’t move. I didn’t dare look back into the street.

I dug in my bag for my cell phone.

Hello? Jessica yelled. There was music in the background.

I need you to pick me up downtown, I said.

Noelle?

Yeah. I need you to pick me up downtown. I need to sleep over.

Is everything okay?

Yeah, I said. Please.

There were muffled voices.

Okay, Jessica said. Okay, I’ll be there in ten minutes.

I hung up and called Lace. I told her I was spending the weekend at Jessica’s.

I leaned back against the wall. I closed my eyes. I tried to slow my breath.

I felt like I’d cracked open all over again and now I was spilling everywhere.

Dear Dario,

I was ready to tell my sister that Keeley and I were, whatever we were. I was ready to just tell her and get on with our lives, somehow the way they’d been. But after that dinner, after that moment when Keeley said something to me I never thought about hearing, I didn’t want to tell anybody about it. It’s hard to explain. All the other stuff just became less important. I just wanted to be with Keeley. I just wanted to figure it out with her. Maybe that’s what you felt like. Maybe you felt like this so much, you couldn’t think about sharing Lace with anyone. Not even us. I think I got a glimpse of that. It scares the hell out of me.

It’s funny. You’d think that if your girlfriend tells you she has no idea when she’ll be ready to have sex with you, it wouldn’t really do wonders for your relationship. But somehow, it made everything sort of solid between us. It was like from the moment Keeley cut into her steak at Mirabel’s, we became something different. I knew she was beautiful, anyone who walked by her on the street knew that. I knew that sometimes I couldn’t stop thinking about her—the way she breathed under my ear before she kissed my neck or pulled my belt loops into her. But then I started to think about her chewing her steak and laughing at the same time and telling me she loved me without letting me say a word. There weren’t a lot of girls I knew who would be brave like that and then just let you watch them chew a giant mouthful of food.

Keeley wanted us to just be open about everything. She was waiting for me outside the soup kitchen on Sunday.

Do you want a ride home? she asked.

Do you think we should? I don’t want Nole to see us. She hasn’t been home all weekend and it might be weird if—

Keeley hadn’t been over to our house since the soup kitchen day.

Jesus, Nadio. She was leaning against the side of her car, her arms folded. How long are we going to do this? she asked.

What do you mean?

THIS. Pretend like we’re not together. Walk on eggshells around Noelle. Let her be in charge of everyone’s lives ’cause we’re all scared of her.

I’m not scared of her, Keeley. I just feel like she’s going through enough right now.

Enough of what? Enough of being a selfish brat. Enough of skipping school for some boyfriend no one’s ever seen? Enough of denying happiness to the people she cares about because she doesn’t have any?

Whoa.

Well. Keeley uncrossed her arms and rubbed her hands together. I’m sorry, Nadio, but it’s true. I just feel like Noelle is dominating our whole relationship and she’s not even in it.

I think there is a lot of other stuff that dominates our relationship too, I said. I couldn’t help it.

Keeley’s eyes got wide. She took a deep breath.

Okay, she said. That’s fair.

I’m just saying—

You’re saying it’s not all about Noelle.

It’s not, I said. She’s my twin sister and my instinct is to protect her. But this is weird. For the first time I have an instinct to protect someone else too.

I hope you’re talking about me, Keeley said. She smiled.

So how’re we gonna do this? I asked.

We have to talk to her, Keeley said.

But when we got home, she was asleep. Lace said she had a fever.

I spent the weekend at Jessica’s in a state of near-living. That’s all I can say. I was walking around but it wasn’t like it was my body or even my head. I couldn’t believe things. I felt like something had happened that changed the way I saw everything. I couldn’t stop thinking, can I really be this alone? I felt like there was nothing but cold air around me. Like if I opened my mouth nothing would come out, nothing anyone could hear. Even though I was at Jessica’s, it was like complete solitude. I just lay on her bed and stared at the television. I held my phone in my hand. Call me, call me, I whispered in my head, till it became a rhythm.

Who was I talking to? Parker, my brother, Keeley. I didn’t even know.

What did I see? What happened? Were they really a couple? For how long? They were kissing like it was something they did all the time. The way she laughed up at him was a way I’d never seen her. And Nadio. I’d never seen that much affection from him, the way he held on to her. I’d never seen that ever.

I thought, I thought, I thought. I thought Parker was my secret. I thought I would have this secret relationship, I’d get something no one else felt yet, no one else knew, and it would be all mine and I would get to have this other life too. I would get something.

Now I couldn’t even call him. I couldn’t.

So what? he’d say about my brother and Keeley. All of us are free to decide, he’d say. The two of them together aren’t about you. So what?

But it was about me. It was. All I wanted was for him to see that. And fill in that space.

Jessica thought Parker and I had had a fight. She rubbed my back and brought me cups of tea. It’s all right, she said. You guys’ll work it out. I let her think so. I couldn’t explain anything else to her. I felt paralyzed and broken at once. The only way Jessica could explain that was through Parker.

Why don’t people ever see the way other kinds of love can wreck you? What about the way being left out of love can wreck you?

Everything always happened for Nadio. For Keeley. Being beautiful, seeing places. Winning awards. It just happened. Now there was no room.

* * *

It came to me on Sunday. I told Lace I was sick and faked a fever. I went straight to my room and didn’t see my brother. On Monday morning she called me in sick without even an argument. I slept through the morning after she went to work. I took a shower and shaved my legs and tried to find nice underwear but it was all cotton and sort of faded. So I picked a red-pink pair and the lacy tank top and I got dressed and took the bus to his house.

I knew he was working but the door was never locked, not through Sammy’s. The clean dishes I’d piled in the sink were still there. There was an ashtray overflowing on the kitchen table and a T-shirt tossed over the back of a chair, but otherwise Parker’s apartment looked like a set—barren and unlived in and waiting.

I could live here. I could live here.

I imagined my sweaters piled on the empty shelf in his closet. I touched the sleeves hanging there. I imagined my textbooks next to his cookbooks on the bookshelf. Lace had been seventeen, a year older than me, and living alone in another country, living and eating and sleeping with the person she loved. I could do it.

I lay down on his bed, on top of the sheet and a tangled blanket and I pulled his T-shirt against my neck. I pulled my knees up to my chest.

I wanted to be just here.

When he woke me up it was dark outside. He was sitting on the couch and put his hand on my arm.

Hey.

I opened my eyes.

What are you doing here?

I wanted to see you, I said, barely awake, groggy enough to admit this out loud.

Okay, he said. His eyes were narrow, puzzled, but soft. It’s a school night, he said. And it’s late.

I don’t care, I said.

I could see behind him. The night was black outside. I reached up and pulled the collar of his jacket down to me. I kissed him. I tried to swallow him. I dug my fingers into the back of his neck. I could feel him pushing back into me, all of him. I moved my hands down under his T-shirt. His skin felt strange and familiar at once. He stretched and bent until all of him was on top of me like a blanket. I knew what his body was going to do. That was suddenly familiar. Everything was reaching and immediate. I moved my hands to his belt, digging into my hip. I fumbled at it. I could feel the wires and muscles in all of his limbs tense and strong at once. My hand stumbled, his belt pressed into my hip. He pushed my hand away and undid his belt in a moment, a second—he pushed my hand back toward the waist of his jeans then as his fingers flipped back to my stomach, my zipper. My skin jumped. His mouth fought against mine. Our jeans peeled down almost at once. The skin of my legs against his skin. His hands kneaded at me. He lifted his head.

You okay?

I nodded. I had nothing left to say out loud.

As I nodded everything happened like a waterfall—fierce, rushing, crashing. Our clothes gone, it was just skin and the strength of his arms and hands against me and the heat from his skin. We ripped and pulled at each other and pushed against each other. He held my head back and kissed my neck and my fingers pushed his back and we breathed. I stopped thinking at all. I stopped everything that wasn’t right there.

And it was over.

It didn’t hurt especially. It just was.

He fell asleep. It was almost immediate. Stretched out snake-like, still on top of the twisted sheets, his breaths even and deep. He was sleeping. I sat up. I traced my hands along the designs across his back, and down the length of his spine:

what

does not

destroy me

makes me

stronger

I traced my fingers lightly up and down the letters. Wake up, my head whispered. Wake up.

He did finally. I heard his breathing catch as he came out of sleep and twisted to look at me.

What’re you doing, he said. There was nothing in the way he said it. It wasn’t sharp or angry or tender or sweet. He was only asking.