How to Love (19 page)

Somewhere in my head, a little pilot in a little airplane was doing his best to prevent a fiery crash, shouting
mayday
with no one to hear. “Cut it out,” I managed, but by this point I wasn’t fooling either one of us. “I’m not kidding.”

“Me neither.”

“You wouldn’t have ever said another word to me if I hadn’t been—”

“You’re wrong,” he interrupted. “It would have taken me a little time, probably. But I would have gotten there.”

“I sincerely doubt it.”

“I’ll have to prove otherwise.”

I shifted my weight from boot to boot, uncertain. A silent war was raging in my chest. “I’m serious about the college thing,” I told him finally, as if it was some kind of compromise—an escape hatch, a contingency plan, a way to protect my heart. “I’m gonna hear from schools soon. I’m not long for this world.”

“Duly noted.” Sawyer smiled. “But I want to be with you.”

“Do you always get what you want?” I started, but I only got halfway through that particular inquiry because Sawyer was leaning in and kissing me up against the side of the building, warm hands on either side of my face. And in the heat thrown from his body, somehow my questions evaporated into the humid Florida air.

Aaron takes me out for Mexican a few nights later (I spotted the Celine Dion drag queen in CVS with an
Us Weekly
and a family pack of peanut M&Ms, which makes it his turn to buy). We order margaritas and fish tacos at a table near the band. The restaurant is just around the corner from his place, and we head back there afterward, his steady fingers threaded through mine.

I keep up my end of the conversation like a star, frankly, so chatty I’m borderline manic, but underneath I’m feeling edgy and out of sorts—restless and almost panicky, like I’m pressing at the inside of my skin trying to get out. It’s just garden-variety anxiety, probably, but I hardly hear a word he says all night.

The truth: I can’t stop thinking about Sawyer.

“Okay,” Aaron protests finally, pulling back a bit. We’re on the couch in his living room, one of his big hands cupped at the base of my neck. I feel tense from the tips of my ears all the way down to my ankles. “Now
you’re
the one who’s being weird.”

I’m surprised he’s noticed, actually, that he’s tuned-in enough to be able to tell. I’m not used to that kind of attention. I don’t know if I like it or not. “Who, me?” I ask, bluffing, eyes wide and innocent. “I’m fine.”

He doesn’t believe me—I can tell that he doesn’t believe me—but he lets me kiss him for another minute before he tries again. “Reena,” he says, rubbing his palm up and down my arm. “Come on. You can talk to me.”

I
could
tell him, I think, and I
almost
tell him, but instead I just sort of charge ahead. “What if I stayed tonight?” I ask. “I could go pick up the baby and then come back here, and—” I break off. “You know. Stay.”

Aaron looks surprised, like he wasn’t expecting that from me. “Sure,” he says slowly, a pleased smile spreading over his face. “I’d love that, if that’s what you want to do.”

“I … yeah,” I say, voice pitched a little high and desperate even to my own ears. “Yes.”

His grin falters a bit, just around the edges. “Are you sure?”

“Aaron—” I open my mouth to reassure him, to say,
Of course, I want to
, but when my answer comes, it’s from somewhere inside me that I didn’t even know existed, some
small, hidden place that wouldn’t show up on a map. “I think we should take a break.”

Um.

“
What?
” For a second he looks totally and completely baffled, like I’m speaking a language he’s never heard before, and I guess I can’t really blame him—fifteen seconds ago I was asking to stay the night. “I don’t—” He blinks at me, like he thinks I’m being crazy. “Why?”

“I just—” As soon as it’s out of my mouth I know it’s true, that whatever I’m trying to do here isn’t working. That I’ve been trying to force a key inside a lock that doesn’t fit. “I think I need a break, you know? With everything that’s been going on with my family, and school—”

“What? What’s going on with
school?
” That’s a bullshit explanation, and Aaron knows it. He’s still staring at me like he’s been blindsided, anger just starting to creep in. “Is this about Sawyer?”

“It’s not,” I say immediately, still pacing. “I promise it’s not.”

“Really?” His voice rises, just a shred. “I guess I just don’t really get where it’s coming from if it’s not coming from Sawyer.”

“It’s coming from me!” I burst out. It’s the nearest I’ve ever come to boiling over with him: I keep my feelings clutched close. “I’m restless, or something, I don’t know.”

“So let’s go somewhere!” he suggests. “Let’s go to the Keys or something. We can take Hannah, sit on the beach for a couple of days.”

You’re not understanding me
, I want to tell him. It’s so much bigger than that. But how
could
he understand, really? I’ve never bothered to explain.

The worst part is that I can see myself being happy with Aaron. I can see myself settling down here in a little house with the baby, safe near his family and mine. I’d finish my degree at a state school. I’d wait tables at the restaurant while Hannah grows up. I can see it all laid out for me, as neat and small and pleasant as a weekend in the Keys, and it makes me want to scream like nothing else I have ever experienced. I can’t live like this forever. I
can’t.

“That’s not the solution,” I manage, voice shaking a little—God, already I’m thinking there’s an outside chance I’m the stupidest woman ever born. “Look, Aaron, you deserve somebody who’s going to be a hundred percent—”

“Don’t do that,” he interrupts quietly, and that’s how I know I’ve made him angry. “Don’t make it about what I deserve. If you don’t want to be with me, then fine, but at the very least just tell me the truth.”

And because he deserves that much at the very least, I just … nod. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, shrugging helplessly. I feel like the eye of a hurricane, panicky and calm. “But I think I need to go.”

Aaron looks at me for a minute like I’ve wrecked him, like I’m not the person he thought I was at all. “Yeah,” he says finally, shrugging back—the slightest lift of his shoulders, hurt and unconvinced. “I guess you do.”

“Look at him,” Shelby said, crossing a party of five off her list as she stood at the podium on Thursday night—spring break of junior year, the beach teeming, the whole restaurant packed. She gestured toward the bar, looking disgusted. “He thinks he’s Don Juan fricking DeMarco. You know, if I was all over the clientele like that, you can bet your ass I’d hear about it. Or, God forbid, if you were.”

“What?” I glanced behind me, a basket of bread in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other, and tried to appear as uninterested as humanly possible. I knew Shelby wasn’t exactly a giant fan of whatever I had going on with Sawyer. “You call it hanging out, I call it masochism,” she was fond of saying, wrinkling her freckly nose. “Potato, po-tah-to.”

And maybe it
was
masochism: Sure enough, at this particular moment Sawyer was leaning over the bar, engaged in animated, definitely flirty conversation with two girls I half recognized from school.

“Hm,” was all I said before delivering the bread basket, doing my best to ignore the thick, sour shot of jealousy, the dropping sensation in my chest. We weren’t even technically
dating
, I didn’t think. Two weeks after the scene on the sidewalk, and I still didn’t know what we were.

Whatever. It was fine. Sawyer liked girls. Right now he liked these girls.

Except, I realized as I passed Shelby on my way back to the kitchen, they were both holding half-empty wineglasses. “Oh, what an ass,” I muttered.

“Nolan, party of four?” Shelby called. She turned to me, perched primly on her stool. “Do it. Cowboy up.”

I made my way over to the bar, glared until I caught his attention. “Talk to you for a sec?”

He grinned at me, pulled the rag off his shoulder and dropped it below the counter. “Hey, beautiful.”

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped, as he followed me into the back hallway, near the office.

Sawyer frowned. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not nice.” I scowled and glanced at the girls, one of whom had
SEXY
spelled out in rhinestones across her shirt. I hated that. It was like having to explain a
joke. “Do you ever think? I mean…” I paused, struggled to find words. “Do you ever
think?
”

“I don’t—” Sawyer put his hand on my arm. “What are you talking about?”

I wriggled out of his grasp. “Did you serve them?”

“Did I serve who?”

“Those girls.” I nodded in their direction. “Helga and Olga, or whatever the hell their names are.” I swallowed. “Did you serve them?”

“Yeah,” he said, no hesitation at all. He looked confused. “Why?”

“They’re in my gym class, Sawyer. They’re in high school.”

“Oh.” He glanced at them, then back at me. “Whoops.”

“Whoops?” I sounded shrewish, I knew, but at this point I didn’t care. “Really,
whoops?
That’s a good way for my dad to lose his liquor license.”

“Reena, relax. Nobody’s gonna lose their license. I didn’t think to check, but—”

“All I’m saying is that maybe if you’d spent a little less time—” I broke off. A little less time
what
, exactly? Looking at hot girls was what, but I couldn’t say that out loud.

Sawyer blinked at me. “Wow,” he said, after a moment. “Okay. You’re pissed.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“It’s sort of cute.” Two indentations that just missed being dimples appeared at the corners of his mouth.

“Stop saying stuff like that to me.” I scowled. “You know, not every girl in the whole world is impressed by you.”

He nodded seriously. “About three-quarters.”

My God, he was such a bastard sometimes. I could have screamed.

Shelby swooped in just then, cool fingers curling around my wrist. “Quite the crowd you got over there, chief,” she said, nodding at the bar.

He nodded. “I’m on it,” he said, looking at me. “Reena—”

“Forget it,” I said, shaking my head. “Forget it.”

I stomped off, plastered a smile on my face, went back to my tables, and steamed my way through the dinner rush. A couple of hours later I was standing in the back hallway, looking out the window at the patio and drinking a cup of coffee, when I heard him come up behind me. “Slacker,” he called me, by way of hello.

“I’m on my break.”

“I know. I’m kidding. Listen, Reena, about before—”

“Don’t,” I interrupted. Already I felt stupid, felt jealous, felt young. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I dropped the ball, okay? I’m sorry. But nobody got hurt.”

“Sure. You’re right.” I started to brush past him, but he grabbed my arm. I pulled away. “Don’t.”

“Why?” He looked genuinely confused. He looked like Christopher Robin. “Reena, I don’t know what your problem is with me tonight, but—”

Just then Sawyer’s words were cut off by the loud, shrill whoop of the fire alarm: I saw his face crease, his eyes widen. “Holy shit,” he said softly, and when I turned to look behind me, I saw the smoke leaking from the kitchen door.

“Oh my God.”

“Shit. Move,” he said, flipping the handle on the back door and pushing me through. I could hear people yelling inside.

“Sawyer, my dad—”

“Reena!” He grabbed at my arm and steered me onto the patio. My coffee cup smashed on the pavement. “Go.”

*

It was a grease fire, I learned later, small and fast and stinking. Nobody was hurt, but the damage in the kitchen was enough to close us down for the rest of the weekend. Dark, damp-looking stains crept up the walls like crooked fingers: the whole dining room reeked of oil and smoke.

My father put a hand on my shoulder as I sat alone in a booth a couple of hours later. He’d already sent Shelby and the rest of the waitstaff home. “I have a couple of things to finish up here,” he said. He looked exhausted; earlier I’d seen him munching Tums and I let myself worry, for one quick minute, about the stress on his heart. The idea that we could have lost the restaurant made me feel panicky and protective of the place and my father both. I thought of leaving for college in a few months and felt a pang of missing him, even though he was right in front of me. “Can you make it a little longer?”

“I can take her, Leo.” That was Sawyer, materializing out of nowhere like a ghost—I’d been half convinced he’d left, no good-bye or explanation, like that night in the hospital all over again. “I can drive Reena home.”

My father looked at Sawyer for a long minute, then back at me. Finally he sighed. “Straight home,” he said, and I knew he must feel even worse than he looked. “I mean it.”

“Straight home,” Sawyer promised. “Absolutely.”

I nodded, stood up, waved good-bye to my father. Sawyer pushed open the front door of the restaurant with one broad shoulder and swore softly as a blast of wind sliced inside. “Freezing,” he said—although it definitely wasn’t cold for any place besides Florida—and he took my hand so casually that I wondered if he even knew he’d done it. I swallowed and tried to ignore the petty contact, the shock waves it sent through my bones.

“Don’t you have a jacket?” he asked. He wrinkled his pretty nose as we hurried around the side of the restaurant to the parking lot.

“It was in the kitchen.” The sky looked heavy, full of thick, purple clouds.

“Fat lot of good it’s going to do you in there,” he said, opening the passenger door. “There’s a sweatshirt in the backseat.”

Kid had manners, at least, I thought. Lydia had made sure of that. “I’m okay,” I lied.

He slid behind the wheel, groped around in the backseat,
and produced a gray hoodie. He looked annoyed. “Reena, can you forget your principles or whatever for one second and just take it? It’ll be a few minutes before the car warms up.”

He looked awfully good in the dark, and I found myself nodding. “Okay.”

“Good.” Sawyer stepped on the gas. “That wasn’t so hard, right?”