How to Love (29 page)

“Hey,” he says. “I heard about your dad.”

“He’s okay, we think,” I tell him. “I’m going to go by the hospital in a bit.”

“Want some company?” he asks. “We could grab breakfast real quick.”

I’m trying to decide how to answer that when Sawyer’s voice reverberates through the living room, all noisy and cheerful. “Is that Shelby? Invite her in! I’ll make her some eggs.”

Damnit.

Aaron’s face changes, hardens. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t realize you had company. It’s only your car in the driveway.”

“No, it’s just—” It’s just what? It’s not just anything. It’s sex with Sawyer LeGrande.

“Shelby Fitzsimmons, star of stage and screen,” Sawyer calls, making his way through the dining room. He sees Aaron and freezes for just one second before he recovers,
a nearly undetectable smile quirking at the corners of his mouth. Already I want to slug him. “Oh. Not Shelby.”

“Not exactly,” Aaron says slowly, and God,
God
, I feel like garbage.

“Well, hey, man, good to see you,” Sawyer says, recovering. If you didn’t know better you’d think he was totally decent. “I’m, uh, making eggs, if you’re interested.”

“Thanks, but I have to get going,” Aaron says, edging his way to the door. “I have to get to work. I just came by to make sure Serena’s dad was okay.”

“I just got off the phone with Soledad, and she says he’s doing great.”

“That was Sol?” I ask, forgetting for one moment the massacre going on in front of my very eyes.

“Well, then, I guess that’s that.” Aaron looks from me to Sawyer and back again. “I guess … I guess I’ll, ah, see you around, Reena.”

“Aaron—” What am I going to say? I’ve been terrible to him, this good person, this soul who brought me flowers and made me smile on my ugliest of days. There’s no excuse in the world.

It doesn’t matter, really; Aaron’s already out the door. “Give your dad my best,” he calls over his shoulder, retreating like possibly my house is on fire and I’m just too stupid to notice and save myself.

“Shit,” I say, when his car is gone from the driveway. “Shit!”

“What?”

I turn on him savagely. “Shut up.”

“Oh, come on.” Sawyer has held it in as long as he can; he’s smiling now. “It’s not that bad.”

“No, actually, it’s
exactly
that bad. You don’t understand. You definitely do not understand.” I think of how angry Shelby is at me already. I think I’ve just annihilated our friendship for good. “I have just completely screwed myself.”

“Well.” He side-eyes me a bit, mischevious. “I wouldn’t say
that
, exactly.”

“I said shut up!”

Sawyer rolls his eyes. “Can I ask you a question? Do you even like him? Or is he just, like, practical? Because I’ve gotta tell you, Reena, he’s like the human equivalent of a bowl of shredded wheat.”

“Go to hell, Sawyer. You don’t know him. He’s a really nice guy.”

“So is Mister Rogers, but that’s no reason to jump into bed with him.”

“First of all, who I do or do not jump into bed with is none of your business. Second of all, speaking of things you don’t know anything about, he was a really good boyfriend.” I turn and stomp toward the kitchen. “And third of all, Mister Rogers is dead!”

That stops him for a moment. “Mister Rogers is dead?”

“For years!”

He follows me through the dining room, stopping to tousle Hannah’s hair. “Can you quit running away every time I try to have a conversation with you?”

“You’re one to talk about running away,” I shoot back, turning off the stove and replacing the eggs in the fridge.

Sawyer makes a face, like maybe that particular refrain is wearing a bit threadbare for him. “Well, I’m here now,” is all he says.

“Right.” I bounce around the kitchen like a pinball, tossing various and sundry items into the backpack on the chair: phone, keys, crackers for Hannah, a couple of juice boxes, a stuffed stegosaurus. “Until you get the itch or the urge or whatever it is that makes you do the lame-ass things you do and you take off again and I’m back where I started, except that now I have completely alienated the one guy in my entire life who actually treated me well.”

Sawyer doesn’t like that. His soft mouth thins. “I treated you well.”

“Mm-hmm. I especially appreciated the part where you peaced out without even having the decency to make up a lie about going out for cigarettes.”

“How long are you going to hold that against me?”

“Until I’m not pissed about it anymore!”

“So, forever?”

“You were gone for two years! You’ve been back for two weeks!”

“You know, what I love about all this is how conveniently
you forget that you were on your way out, too, when I left. You told me every day.”

“I was going to college!”

“You were getting out of here a full year before you had to, and never coming back. You were going to go do something great and amazing and a hundred times better than the restaurant and this town, and a hundred times better than me.”

“Sawyer, don’t be such a baby. I never said that.”

“You said it in a hundred different ways. You were leaving anyway. I just thought I’d get the jump.”

“Jesus God.” I roll my eyes, try to think for a moment, and when I do there is only one logical conclusion for me to draw. I feel mean as a rabid dog. “This was stupid of us.”

He looks at me suspiciously. “What was?”

“This.” I spread my arms out. “Last night, this morning, all of it. It was a bad idea. I was upset. I shouldn’t have let you—”

“
Let
me?” he explodes. “You came looking for me! I was ready to sleep on the damn couch!”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m a maniac, and you make me that way. You’ve been back for thirty seconds, and I’m acting like an idiot all over again.”

“Well,
that’s
not far off.”

God, I am so frustrated with him. I am frustrated with my whole life. “Screw you.”

“Nice.” He’s angry, too. “You know what? Let’s just forget about it.”

“You know what? Let’s.”

“Fine,” he says, and he could be giving me the weather report but his eyes are cold like marbles. “It never happened.”

“What are you wearing?” Sawyer wanted to know.

I glanced at myself in the mirror as I cradled the phone between my ear and shoulder. It was the Friday after I’d gotten my letter from Northwestern; he was supposed to be picking me up in twenty minutes for what, he promised, was going to be a Very Big Date. “Why?”

“Because I want to make sure we’re not wearing the same thing.”

“Shut up.” It was the middle of May, uncomfortably hot. “Everything I put on makes me sweat. So maybe nothing.”

“I see.” He was smiling, I could hear it. “Now there’s an idea. Be ready in ten, yeah? We’re celebrating. My girlfriend got into college this week.”

We drove to South Beach that night, windows of the Jeep rolled all the way down; the air conditioner had finally given out a few weeks before, and I smelled ocean and summer. Charley Patton twanged out into the heat:
Took my baby to meet the mornin’ train
… Sawyer kept one hand on my leg as we made our way down 95, breaking contact occasionally to rub at a twitching muscle in his jaw.

“I like your wrists,” he commented suddenly, glancing over at where my hands were resting in my lap. He traced the underside of my forearm with the tip of his finger.

I looked at him skeptically. “My wrists?”

“Yeah,” he said, half smiling as he switched lanes. “Relax. I don’t have, like, a weird wrist thing. I just like yours. They’re small. Like bird bones.”

“Bird bones,” I repeated.

“Yeah.” He paused. “See? Now you ruined the moment.”

“You were making a moment?”

“I was trying!”

I laughed. “Sorry. Do it again.”

“No!” he said. “The moment is over.” But he was laughing, too.

South Beach was shiny like a carnival, all Art Deco buildings and neon storefronts, but the Breezeway, where we wound up, made the Prime Meridian look like the bar at the Ritz. We had to walk down a dark, garbage-strewn alley to get to the door, and I wondered how Sawyer knew where he was going.
You drove all this way to bring me
here
when all of
South Beach is lit up like Christmas?
I wanted to ask him, but I wasn’t in the mood for a fight.

Sawyer held my hand as he expertly wove through the crowd, pulling me along like deadweight. It seemed to me that he liked crowds, big noisy crushes of people. It seemed to me that he was good at them.

He let go when we got to the bar, peering through the smoke like he was looking for somebody. “Wait here,” he said in my ear. His breath tickled, set my dangly earring swinging.

“Why?” I squinted, suddenly suspicious. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the music, something thumping and loud I didn’t recognize. “Where are you going?”

“Just wait a sec. We’ll go grab dinner right after this, I promise.”

I sighed and headed for the bathroom. I’d downed a soda on the ride. When I was finished, I killed time by reading the graffiti on the wall next to the empty Tampax dispenser, making up stories in my head to go with the scribbled initials, the doodled hearts, the swears. I was getting very good at killing time. My shoes were sticking to the floor, and I was picking my way toward the exit when I heard one yell, a woman’s, rise above all the others.

“What’s going on?” I asked a slightly inebriated guy as I rounded the corner from the small hallway that housed the restrooms. It had gotten more crowded since I’d been gone, and I couldn’t see the action.

“Two idiots got into it,” he told me, after looking me up and down in a way that made me shudder. Then, as if perhaps that wasn’t clear enough: “Fight.”

I looked around for Sawyer, saying a quick prayer that I knew was useless even as it ran through my brain. Standing on my tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd, I realized that one of the two idiots getting into it was absolutely my boyfriend. Suddenly, our little trip to the Breezeway made a lot more sense.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, realization dawning bright and harsh. I could see the bouncer and the bartender moving in to break it up, and I stood frozen for endless seconds, debating whether to move toward them or flee. I whimpered as a fist connected with Sawyer’s cheek, and felt the acid rising up in my throat as he reared back and slammed his knuckles into the other guy’s mouth. He was a good fighter, I realized dully, then turned around and pushed through the crowd toward the door.

I was on my heel and into the alley even before the guy Sawyer had talked to at the door pulled him out of the bar. “Dude, I’m not wasted,” he was saying, but the bouncer didn’t seem to care. “He started it, I swear.”

“He belong to you?” the man asked me.

I almost said no. Sawyer looked at us sullenly. “Yeah, I guess,” I replied. “Thank you. Sorry.” The bouncer nodded and shrugged and turned to go back inside, and I pulled Sawyer’s car keys from his back pocket as we walked
toward the street. I was tired of driving home. “Get in the car,” I said.

“Reena, that was supposed to be so quick, but that guy—”

“Don’t talk,” I interrupted.

“We were going to go somewhere else—”

“I said don’t talk to me!” I started the car. “Is that why you brought me all the way down here?” I demanded. He didn’t reply—because I’d told him not to, I suppose—so I barged ahead. I was close to tears, I was so angry. “Seriously? And you tried to make it look like a date. Because I got into
college?
Jesus. I don’t believe you. I seriously do not believe you.”

“It was supposed to be a date,” he muttered. “I was going to take you someplace else. It would only have taken a second if that guy hadn’t been such a douchebag.”

“Right. It’s his fault. It’s your
drug dealer’s
fault.” I flinched just looking at his ruined knuckles. There was blood seeping from them. “This is ridiculous.” I glanced out the window, put my blinker on. “Do you know that this is ridiculous? This isn’t real life. This isn’t how I operate.”

“What are you doing?” he asked, instead of answering me.

“I’m stopping at Walgreens.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to get stuff for your hand! Jesus!”

“I’m fine.”

“There are teeth marks! You want to get rabies?”

He barked a laugh. “Nobody’s getting rabies.”

“You want to get AIDS?” I almost gagged on the words. I turned off the Jeep in the Walgreens parking lot and, after debating for a minute, pocketed the keys.

“Nice,” he said. “Where exactly do you think I’m going to go? You think I’d leave you here?”

“Who knows what the hell you’d do?” I slammed the door and headed into the store, where I spent all the cash I had on me on peroxide, gauze, a tube of Neosporin, and another soda. I wished for my father, for Shelby, for Soledad, for Lauren even. I didn’t want to go back out to the car. I could feel him receding, going so far that I couldn’t catch him, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

The cashier surveyed my purchases and looked at me half-sympathetically and said, “Hope your night gets better.”

“Thanks.” I had to look into the fluorescent light to keep from crying.

“Goddamnit, Sawyer,” I hissed, switching on the overhead light in the Jeep. He looked worse than I’d thought. He was going to have a shiner. I thrust the soda at him, and he applied it to his rapidly swelling eye. I hoped he had a headache. “You know, why would I even want to go to college when I can stay here and play Florence Nightingale to you?”

“Beats the hell out of me. Shit,” he said, when the peroxide hit his knuckles, breath hissing from him like a balloon. “That hurts.”

“Good.”

“Look, don’t even bother,” he said, pulling his hand away. “I’ll take care of it myself. Let’s just go.”

“Fine. Have it your way.” I threw the Jeep into reverse. I hated this car, and this town, and the entire state of Florida. I thought of speeding north toward Alligator Alley, of driving us right off the road into the swamp. “I can’t believe you’re going to act like this.”