Love on the Ledge (17 page)

I don’t know what to say to him. Today’s been full of so many ups and downs that all I want to do is crawl into a ball and sleep. “Can you just hold me?”

“For as long as you ask me to.”

We sneak into the house at dawn, before anyone is up. Hayden stays in order to finish up the gazebo. He pulls me into a soft, sweet kiss that threatens to curl my toes. I slept curled against his chest the entire night, and probably only drooled on him a little bit. If his alarm hadn’t woken me up, I’m sure I would have stayed in the bliss of dreamless sleep.

“Can I take you to lunch later?”

“I can’t,” I say. “I have a lot of cleaning up to do.”

“Tomorrow?”

“We’re taking the family out to the vineyards.”

“Which one?”

“Goose Walk and then the Long Ireland distillery.” Before he gets a chance to look disappointed, I ask, “Do you want to come?”

He makes a face, half embarrassment, half trepidation. “I don’t think your family likes me. I’m sure they’d rather see you with someone like Xandro. Not being jealous. Just stating a fact.”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t care. I want you to come. It’ll probably help the female faction if you’re shirtless. Probably half of the male faction as well, actually.”

He squeezes my waist and it makes me tingle all over. “Shirts are so cumbersome, but I’ll clean up.”

“I have no doubt.” I welcome the kiss he presses on my hand and want to pull him back to me, take him up to my room.

Instead, I leave him to work and find myself in River’s room, where she and Leti are sprawled on the bed.

“I’m not ready for a lecture,” River tells me.

“I wasn’t going to lecture you. But I did bring cookies.”

She sits up instantly. I throw the pack of Oreos. It’s my last sleeve, but she needs it more than I do.

“Milk?”

I sigh and go to the kitchen to grab milk and three cups. They make room for me. River dips her Oreo, waits a few seconds, and then eats it. Leti likes her cookie dry, then washes it down with milk. I like to eat the cream first, the cookie last.

“River,” I say. I don’t care if I’m pushing her a little bit. She needs a good push. “River, please.”

She finishes her milk. She sits up with her legs drawn to her chest. “I don’t know what happened. It’s something inside of me that sometimes just snaps. I met this guy at the beach the other night and he wanted to party. So I did. He took me to the back room behind Smitty’s.”

“Were you there all night when we found you?”

She nods. “I wanted to leave, but then I got a really great hand. And I just kept getting better and better until I lost it all. I was up ten grand. Ten grand, Sky. Do you know what I could do with that?”

I nod. She’d get a new car. She’d stop waitressing. She’d do something with her life. It’s the same old River song.

“River,” Leti says. “Can you just for a second stop and think what would have happened if we hadn’t been there?”

She shakes her head. River always gets close to the edge of situations. So close that I think she wants to feel what it might be like to go all the way. I’ve been in the car when she’d step on the gas until she was at top speed, just to see what it would feel like. When we were in Ireland, she stood on the edge of a cliff with her arms and face tilted to the open sky. I was afraid she’d jump. But that’s River. She likes living on the edge. My worry is that even if she doesn’t want to, one day she’ll get so close that there might not be a coming back.

She digs into her pockets but can’t find what she’s looking for.

“It’s not there,” I tell her. “It’s gone.”

“Sky! I owe Will money.”

“Turn in the chips. I’ll spot you the rest.”

“I can’t keep taking money from you.”

“Yeah well,” I say, turning angry. “You have to. You won’t always have to but you have to for right now. I’d rather lose a buck than lose you, okay?”

She leans back. With the last smudges of her makeup, her pouty swollen lips, and her unwashed hair, she looks like a little kid trying to be a grown up. I feel for her. We’re twenty-three, but even though high school and college are long gone, we’re not finished becoming who we’re supposed to be. I know I’m not.

“I’ll get help,” she says. “Just—after the wedding. I want to enjoy the summer with you guys. I’ll be good.”

That’s the thing with River, I can’t be mad at her. I can’t say no to her. All I want is to wrap my arms around her and make the world better for her, but that’s enabling.

“Okay, bitch,” Leti says good-naturedly. “But you can’t come to the tasting tomorrow.”

River rolls her eyes. “Alcohol isn’t the problem. It’s everything else. Once the chips are down, I don’t know how to quit.”

“River…”

“You can’t just leave me alone in this house. Everyone gives me dirty looks. Why can’t it just be us?”

I rub her leg. “Okay.”

“Okay,” she says, feeling as if she’s won.

“Listen,” Leti says. “If you aren’t going to take care of yourself for you, then do it for us. You know we love you no matter what, but that’s what we’re here for. For you.”

River nods, but she doesn’t look at either of us. She shuts her eyes. She squeezes both of our hands, and eventually, we all fall asleep. Still, I know what a false promise looks like, and River doesn’t mean to keep hers.

I leave before anyone in the house can notice I’m gone.

I roll down the windows of River’s car to try to get the cigarette stench out, then finally stop at the gas station to pick up an air freshener. Someone honks behind me, but I ignore it and keep driving into town where I’m going to knock on the door of La Vie est Belle until they say yes to cooking for me.

My phone rings and I send it to voicemail. I park and grab a coffee. The restaurant isn’t going to open for another hour so I’ve got time to kill.

My phone starts going off with a series of chimes, which tells me my family knows I’m not home.

Pepe:
Nena… please come home
.

Maria:
You’re being selfish.

Mom:
No me hables.

Yunior:
Can you pick me up a large iced latte and a bagel?

Tony:
Sky, whatever happened, we can talk about it. We should never have put this burden on you.

That’s the message that breaks my heart. It’s not a burden. It’s something I wanted. I start to type back, but my phone rings with a name I wasn’t expecting.

“Lucky?” I answer.

“Holy crap are you hard to pin down,” she says. “I texted you a few days ago to let you know I was in town. Are you freezing me out because of my mom and Bradley? I thought we were starting to be besties.”

“I never got it, I swear!” I take a sip of my coffee. It’s better than telling her I completely forgot about her text. “Wait, was that you honking at me this morning?”

She answers with a laugh. “Are you busy? I kind of have to talk to you.”

There is only one thing—or person—that Lucky and I have in common. I swallow the dryness on my tongue. “What’s going on?”

“It’s about Bradley.”

• • •

My mom used to tell me that no matter what I was afraid of in life, I had to confront it. Back then she was talking about Heaven Moreno, a girl with a piggish nose who believed her parents when they told her she was the most beautiful girl in the entire world. Heaven was the fifth grade mean girl before mean girls wore pink on Wednesdays, and for some reason she hated me. She pulled my hair when the teachers weren’t looking. She spilled her chocolate milk on my white shirt. She started a rumor that I didn’t wear a training bra (not so much a rumor as the truth).

I tried my best to avoid her, but she found me. When I asked my mom to change my class, she refused. “You have to confront her,” my mom told me. And on the day she put glue on my chair (our uniform pants were navy blue), I snapped.

“What’s your problem?” I asked. Not so much asked, but whispered to the floor.

She sucked her teeth, fueled by the confidence of having every girl in class stand behind her. “You’re my problem.”

I didn’t know what to say to that and everyone just snickered.

“You think you’re hot shit.” For a ten year-old, cursing in school made you a badass. She was a princess, but she wanted to be a badass. I was quiet and wanted to be left alone. “Well, you’re not.”

“Neither are you.”

That was it. That was the first time I’m sure anyone had told her that. Tears brimmed to her eyes and as soon as the teacher walked in, she let loose with the waterworks.

Suddenly, I wasn’t
the
mean girl, just
a
mean girl. I made the princess cry. My mom still had to come to school because I was accused of picking on another student. Meanwhile, I was still wearing pants with the ass covered in glue, and that was when I realized that the world wasn’t fair. Sometimes confronting problems wasn’t the best solution, but at least Heaven left me alone for the rest of the year.

Now that I’ve got River’s car stalled in front of a house that belongs to a woman who ended my relationship, I remind myself that as you get older, you have different kinds of fears and problems to confront. This fear is that I’ll never be able to get over Bradley. That I’m not strong enough to move on. That my little bit of steel is diminishing with every second the past is in neutral, and I’ll end up being the kind of person I hate.

My knuckles are white around the steering wheel. I swallow a deep breath and release it slowly. It’s just a house, I tell myself.

“Don’t be an idiot,” River had told me.

Maybe the advice I’m searching for isn’t “face your fear.” Instead it’s “don’t be an idiot.”

Maybe life would be a lot simpler if everyone collectively stopped being idiots. Wouldn’t that be grand?

I turn off the engine and dig into my purse. I find the blue seashell Hayden found for me at the beach. I trace the sea-polished surface, like it’s a talisman of good luck. In a way it is. Just looking at it brings a smile to my face. I set it on the dashboard and walk up the driveway.

It’s not the biggest house in the Hamptons, but it’s pretty damn nice. Miniature palms line the front path to a house with the kind of modern designs that make it look more like it belongs in Mars circa 3199. I don’t know why, but that gives me a little bit of pleasure knowing that the owner of the house and I are polar opposites.

“I was wondering how long you were going to stay in the car,” Lucky says. Lucky stands a bit shorter than me. Her long dark hair is tied up in a messy bun. Her cool gray eyes are hidden behind a pair of shades. Her shoulders are red where her skin rebels against the summer sun.

“That obvious?” I ask.

She pulls me into a hug. Her black bikini is warm, like she just got up from her lounge chair. If you had told me a few months ago that I’d be hugging Lucky Pierce and actually be happy to see her, I’d have called you crazy.

“You look good,” I tell her.

“Yeah, all the restaurant stress leaves me with zero time to eat.” She leads me around back, past a gate that takes us to the giant kidney-shaped pool. There’s a giant hot tub and, of course, more than one grill—a propane one and a brick oven with a slab on it. Hedges block the view from the neighbors on either side. I wonder if Bradley ever stayed here.

I torture myself with that train of thought, then force myself to let it go when James Hughes, chef extraordinaire, finishes swimming his lap. The man who surfaces from the water occupies my entire brain. From the strong muscles that glisten with water, to the abs that ripple as he pushes himself out of the pool. He rakes his black hair back, and even from a distance I can see how green his eyes are.

I glance at Lucky, who stares at him. I recognize the look of love in her eyes. Lucky looks at James with complete and total adoration. When she sees me staring at her with a grin on my face she tries to cover it with a scowl. Why are people so eager to hide how happy love makes them?

“Shut up.”

I hold my hands up innocently. “I didn’t say anything.”

But she doesn’t stop that look from returning to her face. James brings his wet body over to us. He takes Lucky by her face and pulls her into a wet kiss. She doesn’t complain as his hands wrap around her petite frame and grab her sizable derrière. When they pull apart, they take a minute to smile at each other. Something inside of me aches.

“You guys are gross,” I tell them.

James goes off to dig in the beer cooler and Lucky gives me the finger. I grab her hand.

“Is he converting you to the tattoo-side of life?” I rub my finger across the skin of her hand, over a bright four-leaf clover that’s inked just under her thumb.

She pulls her hand back and takes the beer James offers her. I take one, too.

“I was trying to convince her to get, ‘yes, chef’ on her forehead, but it didn’t go over so well.”

Lucky makes a face. “I don’t think forehead was the original place you suggested.”

I twist off the beer—a Boston Lager, of course—and follow them to a plush lounge area beside the pool. A large palm creates the perfect amount of shade. The water ripples a perfect shade of blue, and for a moment I think of the sand dollar on my dashboard and the boy whose number is written on it.

“What’s new, Sky?” Lucky says politely. I can sense she wants to get to the core of why she asked me here, but she seems nervous about it. “You up and left me when I finally had a friend in Boston.”

“Hey,” James says, taking umbrage to that.

“You’re my boyfriend,” she says. “It’s different. I can’t talk to you about the stupid shit you say.”

“Why not?” He pinches her thigh. “How else am I supposed to know not to say it again?”

“The man has a point.” I say, allowing myself to relax into the high comfy back of the wicker couch. There’s a spread of cheeses, toast points, and homemade spreads.

“How’s the wedding stuff going?” Lucky asks.

I do a shit job at hiding my stress. “It pretty much sucks.”

“Why?” Lucky leans forward and James looks like he doesn’t know if he wants to stay or run.

“It’s kind of the small things that started going wrong. The roof caved in on one of the guest rooms.”