Meant For Me (20 page)

“That’s cryptic. Here I thought you were going to demand I make nice with my sister.”

I shook my head. “Why would I blackmail you into doing that? If your interest isn’t genuine, it will just hurt her more in the long run. But I know she wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

She didn’t seem to know what to say. But the box went into her pocket, creating a bulge there against her narrow hip. She was definitely thinner than Chloe. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” I touched Asher’s soft blond hair. “Where is his dad?”

“Dead. Heroin overdose.”

Somehow that wasn’t surprising.

“And before you go and ask, no, I don’t use. I wanted him to get off that shit but you just don’t walk away from heroin.”

“I guess not.” I took her other bag off my arm. “Can you carry all this yourself?”

“Yep. Everything I own, in two bags. I’ve learned how to travel light.”

She could joke about it all she wanted, but it wasn’t good and we both knew it. “Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah. And Chloe will come around. You don’t seem like a bad guy.”

That made me smile. “I don’t totally suck, I guess. But she could probably do better.”

“Well, there are definitely worse guys than you.” She adjusted the baby on her hip. He was playing with the ends of her hair. “And I’ll think about talking to her. I promise. And thank you.”

“Okay. See you around, Anya.”

I didn’t know what else to do when I kept texting Chloe and she kept not answering. So I wandered around the city, taking the subway to Grand Central Station and going down to the dining concourse underground for some food. It was hot down there and crowded, hard to breathe, no air movement. It was like being caught in the armpit of a fat guy. I ordered a deli sandwich and muscled my way to a free table to sit down and eat it. Chloe finally texted me back.

Taking the train to Portland. Dad is picking me up.

Great. Now her father thought I’d abandoned her in New York.

Before I could respond she sent another message.

When your phone was on the desk you got a picture from some girl named Lila of her vagina. I deleted it. I shouldn’t have touched your phone, sorry.

Well, that was just the last thing in the fucking world I needed right now.

I haven’t talked to Lila since I met you.

That was the truth. I hadn’t.

I’m not sure it matters.

Everything matters.

I tossed my pickle to the side of the wax wrapper and picked up my sandwich. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, not knowing what to do, but it frustrated me even more now than it ever had. I missed Chloe, as stupid as it sounded. I wanted to bury my lips in her hair and hold her in my arms. I wanted to hear the whisper of her voice in my ear and feel her fingers tentatively stroke across my chest. How could something so right go wrong so quickly?

I miss you
.

Yep. I went there. Thereby confirming my status as the most pathetic asshole ever.

Please don’t. Not right now.

When?

I mean, I’d already thrown it out there, so I might as well roll with it.

I don’t know. Maybe we both need to figure stuff out.

My phone fell out of my hand. I bit my sandwich. What was there to say to that? Nothing. Figure what out? I could figure out how to stop drinking and what the fuck to do with my future and she could figure out how to talk.

If we waited for any of those to happen we might be waiting a long ass time. Part of me wanted to throw the night before in her face, but I restrained myself.

She beat me to it anyway.

Last night was a mistake. I’m sorry.

Just like that she reduced what was damn near a religious experience for me to a regret. In a text. She might as well have put a hashtag in front of it. #oops #lostmyvirginity #forgothisname

As dozens and dozens of people moved around me in the hot cave under the main dome of the station, I flicked at my pickle with my finger and thought about why I was even in the city. I didn’t even like New York that much and I sure in the hell didn’t like driving sixteen hours round trip in three days to spend an insanely large amount of money on a hotel room. But I had done it without question because for weeks, even without the ability to see Chloe in person, I had been falling for her. The more I read her texts and messages and her personal stories she sent, the more I had listened to her piano playing, the more I had seen who she was, and it was beautiful. She was a beautiful person inside and out.

Maybe she didn’t want me to be overprotective. Maybe she had spent her whole life having her father treat her that way.

That didn’t mean that she could get mad about one little thing and just throw over our whole relationship.

There was no way that what we had done the night before was a mistake. I knew what mistakes were. I knew when I woke up and felt that pit in my gut and had that momentary hesitation where I tried to piece together what had happened the night before that I’d made a mistake, no matter what I’d done.

Sex with Chloe was no mistake.

I had made so many mistakes. Now I was done with mistakes.

She wanted me to fix myself? Sure. I could do that. But there was no reason that she and I couldn’t communicate and fix what we needed to together.

The night before had been the total opposite of how I’d felt and viewed every sexual encounter in the last eighteen months. It had meant something. And I would be fucking damned if I was going to just roll over and let her relegate me to the status of Her First with nothing more than a backward glance.

I stood up and tossed the rest of my lunch in the trash.

Then I went to get my car and drive to Rockport to take the ferry to Vinalhaven.

As I walked down the street I sent Chloe a text.

Last night was no mistake. A mistake would be turning your back on the one guy who actually hears what you have to say.

If the mirror shatters, do you still exist? If you can’t look and see your reflection, how do you know you’re still there? You can look down and see your arms, and see your legs, but what if your face isn’t the same? You can’t check, so do you really, truly know?

When I saw my sister for the first time, I expected to feel something more. Instead what I felt the incongruous reality of staring at a stranger. I thought Anya would look more like me. Or I would look more like Anya. That despite all those years apart, somehow we would have mimicked each other’s style and movements, without being consciously aware of it.

What I saw was a completely separate human being, whose expression revealed nothing. Which seemed especially startling because my expressions show everything. My face is my words. The tilt of my mouth, my forehead, those are my sentences.

So when I saw my sister and I saw nothing I felt as if the entire foundation on which I’d built my life crumbled out from under me.

Nothing makes sense, nothing is real or solid.

I think I love you, Ethan, but how do I know? And how do I know that what you love is me, versus what you think is me?

Without a twin, without a purpose, without the need to prove that my sister is real, what is left of me? Am I really just the weird silent girl that no mother wanted?

I don’t know.

I don’t know anything.

All I know is that I’m grateful to you.

But until I can speak I have nothing left to say.

I was halfway home when I got the message from Chloe. And then I really got the message. She didn’t want me. I had been, what? A distraction maybe? A fantasy? I wasn’t sure.

But “I think I love you, but” wasn’t what I needed or wanted to hear. Even I had a threshold for how pathetic I could be and I wasn’t going to crawl my ass to Vinalhaven and beg. No, instead I was going to lie on my couch in the dark and listen to Chloe’s piano playing on my phone. So much less pathetic.

My body was tired from the tumultuous two days and very little sleep, but my mind was racing as I kicked off my shoes and crawled onto the couch. I waited for my thoughts to sort themselves out, for a plan to formulate. I waited for the impulsive urge to go to the bar, to drink, to bury myself in a willing partner to surface, but it didn’t. I wanted to be with Chloe or I wanted to be alone.

Maybe she didn’t believe that what I felt was real or solid, but I knew that it was. I was twenty-five, not sixteen. I wasn’t in the business of telling chicks that I was in love with them for no apparent reason.

I wondered what she had told her father about why we were in New York. The truth? I had no idea. She’d said her father didn’t believe she had a twin. So it seemed unlikely that he would now. It wasn’t like we had actual documents or DNA proof. So really, what was different in her life?

It pissed me off that she doubted my feelings. That was her shit, not mine. I hadn’t wavered. And falling in love with her had reminded me exactly who I was. I was loyal. I was decent. I was someone who went after what I wanted and I got it, but not at the expense of other people. Until twenty-three I’d been a go-getter and now I had fallen into a pattern of rolling over and letting life just happen.

That wasn’t me. It had made me incredibly unhappy.

Chloe had helped me hold that very mirror she talked about up to myself and see exactly who I had become- someone I didn’t respect. Someone miserable. It wasn’t me. It was me with a mask, a shield.

So you know what? I didn’t need fixing. Nothing I had done with Chloe was wrong. And while I was sometimes frustrated with her, I’d never asked her to change either. I’d asked her to move in with me, not go to therapy or work on her disorder. I’d read all about those techniques they used, forcing mute people to speak if they wanted something and making them repeat to others what they said to those they were comfortable with. I figured that was her choice, her decision, not mine.

Fuck this noise.

I stood up. I was going to Vinalhaven. I was telling her I’d seen Anya again because I didn’t need that shit coming back to haunt me, when all I had been doing was looking for Chloe. And then I was going to tell Chloe exactly what I thought of her avoidance techniques and lay on the line what I wanted.

Her.

I wanted her.

When I had proposed to Caitlyn, I had gone the route of what social media encouraged us to do- The Grand Gesture. I had pulled out a ring at the top of the fraternity house stairs at the homecoming ball in front of a hundred people. It had never once occurred to me that she would say no, and she didn’t. But now, two years later, I realized that some moments in life are meant to be private. Like a first kiss. The first “I love you.” Arguments. Marriage proposals. It wasn’t about finding the perfect way to Instagram personal milestones in life. It was about living them with the person who had your heart.

I could have waited days, weeks, months to see Chloe. I could have let her work through her disappointment with Anya and I could have enrolled in law school, found an apartment, handed her a key and a ring with a quartet behind me playing one of her favorite classical pieces and a honeymoon booked to Russia to see where she was born, or something like that. Balloons and flowers and a photographer hidden in the bushes. Even if I were sure of her response, which I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have done that.

With Chloe, everything was so raw, so genuine. This had to stay that way too.

Just me and her.

When I got to Vinalhaven my sister and Emma were waiting for me in the parking lot. Seeing Aubrey holding her baby, smiling at me, reminded me of Anya, and her being tossed out onto the street by her landlord. I had to admire what she was trying to do, raise a kid by herself. Neither she nor Chloe had had an easy life and where it had made Anya hard, it had made Chloe tender. She felt things so deeply that it had created her mutism.

But I honestly didn’t see that as a flaw. It was something I loved about her- that she cared so much.

“You’re nuts,” was my sister’s greeting.

“Probably.”

“Paul was having a cow. He thought you and Chloe ran off and eloped or something.”

“If we were eloping I would have stayed in Maine where you don’t need a marriage license.” I took Emma from Aubrey and help her up in front of me, giving her a kiss. “Hey kid. Your mom’s a jerk, did you know that? Did you know that?”

Aubrey laughed. “It runs in the family. But seriously, I thought this had something to do with Caitlyn and Heath getting married last weekend.”

I’d actually forgotten Caitlyn was getting married. “This has nothing to do with that,” I said mildly. “Chloe asked me to help her look into her adoption, that’s all. The rest is up to her to share. But I will say I don’t think she got the answer she wanted.”

We walked over to Aubrey’s car and she unlocked it. “Can you put Emma in her carseat?”

“I’ll try. But you should inspect my work afterwards.”

“Of course. So why are you here, Ethan? I know it’s not because you missed me so much you had to come back.”

“Chloe and I had a bit of an argument. I decided I wasn’t going to let her go underground when we should talk about it.”

“Does that mean she dumped you and you are trying to pretend she didn’t?”

I made a face at my sister as I sit the door, Emma securely in her seat. “You know, for once, a little sympathy would be nice.”

“I’m terrible at showing my emotions, you know. I like to turn everything into a snarky comment.” Aubrey studied me. “You care about her a lot, don’t you?”

I nodded. “I do. And this is different, Aub. I enjoy being with Chloe. I think about her in terms of what can I do to make her happy, not what she can do to make me happy.”

“You know, the ironic thing is you’ve always been great at relationships. If anyone can commit to a girl and do it well, it’s you. That’s why I never understood this whole Jersey Shore thing you had going on. It wasn’t a good fit.”

“Thanks, I think.” I went around to the passenger side of the car and got in. “Drop me off at Chloe’s, will you?”

“Of course. I didn’t want to cook dinner for you anyway.”