The Last Time We Were Us (26 page)

I feel achingly clumsy, but I manage a small smile.

“Come in. My dad’s at work.”

His words give me chills, a not-so-subtle reminder we have the apartment to ourselves. Seeing him now, after not seeing him for a week, after speaking with him for hours each night, there is want in every bone in my body, in the jillion hairs on my head, in the tips of my fingers and the pit of my stomach.

He makes a show of offering me sweet tea, but I decline.

We hover, strangely, in the living room, because what is happening is so new. And it’s amazing how you can know someone forever and then find this secret place, like a password-protected clubhouse, where only the two of you are allowed in.

“You want to show me your old photos?” I ask. “I saw a box on your dresser.”

“Sure.” He’s obviously grateful for the suggestion. Can this boy who has spent the last two years locked away with so many different kinds of people, struggling against more than I ever have and more than I likely ever will, be just as nervous as I am?

We walk into his bedroom, and he grabs the box, pulls out a photo with a slightly shaking hand—in it, I have ketchup all over my face.

“You sure were a cute kid.” He sits on the bed, and I sit next to him. “I don’t even remember this being taken. Do you?” He turns to me as he says it. I shake my head.

His hand is trembling harder now, and I pull the photo away, put it back in the box, rest my hand on his, and trace the outline of his thumb and forefinger.

“Have you thought about us before?” I ask.

“Yes.” He says it without hesitation. “Many times.”

“Me too.”

We stare at each other, waiting to see who goes first. Sitting here next to Jason, I feel all of the things I never felt with Innis, as much as I tried to tell myself I did. With Innis, the butterflies were the challenge, the conquest, the wondering if someone so popular could possibly like me, the sheer appreciation of Innis’s looks, of his power in our town. But with Jason, there is no wonder. I know he likes me, it’s not that. With Jason, it’s just that if he kisses me, I feel like I’m going to explode. And if he doesn’t kiss me, I’m going to explode, too. His breath is hot between us, and I am hyperaware of my thumb tracing the lines of his rough hands. Of all of the different parts of him that I could touch.

“This is kind of weird, isn’t it?” I ask.

He looks at me, his eyes so penetrating, so steady, I think mine might burn up if he doesn’t stop.

“You think too much,” he says. And that’s when he leans in.

His kiss is relief. Soft and smooth, his mouth on mine; our hands laced together.

I kiss back, and slowly, our mouths open. We find each other, and it is so sweet and delicious that I forget to breathe until he pulls away, and I suck in air.

“Remember when you said it’s not where you start, it’s where you end up?” I ask.

He nods.

“What if I end up with you?”

We dive back in, our tongues exploring, our lips forming soft, perfect shapes.

There was fire and there was burning and there was a night that should never have been. A night that changed everything.

But now, there are fireworks.

After a minute, he pulls back, and his smile is wide and true.

“What if you do end up with me?” he asks. “Wouldn’t that be wild?”

Chapter 24

O
N THE WAY BACK TO MY HOUSE,
I
DO GO TO THE
mall. Not the one in Greendale, the one I went to a lifetime ago, with a troupe of girls to help me choose a dress, but the small one in Bonneville, just a few minutes away. I head straight to the cheapest store and back to the clearance rack, just so I have something to show for my so-called trip that’s taken now close to three hours.

I’m fingering a shiny black necklace with plastic beads, when a girl says, “Excuse me,” as she reaches for a pair of faux-pearl earrings.

Her voice is unmistakable. Sharp, direct, and free of the overdone Southern drawl that Mom calls charming and I call fake. I turn to see Veronica standing beside me.

“Liz.” She looks startled, then immediately regretful. Apparently a cheap pair of earrings wasn’t worth the cost of running into me.

“Hey.” Veronica’s hair is thick and straight, hanging past her shoulders, longer than I remember it. She’s wearing a touch of eye makeup and a sundress we picked out together. Behind her, Alice, her twelve-year-old sister, gives a quick wave before turning to a bin of neon-colored socks. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine.” Her lips form a thin line, and she doesn’t return the question.

The worst thing that happened between me and Veronica was what didn’t happen. The big blowout was actually between her and MacKenzie, not her and me. We didn’t scream about how we didn’t want to be friends anymore. We didn’t rip up the notes we’d written each other, or block each other online. We barely even traded harsh words.

The end of me and Veronica was a slow burn, so slow that I didn’t know it had started until it was well on its way. And it started way before that stupid party. It started before MacKenzie, even.

Veronica and I were always a ticking time bomb, because she never understood why I’d want to be popular in the first place. It’s not like she was too cool or artsy or whatever, it’s just that she never saw the point. The first time we hung out outside of class, early freshman year, I told her about Jason, how much I hated him for ditching me for the “popular crowd.” I really think I used those words. She just looked at me with curiosity and said, “Are those the people you really want to be around, anyway? They always have so much
drama
.”

Looking at her now, I ache to tell her everything that’s happened, to get her practical Veronica opinion on it all.

“We should hang out sometime,” I say.

She waits a second before answering. “Maybe.”

I grasp at anything to fill the space. “My sister’s about to get married.”

“I know,” she snaps. “You told me when she got engaged.”

And it stings, because when Lyla got engaged, Veronica and I were still friends. She looks back at her sister. “I should probably be going.”

“I was serious. We really should hang out. Maybe this week?”

She almost seems to open up, let me in. But then she glares at me, her eyes almost black. “I think you’re probably too busy.”

And like that, she turns around, grabs her sister by the elbow, and walks out of the store as quickly as she can.

M
Y PHONE RINGS
at seven the next morning, way too early for a Sunday. I force myself out of sleep, picking it up groggily. The number on the screen makes me smile, though I still haven’t programmed it, out of fear that Mom or Lyla or anyone else would see it.

“Hey,” I say. How is it that my fingers are tingling from nothing more than a phone call?

His voice is happy and open. “Come outside.”

“Now?”

“If you can.”

I tiptoe down the hall to see if my parents are up. I can hear the shower running through their bedroom door. Dad gets up early, even on Sundays, but Mom must still be asleep. “Be there in a second.”

I head down the stairs and look out the front window. There’s Jason’s truck, idling in front of his house, pumping gray clouds of exhaust into the morning light. The coast looks fairly clear, so I slip out the front door in my sleep shorts and a tank top, flip-flops on my feet. I’m so excited to see Jason that I don’t even care that my hair is messy, that I’ve got no makeup on.

I open the door to the truck, and the smell hits me immediately, sugar, flour, and pure nostalgic warmth. The polka-dot box sits on the dash.

“You didn’t.”

“I was driving to work, and I saw the light on,” he says. “I figured my boss wouldn’t kill me if I was a few minutes late, given that I’m recovering and all.”

He opens the lid, and the sweet smell is even stronger.

“Still your favorite?” he asks.

“Are you kidding?”

Your first time having a real Krispy Kreme doughnut is a rite of passage in North Carolina. It has to be the real deal, fresh from the shop when they have the HOT light flicked on.

Jason and I had ours together when we were five or six. I’d stayed over the night before, and Mrs. Sullivan slipped into his room superearly, got us out of our bunk beds, and told us we were going to have the best doughnuts of our lives. She always said that fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts were the only thing North Carolina had on New York, food-wise. When she handed them to us, they were still hot, and they melted in our mouths, just like she’d said they would.

“You first,” he says, and he picks it up and places it in my mouth. I bite down, the layers and pockets of pastry turning to warm sugar-air in my mouth. I take it from him, and he grabs his own, and we chew and smile and laugh at the crumbs of glaze on the corners of our mouths, just like we did when we were kids.

“I can’t stay,” he says. “I just wanted you to have that.”

“You are amazing,” I say. “Do you know that?”

He flicks a crumb of sugar off of my lips. “You deserve amazing, Lizzie Grant.”

W
E MAKE PLANS
to hang out after his shift is over, around five. I go back to bed and sleep in late. When I finally get up, I spend the afternoon helping my parents around the house. I figure any brownie points I earn now might help down the road. When the upstairs toilets are cleaned and the laundry in the machine, I walk up to my room, flop back on the bed, thinking about Jason, how there are only a few hours until I see him, touch him again.

As five o’clock gets closer, I find myself thinking of one of the last times we hung out before things changed. We were at the community center pool, doing our lap competitions, Jason beating me as usual. The water beaded against his skin, brown in the deep of summer. I was just starting to feel self-conscious about my body; we were only just beginning to look at each other differently.

He swam to the edge, easily five seconds ahead of me, leaned his head back on the concrete, lay there, smiling in his victory. When I swam to meet him, he didn’t make fun of me like he usually did, didn’t shout, “Oh, snap!,” do his stupid Marlon Brando impression (
I coulda been a contenduh
), any of that. Instead, he grabbed my hand and pulled me close to him. I leaned my head on the concrete, too, and we floated like that, shoulders touching, staring up at an impeccable June sky. And I wondered, for those few moments, if Jason was about to be mine.

And here I am, so many years later, so much changed, a rough, windy road bringing us to the point where we are—
finally
—us again.

I’m about to leave when I see a missed call on my phone from Mrs. Ellison. I’m instantly scared, that I shouldn’t have been so stupid to go out in the truck with Jason, kiss him where anyone can see. I call her back, and she doesn’t answer.

There’s a nagging, though, a dark blurry shape in the corner of my mind. What we have now is a reprieve—he still hasn’t told me exactly what happened, and I haven’t told him that I slept with Innis. I tell myself it will be okay, that whatever Jason has to tell me about that night can’t possibly be that bad, that what happened with Innis won’t have anything to do with the way he feels about me.

I inform Mom that I won’t be here for dinner, that I’m going to dinner and a movie with Marisa. She looks at me a little questioningly, but I’m out the door before she has much of a chance to protest.

I get to his place at five thirty. He answers the door with a smile, with a look that says we’re alone again, and I walk in, kiss him right on the mouth. “How was your first day back?”

He shrugs. “It was work. How was your Sunday?”

“Uneventful.” I think about the missed phone call, whether I should tell him about my irrational fears.

He hovers at the door, with a smile on his face that says he has a plan. “You hungry?”

And I decide right then not to tell him anything, that these are our moments, and I shouldn’t ruin them. “Definitely. Where do you want to go?”

“Do you still like Best Burgers?”

I raise my eyebrows. “Of course I do. But I haven’t been there in years.” It’s a hole-in-the-wall spot on the more industrial side of town. Dad loves it, but Mom says there’s no ambiance, which is kind of the point.

“Great,” he says. “Let’s go.”

The place is just as good as I remember it. We order cheeseburgers and take a table by the window. After a few minutes, a girl with great big hoops stuck through her ears comes out with two greasy, sloppy burgers, a bucket of fries, and two Cokes.

I think about what MacKenzie used to say—
the bigger the hoop, the bigger the ho
—and as the girl smiles at me, I realize that sometimes MacKenzie is an idiot.

Jason digs into his burger, while I pinch the straw and tear the bottom off, then lift it to my mouth and blow. The wrapper shoots at him, hitting him square in the nose.

“Oh, you’ve got it coming.” He grabs his straw, rips off the wrapper, sucks up a bit of Coke, and spits it right at me. It hits my cheek, then splatters on the table, and an older lady turns to us and gives us her meanest behave-yourself look. We just laugh.

I eat my burger, and I get mustard all over my face, and he smiles, licks his thumb, wipes it away.

When we’re done, Jason pays for the meal, a grand total of $10.50, and I’m riding our high, thinking that cheap burgers beat French roasted chicken any day, when I turn around and see, of all people, Erica and her husband, Dan.

“Erica!” Her name slips out like a curse word.

“Hey, Liz.” Her voice is venomous as she flits her eyes to Jason. “You remember Dan.”

“Hey, Dan.” It’s the part where I should say, “And you remember Jason? My old next-door neighbor?” But I just can’t.

“We should probably get going. Enjoy your dinner.” I head for the door, only looking back to make sure Jason’s behind me.

In the car, I realize that my breathing is heavy, panicky. Erica’s probably texting Lyla right now.

“Are you okay?” Jason asks.

I don’t answer his question. “Are you mad at me for not introducing you?”