The Wright Brother (17 page)

“Disgusted? By love? Are you insane?”

“Who said anything about love?” She wrinkled her nose even as her heart pounded from the truth of those words.

“Oh, baby girl, only love could make someone as depressed as you are right now. That boy is crazy for you—”

She snorted. “Crazy for me. Yeah. He left me, Mom. Wrote me a Dear John letter and stuck it on my dresser. Told me that it could never happen.”

“Hm.” She placed a hand to her chin. “I mean, I’m super curious when in the hell this could have happened, since as far as I know you two haven’t been alone since you’ve gotten home. You haven’t been sneaking that boy into your room at night, have you?”

“Mom, please get serious. No, I haven’t done that. And it happened while I was at college.”

“Ahh.” She nodded. “Well, that certainly explains a lot.”

“Like what?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Like why you were so adamant about not coming home this past Christmas.”

Cringing, Elisa glanced down at her socked, pinstriped foot.

Elizabeth tipped her chin up. “Elisa, I don’t know why he said what he did. But I know that boy, almost as well as I know you. And the advice I’m giving you now, I wouldn’t give you with anybody else. Not even Rome or Chris, God bless ‘em but those two are trouble with a capital T.”

She clenched her jaw, feeling as though she might cry. Which, how that was even possible anymore was beyond her—it seemed like the past year she could have filled the Saint John River with her tears alone.

“Baby, he loves you. He’s just young. And sometimes when you’re young, you’re stupid. But in his case, I really feel that he was trying to put you first.”

She scoffed. “How in the world is breaking my heart putting me first?”

“Honey.” Her look turned serious. “I don’t know how long you two have been, well, you know.” She shook her head. “And the truth is, I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway, but you’re two years and five months older than him. He only turned eighteen in December. He was still in high school. You in college. What do you honestly think he could have done?”

That had been almost verbatim her reasoning for staying away from him all those years. It was like her mother was throwing her words back in her face and she didn’t like it at all.

“Two and a half years is nothing when you’re thirty and twenty-eight, but it’s an enormous divide when you’re fifteen and eighteen.”

Dropping her right leg to the floor, she bopped it up and down nervously. “I see him now, Mom, and it’s like I don’t know who I am. Like I’m two different people. I love him so much, and yet I hate him.”

“You don’t hate him.” She touched Elisa’s chin.

“Then what do I feel?” she snapped, knuckling her left eye and sniffing. “Because it sure feels like hate.”

“Love. The same kind of frustrating love I’ve felt for your father over twenty years now. Love isn’t perfect, it isn’t always beautiful, and most times it just flat out hurts like hell. But if you’re lucky enough to find someone to share in that level of pain with you, then you should count yourself a lucky girl.”

She laughed, even as a tear spilled out of her eye. “Only you would equate love with pain.”

Giving her daughter a warm hug, Elizabeth patted her knee. “You have to face this, Elisa, and just be open to whatever happens. Julian might be Mr. Right, or he might only be Mr. Right Now, or Mr. Not At All. But either way, locking yourself away in your room like this, it’s not healthy. Live your life, baby girl, and let time do its thing.”

Wrapping her arms around her knees, she gave her mother a weak smile as she made her way to the bedroom door.

“What movie did they want to see?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Elizabeth shrugged airily. “Knowing them, probably some cheesy action flick.”

“Oh yay.” She rolled her eyes.

“So can I let them know that you’re in?”

Why had she avoided telling her mother for so long? The pain was still there, but now with it in perspective, she could see what she needed to do.

“Yeah, I’m in.”

It was Julian who came and knocked at her door later that evening. He was actually wearing some color tonight. Instead of the usual blacks and grays he typically wore, he was dressed in dark blue jeans and a hunter-green ringer tee that made his sea-green eyes seem almost electric.

It took everything she had just to swallow.

His hands were in his pocket as he jerked his chin toward the truck, where Christian and Roman already sat waiting.

Waving goodbye to her parents, she grabbed her shell-pink cardigan off the wall hook and was just about to slip it on when Julian took it from her and helped get her into it.

Then very gently, he lifted the hair that’d gotten caught beneath her collar and freed it loose. Just that simple touch made her skin tingle and warm with a rush of blood.

“Thank you,” she whispered it to him.

He nodded, as if he’d heard her, then turned and headed for the truck.

“C’mon, then, girl,” Roman called out, slapping his hand on the truck door. “We’re already gonna be late for the previews thanks to you.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and when Julian extended his hand for her to take it, she took it.

Reveling in the feel of his firm hands, so different from her soft ones. His touch lasted just a second longer than it should have, but she wasn’t in a rush to free herself of him either. And when he squeezed the tip of her thumb, she squeezed his back.

She wasn’t sure what they were saying, but they were definitely saying something.

The truck took off and she was glad she’d clipped her hair back and decided to wear the white capri pants instead the floral skirt. With how windy it was tonight, Julian would have caught several flashes of underwear. Which he probably wouldn’t have minded, come to think of it.

Neither one of them spoke, mostly because of how dark it was. But she felt his stare all over her.

She couldn’t help but wonder where Mandy was. Was it just going to be three of them tonight?

Deciding she needed to know, she asked him when they stopped at a red light. “Where’s Mandy?”

He made the sign of breaking up and her eyes widened.

Had he broken up with her? For real this time?

She would have asked him more, except the light had turned green and it was once again too dark to have a conversation. They could talk into each other’s palms, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for that level of intimacy just yet.

The drive to the theater was probably one of the most intense fifteen-minute rides of her life. So much so that by the time they pulled into the parking lot, her thigh muscles were popping and snapping like Mexican jumping beans.

Let things happen as they would
. That was her new running mantra. If it was meant to be, then it was. And if it wasn’t, then it wasn’t.

She went back to school in a week, and Julian’s life was completely up in the air. She knew nothing about his plans, where he was going, what he was doing. For all she knew he’d be staying in Sunny Cove and bagging groceries. She really just had no clue.

That stupid “ships in the night” analogy came back to her then, but she was determined to have a good night and to take her mother’s advice and stop worrying about things that couldn’t be changed.

“Thank you,” she said to Julian as he helped her from the truck, and she might have kept her hand in his forever if she hadn’t spotted Mandy glowering at them from beneath the neon marquee sign.

He must have spotted her at the same time, because a growl slipped from his throat. Dropping her hand, he marched over to Mandy just as Christian moved to join her.

“That psycho bitch needs to learn what ‘over’ means,” Chris snapped.

Feeling as though she’d just swallowed a ten-pound bag of rocks, she shrugged. “Let’s just go get our tickets, okay?”

Elisa tried not to stare at them, tried to respect their privacy, but when she saw Julian gesture, “We broke up,” her brain suddenly seemed to stop sending signals to her feet to keep walking.

Mandy may not have been able to sign, but judging by the way her eyes drilled holes into him, Elisa knew she’d understood the meaning.

As if aware that Elisa was there, Mandy twirled on her. “Dirty whore!” she spat, causing several couples to stop and stare at them wide-eyed.

Roman tossed his arms out wide and stepped in front of Elisa. “Go away, Mandy, he dumped your ass. Get a fucking clue, how about that?”

Julian was trying to get a grip on Mandy’s shirt, but the girl was beating a warpath that headed directly for Elisa.

Elisa dug her fingers into Rome’s teal polo shirt.

“You perverted freak,” Mandy rushed her, but again Roman blocked her.

This time, Christian also came to his brother’s aid and helped tug Mandy back.

Elisa’s nostrils flared, aware of the scene they were making. Aware of all the eyes and faces staring at them. Her cheeks flamed scarlet as her blood pressure rose.

She could defend herself, but really, what could she say that wouldn’t make it worse? Julian’s eyes were dark and heavy as they gazed on her. It was easy enough to read his anguish of the situation, which only made everything about a million times worse.

“Yeah, I don’t care if they hear,” Mandy yelled, trying to jerk herself free of Julian and Christian’s hands. The boys were tugging her away from the main entrance of the theater, around toward the side where the crowd was thinnest.

But Mandy was far from done. “You just couldn’t take it, could you? Had to come back for more, you nasty ho. What, men your age just don’t do it for ya? You into kiddie porn, too?”

“Enough,” Christian roared and gave her a rough shove back. “You’re a girl, so I won’t punch you for saying that shit, but—”

“But what?” she spat as she adjusted her black corset top.

“You keep it up”—he got in her space—“and I’ll conveniently forget that my mother raised me to have manners.”

Her snarl was full of piss and vinegar as she shook her head. “She’s the fucking pedophile and you guys come at me. Nice. Just wait till I tell everyone.”

“Oh, fuck off, Mandy,” Roman snapped. “We’ve already graduated, that schoolyard crap doesn’t mean shit to us anymore. Get the hell away from here and don’t come back. Ever.”

Mandy twirled on Julian, and as much as Elisa hated to admit it, she saw the hurt and pain mingled inside the rage. It was why she kept her mouth shut, not because she was scared, and not even because she didn’t deserve it—because whether Mandy believed it or not, Elisa had never meant to hurt her—but because Mandy was hurting as bad as she was.

Elisa knew what it was to feel that kind of pain. So she swallowed her words and allowed herself to look like a coward hiding behind Roman’s back when the truth of it was that she was angry too.

Furious, not just at Mandy for saying what she’d said, and not even because of what Julian had done. She was angry because if life had dealt them different cards, this would never have happened in the first place, she’d have been with Julian from the beginning and Mandy never would have been at all.

Raising her hand, Mandy struck Julian’s cheek and Elisa winced as the sharp
crack
of it reverberated down the alley, and then, turning on her heel, Mandy walked away.

Elisa had done the same thing to Julian just a few weeks ago, but seeing someone else do it to him, it made her livid, made her see red, made her want to forget the fact that Mandy was in pain and just squash that bitch for hurting him that way.

For a second no one said anything. Elisa could only watch as Julian tipped his head skyward, and his look was so shattered that her soul ached.

“Guess we shouldn’t go to the movie now,” Christian murmured and signed it at the same time, even though Julian still wouldn’t look at him.

But Elisa surprised Chris when she said, “We only missed the previews.”

Elisa was tired of hiding, of running away from her problems.

Roman looked shocked. “Are you sure? I don’t think there’s a person inside there who didn’t see that, or at least hear it.”

Was she humiliated? Yes. Absolutely.

Did she really want to face the crowd? No.

But who where they to her?

Nobody.

She didn’t know them. And they didn’t know her.

She wasn’t a freak. She wasn’t a pedophile, what she and Julian had done, it’d been pure and beautiful and perfect. Did she regret how things had gone down? Of course. But it was nobody’s business but hers and Julian’s, and she was so over giving a damn what people thought about her.

“Roman, I came here to see some rippling muscles with guns and I’m not leaving here until I do.”

She turned when she sensed Julian’s eyes on hers. Giving him a brief nod, she turned and led them back to the theater. And even though her hands shook when she handed the cashier her card, she plastered on a brave smile and walked inside.

The theater was crowded, but they were able to find four seats on the very front row. It was uncomfortable as all get out being forced to crane her neck the entire time, not to mention the movie had to be in the list of the top ten worst films she’d ever seen.

But at least it was easy to pretend like she was okay, because she didn’t need to talk. She didn’t need to smile, or try to be witty, or silly. She could sit there, beside Roman, and feel like it was okay to just be sad for a while and trust that he’d give her the privacy to do it in.

They drove home in silence. Julian had sat three seats away from her at the movie, and now in the bed of the truck, he was leaning against the frame of the bed, gazing off to his left with a pensive, mile-long stare.

She waved goodbye to the Wrights a short while later and when she walked back into her house, she got about halfway up the stairs before it dawned on her that she wasn’t sleepy at all.

Her parents were asleep, and she wasn’t really in the mood to veg out in front of the TV.

Last thing she wanted was to be trapped in another building, even if it was her home. So she walked back outside and headed toward her mother’s sitting area in the garden.

The moon was full and golden. The sky a deep navy blue with fluffy streaks of white dotted upon it.