Waiting for You (30 page)

He let me walk away and
gave me some space. In the twenty minutes he sat outside, smoking another two
cigarettes, his temper had calmed as did mine. Covered up to my chin in
blankets and fully clothed, I laid there and stared at the ceiling as he moved
through the room and eventually in bed beside me.

“Why
Mercedes?”
The words hung in the air, apprehension suffocating me. I felt
tears slip from the corner of my eyes at the mention of the memory.
First Eric and now Dylan.
Was the reason behind him putting
a baseball bat through Eric’s windshield because he was jealous of Eric and not
me all along?

Dylan picked up the
water bottle on the nightstand near the bed diverting his yes from mine. He
didn’t make eye contact and I knew why. After taking a drink, he set the bottle
down, still no eye contact. His expression remained the same, his eyes focused
on the ceiling when he finally
laid
down beside me.
“I’ve never given any thought to it. I woke up beside her and then left without
another word.”

“When you saw Eric and
her together, what hurt more, that she was with someone else?” My words came
out choked as the tears flowed again. He knew then that I was crying. There was
no hiding it now.

“Bailey,” he grimaced.
He couldn’t even look at me. “She had nothing to do with it. I told her that I
was upset that he was cheating on you.”

“Why
her?”

Nothing was said for
close to a minute. His palms pressed to his face, digging at his eyes and then
he groaned dropping them beside him. “She was just a girl brown
eyes
. One that was willing at a time where I had no idea
what was going on around me.”

“Were you high?”

“Worse, I was strung
out at the time. Fucking tossed beyond belief. The only reason I know it happen
was waking up naked next to her and the condom on the floor.”

My heart felt like a
knife was stabbed through it and it was trying to beat around it.

Up until now I had no
idea that Dylan had done anything worse than marijuana. How could I have
though? Anytime we talked about that, the conversation quickly changed to
something else.

It was times like this
when it was easy to mistake his actions for inadequateness. That maybe he
didn’t feel the way he said he did about me. I knew though. It was in his touch
and the way he looked at me.

So he slept with
Mercedes. I didn’t have any claim to him back then and wasn’t sure I really had
any now. What scared me was the way it felt and how hearing that he had been
with my best friend, and she knew that I had hidden feelings for Dylan growing
up, and she still slept with him.
And Eric.
It was
like she took everything I had or wanted. That’s exactly the way Mercedes was
though. I knew that.

Dylan wasn’t going to
let me go to sleep without feeling my skin next to his. It didn’t matter that
we had a fight or that I was still upset with him, we had something between us
that wasn’t going away.

“Take this off brown
eyes.” He said tugging at his t-shirt I was wearing and the sweatpants too.

I did as he wasn’t
wearing anything but his underwear.

Sure, I was easy to
forget but Dylan was easy to forgive. His words still hurt, they did, but I was
willing to forget them for now and be in the moment. I wasn’t sure what
tomorrow would bring. What if this was the last night together? Did I really
want to spend it mad at him? No.

Dylan moved, planting
his hands firmly on both sides of my stomach and ran his nose against the side
of mine. He brushed his nose and lips down my cheek, around the corner of my
open lips, over my chin.

My head fell back. My
spine curved up. I heard myself whimper and hum. He shifted onto his knees and
glided his nose down my neck. It started there, under his teasing affection,
and spread like wildfire. Every millimeter of my skin tingled and burned for
his touch, his skin, and his kisses. He was apologizing.

The aching in my
stomach spread hotter, all throughout me. The needful burning he lit in me
prickled painfully under the surface of all my skin. I wanted him. I wanted him
to show me his love in the most intimate way. The way he had with others only
with me, it’d be different. We would be sharing something he hadn’t with
others.
Love.
I knew enough about his encounters with
those other girls to know he hadn’t been in love and it was just sex with them.

Dylan whispered and
worshiped. I panted and pleaded for more, always needing, wanting, begging for
more but he wouldn’t give in.

“Not tonight brown
eyes,” he whispered when I tried to position his naked body where I needed it
most. “I can’t do it because I need you to feel what I feel for you the moment
it happens and right now, I’m not sure that you do. Not after a fight.”

Why did he keep saying
that?

“I want you Dylan,
right now.”

His expression didn’t
change and he stared at me like I hadn’t said anything.

When I tried again, he
moved from between my legs to beside me. “Brown eyes,” his voice was full of
hesitation. “Not like this, not here, and certainly not after what happened
earlier.”

“But…I want you,” my
voice cracked without me wanting it to. “Show me you want me too.”

His gaze was on mine,
taking in my responses to his touches, my words. “And I want you too…but not
like this.”

His rejection hurt. I’m
not going to lie. Deep down, I knew he had reasons for waiting. There was
something untouchably deep about him and to see it, to really see it, you had
to understand him. In a weird way, I did so I didn’t push it.

16.
   
The Wade Brothers – Bailey Gray

There has always been a
mystery around the Wade brothers. Drew was older than Dylan by three years. He
was always into drugs as long as I could remember but when he nearly overdosed
at sixteen, Ken didn’t take well to that, I assumed. I didn’t know the entire
story and Dylan never felt the need to go into details.

All my theories were
speculation. I never knew the truth and I wasn’t sure I ever would outside from
what I learned from his uncles and the brief interactions Dylan and I had about
him.

That weekend we arrived
in Birmingham Drew was out of town. We he got back into town Friday night, I
was afraid to go to the bar with him after what happened on Tuesday night at
his friend’s house.

Since then things had
went back to normal but we had yet to take things further sexually or talk more
about what happened.

Dylan seemed nervous
that afternoon and said little until we were in the parking lot. Even then, he
said nothing to me but reached for my hand and held it as we stepped into the
downtown Birmingham bar his brother now owned. A sign on the outside said The
Joint. I laughed at the thought that it held somewhat of a hidden meaning. I’m
sure it did.

Drew was in there, it
wasn’t hard to spot his tall slender body slouched in a booth going over what
appeared to be invoices. Drew looked very much like Dylan aside from tattoos.
They were usually confused as twins when they were younger and could still pass
for them.

When the bell sounded
as we walked inside, cigarettes and dingy carpet engulfed us surrounded by
dusty gold walls. Old kegs were used for tables with glass tops and wooden
chairs. In the booths, the wooden tables had a gel coating over them with
hundreds of coasters underneath the coating.

Dragging me along with
him, we approached Drew. He stood, smiling at his younger brother.

Dylan smiled when Drew
hugged him and it was easy to see they didn’t part on bad terms and still had a
brotherly bond.

“You remember brown
eyes, right?” Dylan asked pulling from Drew and gesturing to behind him to me.

Drew’s eyes seemed
distanced as he tried to remember me. Years of using probably fogged his
memories.

“Yeah.”
He gave a
smile,
one that matched Dylan’s and reminded
me of their mom. Drew had Dylan’s eyes, bloodshot and dark, but they had the
same smoky ice blue to them. “You guys want a drink?” Drew nodded to the bar
over his shoulder.

Without waiting for us
to answer, Drew walked through the crowd to the bar in the back.

We followed. Dylan
reached back, his hand finding mine to guide me with him. It was still early in
the night. The bar was scattered with about ten different people all-seeming to
be lost in their own world.

“So
runaways, huh?”
Drew smiled up at me when we stood by the bar, both of
us finding a seat on the wooden stools that surrounded the weathered wooden
bar. “Where are you guys heading?”

Dylan took a shot that
Drew pushed in his direction and then the beer. I did the same looking at Dylan
as I did so. “We’re thinking of staying here for a few weeks and then we’ll see
where that takes us.”

“You’re welcome to stay
at my place.” Drew suggested taking a rag from under the bar and wiping down
the wood in front of him. The smell of bleach rose above the beer in front of
me. “I’ve got a girl staying with me but we have a spare room you’re welcome to
use.”

Dylan agreed, maybe to
be closer to his brother, but I wasn’t one to argue. I didn’t really care where
we stayed. Part of me liked the idea of staying with his brother as I would
feel closer to Dylan.

We went out to dinner
with Drew that night instead of staying at the bar. Most of the time Dylan and
Drew talked and they did include me too but I spent a great deal of time
watching the two of them.

Drew was mellow where
Dylan was dauntless.

Dylan didn’t need to be
loud to get his point across but in his own way, intuitive natured, quick to
stand up for
himself
, speaking in sighs and motions,
he did it with an edge you wouldn’t expect from an eighteen-year-old kid.

The next morning Dylan asked me if I
wanted to go see his mom’s grave. The tenderness he displayed while asking was
sincere and nearly broke my heart. He looked lost, sad, conflicted, every
emotion a kid would feel while going to see his dead mothers grave.

Apparently, Dylan
hadn’t been there since he was twelve and felt it was time. Why he wanted me
there was somewhat terrifying for me.

Dressed in a black
dress I borrowed from the girl staying with Drew, Dylan borrowed a suit from
Drew and said his mom would be pissed if he went there wearing that shit he
wears nowadays. Drew laughed and agreed. Apparently, he went there every
Sunday. She died on a Sunday. Sunday was Drew’s day with her.

Dylan wanted to go on
another day. He chose Saturday morning.  

“I’ve never seen you
wear a tie before,” I said when we walked through Drew’s house and to the
driveway to get into his GTO.

“Yeah, well,” he gave
the tie a tug pulling it from his neck to hang loose a little more. “It’s for
her. Don’t get used to it.”

“You’re not much of a
rebel looking like this,” I giggled when he climbed over the seat to his side.
Still couldn’t open the door since the bull incident and it seemed the longer
he went without fixing it, the more I understood his theory about memories.

“Stop it,” he said
shaking his head with a laugh when he caught me looking at him. “You’re
distracting me and I never claimed to be a rebel. Don’t put a label on
something you don’t understand.”

When we got to the
cemetery about a mile down the road from Drew’s house, I let Dylan be alone and
stand near her grave by himself. Since it’d been so long since he saw her, I
couldn’t see invading on his privacy.

Dylan was still
affected by the death of his mother. Whenever he said his mom’s name, there was
a tiny glimmer of pain he tried so hard to keep hidden, but I saw it. It was in
the way his hands shook the entire way here and the distant look in his eyes
when he got out of the car and slowly walked over, the setting sun around him
was beautiful. It may have been wrong to do, but I took a picture of him walking
toward her grave. Afterward, I pulled it up on my camera and stared at it. The
sunlight had caught in the top right corner of the shot and casted rays of
light at Dylan, walking, dressed all in black with his hands in his pockets,
head down. In the corner of the left side of the shot was his mother’s
headstone.

I snapped one more
photograph when he knelt down beside the headstone and placed a lily near it,
her favorite flower. He only bought one this morning, he said she appreciated
simple gestures like that.

It wasn’t long and he
motioned for me to come over, so I did, keeping quiet until he spoke. We both
sat in the grass now, looking at the headstone. Around her name were three
sparrows, the same sparrows around the tattoo on Dylan’s collarbone.

Dylan must have noticed
me realize this and smiled. “Sparrows mean undying love and commitment to one
person, or so they can mean that. If on your arm, they can mean that person
values freedom over everything else, bound by no rules.” With a sideways smirk,
he gestured to the headstone. “For sailors sparrows mean a safe return home.
Drew chose sparrows for that reason.”

Nodding, I read the
scripture placed upon it.

Lauren Wade

July 30, 1972
– December 14, 2003

No hand so
soft and gentle

No heart so
tender and true

No sorrow
greater than us losing you

Dylan had told me the
story behind her headstone as we sat
there,
it was
something he wrote for her in school when they asked us to write a poem. It
wasn’t exactly the same but they had decided to use it for her headstone
because she loved it so much.