Authors: Katie Cotugno
“Corner of Las Olas and Third Ave,” he tells me, a delighted grin evident in his voice. “Suck on
that
.”
“What? No way.” There’s this drag queen who looks like Celine Dion that hangs out around town, and if Aaron can prove he’s seen her, I have to buy dinner, that’s the game. Aaron buys dinner more often than not. “Did you get a picture?”
“What do you think, it’s my first rodeo?” He laughs. “Of course I got a picture. Steaks on you, Chicken Little. You still around tonight?”
I hesitate. Aaron is Shelby’s twin brother, the one who
moved to New Hampshire before I could ever meet him in high school. Now he’s a boat mechanic at a marina on the Intracoastal and probably the best thing to ever happen to me, dating-wise. Still, this day’s not even half over and all I want is to sit, very quietly, in a room all by myself. “How’s tomorrow?” I ask, hedging.
“Tomorrow works,” he says good-naturedly. “Take a drive downtown in the meantime, see if you can’t catch her yourself. We’ll go Dutch.”
“How generous,” I tease—they’re my rules, after all. “Listen, I’m working brunch, so I’ve gotta go, but—”
“Yeah, yeah. No worries,” he says, and then, hesitating: “You okay, though? You sound … I don’t know. Something.”
The thing about Aaron is that I could probably tell him, no problem. He’s a reasonable human, more easygoing than I’ve ever hoped to be in all my time on this earth. Odds are he wouldn’t be weird about Sawyer turning up out of nowhere. Odds are he’d be totally cool.
Still, though. Still.
“Tired,” I answer, which technically isn’t lying. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
*
“Where the hell have you been?” is the first thing Shelby says when I get into work ten minutes later, before
Hi
or
How are you?
or anything else remotely civil. She’s home for the summer from college in Massachusetts, where she’s learning to be a doctor and also to talk like the characters
in
Good Will Hunting
. Shelby flew back to Broward in the middle of her freshman year to help me deliver Hannah, memorizing all the bones in the human body between my contractions and charming the nurses into helping her with her homework. She was eighteen years old, and she was my labor coach. Not everybody has a friend like that.
“I had to put the baby down,” I tell her, glancing around the empty restaurant. We don’t start seating until noon on Sundays, and it’s only a quarter of.
Shelby makes a face. “Uh-huh.” She looks at me pointedly as the phone on the podium rings, like she knows exactly what—exactly
who
—I’m searching for, and doesn’t know why I’m wasting her time trying to be slick about it. “Good morning. Antonia’s,” she says, all syrup, but she’s staring at me like my hair is on fire as she scribbles in the reservation book, and I stand there and wait for what’s next.
“First of all,” she tells me once she hangs up, sex-kitten purr gone and replaced by her hybrid half-accent—Shelby’s lived all over the country, and you can hear it in her voice. “Super-Sperm Sawyer is in the kitchen with Finch at this very moment. So probably you should start there.”
“
Shh
,” I hiss, eyes darting toward the back of the house. I open my mouth to explain, although in the end all I can come up with is “He was at church, too.”
“Yeah,” Shelby says all attitude. “I bet.”
I stare at her. “What does that even
mean
?”
Shelby shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t like his hair. It
makes him look like a cancer patient.” Shelby has never been one to reserve judgment. “Why didn’t you
call
me?”
“I didn’t know it was going to hit local news outlets so fast,” I say, sinking into an empty chair. I’ve had a headache for the last twenty-four hours and think longingly of the ibuprofen in my purse, though at this particular moment even finding a glass of water feels like an Olympic endeavor.
“Oh, don’t even joke.” She stops, looks at me. “Did you tell my brother?”
I roll my eyes. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Bull
shit
. Reena,” she begins, voice going soft and urgent. If she’s nice to me I’m going to burst into tears. I start to shake my head but here he comes though the swinging doors from the kitchen, and even after all this time the room seems to orbit around him, like he’s got a perpetual spotlight on him everywhere he goes. I think, suddenly:
Risen from the dead
.
“Ladies,” Sawyer says gallantly. He’s got another Slurpee in his hand, enormous, pink and bright through the clear plastic cup.
“
Ladies?
” Shelby snarls. Shelby has never been afraid of Sawyer. Shelby has never been afraid of much of anything, so far as I can tell. “Seriously? Two years later and the best you can do is
ladies
?”
“I was going for casual,” he tells her, wrinkling his nose and smiling, half bashful. His mouth is faintly red with the dye. “Did I overplay? I overplayed.”
“A little bit.” Shelby rolls her eyes. “I’m going to need a drink.”
“Really?” Cade looks up from across the dining room and frowns, but doesn’t actually make any move to stop her. Cade’s always been a little gobsmacked by Shelby. “We’re not even open yet.”
“Bloody Marys!” she says cheerily, heading for the bar. “I’ll make you one, too, Kincade.” She flips up the partition, nudges my brother out of her way. “What about you, Sawyer? Can I offer you a strong alcoholic beverage to help take the edge off being yourself?”
Sawyer and I snort at the same time; he looks over at me, smirking, and holds up his Slurpee like a toast in my direction. “I’m good,” he says, eyes on my face.
“Really.” Shelby’s eyebrows hitch as she reaches for the tomato juice. “What are you, off the sauce?”
“As it were.”
“A bartender who doesn’t drink anymore? How romantic.”
“Yeah, well.” Sawyer nods and slides onto a barstool. “I’m a romantic kind of guy.”
Oh,
come on
. Cade looks like he’s about to projectile vomit all over the restaurant and, frankly, I don’t blame him. I’m feeling a little queasy myself. I get up and head back to the office to punch my time card, then set about completing as many menial tasks as I can find: folding napkins and stacking glassware, refilling ketchup bottles, which grosses me
out to no end. I keep my hands busy. I work. We’re slammed for brunch every Sunday, the wait skyrocketing to an hour or more, and once Shelby opens the doors it’s bread and smiles until midafternoon. When I finally have a minute to glance over at the bar, Sawyer’s disappeared into the teeming crush of bodies, like maybe he was never there at all.
“Who with?” was the first thing my father wanted to know when I told him I was going out for a bit after work—a fair enough question, seeing as how I’d spent the last eight months hanging out with no one so much as the pizza delivery guy from Papa Gino’s. He’d been chatting with the drummer in the band and he smelled like coffee and cologne, familiar; it was a smell I thought I’d miss when I left home.
“Allie,” I blurted, not knowing I was going to lie until I did it. “With Allie.”
I don’t know why I didn’t tell him. There was no reason to think he’d say I couldn’t go: Sawyer was his godson, after all, heir to his musical talent in practice if not by blood.
Still, he’d have wanted to know the
where
s and
why
s and the
what are you doing
s, and a thousand other things I could only begin to guess. For now it just seemed neater not to say.
“Allie,” he said slowly, slipping one bearlike arm around my shoulders. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”
“Um,” I said. “Yeah.”
My father shrugged, nodding at one of the waiters to comp a round of drinks. He trusted me. He’d never had a reason not to. “Have a good time,” he said, lips against my forehead in a distracted good-bye kiss. “Home by curfew.”
“Yeah,” I said again. “Of course.”
I found Sawyer in the back hallway, leaning against the door to the office and scrolling through his phone, vaguely bored. “Did you just lie to your dad about me?” he asked, smirking a little.
“Yes,” I said.
The smirk bloomed into a grin. “Well, okay then,” he told me, perversely delighted. “Long as I know where I stand. You ready?”
“Sure,” I said, hoping against hope that he couldn’t tell what a big deal this was for me—that just the thought of being alone with him had my stomach doing the kind of gymnastic tumble that would have made Béla Károlyi proud.
Sawyer held the back door open and I followed him across the parking lot to his ancient Jeep. He didn’t talk. I had no idea where we were going, and at this point it felt
a little late to ask: I opened my mouth, hesitated, shut it again. Sawyer didn’t seem bothered at all.
I glanced around the Jeep as surreptitiously as I could manage, beginning a list in my head as he hit the gas.
Floor of Sawyer LeGrande’s car, a complete inventory: empty Snapple bottle, peach iced tea, check.
Duke Ellington Live at Newport 1956,
check. Dashboard: sunglasses, check. Tree-shaped air freshener still in the package, check. Mix CD with Allie Ballard’s handwriting on the label, check.
I closed my eyes for a second. Allie used to make me mixes all the time, songs for my birthday and Christmas and springtime and Tuesdays. My favorite was called “The Bad Behavior Mix”: sixty minutes of ridiculous hip-hop capped with Phil Collins’s “A Groovy Kind of Love,” presented to me on the occasion of our first high school dance. We ended up back at my house by nine thirty that night, making brownies with Soledad and shouting along with Kanye, doubled over in hysterical giggles.
I didn’t mean to sigh, never even heard myself do it, but I must have, because Sawyer glanced over at me as he turned onto A1A, sharp features lit reddish by the neon lights on the dash. “Long day?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, letting him think that it was the monotony of service work getting me down and not the absolute hopelessness of being in this Jeep with him, his eyes glittering a hundred thousand adjectives beyond green. “Kind of.”
Sawyer nodded. “You want ice cream?”
I blinked. “Ice cream?” I repeated. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it … wasn’t that.
“Yeah, princess, ice cream.” Sawyer laughed as he pulled into a parking spot, not bothering to wait for my answer. “What did you think I was gonna offer you, like, some glue to sniff?”
“No!” I said, although to be honest, he was probably closer to the truth than not. I unbuckled my seat belt and climbed out of the car. “No.”
“You think I’m so sketchy.” He bumped my shoulder with his as we crossed the parking lot, so lightly I thought it was probably an accident. “Like, way tougher than I actually am.”
I shook my head and looked away. “I really don’t,” I promised.
“Okay,” he said, in a voice like he thought I was full of shit but didn’t particularly mind. “Whatever you say.”
We ordered at the counter and I dug in my purse for my wallet, pulling out a set of house keys and my
Lonely Planet
to get to the bottom of the bag. Sawyer pushed my hand away. “I got it,” he told me, handing over a wrinkled ten to the cashier. He nodded at my book. “Planning a trip?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, no.” It suddenly felt enormously stupid, this game I played with myself, like hopscotch or Barbie. “It’s for my admissions essay.”
“To college?” Sawyer raised his eyebrows, licked the dripping bottom of my cone before handing it over. It was an old-fashioned shop, wood paneling and knickknacks on
the walls, an antique cash register that sprung open with a loud ring. I smelled sugar and cold air. “Already?”
I nodded. “Northwestern,” I told him. “I’m graduating a year early, so I’m going to apply in the fall.”
Sawyer tilted his head to one side. “That’s ambitious.”
“I’m ambitious.”
“I know,” he said, taking his own ice cream and herding me back toward the door, holding it open with one foot as I scooted through. “So that’s what your essay’s about, then?” he asked as we crossed the lot toward the car, navigating a teeming crowd of noisy, restless kids about our age, shouts and laughter. “Traveling?”
“Yeah, kind of.” I shook my head, embarrassed. “It’s stupid.”
“I doubt that.” We were back at his Jeep by this point. Sawyer climbed up on the hood to eat his cone, angled his head at the empty space beside him until I got the message and pulled my sneakers up onto the bumper along with him. “Tell me.”
“Ugh, fine.” I rolled my eyes a little, blushing in the dark. “The program I’m applying to is for creative nonfiction, you know? Travel writing.” The words sounded wooden and unfamiliar; this wasn’t something I’d told a lot of people besides Allie. “So I’m writing the essay like a travel guide, basically—go here, do this, avoid this gross hotel—only instead of it being about a particular place, it’s actually about, like—my life.” I shrugged again, embarrassed. “Or
like, the life I want to have.”
“That’s not stupid.” Sawyer was grinning. “That’s cool. I want to read it when you’re done.”
I snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” Sawyer said, considering. His white T-shirt seemed to glow in the light from the storefronts. “Early graduation, huh?” he asked after a moment. “You’re that desperate to get out of here?”
“No,” I explained, “it’s not that. I mean, of course I’ll miss my family and everybody. I love my family, I just …” I shrugged. I didn’t know how you could explain something like loneliness to someone like Sawyer—the feeling that I had to find something to wrap my hands around, and that whatever it was, it wasn’t here. “There’s not a whole lot for me here, you know?”
Sawyer smiled a bit, unreadable. “So I better hang out with you while I can, is that what you’re saying?”
Which—what? What was going
on
here? I had no earthly idea what he was after. “Pretty much,” was all I said.
We sat in silence for a little while, watching the cars go by on the highway. I ate my ice cream. I waited. “You’re quiet,” he said eventually.
I considered that for a moment. “Well,” I said, “so are you.”