How to Love (18 page)

“You did?” Aaron says—and God, his
face
, I feel terrible, I feel like the worst person in the world. He looks pissed, yeah, but more than that he looks
hurt.
“Seriously?”

“He’s Hannah’s dad, Aaron.” I’m being deliberately deceptive, as if somehow that’s all Sawyer is—somebody I
knew a long time ago, a footnote in my life as it stands. It’s not fair of me, I know that, but just—the last thing I want to do is mess things up with Aaron. “Of course I’m going to see him now that he’s back. He wants to be in the baby’s life, and we just need to … figure out how that’s going to look, I guess.”

I reach for his hand, run my thumb over the calluses on the pads of his fingers—there’s a scar in the meat of his palm, long and thin, from a piece of jagged metal on a schooner he helped restore back in New Hampshire. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Aaron had stayed in Broward for high school—if I’d have noticed him then, his wry smile and the flecks of amber in his dark brown eyes, or if I’d have been too dumb and distracted to see.

He shrugs now, a hint of sulky mulishness I’ve never seen from him before. “No, I know,” he says finally. He looks at Hannah for a minute, takes the damp, half-chewed cookie she holds out to him with no hesitation at all. “Look, Reena,” he tells me. “I grew up with a lot of bullshit in my life, okay? I don’t operate like that anymore. I like you a lot. I want you to
know
that I like you a lot. But if you’re not at a place in your life where this can go somewhere …” Aaron shakes his head. “I guess I’d just rather have that out there now.”

I feel myself blushing, this warm pleased flush that starts in my chest and radiates outward, my whole body heating
up in a way that has nothing to do with the humidity index. I get my hands on either side of his face and plant a kiss against his mouth. “I like
you
a lot,” I tell him, fingertips scritching though the hair at the base of his skull. “This is just … I don’t know, an unexpected development, or something. But there’s nothing going on between me and Sawyer, okay?” I swallow the guilt and uncertainty, smile as he reaches up to tuck a bit of hair behind my ear. “I would tell you if there was.”

After a moment Aaron half smiles back at me, reluctant. A brass band sets up at the end of the street. Eventually he holds out his hand and we head back through the market: crowds and orange citrus, the sunshine state.

*

At the beginning of the summer, Shelby and I had a standing date for yoga after my art class on Thursday mornings, but then for three weeks in a row one or both of us were so late that we couldn’t get in, so now we have a standing date for breakfast at the Greek diner across from the yoga place for which we are always, mysteriously, right on time.

She’s there before me today, sitting at our usual table with two iced coffees in front of her, and she nudges the darker one toward me as I sit down. “Watch out,” she says quietly, red hair falling like a theater curtain over her face. “Marjorie’s in a mood.”

“Good to know.” Marjorie is the extremely tall, extremely skinny waitress who works this shift at Mount
Olympus. Half the time she’s thrilled to see us and half the time she hates our guts, and there is virtually no rhyme or rhythm or way of predicting at all. It adds a real element of surprise to a Western omelet. I nod briskly, reach for a menu. “I’ll choose fast.”

“I think you better.” Shelby dumps some more cream into her coffee, takes an experimental sip and wrinkles her freckled nose. “So what’d you learn in school today, honey?” she asks, once I’ve ordered—very politely—a couple of eggs over easy. “You have any homework for me to sign?”

I grin. “Got some spelling words you could quiz me on, if you want.” Shelby’s the one who got me to sign up at Broward to begin with, right after Hannah was born. She was worried, and probably rightly, that I’d never see anybody my own age again if I wasn’t required to show up someplace where they took attendance. “Dork.”

We drink coffee and try, with negligible success, to get Marjorie to smile when she brings us our food. We make plans to take the baby to the beach. Shelby’s dating a girl named Cara up in Boston now, a political communications major with huge hipster glasses about whom I am desperately curious and who, Shelby tells me, might be coming down at the end of the summer. “You’ll like each other,” she promises, although secretly I can’t imagine Shelby’s sad teen-mom friend from home is particularly high on this chick’s list of must-meets. Still, Shelby seems so
happy;
I sort of can’t wait to lay eyes on the reason why.

“So,” she says as I’m finishing my toast, and just from the barely perceptible change in her tone, already I’ve got the sinking feeling I know where this is going. “You and Sawyer.”

“Me and Sawyer what?” I say, and it comes out a little more defensive than I mean. I take a deep breath, file the ragged edges down. “Did Aaron say something to you?”

“Did my brother talk to me about his girl problems?” Shelby snorts. “No.” She reaches over and snags the last few abandoned home fries off my plate. “He also kind of doesn’t have to, though.” She shrugs, like
What can you do.
“Twin thing.”

I nod, chew slowly. “Right.”

“Right.” Shelby takes a long sip of her coffee, then sits back in the booth and eyes me across the cracked Formica. She can do this; I know from experience. She can wait me out.

“What?” I demand finally, literally throwing up my hands. My fork clatters on the table. Marjorie shoots me a filthy look. “There’s nothing happening with Sawyer. Believe me. Sawyer is a disaster. Me and Sawyer
together
is a disaster.”

“And yet?” Shelby prompts, then repeats it three more times: “And yet, and yet, and yet.” She grins, like she’s trying to take the sting out. “That’s from a poem, right? I feel like that’s from a poem.”

I snort. “Probably,” I tell her mildly, doing my best to rein it in. I feel like the worst kind of turncoat. Because
what happened with Sawyer—one-time thing or not—is bigger than just messing around on Aaron. It’s a hundred times more complicated than that: Shelby and her family have only ever taken care of me.
My
family has only ever taken care of me, really, and here I am lying to everyone like it’s junior year of high school all over again. I hate it. I’m not doing it. No way.

Shelby only shrugs. “Look,” she tells me. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you I don’t have any kind of emotional stake here. I love you; I love my stupid brother. Of course I want you guys both to be happy. And of course I want you both to be happy together, if you can.”

“Shelby—” I start, and she holds up a hand to stop me.

“But if you
can’t
—and I’ve seen this movie before, I know how stuff goes with you and Sawyer—then as long as you’re not shitty about it, I just want to tell you that I’m going to really try and not be shitty about it, either.” She shrugs again, like she’s tired of this conversation. “He likes you, though. Aaron does. I can tell.”

“I like him,” I tell her immediately: a reflex, like looking up at the sound of my name. “I like him a ton.”

“Well,” she says. “Good.” Shelby frowns, peers across the diner for Marjorie. “I think I should have ordered extra bacon,” she tells me, and we don’t talk about it again after that.

One damp afternoon at the end of February, I swung by the restaurant during my free period, hurrying—I wasn’t working, but I’d left my calc book in the office the night before and wanted to see if I could grab it before I had to get back to school for a newspaper meeting.

“Goddamnit,” was the first thing I heard. The restaurant was deserted—the lull between lunch and dinner—and Roger’s voice was booming from the office. “Where in the hell have you been?”

“Look, it’s not gonna happen again.” That was Sawyer. Sawyer was here. I froze. Where had he been? He’d been gone? I hadn’t seen him in weeks, since the night I’d stayed over, but I figured he’d been avoiding me.

“You bet your ass it won’t. We’re not doing this. I’m not going to have police officers calling my house. I’m not having you disappearing for weeks at a time. If you want to live in that squalor and throw away your education and ruin your life, that’s your business, but I won’t have any part of it.”

Police? What the hell had he
done?
I thought of the not-aspirin in his sneaker the night I’d slept over. I thought of his broken hand from last year. I stood there like I’d been hit by lightning, fingertips scrabbling the edge of a tablecloth, feeling absolutely one hundred percent rooted to the floor.

“Get out of my sight, Sawyer. I don’t even want to look at you.”

I could hear my heart beating, fast and skittish. I crept a little closer to hear. “For God’s sake, Dad—” Sawyer started, but Roger cut him off, closed for business.

“I mean it. And don’t you dare swear at me.”

“Fine.” I heard Sawyer get up, and I made for the front door as fast as humanly possible. I tried to keep it as quiet as I could, but the strap of my bag caught on the back of a chair and I had to pause to untangle it. My hands shook as I worked it free.

“Oh,” Sawyer said, when he rounded the corner and saw me. He looked
pissed.
“Hey.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” I replied immediately, then backtracked. “I mean. Hi. I, um, left my book.”

“In the office,” he told me with the vaguest hint of a
smile—blink and gone. He hadn’t shaved. “On the desk. I figured that was yours.”

“Yeah. Well.” I started to move past him, but he caught me by the wrist.

“Where’re you going?”

“To get my book,” I said, glancing fast, down at our hands, up at his face, back down again. It came out bitchier than I meant.

“Aha.” He squeezed once, let go of my arm. “Sounds like a plan.”

“Yeah. So. I’m going to go and … do that.”

Sawyer nodded. “Okay.”

I made my way into the office, mumbled a greeting at Roger, grabbed the damn textbook, and fled back outside. Sawyer’s Jeep was parked at the curb, and he was leaning against the driver’s side, arms and ankles crossed. “Need a ride?” he asked.

I swallowed. “No.”

“Want one anyway?”

“Sawyer …” The wind was blowing. A car sped by. “I have a meeting.”

He shrugged. “Skip it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Are you kidding me?
I almost asked.
Because I’m trying to get you out of my system. Because I don’t always like the way I act when I’m with you. Because we had sex, and you fell off the face of the earth.

“Why did the cops call your house?” I asked instead. Sawyer grinned. “I thought you didn’t hear anything.”

“I lied.”

“Fair enough. Take a ride with me and I’ll tell you.”

“That’s how girls get killed.”

“How’s that?”

“They get in the car with sketchy guys.”

Sawyer just cocked an eyebrow. “A walk, then.”

I should have said no. I should have gone to my stupid meeting. I should have done basically anything else besides what I actually wound up doing, but that had never stopped me before when it came to Sawyer, and even as I thought about the abject hell these last few weeks had been, I nodded instead. “A quick one,” I said after a minute. “Around the block.”

Sawyer nodded once, considering. “Around the block,” he said.

We set off in the direction of Grove Street underneath the bright February sky—past a jewelry store, the dry cleaners. This felt a little ridiculous. For a while, neither one of us talked. “So here I am,” I told him finally. “Walking. What did the police want?”

Sawyer shrugged. “I got in a little trouble at a bar. Drank too much.”

I rolled my eyes before I could stop it. “Do you think that makes you more interesting or something?”

“Hmm?” That got his attention. “What’s that?”

“The whole brooding, king-of-pain thing you do.” I felt punch-drunk. He was gone already; I had nothing to lose. “I mean, I know girls fall for it. I fell for it. But do you think it makes you more interesting? Because, you know?” I shrugged. “It doesn’t.”

“No.” Sawyer smirked a little, impossible to read. “I guess it doesn’t.”

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Go ahead,” he allowed. “Hit me.”

“Why did you waste your time with me?” I was comforted by the rhythm of my boots on the sidewalk, for some reason found courage there. “I mean, those girls … the ones at your concert, or the ones who come into the restaurant. I feel like they probably would have … I feel like it probably would have taken at least a little less effort with them. Less of a preamble.”

Sawyer stopped walking. “I don’t want them. I told you that.”

“Right. You hate your type.”

“Reena, I’m sorry I didn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, cutting him off, lying. “I mean, I wasn’t really expecting anything from you anyway.”

“Ouch.” Sawyer exhaled, ran his tongue over his teeth. “You should talk to my dad.”

“See? That’s what I’m talking about. Poor you. When really you’re just full of garbage, and I don’t know why I let you get to me like that when I’m going to leave in a few
months anyway, and probably never come back in a million years unless it’s Christmas and I need someone to buy me a coat. Or something.”

“I know you’re getting out of here, Reena.” Sawyer sighed. “You don’t need to play the smart card with me, okay? I know how smart you are. Look,” he said, grabbing my wrist again, pulling me around a corner with enough force that my backpack thudded off the side of the building. My heart was banging away behind my ribs. “I got a little skittish, okay? I do that sometimes. Get a little freaked. But I don’t want to do that with you. I don’t want to get scared.”

I huffed a bit. “Stop it.”

“I’m serious,” he said softly. He had both wrists, and then he slid his grip down so he was holding my hands. “And I know you have no reason to believe me.
I
probably wouldn’t believe me. I’d probably think I was full of shit. But I
like
you.”

I shook my head, stubborn. “Right.”

“I do. I like your brain.” Sawyer grinned. “And I like the rest of you, too, if you don’t mind me saying so.”