How to Love (27 page)

“Is this
about
my buzz?”

“No, it’s about you telling me you never had sex with that girl when clearly you did!”

“Oh God.” He was quiet for a moment, leaned his dark head back against the seat. “With Lauren? Did she tell you that?”

“Among other things.”

I had sort of expected him to deny it, but Sawyer only shrugged. “It was way before you. Before Allie, even. It wasn’t important.”

“I asked you point-blank, and you lied.”

“You said it was going to upset you if I had had sex with her! You basically asked me to lie to you.”

“I absolutely did not,” I snapped, swinging a wide right turn onto Commercial. “I was being honest. I was expecting the same thing from you.”

“Reena, sweetheart, you don’t want me to be honest with you.”

“What is
that
supposed to mean?”

“It means …” He trailed off. “It means that you somehow got this idea in your head of who I am that doesn’t necessarily correspond to reality. And when I don’t act the way you think Sawyer LeGrande should act, you get mad. Like I haven’t learned my lines or something.”

“First of all, that’s not true.” Was it? “Second of all, I never asked you to act any way except to be up-front with me. Honestly, I think you’re the one who has a script of how Sawyer LeGrande should act. Like you have to be too cool for school one hundred percent of the time. You don’t. You just have to be a human.”

He shrugged. “I was just … I thought I was telling you what you wanted to hear.”

I thought of Allie for the hundred thousandth time.
If
you can’t handle flip cup with Lauren Werner
… It was becoming a nasty little mantra in my brain. I felt so violated sitting in his Jeep with him, swallowing back the lump I felt forming in my throat. I wanted to curl up in a corner and never let anyone touch me again. “Do you still
like
her?”

“Reena.” Sawyer huffed a quiet laugh, disbelieving. “Is that why you hate her so much? Because you think I like her?”

“No, that’s why I hate
you
so much. I hate her so much for many other reasons.”

“Don’t say you hate me.” That got him, a little; his eyes narrowed like I’d landed a blow. “That’s mean.”

“So is lying.” I turned into the driveway of the house he was living in and slammed the brakes. “Go to bed, Sawyer. I’ll bring your car back here tomorrow.”

“If that’s what you want to do.” He got out of the Jeep and for a moment I thought he was going to huff into the house without saying good-bye, but he made his way over to the open driver’s side window. “Kiss me.”

Up close, he wasn’t looking so good: pale and almost waxy-looking, eyes bright as they’d been the other night in my room. He smelled like the inside of a bar. I pecked him on the lips, quick and antiseptic. Sawyer made a face.

“Are you serious?” he asked, shaking his head a little. “You’re not going to kiss me?”

“I did kiss you.”

“That wasn’t a kiss.”

“Sawyer …” I was struggling. “If you’d just eaten a whole bag of Doritos, I wouldn’t kiss you then, either.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“You know, Reena, I just think that maybe if you tried—,” he began, and just like that I was one hundred percent closed for business.

“Don’t you dare,” I managed, arms crossed in front of my chest like I was freezing, even though it was eighty degrees. “Do not.”

“Hey,” he said, hands up, taking a step back. “Hey. It’s me. Relax.”

“Well, don’t try to peer pressure me!”

He laughed. “I’m not trying to do anything to you. I just think everybody should try everything once.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s so boring, Sawyer.”

“How is that boring?”

“Why do you need me to validate you?”

“I don’t!”

“So do what you want to do!”

“So don’t act like I’m a piece of shit when I do it!”

“I’m not.”

“You are!”

“This is ridiculous.” I gripped the top of the steering wheel, rested my forehead on my knuckles. “Maybe I shouldn’t go with you anymore.”

“Maybe not.”

“Okay then.” I shrugged, threw my hands up. Blue light spilled over his face. I felt like this had gotten away from me somehow when I wasn’t paying attention. “Just … okay.”

Sawyer reached into the Jeep, running a hand through my hair and down my cheek. I turned my head and pressed my lips against his palm. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said slowly, but even then it felt like good-bye.

I’m not sleeping when the phone rings in the middle of the night—just lying in bed and worrying about my father, thoughts like a freight train hurtling stopless through my brain. I launch myself across the mattress to pick it up. “What?” I say immediately, voice panicky and shrill, demanding. “What? What? Tell me.”

“Reena,” Soledad says softly, and I think I’ve never been more afraid in all my days on God’s green earth. “Reena. It’s all right.”

It’s all right.

He’s okay, she tells me calmly. He came through the surgery, critical but breathing. For now there’s nothing to do but let him rest. “I love you,” she says before she hangs
up, my hand pale-knuckled and sweaty around the receiver, chin on my knee in the dark. “And whatever else happens, sweetheart—your dad loves you, too.”

I hang up. I cry for a while. I sit silent in the center of the mattress, like it’s an island in the middle of the sea.

Finally I get out of bed.

I open my door and gasp: There’s Sawyer sitting on the floor in the hallway, head back against the molding and elbows on his knees. He’s taken off the button-down he wore to dinner—it seems like days ago that he walked into my house with Roger and Lydia, all stupid and brave—and the cross on his upper arm peeks out from the sleeve of his undershirt. “Hey,” he says, suddenly alert. “How’s your dad?”

“Okay, I think. Soledad says okay.” I squat down so that we’re at eye level, voice quiet so we don’t wake the baby. “Whatcha doing?”

Sawyer shrugs a little, half-embarrassed. “Keeping watch.”

“For intruders?”

“Basically for you.” He makes a face. “I’m sorry. That was a really lame thing to say. I don’t mean to freak you out.”

“You’re not freaking me out.”

“I’m freaking me out a little.”

I shrug. “My dad’s okay,” I tell him. “For now, at least.”

Sawyer smiles. “Soledad on the phone?”

I nod. I’m not surprised to find him out here, is the truth
of it—like somehow this is inevitable, the natural course of things. Maybe he’s a homing pigeon. Maybe I’m his home. “Do you ever think that this is really not the right place for us?” he asks.

I squint a bit, not entirely sure what he means. “Every day,” I tell him. “But like I said before, where am I going to go?”

“Not you,” he says, urgent, like there’s something I’m not understanding. “Us.”

“Us?”

“What if we got out of here?” he asks. “When your dad is better, I mean. Just … what if we took the baby and went?”

I swallow my heart back down into my chest. “Where?” I ask.

Sawyer looks right at me and smiles, huge and simple as a map of the world. “Everywhere,” he says.

Everywhere.

“Sawyer.” Right away I think of all the reasons why it’s impossible, of the places I’ve never been and all the things I haven’t done yet. I think of a road stretching all the way across the country and I think of all the nights I’ve spent alone, and when I see he’s still waiting on an answer, I give him the only one that makes sense. “Why don’t you just come and sleep where you belong?”

A vertical line appears between his eyebrows; his eyes turn a deep emerald color, birthstones in the dark. “Are you
sure?” he asks after a minute, and his voice is lower than I have ever heard it. “Don’t say it if you’re not sure.”

“Uh-huh.” I’m surprised at the steadiness of my own voice. His fingers clench and unclench; I take one of his fists and force it open, place my own hand inside. “I’m sure.”

I pull him to his feet and into the bedroom. Outside through the open window I can hear the rain starting to fall. The heat never breaks here, not really. My spine thuds softly into the sheets.

Sawyer hums a little sound into my temple: Beneath his soft, bristly hair the curve of his skull feels both familiar and strange. I get my arms around his neck to keep from flying apart at my joints and we’re holding on to each other like it’s the last day, when all of a sudden, all at once, Sawyer goes completely still.

“Say you love me,” he orders quietly. He’s not moving at all.

“Hmm?” I say into his shoulder. I look up. He’s balancing his weight on his forearms and I can see the freckles across his face as he hovers over me. “What?”

“Say you love me,” he repeats, and in the dark flash of his green eyes I can see this is very important to him, some kind of promise he’s made to himself. He doesn’t want me to make him do this without saying the words. “Reena.” He is almost pleading. “Say you love me.”

Don’t do this to me
, I want to tell him.
You can’t. I can’t.
When he left I held that
I love you
tight in my sweaty palm,
tucked into my shirt like a talisman.
I love you.
The one thing he gave me that I didn’t give him ten times over. The one thing I kept for myself.

“Sawyer,” I say, thumb skating across his eyebrow, trying to stall. “Come on.”

He looks right at me. “Say it.”

If I say it, and I lose him again, it might kill me. If I don’t say it, I might lose him right now. My heart is knocking away inside my chest. “I can’t,” I whisper finally, and I feel like the worst kind of coward. “I’m sorry.”

He closes his eyes for a second and I tense like I’m waiting for a blow, fully expecting him to roll away from me, to pull on his jeans and get the hell out of here once and for all. But then:

“Okay,” Sawyer says, on a long, quiet exhale. I can feel his ribs expand and contract against my chest. “It’s okay.”

“We can stop if you want,” I offer stupidly. “I get if you want to stop.”

Sawyer smiles down at me, quick and vanishing. “I don’t want to stop.”

So. We keep going.

It’s strange and heartbreakingly familiar to do this with him after so much else has happened: All at once I’m remembering a hundred different things I forced myself to forget about, the telltale hitches in his breathing and the scar at the center of his chest. The back of his knee is warm when I tuck my foot there. He looks at me the whole entire time.

When it’s over we lie on our sides facing each other for what might be days, gray light and the sound of the wind in the palm trees outside the window. I feel the weight of his gaze like something physical, a sheen of sweat coating my skin. Finally I can’t hold it in anymore; just breathing is like a hurricane. “Seattle,” I say.

He raises one eyebrow. “Seattle?”

“I think everywhere should start in Seattle.”

“Seattle it is,” he tells me like a certainty, and after that we fall asleep.

Sawyer going to parties without me was almost worse than going with him. Sometimes he showed up in my driveway afterward, flicking the headlights on his Jeep, waiting in the dark until I came downstairs to let him in. I shushed him as we climbed the stairs, always terrified that tonight would be the night my father caught us. I tried not to think of where he’d just been and what he’d been doing as we lay in my bed talking about all kinds of things: music, our families, the various scientific facts Sawyer had gleaned from an early childhood spent, I learned, buried in books about the weather. “Tell me about thunderstorms,” I’d whisper sleepily. Tornadoes. Droughts.

Maybe the problems started then, when I ran out of
meteorological phenomena to ask him about, or maybe they started a long time earlier, even before the night he showed up at my house way later than usual, sweaty and skittish, spacey and pale. “You okay?” I asked, once I’d locked us inside my bedroom, the two of us hidden from the sleeping world.

Sawyer nodded vaguely. “Mm-hmm.”

“You sure?”

“I said yes, sweetheart.”

He was always a patchy, haunted sleeper, but tonight he tossed more than usual, tangling the blankets, breathing hard. I ran my palm up and down his backbone, trying to quiet him down, but it was like he was waiting for something to attack. Like he wanted to get up and prowl.

“How many?” I asked finally, the third time he drifted off only to wake violently a moment later. He was making me nervous. Clearly Sawyer’s extracurriculars skewed toward the illegal, but I’d never seen him like this. I tried to remember what I’d read about how easy it was to overdose on pills. “Sawyer. Hey. How many?”

“What?” He sounded annoyed. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Sawyer—”

“
Reena.
” His voice was sharp. “Let it go, will you?”

Then why did you even come here?
I wanted to demand. Instead I gave up, rolling over to face the wall. “Sure,” I said sullenly. I had a calc test in the morning; I was more tired than I wanted to admit. “Well, try not to die, will you?”

That got his attention. “Hey,” he said, moving closer, pressing the length of his body flush against my back, burying his face in my hair. “Hey. I’m okay, all right? I’m sorry. I’m not going to die. I was stupid tonight. I won’t do it again.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t understand what I had with Sawyer: I couldn’t figure out how he could make me so happy and so miserable all at once. But I let him hold me anyway, our pulses tapping out a syncopated rhythm, our breathing finally evening out. My eyes had been closed for a few minutes when he said it: “I love you,” he muttered, so quiet, like a prayer whispered into my neck.

“Hmm?” I was nearly asleep myself, edges blurring; I was one hundred percent sure I’d misheard.

“I love you.” He said it again, clearer this time, right into my ear, breath tickling. I felt like a hydrogen bomb. I tried to be very still, but I knew he could feel my entire body tensing, a runner ready to begin a race—

Get set—