How to Love (28 page)

Go.

I opened my mouth, shut it again.

Oh God.

I did love him, is the awfulness of it. I’d loved Sawyer since the seventh grade, when Allie and I began keeping a list of the places we spotted him. I loved his quick, blistered musician hands and the honest soul he kept hidden safe under all his bravado, and I loved how I was still, every day,
learning him. I loved his silly, secret goofy side and the way he had of making me feel like I was a tall tree, just from the way he looked at my face. I loved Sawyer LeGrande so much that sometimes I couldn’t sit still for the fullness of it, but when I opened up my mouth to tell him so, nothing came out.

I could do anything for him, I realized suddenly. I could give him anything. But not that. If I said that to him, I knew I could never get it back.

“Go to sleep now,” I whispered, and he didn’t say it again.

I wake up sometime after dawn, stirred by the metallic grind of the garbage truck as it clamors down Grove Street. I listen for a moment to the clang of the metal cans next door, and when I open my eyes, I’m surprised to find Sawyer still sleeping next to me: For all the nights we’ve spent together, this might well be the first time he hasn’t slipped out before sunrise.

I take the chance to look at him, face down with one arm slung over his head, freckles dotting his back like constellations. Just for a minute I give in to the urge to touch him, run my fingers over the patterns there, but Sawyer doesn’t stir. He sleeps differently than he used to. He thrashes less,
breathes more deeply. It used to be that he shuddered in his sleep, trembled and muttered like the devil was in his dreams.

It’s not until I get out of bed that he wakes up, opening his eyes halfway. “Where you going?” he wants to know, stretching a little.

I smile. “Gotta get up.”

“Nah.” He shakes his head sleepily and holds the blanket open, an invitation for me to climb back in. “Five more minutes.”

“Well.” I consider. “Okay.” I slide beneath the quilt, rolling over onto my stomach and slipping a hand under the pillow. “Hi.”

“Hi. What do you have today?” he asks, one hand on my back, thumb tracing lazy circles there.

“Um.” I run through the to-do list in my head. “The hospital. And then school, if Stef can take the baby for me.”

“I can take the baby for you.”

“Okay.” That makes me smile. “And then work at four.”

“I’m on at seven.” He grins. “We haven’t worked together in a long time.”

“When we were in high school I used to check your schedule right after I checked mine, so I would know if it mattered what I looked like or not,” I confess. I feel a little giddy. “Not that you ever noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed.”

I snort. “You did not.”

“What you looked like was never lost on me,” he says, lacing one arm around my shoulder, pulling me down until my head is resting on his chest. “Nothing about you, my dear, has ever been lost on me.”

By May, the Platonic Ideal had begun doing shows under one of the pavilions by the beach—Iceman’s uncle worked for parks and rec and had gotten them the gig, Tuesday and Thursday nights just after sundown. I went whenever I wasn’t working, either luring Shelby along with promises of onion rings and milkshakes, or otherwise flying solo, snagging Soledad’s car for the night and making the drive to the water with all the windows rolled down, humming softly out of tune. Truth was, I liked being by myself, free to sit way in the back on the low wall that separated the sand from the sidewalk behind it and stare without interruption, to listen while my boyfriend sang his songs.

Tonight I perched in my usual spot, chewing thoughtfully
on my bottom lip as the band launched into a rocky version of “Come Rain or Come Shine” that I knew Sawyer had arranged. I glanced around at the crowd, recognizing several faces from other beach shows or the parties I’d been to before I stopped going: The Wiggles were there, and I tried my best not to stare at them in their shorts and bikini tops. Sawyer was trying his best not to stare at them, too. He caught my eye and grinned, fingers moving swiftly over the neck of the bass.

He was so good, and it made me so happy to watch him. His whole body relaxed when he played his music, knots pulled from shoelaces, like he was finally free. He was wearing navy blue cutoffs and a beat-up pair of Chuck Taylors, and I had never been gladder to be his girlfriend.
I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you…

“So were we freaking awesome?” he asked later, sidling up to me after they were finished, the crowd breaking up and drifting away in clusters of threes and fours. I always tried to let him have his space at these things, always waited until he sought me out. I lifted my damp, heavy hair off the back of my neck.

“As usual.”

“Dude, we’re gonna head over to the Meridian for a bit,” Animal called. He was standing with one of the bikini-clad girls, whom I had silently dubbed Giggles Wiggle. “You guys wanna come?”

I held my breath, but Sawyer shook his head. “Nah,” he
shouted back over the rhythmic drone of the ocean. “I’ll catch up with you guys later.”

We got a couple of Sprites at the sandwich shop across the street, then wandered back toward the water, plopped down where the sand had begun to cool. “We don’t go to the beach enough,” I observed, looking out at the dark horizon. The tide was coming in, licking at my toes. “I like the beach.”

“Real Floridians don’t go to the beach,” he replied. “It’s too hot.”

“What about them?” I asked, tilting my head to the right. In the distance, a group of kids a little older than us were grouped on a blanket. It was after ten, and besides them, the sand was nearly empty. “They’re here.”

“They’re probably from Michigan.”

I finished my Sprite and reached my hand out for his, which Sawyer delivered with a sigh. “Don’t chew my straw.”

“I don’t chew straws.”

“Yes you do.” He planted a kiss on the back of my neck.

The skin all over my body prickled pleasantly, but I leaned forward, away from his mouth. “I’m sweaty.”

“Salty,” he corrected. “You taste good. Like pretzels.”

“You really know how to sweet-talk a girl.”

“A regular Casanova,” he affirmed.

“Heathcliff,” I said. “On the moors and everything.”

“Don Juan.”

“Juan Valdez.” I giggled.

“Uh-huh. Ever had sex on the beach?”

“Real Floridians don’t have sex on the beach,” I informed him. “Too hot.”

He poked his tongue into his cheek. “Smart-ass.”

“You could try your luck with one of those girls from Michigan, though.”

“Right.” He grimaced when I handed his cup back to him. “Look at this,” he said, holding up the straw and smirking. “You’re like a woodchuck.” He flopped backward, head in the sand. For a long minute, neither of us talked. “So what am I going to do when you leave, Reena?”

I blinked. I was not expecting that from him. I wasn’t expecting to ever talk about it, much less for him to be the one to bring it up.
I am not long for this world
, I’d told him that day outside the restaurant, although lately graduation felt like it would be here any minute now. I checked the mailbox every day for an envelope from Northwestern. “Girls from Michigan, clearly.”

“I’m serious.”

Well.

“I don’t know,” I said carefully, choosing my words with all the caution of seventeen years spent listening for clues. “It’s not like I’d ever expect you to be, like … It’s not like I’m asking you for anything.”

Sawyer’s face flickered, unreadable. He wasn’t looking at me. “Ouch.”

“No, no, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said, backpedaling.
“I mean, I know you could be, like… faithful, I mean. If you wanted to. I just … wouldn’t think you’d want to, is the thing. Besides,” I ventured finally, when he still refused to answer, “this is all completely theoretical.
If
I get in. The magical
if.
”

He shrugged, looked out at the ocean. The waves were coming quicker now: Soon we were going to need to move. “You’ll get in.”

*

He was right. I got in.

Sawyer had picked me up at school, and I grabbed the mail from the box when we got to my front door, slow and rambling. He had his fingers hooked into the belt loops on the back of my jeans as I pulled out the bills, a
TV Guide.

And.

A big envelope. From Northwestern.

“Oh,” I said, more like a sigh. I sat down on the steps, a handful of catalogs and envelopes fanning out onto the porch. “Oh my God.”

“Big is good, right?” he asked, sitting down beside me, although he had to know it was—after all, he’d applied and been accepted to college the year before. But he was still wearing his sunglasses, and I couldn’t see his face. “Big means they want you?”

“Big means they want me.”

“Of course they want you. They’d be idiots not to.”

Congratulations
, the letter said.

The storm door creaked open; Soledad stood at the screen wearing a pale pink tank top, all tan skin and freckled arms. “How was your test?” she wanted to know, then: “Hey, Sawyer.”

“Good,” I said, turning around and looking up at her. I held out the letter. “I got into Northwestern.”

Soledad’s face bloomed open, a wide, delighted grin. “Reena!” she cried, hurrying outside and throwing her arms around my shoulders. “Oh, Reena, sweetheart, that’s wonderful!”

God in his golden heaven, I wanted to go. I wanted that writing program, I wanted to study abroad—to own a pair of corduroy pants and read fat Russian novels in coffee shops and tromp down the street in yellow snow boots all frozen winter long. I wanted to be someone totally different. I wanted to see places I’d never been. I’d wanted all those things for as long as I could remember, but I’d wanted Sawyer for even longer than that, and now that I had him and the choice sat before me, it didn’t feel as easy as it once had. I thought of Ms. Bowen, of all the hard work we’d put in so I could graduate early.
A lot of kids don’t want to miss their senior year.

Sawyer hung out at my house late that night. The two of us sat on the floor of my bedroom until almost eleven, door wide open per Soledad’s instructions, playing an epic game of rummy: He was the only one who’d ever managed to learn Allie’s convoluted set of rules. I ran downstairs to
get us more ice cream out of the freezer, tossing a giddy “Don’t cheat!” over my shoulder, and came back five minutes later with a pint of Super Fudge Chunk in my hand to find him not where I’d left him on the carpet, but standing at my desk with his ankles crossed casually, reading my college application essay.

“Um,” I said, staring at him and trying not to feel as irrationally caught out as I did, as exposed and weirdly spied on. After all, I’d always told him I’d let him read it eventually. “Where’d you get that?”

“Was on top of the pile,” Sawyer said, nodding at the truly explosive mess on the desktop: textbooks and test papers, an email from
South Florida Living
asking me to come in and talk to them about that internship. He didn’t look guilty at all. He was smiling. “This is really good, Reena.”

“Yeah?” I asked, some of the shrillness seeping out of me. I knew it was pretty good, objectively—after all, it had gotten me into Northwestern—but it was different to hear Sawyer say it. I set the ice cream down on the dresser. “You think so?”

Sawyer nodded and sat down on my bed; instinctively, I glanced out into the hallway, but my father and Soledad were both still downstairs. “How come you never let me read it before now?” he asked.

“Dunno,” I said, sitting down beside him. Brushing two of his fingers with two of mine on top of the quilt. “Felt shy, I guess.”

Sawyer smiled. “You don’t have to be so shy all the time,” he said. “It’s just me.” Then, a beat later: “You’re really gonna go to all these places, huh?”

I looked up at him, surprised. There was something about the way he said it that made me think he was just wrapping his brain around it for the first time, the fact that I was really going to leave at the end of the summer. “That’s the plan,” I said quietly.

He nodded again, sinking back into the pillows. He slept over so much my sheets had started to smell like him. “Maybe I need to get out of here, too,” he said after a moment.

I raised my eyebrows, reaching for the ice cream. Vague as it was, it was the first time I’d heard him talk about anything resembling a plan. “I mean,” I said, leaning off the bed to grab our spoons out of the empty bowls on the carpet, “I hear Chicago’s a good music town.”

“Oh, yeah?” I looked over and Sawyer was grinning, broad and open. I felt something like hope expanding like a yellow balloon deep inside my chest. “Well,” he said, clinking his spoon with mine like maybe we were deciding on something together. “Maybe I’ll need to check it out.”

It takes us half an hour to get downstairs, Hannah dressed and fed and into the playpen in the dining room, right next to the kitchen door. “I’m going to make you breakfast,” Sawyer decides, heading for the fridge.

I shake my head. “I’m not really hungry.”

He makes a face. “You didn’t eat last night, because you were upset, which is fine. But today is a new day. Thus, eggs.” He grins at me, and I sit down, content to be taken care of for a few minutes. Content to let him do it.

The doorbell chimes. “It’s probably Shelby,” I tell him, standing up. Her mom is a nurse at the hospital, and there are a slew of messages on my cell. The phone in the kitchen begins to ring. “Can you get that?” I ask Sawyer over my shoulder.

I hurry into the living room and swing the door open without checking the peephole, realizing my idiocy one second too late. It’s not Shelby coming to see me, this sunny summer morning: It’s Aaron. There is one second in which I think,
shit.

“Hey!” I say brightly, taking a step back to let him a foot or so into the house, but no more. He’s freshly scrubbed and wearing a T-shirt with the marina’s logo on it, ships sailing off to sea.