Loud Awake and Lost (14 page)

“Are your parents okay with me being here?” I asked in his ear.

“You're sweet to care about what my parents think,” he answered. “I don't.”

“Clean-shaven liar. Of course you do.”

Holden rubbed his chin. “Touché. But Mom's too wrapped up in the party and Dad's too wrapped around the bourbon.”

“Holdie, fix me a Diet Coke with lime?” asked Rachel.

“You got it.”

Suddenly it struck me that this was how it would be if Holden and I got engaged. This would be our party, with Rachel bopping next to us, and Mrs. Wilde using the very same catering company and ordering up the same polleny flower arrangements. Holden's sparrow-boned Wilde grandparents would be here from Summit, too, along with those quirky next-door neighbors, the Rossiters, who often dressed in matching safari-esque suits—and tonight was no exception. And then Mr. Wilde would drink too much, and Drew would scowl with his scar-thin mouth, and the entire event would be spread in sticky layers of politeness, and would go on way too long.

“Light on ice, heavy on the ale, right?” Holden handed me a ginger ale with just two cubes and clinked his imported beer bottle with my glass. He looked super cute tonight. Even with the clean shave. Effortlessly adult—I practically could see him at age thirty. I imagined us dating on and off through college. It wasn't so out-there; we were natural friends, always had been. We'd never exactly said “I love you” to each other, but still. I'd never felt unloving or unaffectionate with Holden. And there were times I could get stupidly weak-kneed, staring at the chiseled angles of his face. If Holden and I ever did get back together—a big if, but not stratospherically impossible—would we ever have enough reason to break up again?

I felt the puff of Kai's breath in the cold-storage room, the damp animal-shine of his eyes in the darkness, the way the side of his body had pressed mine, the rumble of his voice lulling me—

“Ember!” Mrs. Wilde's thin fingers had latched my wrist. “Let me introduce you to Raina.”

“Perk up, dish-Raggedy Ann.” Rachel gave me a nudge, and Holden reluctantly relinquished me, as Mrs. Wilde led me to where Raina stood in front of the fireplace.

“Raina, I wanted you to meet Ember. Who has been a special friend to Holden.” This was classic Mrs. Wilde—to take something awkward and make it way more awkward.
Special
friend?
Seriously? “I think I told you about her horrible year?”

“Yes. Of course.” Raina's eyes widened. “What a thing to live through.”

Up close, I didn't mind what Smarty had been mocking. Raina's polka-dot headband and super-feminine shoes seemed to suit her. Plus her eyes were gentle as a child's. “My brother, Ian, was in a bus accident,” she confided, “and no matter what anyone said, I swear he was never the same after. Oh—but I didn't mean it that way.” As Raina touched her shell-pink manicured fingers to her lips, I noticed her engagement ring, sparkling with new ownership. “I only meant that you…I mean, you look perfect to me.” She laughed apologetically. “Not a scratch on you.”

“Oh, but I've got a couple of scratches,” I admitted. “Mostly on the inside.”

Raina nodded. “Sometimes those are the hardest to heal. With my brother—”

“Hey, Rain, I want you to meet some of my cousins.” Drew was at us like a wolverine in pinstripes.

“Good to see you, too, Drew.” I cleared my throat. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Ember.” He hardly looked at me. “Nice of you to come.” And then he patrolled Raina away by the elbow as if I were some kind of playground predator. I was relieved to join Smarty, who was now hanging out with Lucia, and, thankfully, no Claude.

“Ciao, Ember,”
Lucia greeted me in her lilting Italian—did she sound delightfully musical, I wondered, even when she got angry? “I've been meaning to tell you something. Remember when you asked me about that girl, Maisie, from my Halloween party? And I didn't know her? Last week, I was speaking with my uncle on the phone, and I asked about her. He said Maisie has a partial art scholarship at the New School. A scholarship that he helps to fund.”

“Oh, that's cool.” I kept my tone casual. Lucia's uncle probably knew Anthony, too. I wondered if he had come up in the conversation.

Lucia shook her glossy hair dismissively. “He says she is not very serious about her art, not like some of the others.” When she got imperious, Lucia sounded kind of like Claude. She had slipped into his skin in some ways since they'd started dating, the way so many couples did. “Uncle Carlos also helped to discover Alice de Souza,” Lucia continued. “Do you know of her?”

My heart leapfrogged. “Alice de Souza? Of course!” I'd just seen the piece in the arts section of last weekend's newspaper, an article about this brilliant new young artist. The photograph had been one of those arty shots, and it had rung a distant bell, as I'd studied that image of a girl standing, speculative in her long spattered T-shirt, one foot planted on either side of a slab of linen canvas on the floor.

I'd figured it was just one of those oddly indefinable déjà vu things, but Alice de Souza must have been Maisie's friend Alice. The picture snapped like a rubber band in my head—Alice in the Cleopatra costume and gladiator sandals at the party was also the same Alice from that day last year, too—
we'd been trooping through Tribeca and then we'd stopped by the apartment on North Moore Street, and Alice was egging us on, “Let's go up, just for a minute,” and then we were spilling through those giant rooms, looking for Anthony's painting.…

On Rachel's “Earth to Ember!” with accompanying finger flick, I was back.

What was wrong with me? Second time tonight.

I was still standing between Lucia and Rachel, but they weren't looking at me. Everyone was listening to Holden's dad give a toast. His arm swung his glass of champagne as he spoke, and his voice was reedy in his strain to amplify himself through the rooms. I fixed my attention. Mr. Wilde wasn't as glammed-out as his wife; in fact, he looked more like a bath-toy version of Holden. Round, buoyant, and even a bit damp.

“…and to be as happy as Eleanor and I have been these past thirty-four years. Marriage is the most important decision you can make. It takes work, it takes commitment, and it takes one incredibly important sentence: ‘Honey, you're right.' ”

“He sure packs in the hammy clichés,” whispered Rachel.

“Drew, my son, I hope you know that your family thinks you knocked the cover off the ball with this girl.”

“Yikes, with a bonus sports metaphor,” I whispered back.

“So please join me in raising your glass as we wish Drew and Raina health and happiness.” Mr. Wilde swiped the air before he drank deeply to the scattered applause and
hear, hear
s.

“Thirty-four years, gawd,” said Rachel, with another sly check on her phone. “Doesn't that sound like a gruesome amount of time to be married?”

“It sounds like a gruesome amount of time to be anything,” I answered.

“Check it, Jake just texted that he's at Floyd with the guys and he's ordered a couple of pizzas. So we can head over—want to say in forty-five minutes?”

“Sure. My allergies can't take too much more of these flowers, anyway.”

The conclusion of the toast had rearranged the room into different conversation nests, and I watched as Holden broke from one of them to give Raina a brotherly embrace before he beelined for me, sidling up and looping his arm around my shoulders in a tight squeeze. He might have had another beer, I could sense from the way he kissed the top of my head—casual, almost goofy.

“Come to my room,” he said, his voice thick and hopeful in my ear. “Away from all these poison weeds, right?”

“Ha, no kidding.” I sensed my friends pretending not to notice Holden's and my closeness. Their tiny nudges, their spidery-watchful energy. This was how it had been. This was how it was supposed to be, in everyone's minds. Friday Follies and parties and everyone together forever, all the way up to Mr. Wilde's sweaty champagne toast, for the rest of our lives.

But would the Wildes really and truly think their son had “knocked the cover off the ball” if he wanted to spend his life with a girl who had broken his heart? A girl who'd dropped everything she'd been, and then one night driven herself over a bridge, killing someone else in the process?

Or would they be (more likely) endlessly brooding and suspicious, always ready to expect some act of self-sabotage or recklessness, the very worst of me?

Ice, fever, ice. I felt light-headed as my resentment seethed. It wasn't for the Wildes to decide. Holden was mine and I was his, if we wanted each other. And if a future together was our landscape, it was a personal map for us to unfold, for us to plot the journey.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Let's go.”

Holden's room was just as I remembered, but at the same time it felt antiseptic. There were a few things I hadn't seen—the graduation picture, and Holden's cobalt-blue Lafayette mortarboard hung rakish over an old Super Soccer Stars trophy. Except it was a phantom presence of Holden here now. I could sense it in the stark surface of his desk and in the absence of his personal presence, that stuffy yet comforting, lived-in bedroom odor of gym socks and sweat and aftershave and a hint of fast-food French fries.

Noise pumped upward through the floorboards. If the Wildes knew one thing about a party, it was how to keep it going. But I never liked the sound of adults getting silly on red wine. Which would be most of the Wildes' friends. It was yet another way that Holden's parents and my parents were different. And while mine might be less “fun,” at least they never became giggle-boozy like Mrs. Wilde, or made dirty jokes with a hot face like Mr. Wilde. I was always surprised that Holden wasn't more irritated or upset, but I guess he was used to them.

Holden clicked the door shut. We each yanked up a few Kleenex—the flower arrangements were killing us—to get control of our weeping noses, laughing grimly about our shared allergy issues, before lying stomach-down and side by side on the bed, where we pored over the Lafayette senior yearbook. Holden got up once to get his iTunes going, and to lower the light. My body was a squeeze of nervous anticipation as Holden returned to the bed and then pushed away the yearbook to pull me close.

I could taste warmth and beer as Holden kissed me hard—there was something defiant about it. I wanted this, didn't I? I shifted position. I was having trouble relaxing; I couldn't seem to find the right place to put my arms and legs. Holden slipped my dress over my head, then undid the clasp of my bra and scooped a hand inside.

“Oh!” We hadn't hooked up for real in such a long time. Of course I'd agreed to it. Just in letting Holden's index finger link mine as we'd stolen away up the stairs, there'd been acknowledgment. We'd been flirting all night, wanting to end up in just exactly this space, alone together.

But now did I want it? I didn't want to overthink it. I wanted to be loose and warm and untrapped. I kissed him back as I cracked open my eyes to stare at Holden's shadowed face. He was undeniably cute. That tousled hair, the slight cleft in his chin—it all worked.

Holden was tugging down my tights—I helped wriggle and peel them off, dropping them over the side of the bed. Sexually, I'd gone pretty far with Holden, nearly all the way to actual sex, and the funny thing about that was no matter how much time had passed, the unspoken rule now seemed to be that all the things we'd done before were ours to do again, speedily, and only because we'd done them all before.

He kicked out of his gray flannels, and I helped him unbutton his shirt, and here we were down to nothing but underwear, facing each other in newly unwrapped shyness. Our mouths met, skin on skin. I could feel his fingertips trailing my spine, finding the bolt—though I'd shown him before, I hadn't let him pause there. In the heated, heavy darkness, his fingers learned and accepted it, and then he carefully rolled over on top of me. His body on mine was a familiar excitement.

Was I betraying Kai tonight, with Holden? The thought triggered another future, only this one was not the Wildes' parlor. Kai's life was less ordered, less safe; his world was explosive with the dry, glittery desert heat of Burning Man, it roared with the baseball crowd in Yankee Stadium, it trekked the green farmlands of the Glastonbury music festival, it teetered at the apex of the Coney Island Ferris wheel. In a split second, I saw all of it distilled as clearly as if a fortune-teller had let me gaze into her crystal ball.

“Holden,” I whispered, unlatching my arms from around his back.

He didn't answer. Gently, I pushed his hand off its hopeful back-and-forth skimming along the elastic band of my underwear. “Holden, I've got to go.”

“What, to Floyd? No, you don't,” he mumbled, catching and twining my hair around his finger the way he used to. “Nobody needs us to be there.”

“It's more like…I don't think I can be here.”

“Huh?” A little dazed, he pitched up on one elbow to regard me. His free hand stroked my cheek. “What's wrong?”

“I'm not…It's too soon, I think. Being here with you.” Not quite true. What I was really thinking was how bizarre it was, after a year, that Holden and I were right back at this same knotty moment. Except this time there was no apple candle, no snoring Jolly at the foot of the bed, no frost on the pane. Only the catch in my lungs that made it hard to breathe through what I knew I might say.

“I felt like we were moving closer,” he said.

“Maybe we are.” I wasn't being totally honest, and if I wasn't being honest, I wasn't being fair. “But I think I just want more time,” I qualified. That was honest. Wasn't it?

“Okay.” He half laughed, then rolled off me so that we were side by side, innocent as toy mice in a matchbox.

We stayed like this for another minute or so, and then Holden jumped off the bed, moving toward the chair stacked with folded clothes and rummaging for his jeans, which he then yanked up in one rough swoop.

“Where are you going?”

“I think I'll hit Floyd.”

“Oh.” I stood, picked up my dress from where it had puddled on the floor. “Holden, I know you're upset.”

“A little bit. That's normal, right? What do you want from me, Ember?”

“I'm not sure.”

“The thing is, I can't be anything more than I am. And I'm one guy, one decision. So make it or don't. Let me know when you do.”

He sounded weary, and I didn't blame him. This wasn't supposed to be the end of this night, with me tossing Holden off as if I were a child who'd grown bored with her amusement. I struggled with the zip of my dress. Holden had snapped on his lamp and was now leaning over his desk, facing away from me and clicking through emails on his laptop.

“Hold?” I whispered.

He didn't turn around. “You coming with me to Floyd?”

“I don't think so.”

“Okay, cool.” His back still facing me. I hated to think of the tears that might be in his eyes. Holden put up a stoic front, but I knew better. “I'll call you later.”

“Sounds good.”

He was hurt, and I couldn't undo it. So I left him; I had to. In the front hall, a number of guests were starting to leave—it was easy to slip out the door unnoticed. Head tucked, I found my coat, then clipped down the front steps and around the corner. Withdrew my cell phone from my bag and keyed in the numbers.

I was walking too fast and I couldn't stop; it was as if I'd spent the past couple of hours caged.

It went straight to voice mail. I spoke in a whisper. “I know this is probably crazy and violates our rules and you're not there and whatever, but I'm coming over. I'll be in the lobby of your building. So just text me whenever you get in from class or work.” I paused. “Because I need to see you, Kai. I'll wait for you.”

One guy, one decision. But hadn't that decision been clinched the moment I'd met Kai on the fire escape?

Quickly, I sent Rachel a text—
pls pls cover for me if my folks call
—before I turned off my phone and began to walk purposefully toward the St. George.

It was the right thing to do, to leave Holden. I couldn't hook up with him—not mindlessly, and especially not with full awareness—if I didn't feel it. Worrying and regretting and puzzling and
perseverating
over us was all just a waste of time. I didn't regret it, but I longed to make it better. And yet I couldn't.

I quickened my step, as if I could outpace my emotions, and checked my watch. It was only ten o'clock. If only I could see Kai again. Even if it was just for a few minutes. So what if he worked and took night classes, so what if he didn't have enough money or free time or whatever? Those were excuses; they weren't real reasons to stay apart.

And I was tired of being apart.

I broke into a run.