Carry the Ocean: The Roosevelt, Book 1 (14 page)

“I can be an interpreter. Also, he can use his tablet to make it talk, when he wants to. But he doesn’t usually want to.”

The idea of being able to bond more with my roommate excited me. “Can we go talk to him now?”

“In a minute. I want to kiss you first.”

Emmet always announced our make-out sessions, and it thrilled me every time. There was something delicious about him giving the order. Emmet always arranged us, initiated the kiss and introduced any new elements.

Today it was tongue.

We’d kissed at the hospital, and some of those kisses had felt pretty steamy to me, but they’d only been teases of lips, maybe a little nibbling and gentle suckling. Emmet liked to play with the sensory aspects of a kiss, sometimes stopping to comment on the feelings they elicited. I loved that.

I didn’t often say much, but sometimes I did. I could tell him anything: how hard he made me, how my chest felt tight, how I loved the way I could feel his mouth on my lips for an hour after. He always smiled when I said that and paid more attention to my lips.

That first day in the garden, though, he parted my lips with his tongue. Surprised, I opened my mouth. His tongue slipped inside and touched mine.

I gasped. Emmet smiled and pulled back, touching my face. “That felt like a fish.”

I laughed and leaned into his hands. It had, kind of. “Bumpy. Like wet sandpaper.”

Emmet’s fingers stroked my cheeks. “I want to do it again. Open your mouth and let me kiss you with my tongue.”

The shiver that went through me was so intense I had to shut my eyes. “Emmet, you make me so hard when you talk like that.”

“Let me touch my tongue on yours again, and I’ll make you harder.”

He did. I’d stopped asking him where he learned to kiss—it was the Internet, always. Sometimes he watched videos, sometimes he read things, and sometimes he found message boards. There wasn’t a corner of the Internet he didn’t know how to find, I swear.

I loved being the recipient of his kissing research, and kissing with tongues was no exception. His tongue stroked along mine, exploring my mouth. He was hesitant and uncertain, but not for long. I made my own explorations too, but mostly I went quiet and let Emmet lead me, because it was the way I liked it. When he kissed me and touched me, everything went away except for Emmet.

The only problem today was that Frenching Emmet made me so hard it drove me crazy not to touch myself. I wanted to touch
him
. I broke the kiss to nuzzle his nose with a careful amount of pressure. “Emmet, I want to do more than kiss you.”

His fingers in my hair tightened. “Yes. When we get our apartment, we can have sex.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to go
that
far, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment. I also didn’t want to wait that long to do more than kiss. “We could go to my room here, now.”

“No. Darren might come in.”

I rested my head on his shoulder. “I don’t want to wait. Moving into our room together is another month and a half away.”

I swear I could
feel
him smile. “I forgot to tell you. Bob said we’re a special case, and we can move in two more weeks.”

I lifted my head and caught him grinning. He
hadn’t
forgotten. He was playing one of his Emmet jokes on me. I didn’t care, I was so glad. Everything in me got loud and hot, but in a good way.

“I want you to kiss me again,” I said. But when he leaned forward, I put fingers over his lips. My stomach flipped in nerves and anticipation as I made my next request. “Can you kiss me hard, Emmet? With your tongue too?”

His face didn’t change much, and his voice was flat, but I could hear his smile anyway. “Yes,” he said.

And he did.

Chapter Fifteen

E
mmet

I
was so excited about moving into The Roosevelt. We had all my things packed up in boxes, which was a little disconcerting, but soon I’d be opening the boxes at my own apartment. My apartment with my boyfriend.

We went shopping at Target for our own dishes and pots and pans. I did most of the shopping. The one time Jeremey went, it didn’t go well.

It took us three tries to get to the store, to start. The first day we had an appointment to go, Icarus House called my mom to cancel. “Jeremey is having a bad day,” the aide told her.

I got upset and insisted Mom take me over, but they wouldn’t let us go upstairs. I paced in the living room and hummed and flapped while my mom argued—and then Darren signed to me.

Are you here for Jeremey?

Yes,
I signed back.
Why won’t they let me see my boyfriend?

Because he’s very sick today. In bed. Sometimes he cries.

That made my octopus go crazy. I signed to my mom I was not okay.

“Please—you need to let my son see his friend, if only so he can see Jeremey is safe,” she told the aide. “If you don’t, I can promise you you’re about to witness a very angry autistic young man.”

They argued a few more minutes, and Darren talked to me some more.

He might have a cold, or the flu.

I shook my head.
He has depression. I’m scared, Darren. I don’t want him to try to kill himself again.

It would be hard to do that from his bed. He won’t get out of it.

It actually would be easy to use his bed, if he had somewhere he could string up the sheets. I hummed loudly and flapped my hands so hard they hurt. I hadn’t banged my head against the wall for a long time, but I wanted to do it then.

Mom calmed me down, and a few minutes later we were able to go upstairs to see Jeremey.

Looking at him scared me. He was in his bed, the sheets over his head, and when I called his name, he didn’t respond. I pulled the sheets back, and my stomach felt funny when I saw his face. He looked flat. I knew he was alive because he blinked, but he didn’t look like my Jeremey.

I felt nervous and upset. I didn’t know what to do.

Mom came up behind me and put a heavy hand on my arm. “Jeremey’s depression is bad today. They’ve given him some medicine to help.”

He looked like he had the day he’d first gone to the hospital. “Did his mom make him upset?”

“No. Nothing in particular made him upset, as far as the nurse could tell. That’s how depression works, jujube. Sometimes you’re sad for no reason at all.”

“But we were supposed to shop for our apartment stuff today. That’s a happy thing.”

“Depression likes to eat happy things, sometimes.”

Right now depression was eating my boyfriend. He looked almost scary. I knew it was the drugs, but I wondered what was going on inside his head.

“I hate depression, Mom. It sucks. It’s a bad disease.”

“Yes, sweetheart. It really is.” She tugged my arm. “Let’s let him rest.”

I pulled my arm away. “No. I’m not leaving him.”

Mom sighed. “Emmet, you can’t—”

“
Not leaving him.
” I sat on the floor and clamped a hand on to the metal frame of his bed. “Not until I know the depression won’t hurt him.”

Mom crouched beside me. “Sweetheart, he’s not going to attempt suicide again.”

“How do you know? Besides, it’s not him who wants to do it. It’s his bad octopus. What if the drugs—?”

I stopped talking because something was tickling my hair. When I turned, Jeremey was looking at me.

His eyes were dull and strange. I could see his light, but it was all messed up. I hummed. I was scared. Was Jeremey okay?

He petted my hair, and he smiled. It was a tiny smile, but it was a smile.

The touch was too soft, but I didn’t care. “Jeremey, don’t listen to the bad voices. You can’t kill yourself.”

“Honey, it doesn’t work like that—” Mom started to say this, but I put my hand over my ear and she stopped.

Jeremey kept petting my hair. He looked like he wanted to talk, but it took him several seconds to get started, and when he spoke, his words were slurry and quiet. “Not…going to. Just a…bad day. Sorry.”

“I want to make it better,” I told him.

“You can’t.” Mom stopped trying to pull me away, but she stayed beside me on the floor. “Jeremey has medicine—not his usual antidepressant. This is something else. A sedative. To calm him and help his brain unplug. He’s still having an intense depressive episode, but the drug is helping him separate from it. It makes him very tired, though.”

“It’s making him drool.”

Jeremey blinked long and slow, and on the last blink, his eyes stayed closed. I hummed, worried.

Mom kept talking. “He’s fine. Yes, the side effects of the drugs aren’t fantastic. But sometimes we need a day off from our brains. He’ll be better later. We need to leave, so he can rest.”

Why didn’t she understand I
couldn’t
leave? “Someone has to sit with him. Someone has to make sure it doesn’t get too dark for him.”

Mom started to tell me I couldn’t stay, but a sharp sound, like a bark, stopped her. I smiled and turned enough that I could see Darren with my camera eyes.

“Hi, Darren.”

Darren typed into his tablet, then held it up. A computer voice spoke. “Emmet, I will stay and watch your boyfriend for you. You can go home.”

Without moving my eyes, I looked at Jeremey, then at Darren, then at my mom. I wanted to stay—but I didn’t. I wanted to make sure Jeremey didn’t hurt himself or wasn’t lonely. But it scared me to see him all drugged like this. I didn’t want to think of Jeremey like that.

“Will you text me and let me know how he’s doing?” I asked Darren.

He tapped into his tablet again. “Yes, if you give me your phone number.”

I gave it to him. “Thank you, Darren.”

“No problem. Jeremey is my friend too.”

Darren did text me, several times, until in the evening Jeremey was able to. He didn’t talk much, just enough to tell me he was okay and feeling better but was still tired. I went to see him the next morning, and he wasn’t quite so drugged out, but he wasn’t himself, either. He cried a few times, and when I asked why, he said there was no reason. He started to apologize, but I told him to stop, and he did. We hugged a little, but he wanted to sleep again, so I hung out with Darren until Jeremey was awake from his nap.

“Sorry,” he said when we sat on his bed that evening. He wouldn’t look at me. “I don’t know what happened. I just felt all panicky, and then all heavy, and then it was just…bad. Very dark.”

“But you didn’t want to kill yourself?” Mom had told me not to ask, but I couldn’t help it. It worried me a lot.

He shook his head. “Not…really. I mean, I always do a little, but it’s not because I don’t want to be with you. It’s because it feels so
hard
to be alive. This time I hurt all over. I felt like I was sick. But I didn’t have a fever, or anything. Just depression.”

“Is it gone now?”

“No. But it’s quieter.”

That seemed better. “When you’re ready, we can still go shopping for the apartment.”

His hand tightened against his leg. “Okay. I’ll try. Hopefully I don’t have a panic attack.”

It took another couple of days before he was ready. He said he wanted to try the next day, but when Mom came to pick him up, he said he was sorry, but it wasn’t the right time. The day after, though, he got in the van, and we drove over to Target.

We went at a time it wasn’t busy, but we didn’t make it five minutes before he stopped in the middle of the cleaning products section, like he’d bumped into something. His body became rigid, his shoulders hunched, and he shut his eyes as his breath started coming fast. He didn’t say a word, but I knew this was a panic attack.

Mom knew too. She led him to the pharmacy area, where they had a bench, and made him sit down. The pharmacist came out, looking concerned, but Mom told her everything was fine. Mom never took her focus off Jeremey, and whenever she spoke, to him or anyone else, she kept her voice soft and gentle.

“Shh. You’re okay. Put your head between your knees if you need to.”

Jeremey didn’t, only shut his eyes tighter and tucked his chin to his chest as his breath came faster and faster. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.” Mom stroked his shoulder, moving her hand to his back. I could tell she was trying to nudge his head down without making him do it.

Normally I worry when Jeremey has panic attacks, but my mom is a doctor, and she’d take care of him. I counted the different kinds of shoe insoles on the wall behind the bench while I waited. Beside me, my dad stood quietly, waiting to see if my mom would tell him to do anything. She did—she told him to go get a bottle of room-temperature mineral water from the shelf in the food section. The pharmacist brought out a cool hand towel, and my mom draped it over Jeremey’s neck. He’d put his head between his knees twice now, and his breathing was normal. But his eyes were full of water, and sometimes tears leaked out.

Six tears by my count, though one was large and might have been three or four tears in one.

“I tried so hard.” His voice was a whisper, all ragged and uncomfortable. “I thought maybe with you guys it would be better.”

“You’ve been through a lot lately.” Mom kept rubbing his back. It would have made me crazy, that much touching, but Jeremey loved it. “Do you want to keep trying, or do you need to rest?”

“Rest,” he said, no hesitation at all.

“That’s okay. We’ll try again once you’ve settled into your new place and are feeling confident.”

Jeremey didn’t say anything else, and after my dad returned with the mineral water, we walked them both to the food court area, which is mostly a Starbucks and an ICEE machine. My dad offered to take Jeremey to Icarus, or to drive him around in the car, but Jeremey said no.

“I can sit here and not freak out.” He sounded angry when he said it, which confused me, but Mom didn’t argue with him, just told my dad to text her if they needed anything.

We picked our cart back up, and once we were away from the food court, I texted her.

Mom, this is Emmet. Why is Jeremey angry? Why won’t he go to the car so he doesn’t have a panic attack?

She read her text, then glanced at me. “Can I answer you out loud, or do I need to text too?”

I glanced around us and shook my head before I texted.
Too many people can listen. I don’t want them listening to Jeremey’s business.

Mom texted me.
This is Mom. Jeremey is angry with himself. He wants to stay in the food court because he knows he’s lost the war, but he wants to win a battle.

I read her text three times. Finally I said,
Mom, you don’t make any sense. Jeremey is not at war with anyone.

She made a winking Emoji.
He knows he can’t shop with you, but he wants to challenge himself to simply stay in the store. That will make him feel as if he accomplished something.

That
made sense. I wished he could have shopped with us. Doing it alone meant I would pick everything, which I enjoyed, except I wanted Jeremey to pick some things too. I tried to think of how we could modify shopping so he could participate.

“Maybe we can give him some choices,” I suggested. “We could take them to the food court.”

“That’s a good idea, but you told me he gets nervous when people make him pick.”

This was true. I frowned.

“Maybe you could take photos of things you thought he might like and send them to him for approval. He’ll probably say yes every time, but it will make him feel more a part of things. You could also ask him what his favorite color is and use it to make choices, and ask if he prefers big towels or regular-sized towels for himself. Things that won’t make him feel as if he has to guess the right answer.”

I thought it was a good idea, and it worked pretty well. I texted a lot of pictures to Jeremey, and like Mom said, he said they all looked good, but it included him. I already knew his favorite color, but I asked him anyway so he could still participate. Eventually I put my headphones in and called him, and I told him about the things I was looking at for our apartment. It wasn’t the same as having him there, but it was better than nothing.

We did more than shopping to get ready to move into The Roosevelt, though, and Jeremey was able to participate in all the other preparations. Althea and Mom gave us cooking lessons, and my dad showed me how to keep a spreadsheet for my bills. We made a lot of checklists so I wouldn’t forget to do anything, and we devised a new schedule which included doing laundry and going grocery shopping. Usually new things and change upset me, but this was an exciting shift.

I think Jeremey was excited too, but he was also nervous. His mom was definitely nervous, and she still didn’t like me. His dad’s mustache twitched all the time.

The day we moved in I had
move in
on my schedule for nine in the morning. We were there on the dot, and so was Bob, smiling and holding up two sets of keys. He’d aired out the apartment so it didn’t smell like paint anymore, but the leftover smell worried me a little, because it wasn’t the right smell of my house. It got better as we brought the boxes in, and my clothes.

I set up my bedroom first. We’d bought a new bed so I could still have my other bed at home. My new bed was a double bed, so I could have sex in it if I wanted. I told this to Mom, but she told me not to tell her those kinds of things. I told her she doesn’t make sense, and she said she understood but still didn’t want to hear about me having sex.

I’d asked Jeremey how we should set up the main living areas, but he said he didn’t care so long as he could sit on the couch and see the TV, and that there was a couch and a TV. He said I cared about setup more, so go ahead and take over. If anything bothered him, he’d tell me, but he said he doubted it would. So I positioned everything up exactly the way I wanted it.

All the floors were hardwood. Bob preferred them for dust control, and they were mostly the same hardwood floors the school had when it was a school. The kitchen had heavy tile, durable and easy to clean or replace. I put a soft rug down in front of the couch and between the TV because it was good for yoga. It was exactly four inches from the TV and four from the couch. The couch would move, since hardwood floors are slippery, but we put a heavy table behind it and anti-slip pads underneath. We had small end tables on each side of the couch, which was blue-green and soft to the touch. The fat stuffed chair matched it.