How to Love (14 page)

“Nope,” I tell her quickly. I get this question a lot and it used to fluster the crap out of me—I’d stutter my way
through explanations to bank tellers and baristas, both of us wishing to God they hadn’t asked. Eventually I found it was better to be clear and direct. “She’s all mine.”

The salesgirl’s eyes widen, just for a second. She’s probably only a year or so younger than me. “Oh,” she says brightly, averting her eyes as she hangs the jeans on the hook inside the brightly lit cubicle. “That’s great.”

I’ve barely gotten the door locked and my pants unzipped before Hannah wakes up, flushed and cranky. “Hey, baby girl,” I say with a smile, trying to head her off at the pass. “We’ll be out of here in two seconds, okay?”

No dice. Hannah whimpers as I try to shimmy in and out of the first pair of pants; by the time it becomes clear to me that everything I’ve picked out is at least a size too small she’s smack in the middle of a truly spectacular tantrum, screaming like she’s being tortured as I lift her out of the stroller, do what I can to calm her down.

“Everything okay in there?” the salesgirl calls shrilly.

“Yup,” I call back, trying to sound like I know what I’m doing. I
do
know what I’m doing, really; I try to remember that as I press my lips to Hannah’s forehead. “We’re fine.”

We’re not, though: Hannah needs a change, and she won’t stop crying. There’s not going to be any shopping today. I get my own holey jeans on as fast as humanly possible, Hannah all hiccups and hollers and the occasional furious “Nooo!” As I hightail it out of the store I’m
painfully aware that I look like something out of one of those MTV reality shows people watch to feel better about their own lives.

“Oh, too bad,” the salesgirl calls behind me. “None of them worked?”

*

All I want is to head home and give up for the day, but I told Aaron we’d come by after the mall for pizza and a movie, some thriller I agreed to against my better judgment. “Relax,” he tells me halfway through, laughing as I almost jump off the couch for the third time in twenty minutes. I hate scary movies, is the truth.

“You relax. Bitch is
toast
,” I reply, reaching for the popcorn on the coffee table and nodding at the girl detective on-screen. Hannah’s asleep in Aaron’s bedroom. Maxie, the bulldog, is snoozing on the floor.

“Nah.” Aaron pulls me closer, one bear-paw hand playing idly in my hair. He smells like saltwater and soap, clean. “She’s too cute. The cute ones never die.”

“In what universe?” I ask, laughing. I’m about to lean into his shoulder when my phone starts making noise in the depths of my purse: the Rolling Stones, I realize after a second, “Sympathy for the Devil.” My heart does a funny thing inside my chest. Junior year of high school Shelby changed the ringtone on my cell so that it played “Sympathy for the Devil” when Sawyer called. When I hear it now, I just sort of … freeze.

Aaron starts laughing, and then looks at my face and frowns. “Who’s that?” he asks as I dig the phone out of my bag.

“Nobody,” I say, recovering, hitting the red
IGNORE
button. “It’s just … a joke.”

“Is it Sawyer?” He doesn’t sound particularly happy about the idea. The light from the TV flickers blue across his face.

“Yeah,” I confess—no reason to lie, right? Nothing going on. “But I don’t need to talk to him, so.”

“So,” Aaron fires back, unconvinced. “What’s he calling for, then?”

That surprises me a little—it’s the first suspicion I’ve seen out of him, really, and it must show on my face, because he backpedals. “Look,” he says. “I’m not trying to be a dick. I just—”

“No, I know,” I say. “It’s fine. I have no idea what he wants, honestly. But I don’t particularly care, either. I’m hanging out with you right now, you know?”

“Okay,” Aaron says eventually, and we hang out for a while, twenty lazy minutes on the sofa once the movie is over. He was right, for what it’s worth: The plucky policewoman lived to fight crime another day.

“Can I ask you a question?” he says once I start to extricate myself—it’s getting late, and I glance around for my flip-flops. “What would happen if you stayed?”

“I can’t,” I say automatically, a reflex, though for a
moment I wonder how it would feel to say yes. “I mean, the baby is here, and—”

“I mean.” He looks disappointed for a second, gets a look on his face like
no kidding:
The first time I brought Hannah to Aaron’s, he bought covers for all the electrical outlets. “I wasn’t going to send her home in a cab.”

“I know.” Here’s the thing: I really, really like him. You don’t need a map to navigate the level terrain of Aaron’s heart. Still, staying over feels like a big deal for some reason, a step I don’t know if I’m a hundred percent ready to take with him: I think of my phone ringing earlier, “Sympathy for the Devil.” Try to stop thinking about it.

At last I smile, scratch through the sandy hair at the nape of Aaron’s neck. “Another time,” I promise, and head into the bedroom to get my girl.

*

Sawyer calls again when I’m on the way home, Mick Jagger twanging out from the depths of my shoulder bag. I fish for the phone and glance over my shoulder at Hannah in her baby seat, but she’s dead to the world. My car smells like Cheerios and hand sanitizer. “We don’t want any,” I tell him, instead of hello.

“You haven’t even heard what I’m selling.” Sawyer’s laughing; I can hear it in his voice.

I frown at the road in front of me, all grim neon strip malls and fast-food restaurants. I am so, so tired of driving this route. “I don’t need to.”

“Sure you do.”

“Knives?” I ask, merging onto the highway. “Vinyl siding? Flood insurance?”

“Better,” he tells me, full of promises. “Let me cook you dinner.”

Oh God. “
What?
”

“Dinner,” he repeats more slowly, like maybe the problem was in his enunciation. “Tonight.”

“It’s nine thirty.”

“It’s European.”

“At your
house?
”

“Well, that’s where my kitchen is,” he says logically.

I roll my eyes. The highway is pretty empty at this hour, the darkened silhouettes of palm trees studding the median and the red glow of scattered taillights up ahead. The windshield fogs up a bit from the humidity, and I swipe at it with the flat of my palm. “Where are your parents?”

“At the restaurant.”

There’s no way. “I already ate.”

“Eat again,” he suggests, undeterred.

“I don’t think so.”

He’s quiet for a minute like he’s regrouping, changing tactics. “Where are you?” is what he tries next.

I check on Hannah in the mirror one more time. “In the car.”

“Where
were
you?”

I sigh. “At Aaron’s.”

“Ah.” Sawyer sounds satisfied. “
That’s
why you didn’t pick up.”

“Maybe I didn’t pick up because I didn’t want to talk to you.”

“That’s not what it was,” he says confidently. “You just picked up now, didn’t you?”

God, he is so
annoying.
And, I guess, right. “We were watching a movie.”

“What movie?”

“Who are you, my father?” I dig around in the console for some gum, shove a piece between my teeth and bite down hard. “A scary one, I don’t know.”

“You hate scary movies.”

“Maybe I like them now.”

“Come over.”

“Sawyer.” I should hang up, really. I don’t know why I’m still on the phone. “No.”

“Why not? Come on, Reena,” he says. “I want to see you.”

“You saw me the other day.”

“I want to see you again.”

That’s a bad idea, is what that is. That is a truly terrible idea. “I have to go,” I manage finally. There is no reason in the world for me to want to say yes as much as I do. I’m passing by the airport at this point: the planes low-flying and larger-than-life, all of that coming and going and me just exactly where I’ve always been. “I’m driving, remember? It’s not safe.”

For a second Sawyer doesn’t answer. I’m expecting him to come back with some new and creative sales pitch, but in the end all he says is, “No.” He sighs a bit like I’ve defeated him, and all at once I’m surprised by how it doesn’t feel like a victory at all. “No, I guess it’s not.”

*

At home I get the baby into her crib without event and wander around the house for a while, restless. I drink some water standing next to the sink. I go up to my bedroom and stare at Sawyer’s number in my phone’s contact list—dial six numbers, then hedge and hang up (my whole life a holding pattern, some variation on
wait and see
). I pace.

Finally I come downstairs.

Soledad and my father are sitting in the living room, watching
Law & Order
on the couch. “Can you guys do me a favor?” I say, hovering on the bottom stair like a ghost and willing myself not to sound so timid.

They both look up expectantly. It’s not often that I ask. “What do you need, sweetheart?” Soledad answers, and the endearment makes me feel about one inch tall.

“Can you keep an ear out for Hannah?” I ask her. “I’ve got something I need to do.”

I was sitting on a desk in the newspaper office, half listening to an eager sophomore pitch an exposé on cafeteria cleanliness, when I felt my phone vibrate inside my back pocket. I ignored it at first—Noelle, our editor, was hugely uptight about texting during meetings—but it buzzed again a minute later, insistent. I fished it out as discreetly as I could.

Look up
, the text message said.

I did, and gasped out loud: Sawyer was standing in the hallway at the windowed door to the classroom, arms crossed and looking faintly amused. He tipped his head in greeting when he caught my eye and I grinned hugely, heart tipping sideways a bit.
What are you doing here?
I mouthed.

“Uh, Reena.” I snapped to attention. I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed Sawyer: Noelle shot me a look that could have taken the bark right off a coconut palm. “Do we have your attention here, or not so much?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, blushing. Everybody was watching now. Sawyer looked like he was about to crack up. I grabbed my backpack off the chair beside me, made for the door. “I just remembered someplace I really have to be.”

“So,” Sawyer said when I got out into the hallway, pushing me up against a locker and kissing me hello like it had been a lot longer than a couple of days since we’d seen each other. “That was very slick, what you did in there.”

“Shut up,” I said, laughing. I shoved him gently in the shoulders, let him carry my backpack down the hallway like something out of a teen movie. We’d been hanging out more and more lately, going for long drives along the water and hitting up Sonic for Cherry Limeades, making out until my mouth went smudgy and red. “How’d you even get in here, anyway?”

“I have ways.” Sawyer shrugged. “Actually, some freshman girl let me in.”

I snorted, rolled my eyes. “Of course she did.”

“Of course,” Sawyer echoed. “So how are things in the world of print journalism?” he asked next, opening up the door for me and stepping out into the early-winter dusk. “On the eve of extinction as always?”

“I mean, I don’t know,” I said, smiling. “I might have
been able to answer that a little better if you hadn’t just yanked me out of my meeting before it was over.”

Sawyer pulled a face. “I didn’t
yank
you anyplace,” he countered, grabbing my wrist and doing just that, pulling me into him so he could get an arm around my shoulders.

“Right.” I laughed and leaned closer, the waffle of his thermal shirt warm against my cheek. “No, it’s good. Noelle’s starting to give me some feature stuff besides the column, which is cool. I’m covering the winter musical, I’ll have you know.”

Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “Fancy.”

I pouted up at him. “It is!”

“I know,” he said, and kissed me again. “That’s awesome, Reena.” Then, as he flipped the key in the driver’s side door of the Jeep: “So what are you doing tonight, anything? Do you have plans?”

Well, sort of, if homework counted. “Was thinking I’d jet down to Havana for the weekend, actually,” I told him, figuring sarcasm was the safest way to go here. Sawyer was definitely acting pretty boyfriend-esque lately, picking me up from school on the days I didn’t ride with Shelby and leaving pomegranates on my front porch. Still, whatever was going on between us was still achingly gray and amorphous: He hadn’t made any declarations, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to make them first. Instead, I waited. I kept watch. “Check out the nightlife.”

“Oh, I see.” Sawyer slid his hand behind my headrest, backed the Jeep out of his spot. “Well, if you think you could maybe blow off El Presidente just for tonight, we’re playing at the Prime Meridian later. You should come and see us, meet everybody.”

Everybody.

On the nights we spent goofing around in the restaurant or hanging out on his parents’ front porch, it was easy to forget that Sawyer lived an entire life into which I had no point of entry—that he hung out with friends I’d never met, played music I’d never heard. I didn’t like to think about where he was when he didn’t pick up his cell phone, weekends I spent with Shelby or by myself doing mundane, high-school-life-type things. It made me feel nervous. It made me feel weird.

“Yeah.” I smiled and willed down the slimy greenish mass of anxiety I already felt forming in the pit of my stomach. “You know, it’s sort of a bitch to get to Cuba, anyway, so.”

“I mean, customs alone.” Sawyer grinned, pulled up in front of my house, and tugged at some hair that had fallen out of my ponytail. “I’ll pick you up at nine.”

*

The Prime Meridian wasn’t nice. Sandwiched between a pet store and a sketchy Chinese restaurant in a strip mall off the highway, it was long and narrow and boasted a tiny stage in back, a raised platform a foot or so off the ground.
The bar was strung with multicolored Christmas lights and tended by a scowly guy who was, in all seriousness, probably seven feet tall. It smelled like beer and cigarettes, too many people in too small a space.

I’d been here with Allie once, back at the beginning of high school, both of us wearing far too much makeup and dressed in our tightest jeans. We’d taken one look inside and fled for the fluorescent safety of last call at Panera Bread, but I figured she’d probably returned at some point, more likely than not with the same boy who was currently steering me through the crowd, one hand on my lower back. The idea made me feel sick-sad, the same way I did whenever I thought about Allie and Sawyer.