How to Love (16 page)

“You like risotto?” Sawyer asks.

“Um.” That is … not what I expected when he said
dinner.
I blink. “Sure.”

Sawyer flicks on the light in the kitchen and the room goes clinically bright, all pale-green tile and gleaming stainless-steel appliances. “So,” he says, lifting a pot off the hanging rack above the island, “how’s Aaron?”

I snort a little. “Can you stop saying his name like that?”

“How am I saying it?”

“I don’t know.” The snort turns into a laugh, a little hysterical. I feel like every organ in my body has lodged itself somewhere in the back of my throat. “However you’re saying it.”

“I’m not saying it any way.” Sawyer shrugs. “
Aaron’s
from the Bible.”

I hop up on the counter. “Aaron works on boats.”

Sawyer nods slowly, like he’s absorbing that information, like there’s an old-fashioned card catalog in his head and he just filed Aaron into the drawer for shit he’s frankly not crazy about but suspects he needs to live with for the time being. “Is he good with the baby?”

“I wouldn’t be with him if he wasn’t,” I say snottily, then: “Can we please not talk about Aaron?”

Sawyer grins like,
As you wish.
“What do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Whatever normal people talk about. Baseball.”

“You want to talk about baseball?”

“No.” I raise my hands and drop them again, useless. “I don’t actually even know anything about baseball.”

“Me either.” He’s cutting up an onion now, quick and expert like Finch taught us all when we were kids. “Is this weird?” he asks once it’s in the pot, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. “You have a look on your face like you think this is really, really weird.”

“Well,” I say, shrugging, picking at my ragged cuticles. “It’s a little weird.”

“Yeah,” he echoes. Then, after a beat: “She kept everything the same. Like, my bedroom and stuff.”

“Who?” I ask. “Your mother?” In truth I’m not really listening, instead watching him toast the rice, pour in a ladleful of stock. Clearly he’s comfortable doing it—clearly he’s done it before—but still it’s somehow unnatural, like a tree beginning to speak.

“Uh-huh. What?” he asks when he catches me staring. “This is how you make risotto.”

“I know how to make risotto,” I tell him. My heels kick softly at the cabinets. “I’m just surprised you do.”

“I know how to do lots of things I didn’t used to know how to do,” he answers, and we’re definitely not talking about dinner anymore. The air crackles: too many electrons, like you could reach out and grab them and feel them buzz inside your hand. I look away.

“Anyway,” I say, too loudly. “Your mom. Your bedroom. I guess she just … I don’t know. I guess she knew you’d be back.”

“I guess so.”

“She missed you.”

“Did she?” he asks. He stirs the rice one more time before he abandons the stove, and, oh God. He stops when he’s standing right between my knees.

“Yeah,” I tell him slowly, glancing down. His hands have
landed on my thighs. “I think she kind of did.” When I look up at him we’re face-to-face like commuters on a packed train at rush hour, and I really need half a second to … “Just,” I say, “hold on.”

“Reena—” he begins, but I cut him off.

“Stop.” I shake my head. “Just don’t … I just need to—” and I’m going to say
think a minute
but instead there is the sudden press of lips and faces, tongues in each other’s mouths like every stunted
love you
is hidden in the wet darkness there. I could act surprised, but this is why I came here, isn’t it? This is what I’ve wanted since the morning he turned up. I get my arms around his neck, hard and clutching. After a moment, I hear him say my name.

It didn’t take long to get from the Prime Meridian to the crumbling stucco house where Sawyer was living with a bunch of his buddies. He clicked the radio off as he coasted up the driveway, took me by the hand and led me up the stairs of a small deck, through the unlocked back door. The kitchen was illuminated by a coiled fluorescent bulb affixed to the ceiling that cast a greenish tinge over the speckled linoleum, the ancient appliances: pretty much what I’d expected, save for—I noted with a little smile—a plastic bowl of pomegranates on the table.

“So who exactly lives here?” I asked finally. He hadn’t spoken since inviting me over, but as he shrugged out of his hoodie he answered easily, like there hadn’t even been a pause.

“Well, me and Iceman, plus Animal’s brother Lou, and Lou’s friend Charlie, all the time. But usually there are some other people staying over.” Sawyer paused, moved toward the fridge. “I think everybody’s probably gone for the night, though. You hungry?”

I shook my head.

“Me neither,” he agreed and kissed me, pressing me back against the fridge and tracing the line of my jaw. It felt like my entire body was liquefying. Goosebumps popped up on my arms, and I couldn’t get over the notion that the floor wasn’t quite even. The blood, I thought vaguely, was having a hard time getting to the places it needed to be.

“You cold?” he asked, when my frigid hands grazed the back of his neck, the tag at the collar of his T-shirt.

“No.”

“Okay.” Then, in my ear, though there was no one around to hear him even if he yelled: “Do you want to get out of this kitchen?”

“Um.” Just for one second, I let go of him to brace one arm behind me, against the handle on the refrigerator door. I felt like the cats I’d sometimes see stopped cold in the middle of the road late at night as I drove home from Shelby’s. Like I’d gotten to the top of the high dive and suddenly remembered that I didn’t know how to swim.

It wasn’t the God thing. I was a habitual Catholic, not a devout one; my religion was incidental to whatever was going on here. I was just—afraid. Not in a bad
way, necessarily, but the way I’d been brought up to fear hurricanes: something powerful coming, better board up the glass.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” he said, gently prying my hand off the door, linking our fingers together. Just—of course he would know. “We can stay right here.”

“No.” I shook my head, stubborn. “Let’s go.”

Sawyer looked at me closely, one hand cupping the side of my face. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Reena—”

“Sawyer. You’ve done it before, right?”

“Yeah, Reena.” He smiled in that half-bashful way he had sometimes, glancing down. “I’ve done it before.”

“Well, then,” I said. “Show me how.”

He nodded, bit his bottom lip. “Okay.”

Sawyer’s bedroom smelled lemony, Pledge layered on top of pot. He didn’t bother with a light—in fact, I wasn’t even sure if there was one—but I could see in the glow of the fixture in the hallway that his room was neat and orderly and sparse. I glanced around: a freestanding bookshelf, an expensive-looking stereo sitting on the floor, a mattress with no box spring. The closet was a little bit open, and inside was an enormous pile of junk—sneakers, books, other teenage-boy refuse I couldn’t see clearly in the half-light. I smiled. Cade was famous for that at home, dumping all his crap into his closet or shoving it under his bed on the occasions when
Soledad forbade him to come downstairs until his room was clean—holidays, mostly, or when we were having company.

Pledge. Company. I cocked my head to the side. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Hmm? Shoot.” He reached down and flicked the power button on the stereo, fiddled with the radio dial; we could get the USF station, sometimes, and Sawyer had told me once that they did a good blues show late at night.

“Did you clean for me?”

“What? No.” He straightened up a little too quickly, ran a hand through his hair a little too fast. “No. Why?”

“You did. You cleaned for me.”

“Reena …” He looked embarrassed. “I don’t want you to think I was, like, planning on bringing you back here.”

I perched on the edge of the bed, smirked at him. “You weren’t?”

“Well…” He shook his head. “I don’t know, Reena. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t think about it. And this place is a dump.”

“It’s not a dump,” I lied.

“It’s a dump. And if you were going to come here, I wanted it to at least be a dump where there’s not shit everywhere.”

“Who
are
you?” I asked, laughing. I felt drunk, almost. I was glad to be sitting down.

“You know who I am,” he said, and I was about to reply, but Sawyer LeGrande was gently, so gently, pushing
me backward into his bed, and that was the end of that. “Reena,” he muttered. “You need to tell me if you want to stop, okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, and smiled. “I really don’t.”

He kissed me for a long time, on top of the sheets and then underneath them. My shirt hit the bedroom floor with a sigh. There was a small but unmistakable scar on his chest, from the surgery he’d had when he was little; he was salty like the ocean and I was fascinated by the way he was put together, the dips between his fingers and the muscles in his back. I reached for the button on his Levi’s, and Sawyer took a deep, shaky breath. “We’re gonna go slow, okay?” he told me. “We’re gonna go so slow.”

*

I wanted to stay awake when it was over. I wanted to look carefully, to remember every single detail so I could write it all down later and not lose it, not ever, but I felt sleepy and sluggish, like I was trying to swim through syrup. “Can you stay here?” he mumbled, and I don’t remember replying, but when I woke up the dawn was dripping gray outside, and I was all alone.

I reached down to the chilly hardwood to retrieve my T-shirt, tried to think and not to panic. I hadn’t heard him leave. His roommates would be back by now, wouldn’t they? What the hell was I going to do, just wander downstairs and say hi? I felt freaked out and weirdly disoriented, totally and completely out of my league.

I got dressed as quickly as possible, crossed the room to nudge my feet into my flip-flops where they’d landed in the corner near the window. I braced my hand on the sill to keep my balance, was looking down when something shiny caught my eye: Tucked in a pair of Sawyer’s hipster sneakers was a crumpled plastic baggie, the cellophane catching the light. Inside that was half a dozen little white pills.

Holy
shit.

They could be aspirin, I told myself as I bent down to fish them out, knowing even as the explanation occurred to me that I was being totally ridiculous. There was no way this wasn’t bad news. They were probably painkillers, I thought with a grim kind of realization, but clearly Sawyer wasn’t about to pop ’em for an end-of-the-day headache.

I was wondering if there was a way for me to slip out of the house without anyone noticing when I heard somebody in the hallway; I shoved the baggie back where I’d found it, wedged my flip-flops successfully onto my feet. Sawyer nudged the door open, a fat pomegranate in each hand. “Hey, lady,” he said easily, grinning at me like his was a world where good things happened often, and like—just possibly—I was one. “How’d you sleep?”

“Um.” I exhaled, grateful he hadn’t caught me snooping. In spite of everything, I felt myself smile at the sight of him, sleep-rumpled and happy. He’d pulled a pair of jeans on, last night’s shirt. “Hey,” I said. “Good.”

He handed me one of the pomegranates, sat down cross-legged on the bed. “You okay?”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded. “I just woke up, and…” I stopped. It sounded silly now, the idea that I thought he’d disappeared on me.

“What’d you think, I left?” He kissed the side of my forehead. “Man, you think I am such a weasel.” He cracked open his pomegranate, swearing softly as the juice dripped onto his sheets. He dug at the seeds for a minute and then held up a hunk of the rind. He looked curious. “What happens if I eat the hard part?” he wanted to know.

I looked at him, still smiling, the warm flush of his full attention; even the pills seemed less sinister all of a sudden, that sharp slice of panic already fading away. Maybe I was wrong, I thought. Maybe I really didn’t know what I’d seen. “A pomegranate grows in your stomach,” I told him.

“Really?”

“If you’re lucky.”

Sawyer grinned and sank down on the mattress beside me. “Oh, I’m real lucky,” he said.

*

It was close to lunchtime when Sawyer drove me home. I crept in through the back door, hoping to sneak straight upstairs, but my father was in the kitchen drinking coffee. “How was Shelby’s?” he asked me quietly, one thumb ringing around the edge of his mug.

“Good,” I said.

“Good,” he repeated. Then, as I made for the staircase: “Reena.”

Uh-oh. I turned around, eyes widening. I felt like he could see right through my skin. “Yup?”

“Sit down.”

“I was just going to—”

“
Serena.
” His voice rose suddenly, and I thought of Moses on Mount Sinai, the voice of God and the burning bush. “I don’t know if you were or were not with Shelby last night, but I do know that this needs to stop right now.”

I blinked, tried ignorance. My cheeks were very warm. “What does?”

His eyes narrowed. “Please don’t insult me.”

“I’m not,” I said. I was holding on to the edge of the countertop, clutching at it with my fingertips. “I don’t mean to.”

“Please don’t think I’m so ignorant that I don’t know what’s going on with you and Sawyer, all right?” He looked so uncomfortable that I almost felt sorry for him. “I might not know what, exactly—and I get the feeling, quite frankly, that I don’t
want
to know exactly what—but I am telling you now that you need to put a stop to it before you do something you’ll regret.”

I glanced instinctively out the window, but of course there was nothing to see there: I’d had Sawyer drop me halfway down the block.

My father saw me looking, rubbed a hand across the side
of his face. “Reena,” he said, more softly this time. “I love you. But you are on very thin ice here. And I don’t think you understand what you’re dealing with.”

I squinted at him. “Meaning …”

“Meaning, Sawyer has a lot of problems.”

Bald denial was my first instinct. “Oh, Daddy, he does not.”

“There are things you don’t know about him, Serena. There are things you don’t know about the world. And maybe that’s my fault, maybe I’ve kept you from—”