How to Love (26 page)

“Nicely done.” I sink down into the rocker, exhausted.

“Go put your pajamas on,” Sawyer says, noticing how tired I am. I probably look like garbage, though I can’t exactly bring myself to care. “Are you hungry?”

I shake my head. “I ate, like, three packs of M&Ms while we were waiting,” I tell him, accepting the hand he offers to help me to my feet.

“I know,” Sawyer says. He closes the door to the nursery behind him as we step into the hallway, leaving it open a crack so that a sliver of light falls onto the gray carpet inside. “I watched you. You’re an impressive woman. You want real dinner, though?”

“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, since you feel so strongly about it.” He grins. “I’ll run downstairs and see what’s in the fridge. You go take your clothes off.”

“Shut up.” I pad down the hallway to my room and change, hastily rebraid my hair. By the time I make it down the stairs, Sawyer has warmed leftovers from tonight’s dinner—Stef must have cleaned up while she was waiting for us, and there are several neat Tupperware containers stacked on the counter. Sawyer’s tuned Soledad’s little radio to the university station, and Billie Holiday croons about her bad, bad man.

“Wanna get tanked?” he asks, poking his head out from behind the fridge door. He is holding out a bottle of white wine.

I raise my eyebrows. “I thought you don’t drink anymore.”

“I don’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t.”

“No thanks.” I hop up onto the counter as he replaces it. “Did you go to a program?”

“Hmm?”

“To quit drinking.”

“Oh. No. I just kind of stopped.”

“Wow.”

“I wasn’t an alcoholic. I was just stupid.” He shrugs elegantly. “The Oxy, though, that I needed a little help with. What?” he asks, of my presumably gobsmacked expression. He nods as he eats a forkful of rice out of one of the containers. “I went for, like, a month in Tucson.”

I blink. “Before or after the farm?”

“Before.” He glances at me, amused. “Is it so hard to believe?”

“That you went to rehab? Kind of.”

Sawyer shrugs. “Don’t spread it around, okay? Don’t want people to think I’ve lost my edge.” He smiles, looks out the window at the shadowy yard. “But it was good. I had quite the habit when I left here, kiddo.”

No kidding. I think of the not-aspirin in Sawyer’s shoe the first night we were together, of Animal and Lauren Werner and the low-slung stucco house. I think of how it felt to lose him, slow and painful and confusing, and how it felt to wonder if I’d ever really had him at all. “Yeah,” I say slowly. “I remember.”

We’re quiet for a minute, the both of us. Finally I clear my throat. “Do your parents know?” I ask him, my voice sounding loud in the empty kitchen. “That you went?”

“Nope.” He shakes his head. He took his ridiculous tie
off at some point, dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar and sleeves rolled halfway up to his elbows. “Nobody does. I mean,” he amends. “You do, now.”

I think about that for a minute. “I wish you’d said something.”

“Really?” He looks interested.

“Yeah,” I reply, smiling a little. “I might have hated you a little less.”

Sawyer grins back. “Probably not.”

“Well, no, probably not.” I pick a bit at the food on my plate. “But it couldn’t have been easy.”

“I mean, it didn’t tickle.” Sawyer shrugs. “They had a twenty-four-hour Slurpee machine, though.”

Aha.
I wrinkle my nose. “There’s that lightbulb,” I say, feeling sort of embarrassed and not entirely sure why. There’s still so much about him I don’t know. “Cheaper than booze.”

“Cheaper than a lot of things,” he tells me, and we sink into silence after that. Still, I’m glad he’s here. I’ve relaxed: My heartbeat has timed itself to the rhythm of the music coming from the radio, syrupy slow, and
that
realization is all it takes to send me into a fresh panic. I sent my father to the hospital today. I humiliated my family. I’m a mess, miserably and in public, in so many senses of the word.

“Hey,” Sawyer says. “Cut it out.”

I blink. “Cut what out?”

“You didn’t give your dad a heart attack.”

“What?” For one crazy moment I think he’s actually read my mind, but Sawyer just shrugs.

“That’s what you were doing, right?” he asks. “Kicking the shit out of yourself for speaking up for once in your life?”

I consider denial, decide it’s worthless. “Among other things.”

“Well, cut it out. Look,” he says. “You know I love your father like he is my father. I know he freaking hates me now, and that’s fine, but he was never anything but good to me when I was a kid, and I don’t hold it against him. But I know how he works. And I know how it must have been for you. Everything you said to him tonight?” Sawyer shakes his head. “He more than had it coming.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe,” he says. He steps forward, right into my personal space. My breath hitches a little. “I’m telling you the truth.”

There’s a lean—oh
God
, there is definitely a lean here, so close I can see the amber flecks in his green eyes—but in the end I jump down off the counter, evading. This day has gone on for years, and I don’t need one more dangerous thing.

“I think I’m going to try bed,” I tell him, putting a safe amount of space between us, the clean expanse of kitchen tile. “Want me to get you set up on the couch?”

Sawyer raises one dark eyebrow. “I think I can manage.”

“Okay then.” We load our plates into the dishwasher. I give the counters a perfunctory wipe. The moon washes in through the window, silver-pale.

It wasn’t long after the night he snuck into my house that Sawyer started taking me to parties on the outskirts of Hollywood—crowded affairs in rented bungalows far from the shoreline, thirty-racks of Bud Light in the fridge. “We’ll just stop by for a minute,” he always said before we got there, but in the end a minute usually took an hour or more. He held my hand at first, introduced me to a friend of Animal’s or a girl who’d graduated from my high school a year or two ago, before he drifted away, promising me he’d be right back, always, that he just had to talk to this guy really quick, take care of this one thing.

“Unless you want to …,” he always began, then trailed off, leaving me to fill in the blanks on my own: unless I
wanted to relax, finally, to let go of my mad grab for control and be, finally, finally, like everyone else. To pull off my armor. To make him happy.
Unless you want to.

I didn’t want to, was the problem, and so I sat on the counter in any number of kitchens, drinking warm beer out of a red plastic cup and watching the minutes go by on the digital clock on the microwave, hoping no one said anything to me as they moved through the room, and wishing I was home watching reruns with Soledad. My stepmother believed in dinner parties and barbecues at dusk, events that required invitations and drinks with stirs and a glass jug full of daises on the counter. “Reena, sweetheart,” she would have said, if she had known how I was spending my nights, “this is not what we do.”

I didn’t like to think about Soledad when I was in those kitchens. I didn’t like to think about much of anything, is the truth, and so I played games to keep myself occupied: Count the Drunk People, or Things I Wish I Was Doing Right Now. Once, I brought a book and hid in the pantry to read it.

Sawyer always wandered back eventually, blissed-out and mellow, quite literally feeling no pain. He was always glad to see me, though my moods were a little more unpredictable: Sometimes I was so grateful he’d turned up that I’d be super friendly, winding myself around him before we even made it home. Other times I was tired and annoyed. Tonight Sawyer was sleepy-eyed and flushed when he
ambled in from the living room, and me? I was ready to kill him.

I’d been perched next to the kitchen sink, kicking at the cabinets and listening to the party sounds as bodies drifted in and out of the room. I’d by mistake put my hand in something sticky on the counter and was rubbing my palm on my jeans when Lauren crashed through the door like a tidal wave. She was wearing a drapey blue shirt and a pair of cowboy boots I’d seen in a magazine, and she was grinning widely.

“Hey, Serena!” she said too loudly. It sounded like a slap. I flinched as she got closer, peered into my cup. “You still working on that same beer?”

I tried for a smile, probably missed. “Still working.”

“Good girl, good girl. Can I ask you a question?” She hopped up beside me on the counter, bumped her shoulder at mine like we were old friends. “Is it true that your family is, like, crazy religious? Is that why you don’t really party?”

“I don’t know that I’d call them crazy religious—” I began, wondering if Sawyer had, but Lauren plowed ahead.

“That’s cool, if they are. I didn’t mean to pry. I just always feel like Catholicism is one of those religions that makes girls either really frigid or really fun, you know?” Lauren laughed. “Anyway, I just left your boyfriend in the other room. He is
fuuuucked
up.” She tapped her nose and
sniffed daintily. “Good luck getting him home tonight.”

Oh God. I closed my eyes for a moment. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what Sawyer was doing with the pills he’d started to carry with him more and more frequently—
OxyContin produces a high similar to heroin when crushed and snorted
, thanks for the tip, Wikipedia—but hearing it from Lauren, like it was a private joke between her and Sawyer …

I wanted to find him, to take us both out of here, step on the gas and figure out what to do after that. I remembered, suddenly, the nights I’d spent at Antonia’s when I was twelve and thirteen, sitting in a booth by the door, drinking coffee and reading while my father and Roger and Finch closed up. I wanted my father now, was the truth. The clock on the microwave said it wasn’t quite midnight, and I was thinking everyone would still be at the restaurant: Lauren was a straitjacket and I was trying to formulate an escape the likes of which would have impressed Houdini himself, but the truth is I was too slow and stupid, and Harry drowned to death in the end.

“You know,” Lauren was telling me, still chatting, an alcoholic lilt in her voice, “Sawyer and I used to come to parties here all the time, when we were together.”

No.

He’d told me no. He’d told me that he and Lauren had never been together—but somehow I’d known, hadn’t I? Otherwise why would I have asked?

I blinked. “That right?”

She was a little drunk, but not so far gone that the hard metallic glint was gone from her eyes. “Sorry. Is this, like, weird for you?”

“What?” I shook my head stupidly. “No. No, go ahead.”

“It was nothing. I mean, we were just kids. It was in high school. We were both pretty wasted all the time, and, like, sixteen. We were a mess. It was comical.”

Yeah, pretty damn comical. You should take that act on the road, really—brilliant stuff. I gripped the counter. I felt sick to my stomach. I had to get out of there.

Lauren’s phone rang and she fished it out of her back pocket, nearly dropping it twice. “Ooh, I gotta get this,” she said cheerfully, looking at the caller ID. She headed for the door, weaving a little; Sawyer wandered in as she went out.

“Can we leave now?” I asked him, before hello.

Sawyer wrinkled his eyebrows and came to stand between my knees. “Sure,” he said affably, and then jerked his head toward the screen door. “There goes your friend.”

“Right. You know, we actually had a really nice heart-to-heart while you were otherwise engaged.” I hopped down from the counter, picked up my purse. “I told her about where I applied to college, and she told me how she sells herself for drug money.”

“Ouch,” he replied, following me out into the yard, around the house toward the driveway. “Those are serious
allegations from such a pristine individual. She’s not a crack whore, Reena.”

“I know. She’s the Virgin Mary.” It was the middle of April and wet everywhere; the grass was slick and stuck to my feet as I crossed the lawn. “Sleep in her bed, if you like her so much. Oh,
wait.
”

“Hey, hey.” Sawyer frowned, an edge creeping into his voice. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I like how the implication there is that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in me. Give me the car keys.”

“Is that Shakespeare?”

“‘Give me the car keys’? No, I pretty much came up with that one on my own.” I felt quick and sharp like the gleaming edge of a scalpel. I felt like I had taken something, too.

“Smart girl.”

“Give ’em.”

“What? No.” Sawyer opened the passenger side door and motioned for me to get in. “I’m fine.”

“Are you kidding? Give me your car keys or I’m calling a cab.”

“Seriously?” He rolled his eyes at me, but he handed them over. “Fine. Here. You know, Reena,” he said as I buckled. “It wouldn’t kill you to relax every once in a while.”

“And a good way for me to do that is to let you crash and kill me? Shut up, Sawyer.”

“What is your problem tonight?”

“They gave the dog beer.” I eased out of the driveway
and onto the road, jabbing halfheartedly at the radio preset buttons: I was so irritated at both of us in that moment that I wanted to drown us out. “Did you see that? They were giving that dog beer in his water dish. They thought it was really funny.”

“They didn’t hurt the dog.” Sawyer snorted a little, like I was trying to be clever. “Out of everything that was going on at that party, you’re taking issue with the dog?”

“No, actually, I’m taking issue with Lauren von Ho-Bag giving me a detailed history of her sexual exploits while I sit in the kitchen of a house where I’ve never been before and you bliss yourself out. But the dog, I have to say the dog is what really pushed me over the edge. At least everyone else was obliterated of their own accord. The poor dog was just along for the ride.”

“Is that a metaphor?”

“Do you want it to be?”

Sawyer leaned his elbow on the windowsill, rubbed at his forehead like I was an unruly child. “Can we just not do this now, please?”

“Why?” I snapped. “Am I killing your buzz?”