Point of Retreat (10 page)

and
hands
…

The point of retreat

Is no longer a
factor

When
both
sides of the line

Agree to
surrender

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve
lost
…

Or is it how many times you’ve
won?

This game we’ve been playing for fifty-nine weeks

I’d say the score

is

none

to

none.

Twenty-two hours and our war begins

Our war of
limbs

and
lips

and
hands…

The best part of finally

Not
calling retreat?

The showers above us

Raining down on our feet

While the
bombs
are
exploding
and the
guns
fire their
rounds
. Before the
two
of us
collapse
to the
ground.
Before the
battle,
before the
war…

You need to
know

I’d go fifty-nine
more.

Whatever it
takes
to let you
win.

I’d retreat all
over

and all
over

and
over

again.

I back away from the microphone and find the stairs. I’m not even halfway back to the booth when Lake throws her arms around my neck and kisses me. “Thank you,” she whispers in my ear.

When I slide into the booth, Caulder rolls his eyes. “You could have warned us, Will. We would have hid in the bathroom.”

“I thought it was beautiful,” Kiersten says.

It’s after nine when round two gets underway. “Come on kids, you guys have school tomorrow. We need to go,” I say. They all whine as they slide out of the booth one by one.

***

Once we get home, the kids head into the houses and Lake and I linger in the driveway, hugging. It's getting harder and harder to be separated from her at night, knowing she’s just yards away. It's become a nightly struggle not to text her and beg her to come crawl in bed with me. Now that our promise to Julia has been fulfilled, I have a feeling nothing will stop us after tomorrow night. Well, other than the fact that we're trying to set a good example for Kel and Caulder. But there's ways to sneak around that.

I slide my hands up the back of her shirt to warm them. They’re freezing. She apparently thinks so too and begins to squirm, trying to get out of my grasp.

"Your hands are freezing!" she laughs, still trying to pull away from me.

I just squeeze her tighter. "I know. That's why you need to be still so I can warm them up." I rub them against her skin, attempting to keep the mental images of tomorrow night from overtaking my thoughts at the moment. It's so distracting. I remove my hands from underneath her shirt and wrap my arms around her.

“So. Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” I ask her.

She shoots me a dirty look. “Do you want me to punch you in the face or the nuts?”

I laugh, but prepare to defend myself just in case. “My grandparents are worried the boys will get bored at their house, so they want to keep them at my house instead. The
good
news is, we can’t stay at your house now so I booked us two nights in a hotel in Detroit.”

“That’s not bad news. Don’t scare me like that,” she says.

"I just thought you would be a little apprehensive about seeing my grandmother. I know how you feel about her.”

She looks at me and frowns. “Don’t, Will. You know good and well it’s not how I feel about
her.
She hates me!”

“She doesn’t hate you,” I say. “She’s just protective of me.” I wrap my arms around her tighter and try to push the thought out of her mind by kissing her ear.

“Well, it’s your fault she hates me anyway.”

I pull back and look at her. “My fault? How is it my fault?”

She rolls her eyes. “Your graduation? You don’t remember what you said the first night I met her?”

I don’t remember. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I try to remember, but nothing comes to mind.

“Will, we were all over each other. After your graduation when we all went out to eat, you could barely
talk
you were kissing me so much. It was making your grandmother really uncomfortable. When she asked you how long we’d been dating, you told her eighteen hours! How do you think that made me look?”

I remember now. That dinner was really fun. It felt great not to be ethically bound from putting my hands all over her, so that's all I did all night long.

“But it’s sort of true,” I say. “We were only officially dating for eighteen hours.”

Lake hits me on the arm. “She thinks I’m a slut, Will! It’s embarrassing!”

I touch my lips against her ear again. “Not yet, you’re not,” I tease.

She pushes me away and points to herself. “You aren’t getting any more of this for twenty-four hours.” She laughs and starts to walk backwards up her driveway.

“Twenty-one,” I correct her.

She reaches the front door and turns and goes inside without so much as a goodnight kiss.
What a tease
! She’s not getting the upper hand tonight. I run up the driveway and open her front door and pull her back outside. I push her against the brick wall of the entryway and look her in the eyes as I press my body against hers. She’s trying to look mad, but I can see the corner of her mouth break out into a smile. Our hands interlock and I bring them above her head and press them against the wall. “Listen to me very carefully,” I whisper. I continue to look her in the eyes. She listens. She likes it when I try to intimidate her. “I don’t want you to pack a damn thing. I want you to wear exactly what you were wearing last Friday night. Do you still have that ugly shirt?”

She smiles and nods. I don’t think she could speak right now if she wanted to.

“Good. What you’re wearing when we leave tomorrow night is the only thing you’re allowed to bring. No pajamas….no extra clothes. Nothing. I want you to meet me at my house at seven o’clock tomorrow night. Do you understand?”

She nods again. Her pulse is racing against my chest and I can tell by the look in her eyes that she needs me to kiss her. My hands remain clasped with hers against the wall as I move my mouth closer to her lips. I hesitate at the last minute and decide not to kiss her. I slowly drop her hands and back away from her and make my way back to the house. When I reach my front door, I turn around and she’s still leaning against the brick in the same position.
Good.
I got the upper hand this time.

Friday, January 20
^th
, 2012

Lake will never read my journal, so I should say what’s really on my mind, right? Even if she does read this, it’ll be after I’m dead when she’s sorting through my things. So technically, maybe one day she will actually read this. But it won’t matter by then, ‘cause I’ll be dead.

So, Lake…if you’re reading this…I’m sorry I’m dead.

But for right now, in this moment…I am so alive. So very much alive. Tonight is the night. It’s been worth the wait. All fifty-nine weeks of it. (Over seventy if you count from our first date)

So, I’ll just say what’s on my mind, okay?

Sex.

Sex, sex, sex. I’m having sex tonight. Making love. Butterflying. Whatever you want to call it, we’ll be doing it.

And I can’t freaking wait.

Chapter Six

I want today to be perfect, so I decide to skip school, clean the house and finalize our plans before my grandparents arrive. I can’t believe how nervous I am. Or maybe it’s excitement. I don’t know what it is; I just know I want the day to hurry the hell up.

On my way home from picking the boys up from school, we stop at the store to get a few things for dinner. We don’t have plans to leave until seven so I text my grandfather and tell them I’m cooking for them. I’m baking basagna. Julia said to wait for a good day to bake it again…and it’s definitely a good day. I’m running behind when I see their headlights through the living room window. I haven’t even showered yet and I still need to cook the breadsticks.

“Caulder, Grandma and Grandpa are here, go open the door!”

He doesn’t need to, they open the door anyway. Without knocking, of course. My grandmother walks through the door first so I walk over to her and kiss her on the cheek.

“Hi, Sweetie,” she says. “What smells so good?”

“Basagna.” I walk to my grandfather and give him a hug.

“
Basagna
?” she says.

I shake my head and laugh. “Lasagna, I mean.”

My grandmother smiles at me and it reminds of my mom. They were almost identical. She and my grandfather are both tall and thin, just like my mom. A lot of people find my grandmother intimidating, but I find it hard to be intimidated by her. I’ve spent so much time with her; it feels like she’s my own mother sometimes.

My grandfather sets their bags down by the front door and they follow me into the kitchen. “Will, have you heard of this twitter?” He brings his glasses to the edge of his nose and looks down at his phone.

My grandmother looks at me and shakes her head. “He got one of those intelligent phones. Now he’s trying to twit the President.”

“Smart phones
,
” I correct her. “And it’s tweet, not twit.”

“He follows me,” my grandfather says, defensively. “I’m not kidding, he really does! I got a message yesterday that said ‘The President is now following you.’”

“That’s cool, Grandpa. But no, I don’t tweet.”

“Well, you should. A young man your age needs to stay ahead of the game when it comes to the social media.”

“I’ll be fine,” I assure him. I put the breadsticks in the oven and start to grab plates out of the cabinet.

“Let me do that, Will,” my grandmother says, pulling the plates out of my hands.

“Hey Grandma, hey Grandpa,” Caulder says, running into the kitchen to hug them. “Grandpa, do you remember the game we played last time you were here?”

My grandfather nods. “You mean the one where I killed twenty-six enemy soldiers?”

“Yeah, that one. Kel got the newest one for his birthday. You want to play it with us?”

“You bet I do!” he says, following Caulder to his bedroom.

The funny thing is, my grandfather isn’t being overdramatic for Caulder’s benefit. He genuinely wants to play.

My grandmother pulls a stack of glasses out of the cabinet and turns to me. “He’s getting worse, you know,” she says.

“How so?”

“He bought himself one of those game thingies. He’s getting all into this technology stuff. Now he’s on the twitter!” She shakes her head. “He’s always telling me things he twitted to people. I don’t get it, Will. It’s like some sort of mid-life crisis, twenty years too late.”

“It’s
tweeted.
And I think it’s cool. It gives him and Caulder a way to relate.”

She finishes filling the cups with ice and walks back to the bar. “Should I set a place for Layken, too?” she says flatly. I can tell by her tone that she’s hoping I say no.

“Yes, you should,” I say sternly.

She darts a look in my direction. “Will, I’m just going to say it.”

Oh boy, here we go.

“It’s not appropriate with the two of you just running off for the weekend like this. You aren’t even engaged yet, much less married. I just think you two rushed into things so quickly, it makes me nervous.”

I put my hands on my grandmother’s shoulders and smile reassuringly at her. “Grandma, we aren’t rushing into things, believe me. And you need to give her a chance, she’s amazing. Now promise me you will at least pretend to like her when she gets here. And be nice!”

She sighs. “It’s not that I don’t like her, Will. It just makes me uncomfortable, the way you two
act
together. It just seems like you’re…I don’t know… too in
love
.”

I take the pan of basagna to the table as I respond to her. “If your only complaint about her is that we’re too in love, I guess I’ll take it.”