24
Before
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.