28
Before
One damp afternoon at the end of February, I swung by the restaurant during my free period, hurrying—I wasn’t working, but I’d left my calc book in the office the night before and wanted to see if I could grab it before I had to get back to school for a newspaper meeting.
“Goddamnit,” was the first thing I heard. The restaurant was deserted—the lull between lunch and dinner—and Roger’s voice was booming from the office. “Where in the hell have you been?”
“Look, it’s not gonna happen again.” That was Sawyer. Sawyer was here. I froze. Where had he been? He’d been gone? I hadn’t seen him in weeks, since the night I’d stayed over, but I figured he’d been avoiding me.
“You bet your ass it won’t. We’re not doing this. I’m not going to have police officers calling my house. I’m not having you disappearing for weeks at a time. If you want to live in that squalor and throw away your education and ruin your life, that’s your business, but I won’t have any part of it.”
Police? What the hell had he done? I thought of the not-aspirin in his sneaker the night I’d slept over. I thought of his broken hand from last year. I stood there like I’d been hit by lightning, fingertips scrabbling the edge of a tablecloth, feeling absolutely one hundred percent rooted to the floor.
“Get out of my sight, Sawyer. I don’t even want to look at you.”
I could hear my heart beating, fast and skittish. I crept a little closer to hear. “For God’s sake, Dad—” Sawyer started, but Roger cut him off, closed for business.
“I mean it. And don’t you dare swear at me.”
“Fine.” I heard Sawyer get up, and I made for the front door as fast as humanly possible. I tried to keep it as quiet as I could, but the strap of my bag caught on the back of a chair and I had to pause to untangle it. My hands shook as I worked it free.
“Oh,” Sawyer said, when he rounded the corner and saw me. He looked pissed. “Hey.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” I replied immediately, then backtracked. “I mean. Hi. I, um, left my book.”
“In the office,” he told me with the vaguest hint of a smile—blink and gone. He hadn’t shaved. “On the desk. I figured that was yours.”
“Yeah. Well.” I started to move past him, but he caught me by the wrist.
“Where’re you going?”
“To get my book,” I said, glancing fast, down at our hands, up at his face, back down again. It came out bitchier than I meant.
“Aha.” He squeezed once, let go of my arm. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Yeah. So. I’m going to go and … do that.”
Sawyer nodded. “Okay.”
I made my way into the office, mumbled a greeting at Roger, grabbed the damn textbook, and fled back outside. Sawyer’s Jeep was parked at the curb, and he was leaning against the driver’s side, arms and ankles crossed. “Need a ride?” he asked.
I swallowed. “No.”
“Want one anyway?”
“Sawyer …” The wind was blowing. A car sped by. “I have a meeting.”
He shrugged. “Skip it.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Are you kidding me? I almost asked. Because I’m trying to get you out of my system. Because I don’t always like the way I act when I’m with you. Because we had sex, and you fell off the face of the earth.
“Why did the cops call your house?” I asked instead. Sawyer grinned. “I thought you didn’t hear anything.”
“I lied.”
“Fair enough. Take a ride with me and I’ll tell you.”
“That’s how girls get killed.”
“How’s that?”
“They get in the car with sketchy guys.”
Sawyer just cocked an eyebrow. “A walk, then.”
I should have said no. I should have gone to my stupid meeting. I should have done basically anything else besides what I actually wound up doing, but that had never stopped me before when it came to Sawyer, and even as I thought about the abject hell these last few weeks had been, I nodded instead. “A quick one,” I said after a minute. “Around the block.”
Sawyer nodded once, considering. “Around the block,” he said.
We set off in the direction of Grove Street underneath the bright February sky—past a jewelry store, the dry cleaners. This felt a little ridiculous. For a while, neither one of us talked. “So here I am,” I told him finally. “Walking. What did the police want?”
Sawyer shrugged. “I got in a little trouble at a bar. Drank too much.”
I rolled my eyes before I could stop it. “Do you think that makes you more interesting or something?”
“Hmm?” That got his attention. “What’s that?”
“The whole brooding, king-of-pain thing you do.” I felt punch-drunk. He was gone already; I had nothing to lose. “I mean, I know girls fall for it. I fell for it. But do you think it makes you more interesting? Because, you know?” I shrugged. “It doesn’t.”
“No.” Sawyer smirked a little, impossible to read. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Go ahead,” he allowed. “Hit me.”
“Why did you waste your time with me?” I was comforted by the rhythm of my boots on the sidewalk, for some reason found courage there. “I mean, those girls … the ones at your concert, or the ones who come into the restaurant. I feel like they probably would have … I feel like it probably would have taken at least a little less effort with them. Less of a preamble.”
Sawyer stopped walking. “I don’t want them. I told you that.”
“Right. You hate your type.”
“Reena, I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, cutting him off, lying. “I mean, I wasn’t really expecting anything from you anyway.”
“Ouch.” Sawyer exhaled, ran his tongue over his teeth. “You should talk to my dad.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. Poor you. When really you’re just full of garbage, and I don’t know why I let you get to me like that when I’m going to leave in a few months anyway, and probably never come back in a million years unless it’s Christmas and I need someone to buy me a coat. Or something.”
“I know you’re getting out of here, Reena.” Sawyer sighed. “You don’t need to play the smart card with me, okay? I know how smart you are. Look,” he said, grabbing my wrist again, pulling me around a corner with enough force that my backpack thudded off the side of the building. My heart was banging away behind my ribs. “I got a little skittish, okay? I do that sometimes. Get a little freaked. But I don’t want to do that with you. I don’t want to get scared.”
I huffed a bit. “Stop it.”
“I’m serious,” he said softly. He had both wrists, and then he slid his grip down so he was holding my hands. “And I know you have no reason to believe me. I probably wouldn’t believe me. I’d probably think I was full of shit. But I like you.”
I shook my head, stubborn. “Right.”
“I do. I like your brain.” Sawyer grinned. “And I like the rest of you, too, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Somewhere in my head, a little pilot in a little airplane was doing his best to prevent a fiery crash, shouting mayday with no one to hear. “Cut it out,” I managed, but by this point I wasn’t fooling either one of us. “I’m not kidding.”
“Me neither.”
“You wouldn’t have ever said another word to me if I hadn’t been—”
“You’re wrong,” he interrupted. “It would have taken me a little time, probably. But I would have gotten there.”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“I’ll have to prove otherwise.”
I shifted my weight from boot to boot, uncertain. A silent war was raging in my chest. “I’m serious about the college thing,” I told him finally, as if it was some kind of compromise—an escape hatch, a contingency plan, a way to protect my heart. “I’m gonna hear from schools soon. I’m not long for this world.”
“Duly noted.” Sawyer smiled. “But I want to be with you.”
“Do you always get what you want?” I started, but I only got halfway through that particular inquiry because Sawyer was leaning in and kissing me up against the side of the building, warm hands on either side of my face. And in the heat thrown from his body, somehow my questions evaporated into the humid Florida air.