36
Before
Ms. Bowen wasn’t thrilled with me for skipping our meeting. “That was really unlike you, Reena,” she chided, a way colder tone than she’d ever used with me before. She was wearing her glasses today, a smart-looking tortoiseshell pair. “Not to mention disrespectful to me.”
“I know.” I felt myself wilt a bit under her gaze. “I’m sorry.” On top of that, my AP Lit teacher was a hard-ass, and when I couldn’t produce a doctor’s note he docked me two full letter grades on the Tolstoy quiz.
I stared at the bright red C at the top of my make-up quiz, feeling sick. This definitely wouldn’t happen again, I promised myself, trying to avoid a full-on freak-out in the middle of the hallway. I couldn’t keep letting Sawyer distract me from what I was actually supposed to be doing if I was serious about graduating early.
My resolve didn’t last long, though: A week or so later and I was a third of the way through a busy-ish dinner service at the restaurant, heading back to the kitchen for another basket of bread for the carb-happy tourists at a two-top in the back, when Sawyer yanked me by the wrist into the office.
“Wha—” I started, eyes going wide, but he was busy shoving the door shut behind us and then pressing me up against it, a kiss like a leash of deer rushing fleetly through my chest. He tasted like chewing gum, and under that like beer. “So how’s your night going, honey?” I murmured against the sharp, sleek line of his jaw.
Sawyer grinned once, hard and bright, two warm hands against the base of my ribs where my button-down had come untucked (or, more accurately, where he’d untucked it). “My night’s great,” he said, and kissed me again.
I closed my eyes and sank into it a little, my fists opening and closing against the starchy fabric of his work shirt. Sawyer was a good kisser. He had one hand behind my neck now, fingertips in my hair and tugging my head back just the slightest bit so he could get to the pale, sensitive skin underneath my collar; he was working one knee ever so slowly between mine when the door to the office opened hard behind me.
I stumbled forward into Sawyer, then turned around. There was my father, eyes dark and angry, jaw clenched hard. For a second, all he did was stare.
“Um,” I said, hand flying to my mouth before I could quell the impulse, wiping with the back of my hand. Behind me, Sawyer cleared his throat. “We were just—”
“Don’t.” Two bright pops of color stood out against the skin on either side of his face. He opened his mouth and then shut it again, like it was taking every ounce of human restraint not to let both of us have it at the top of his lungs in front of the Holy Father and the seventy-five guests in the dining room. “Get back on the bar before I fire you,” he managed finally, looking at Sawyer. “Now.”
Sawyer nodded obediently, smoothed down the front of his shirt, and stepped around me toward the door. I moved to follow, my face even redder than my father’s, but he got a hand around my elbow, tight enough to hurt. “You,” he said quietly. “You stay.”
“Leo—” Sawyer started.
“Sawyer, I swear to God that if you don’t get out of my sight in another second, you’re going to see a side of me you’ve never seen before, and I promise you you’re not going to like it.”
Sawyer went.
My father shut the door hard behind him and turned to deal with me. “Are you kidding me?” he demanded. He only held my gaze for a fraction of a second, like it was hard for him to maintain the eye contact. He went to the desk and dug a bottle of aspirin out of the top drawer, swallowed two without the benefit of water. “I mean it. I honestly don’t know how to handle you lately. I really don’t.”
“Daddy,” I said, trying to keep calm, the way I’d been taught to deal with an irate customer. “We were only just—”
“You were only just what, Serena?” he retorted, literally throwing up his hands. The phone rang on the desk, a noisy jangle, but he acted like he didn’t even hear. His eyes darted to my untucked shirt. “Fooling around in my office and who knows what else? I’m not going to stand for it. I’m not.”
I fiddled a bit with the computer wires hanging off the edge of the desk. To be fair, the office was a colossally bone-headed location for us to have chosen—it was hard for me to keep a sweaty grip on logic where Sawyer was concerned. “I’m sorry,” I said, as sincerely as I could manage. I wanted so badly to calm him down. “That was dumb.”
“It was,” he agreed, rubbing at his tawny forehead, “but I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry. I’m tired of hearing that. I’ve treated you like an adult, Reena. I’ve trusted you even when it was difficult for me. I know you’ve had a hard time this year, and I haven’t forbidden you to see Sawyer so far, but I will if it’s the only way to get through to you.” It was getting dark; outside the window I could see the light changing, purples and blues. “I’m worried about you, Reena. Do you understand me? More than worried. I’m terrified.”
“Of what?” I demanded shrilly. “What exactly are you so worried about?”
My father stared at me like I was a child, like I honestly had no idea how the world worked. “Listen to me,” he said slowly, looking me in the eye for the first time since he’d walked into the office. “I’m your father. And I’m worried you’re going to make a mistake that I’m not going to be able to fix.”
I felt my spine straighten. I was tired of my father’s religion, of his judgment and his guilt and the oppressive smell of incense; I wasn’t a very good rule breaker, but I was tired of being so well-behaved. At times like this I couldn’t wait to leave for Northwestern, to be out from under his watchful, tyrannical eye—although that, of course, would mean leaving Sawyer, too.
“You are so beautiful,” my father told me, almost pleading. “And you are so bright. I cannot for the life of me understand why you’d want to risk throwing all that away for—”
“I’m not throwing anything away!” My voice rose dangerously. “I’m sixteen. I have a boyfriend. It’s normal. Not for me up to now, maybe, but for other people that’s normal. Can you please just relax and let me have some kind of a life?”
My father laughed at that, low and quiet and disbelieving. “Reena,” he told me softly, “that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”
I opened my mouth to reply but he was finished with me by that point, heading for the desk to get whatever it was he’d come for in the first place. “Go back to your tables,” he said, almost absent. “And for God’s sake, tuck in your shirt.”
*
I don’t know when it first occurred to me that my father wasn’t the only one who wasn’t crazy about the idea of Sawyer and me. Lydia was looking at us sideways, for sure. “Your mom thinks I’m an idiot,” I told him after one particularly awkward encounter in the parking lot of Antonia’s, Lydia offering me a ride home in a way that felt an awful lot like a demand and me fumbling my way toward admitting I was actually headed to her son’s. Sawyer laughed like he thought I was kidding. I wasn’t entirely sure.
“She’s a bully, that’s all,” Shelby said when I told her about it during the free period we shared—how tongue-tied I felt around Lydia, how’d I’d watched her bring a burly line cook near tears with a cool, sharp reprimand about the quality of our hollandaise and then found myself completely unable to string a sentence together when she asked me a totally simple question about the new spring schedule. How she’d shot me a bored, irritated look and walked away. “You just have to stand up to her. It’s like when you punch the meanest kid on the playground.”
I snorted so loudly the study hall proctor shot me an irritated glare, her enormous glasses slipping down her oily nose. I glanced down at the article about the jazz band’s spring concert I was supposed to be writing, then back at Shelby. “You want me to punch Lydia LeGrande?”
“Oh my God, yes. With every fiber of my being, I want that.” Shelby laughed and reached forward across her desk, tugged my braid reassuringly. “Just watch, Reena. She’ll never know what hit her.”