40
Before
Sawyer going to parties without me was almost worse than going with him. Sometimes he showed up in my driveway afterward, flicking the headlights on his Jeep, waiting in the dark until I came downstairs to let him in. I shushed him as we climbed the stairs, always terrified that tonight would be the night my father caught us. I tried not to think of where he’d just been and what he’d been doing as we lay in my bed talking about all kinds of things: music, our families, the various scientific facts Sawyer had gleaned from an early childhood spent, I learned, buried in books about the weather. “Tell me about thunderstorms,” I’d whisper sleepily. Tornadoes. Droughts.
Maybe the problems started then, when I ran out of meteorological phenomena to ask him about, or maybe they started a long time earlier, even before the night he showed up at my house way later than usual, sweaty and skittish, spacey and pale. “You okay?” I asked, once I’d locked us inside my bedroom, the two of us hidden from the sleeping world.
Sawyer nodded vaguely. “Mm-hmm.”
“You sure?”
“I said yes, sweetheart.”
He was always a patchy, haunted sleeper, but tonight he tossed more than usual, tangling the blankets, breathing hard. I ran my palm up and down his backbone, trying to quiet him down, but it was like he was waiting for something to attack. Like he wanted to get up and prowl.
“How many?” I asked finally, the third time he drifted off only to wake violently a moment later. He was making me nervous. Clearly Sawyer’s extracurriculars skewed toward the illegal, but I’d never seen him like this. I tried to remember what I’d read about how easy it was to overdose on pills. “Sawyer. Hey. How many?”
“What?” He sounded annoyed. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Sawyer—”
“Reena.” His voice was sharp. “Let it go, will you?”
Then why did you even come here? I wanted to demand. Instead I gave up, rolling over to face the wall. “Sure,” I said sullenly. I had a calc test in the morning; I was more tired than I wanted to admit. “Well, try not to die, will you?”
That got his attention. “Hey,” he said, moving closer, pressing the length of his body flush against my back, burying his face in my hair. “Hey. I’m okay, all right? I’m sorry. I’m not going to die. I was stupid tonight. I won’t do it again.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t understand what I had with Sawyer: I couldn’t figure out how he could make me so happy and so miserable all at once. But I let him hold me anyway, our pulses tapping out a syncopated rhythm, our breathing finally evening out. My eyes had been closed for a few minutes when he said it: “I love you,” he muttered, so quiet, like a prayer whispered into my neck.
“Hmm?” I was nearly asleep myself, edges blurring; I was one hundred percent sure I’d misheard.
“I love you.” He said it again, clearer this time, right into my ear, breath tickling. I felt like a hydrogen bomb. I tried to be very still, but I knew he could feel my entire body tensing, a runner ready to begin a race— Get set—
Go.
I opened my mouth, shut it again.
Oh God.
I did love him, is the awfulness of it. I’d loved Sawyer since the seventh grade, when Allie and I began keeping a list of the places we spotted him. I loved his quick, blistered musician hands and the honest soul he kept hidden safe under all his bravado, and I loved how I was still, every day, learning him. I loved his silly, secret goofy side and the way he had of making me feel like I was a tall tree, just from the way he looked at my face. I loved Sawyer LeGrande so much that sometimes I couldn’t sit still for the fullness of it, but when I opened up my mouth to tell him so, nothing came out.
I could do anything for him, I realized suddenly. I could give him anything. But not that. If I said that to him, I knew I could never get it back.
“Go to sleep now,” I whispered, and he didn’t say it again.