CHAPTER 8
Graham
Me: Touching down now. I’d call but i’m afraid of the flight attendant.
Emma: Lol why?
Me: She has a mustache. And sideburns. And perpetual anger.
Emma: Be careful…
Me: I’m taking my life in my hands to text that i’m only a few hundred miles from you
Emma: Wish I was there now
Me: I want to see you so bad it hurts
The second I hit send, I’m rethinking—too late—that last text. Because how desperate can I seem? It’s been so long since I’ve felt this way. No. I’ve never felt this way. I was lovesick over Zoe, but I didn’t rearrange my life in my head to make room for her everywhere. In a matter of what—less than two weeks?—Emma has gone from the girl who got away to the girl I see in every moment of my future. I’m starting to enter panic mode and second-think everything when my phone plays its text tone.
Emma: Me too
And just like that—relief. Muscle-flooding, breath-releasing, mind-calming relief. Laughing to myself, I stare out at LA as we taxi up to the terminal. I was sixteen the last time I felt so jerked around by my own desires. I’m out of practice.
I won’t see Emma until tomorrow, when she checks into the hotel in LA, and I’m already craving the sight of her like I used to crave the feel of a cigarette between my fingers, between my lips, inhaling, exhaling, the nicotine flooding my system and making everything right with the world, thirty seconds in.
I definitely shouldn’t tell her that thinking of her makes me wish for a cigarette to take the edge off, for the first time in months. Not that I’m sure it would even work.
Me: Heads up, seeing you will not be enough.
Emma: Consider me warned and ready
Emma: OMG *blushing*
Me: :)
***
My next text is to Cassie, to let her know I’ve landed, to ask how Cara’s doing. Most of the time she’s fine when dropped at her aunt’s, but sometimes not. My sister reports that currently, Cara is dancing in front of Caleb’s battery-powered swing and eating Cheerios from a cup.
My family has been supportive from day one as far as Cara goes, day one being the day I brought her home. Before that, they were divided—Mom and Brynn on one side and Dad and Cassie on the other. Mom and Brynn were not in favor of me taking custody of Cara. We’d had a family meeting to make the decision, and even though my sisters were both in college and no longer lived at home, they were both given a vote. Mom was tight-lipped, but Brynn was livid.
“Why would you do this to yourself?” Her hand smacked the pine-planked kitchen table where we all sat, me at the head like the accused. “She told you she’s absolutely not keeping it, thank God, so you’re off the hook for eighteen years of child support. Let her take care of it in whatever way she sees fit and go live your life! You’re sixteen for f*ck’s sake!”
No one said anything. I don’t think Dad and Cassie disagreed with her. They just thought I should be given the choice, and I’d made it.
I stared at my hands, splayed on the table. They weren’t as big as my dad’s yet. They weren’t the hands of a man. They were the hands of a boy. I knew in that moment that I could reclaim my adolescence and walk away from this with my family’s full support.
My voice was low, but sure. “It’s my baby. I can’t just let her give it away—”
“Graham, honey, we can all appreciate your sense of responsibility.” Mom’s placating tone annoyed me even more than Brynn’s anger had. “But Zoe is accountable for not protecting herself, too—”
“We didn’t know antibiotics would screw up her pill.”
“And you weren’t using condoms?” Brynn yelled. “What the hell were you thinking?”
My face flamed. I was sitting in the kitchen while my entire family discussed my sex life and stared at me like I was the biggest idiot on the planet. Unquestionably the most awkward moment of my life.
Dad cleared his throat, and everyone waited for his tie-breaking assessment. My father is a man of few words—a trait I inherited. His eyes met those of Mom, Cassie and Brynn, one by one. “I think Graham’s made his decision, and if Zoe agrees with this, we’ll have another member of the family, and we’ll all adjust accordingly.” He turned to me. “Graham, I want your word that you’ll handle this like a man. No running away when it gets hard. No changing your mind later.”
I nodded. “I know, Dad.”
He returned the nod, as though I was an equal, and I sat up straighter.
“Talk to Zoe. Keep us informed. This will all work out.” He offered a half-grin to my mother, who sat stoically across from him. “It’s not like all three of you were planned, after all.” Mom smirked back at him. That was the end of the family meeting.
Zoe was convinced she was going to be “just like Juno.” We told her parents our decision, and since they’d given Zoe everything she wanted since the day she was born, it was easy enough to convince them to go along. There were moments during the next few months when she was pissed and blaming me for talking her into having the baby. Like the weeks she spent part of second period in the bathroom, throwing up, every day. Or when she got a new stretch mark. Or when she realized she’d gained forty pounds and the baby wouldn’t weigh more than eight.
We weren’t together-together, but Ross Stewart was no longer hanging around (which somehow confused Zoe), and I was convinced that part of everything working out would include Zoe and me getting back together. That didn’t happen, of course.
Once Cara was born, Zoe handed her over, signed the legal papers terminating her parental rights, and went to spend a month in the south of France with her parents. When she returned to New York, she spent several weeks in the Hamptons before heading off to Florida for college. She never called or came by. It was like Cara never happened. Like I never happened.
*** *** ***
Emma
Once I’ve pulled my suitcase across the threshold of my room, I speed-dial Graham to tell him my room number. Waiting for him, I pace the length of the suite, door to window, window to door, my stomach in knots and my face as flushed as if I had a fever.
As he predicted, we’ve texted and talked and Skyped for the past ten days. I know so much more about him than I did a month ago. I didn’t know him at all last fall. I only knew the comfort I felt in his presence, as though he’d always been a part of my life, a part of me. Maybe this is how it feels to lose your memory—only impressions and shadowed inclinations remain, with no factual signals to back them up.
A knock sounds at my door and my heart stops and falls to my knees, starting back up violently as I walk to the door and pull it open. For the barest moment we stand there drinking each other in, before I take a step backwards into the room and he follows as though there’s a cord attached to his chest. The door snaps closed behind him.
Every detail about him has sharpened, my brain having played my mental pictures of him over and over. His dark hair is messy and falls over his forehead. His eyes are deep caramel in this late afternoon room, but they’ll be black in low light. Slight stubble on his chin, and across his jaw. His mouth is set—if I was a stranger to him I’d think he was angry, but I know he’s not. His nostrils flare just the slightest bit and I back up another step.
“Is it… okay… if I lock the door?” His voice is so low, and I recognize it as the voice he uses when we’re talking late at night.
I nod, and he turns to twist the bolt and slam the interior lock home, the sleeve of his black t-shirt drawing back to expose the taut, defined muscles of his upper arm. My mouth goes dry with a longing so strong it makes my breath catch. When he steps towards me, I’m stock still, torn between swaying towards him and taking another step back.
His arms slip around me as he bends and buries his face in my neck. “I’ve missed you.” His voice hums along my collar bone, soaks into my shoulder.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I say, my voice a whisper, like smoke.
He pulls back, his arms still locked at my lower back, and grins. “I’ve missed you more.” I remember this promise from him as he walked away from me last fall in the airport, after we exchanged goodbyes and I told him I’d miss him. I’ll miss you more, he’d said.
I give him a mock-stern look and flash my eyes to his. “I don’t believe you. I think you should have to prove a statement like that.”
His mouth turns up on one side as he stares down at me, that expression so familiar and beautiful it impedes my breath. “Oh?” he says, one eyebrow angling up.
My hands have been inching up his arms, which are tensed and tight around me still. He’s not loosened his hold since he slid them around me. I take fistfuls of his sleeves on both sides and revel in the feel of his shoulders, broad and solid and so different from mine that I feel soft and small.
Pulling me closer, Graham lifts me onto my toes as his mouth crashes down on mine. The feel of his lips, insistent and giving no quarter, stuns me for a split-second, and then I’m matching his movements, opening my mouth, a restrained moan building in my throat as our tongues meet. My hands glide into his hair, the dark strands like ink spilling over my fingers as I urge him closer. “Emma,” he breathes, wrapping one arm around my lower back, his fingers stroking over the skin at my waist as his opposite hand cradles my head, thrusting through the hair at my nape. His touch gentles then, kisses shifting to slow-motion, pulling me along like a subtle current, unhurried.
Without realizing I’ve even moved, I feel the mattress pressing into my calves, and he breaks his mouth from mine long enough to lift me onto it, rising over me in the center of the bed. “I just want to kiss you,” he murmurs, his lips tracing a path from under my chin to my ear before he rolls onto his back and pulls me across him. My knee is between both of his, anchoring him to the bed as his hands run over my back and my shoulders before framing my face and pulling me down for a long, languid kiss.
Capturing his wrists, I mash them into the mattress, my hair falling over my shoulder and tickling along the side of his jaw. “That’s all you want? Are you sure?” I ask, brazen in a way I’ve never been. Because this is Graham, and he’s real and here and touching me—not a face on a screen, thousands of miles away.
He chuckles, his eyes closing as he turns his head and nuzzles my forearm, leaving soft kisses on my wrist, grazing my skin with his teeth and igniting an eruption of goose bumps straight up my arm. His eyes open and he stares at me, all heat. “No. I want everything from you, with you.” He turns his hands until they imprison my wrists, curving over me until I’m under him again. “But right now, I’m just going to keep kissing you until you make me stop.”
If he’s waiting for an objection, he isn’t going to get one. I lick my lips, a signal for kiss me please. And he does.