CHAPTER 37
Nastya
Is it sad to be going on a first date at eighteen years old? I thought about texting Josh to cancel at least six times today. At one point I finally did text him that I couldn’t go because I had nothing to wear.
He texted me right back –
Nothing sounds good c u at 4
So now I’m stuck. The only thing that makes me feel better is that Josh seems to be as socially inept as me. Except that he talks. So I guess he gets the edge. But still.
I really need him. I don’t want to mess this up. It’s bad enough that my brain is a cesspool; I can’t imagine the hellhole my heart would be if he wasn’t in it.
Since wearing nothing isn’t really a viable option, I’m back to square one. I have absolutely no idea what to wear. My fashion sense isn’t lacking. It’s nonexistent.
I went from recital clothes to recovery clothes to repulsive clothes. I’ve never done normal. I don’t even know what that is. This is where the female friend thing would come in. I would have sucked it up and written a note asking Margot to help me, but the whole idea was kind of last minute and she had plans this afternoon so she’s not even home. Which means my closet and I are on our own.
My closet is of no use to me. It may actually be laughing at me. It’s true. I hear it. Other than the sundress I wore yesterday, I’m out of options in the normal department. I look at my clothes. Black, black, some more black. I don’t want to wear any of it. I don’t want to look like Nastya Kashnikov tonight. I don’t want to be a Russian whore. I don’t want to look like Emilia, either. Maybe for tonight I could just be someone else. Some third girl I haven’t met yet.
I realize with a craptastic amount of horror that I am going to have to go to the mall. I throw on one of the eight variations of tight black t-shirts I own and a pair of jeans and head out.
Only I don’t end up at the mall. I end up at Drew’s. The God that I have recently come to think might hate me is smiling on me today because Sarah isn’t home. But then neither is Drew. Mrs. Leighton opens the door. I look at her stomach which seems to have grown exponentially since the last time I saw her.
“Hey sweetie,” she says and she’s the only person on Earth I don’t have the urge to smack for calling me sweetie. She lets me in after explaining that Drew and Sarah went out on a friend’s boat with Mr.
Leighton. She pours lemonade and we sit at the breakfast bar and stare at each other.
“Oh!” she says after a few minutes, and I’d gotten so accustomed to the quiet that I almost fall off the stool. She grabs for my hand and I yank it back out of instinct before I can think about it. I feel like a fool but she ignores it. “I just wanted you to feel the baby kick,” she says reaching for my hand and letting me meet her halfway. She places it on her stomach and it’s the weirdest feeling in the world. I almost expect an alien to burst through her abdomen at any moment.
“Feel
it?”
she
looks
at
me
expectantly. I pull my hand back. I can’t help but see the hurt on her face but I’m too afraid I might start crying and I can’t keep my hand there anymore. “Sorry,” she says.
“I just get a little excited. You’d think the third time around it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it never gets old. It’s my favorite part.” It would probably be mine, too, but I won’t ever get to find out. Maybe I never would have wanted one anyway, but the deciding would have been nice. The piece of shit who took my hand took that, too.
All I wanted was to figure out what to wear on a date I probably shouldn’t even be going on and I don’t know how I ended up with my hand on Mrs. Leighton’s stomach, feeling her baby kick and fighting back tears.
Mrs. Leighton doesn’t do well with the silence. She’s a space filler. “It’s a girl,” she says. “We just found out.” There’s a pad of paper and a pen next to the phone on the counter. I pick it up and write.
Name?
“Catherine,” she says. “After Jack’s mother.”
I smile because I know that one. Pure, unsullied I scrawl and hand it to her.
She returns the smile. “Drew said you had a thing with names. What does mine mean? Lexie, well, Alexa, really. Do you know?”
Defender I scribble and underneath You. Then, before she asks, I give her Drew’s – masculine, manly and Sarah’s –
princess. She rolls her eyes and laughs.
“Self-fulfilling prophecies, you think?” The quiet returns and then she asks, “What about Josh?” I think there’s more to that question than she’s letting on but she’s testing the waters.
Salvation, I write. She looks at the word and nods. And for a minute she looks as sad as I feel.
“That fits, I think.”
I’m not sure what she means so I put down the pen. I’ve written too much for one day already.
“Did you need something?” she asks.
“You came over?”
I think about asking her for help with the dress situation. She could help me. She would help me. But I can’t ask for it. I shake my head and climb off the stool. I still have time to make it to the mall and pull something together.
She walks me to the door but doesn’t open it. When she turns, her eyes are soft like her.
“You know, people always think it’s the girls who are desperate to change the boys, to make them a better person, to be the thing they need.” She’s looking at me like I must understand what she’s talking about, but maybe I’m just dense because I have no freaking clue.
“Josh may seem like a very old man sometimes. But at the end of the day, he’s still a teenage boy and he wants what all teenage boys want.” She stops when I narrow my eyes at her and then laughs.
“Not that. Get your mind out of the gutter.
No. To be the hero. To save the girl. To save you.” She pauses to heighten the effect of the fact that she’s casting me as the damsel in distress in this particular scenario. “But for Josh, he doesn’t just want that, he needs it. He needs to be able to fix things and make it all better; to believe that you’re okay so that he can believe that he’s okay. And if he can’t,” she raises her eyebrows and leaves the thought hanging in the air like a guilt trip and I really don’t know the point of this speech. Anyone who wants to save me is going to need a time machine because that dream is dead. No one was there to save me last time and if I end up needing to be saved from anything else, I’ll do it myself, thank you very much.
I turn to leave and she opens up the door. I’m thinking I’m going to give her a pass due to pregnancy hormones and then
—
“I think you and I both know it’s Josh who needs saving. Have a good time tonight.”
You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.
***
Josh knocks on the door at exactly four o’clock. I still don’t know why we’re leaving so early. We can’t be having dinner at this hour because Josh hates eating early as much as I do. He’s dressed in a dark blue polo shirt and belted khaki pants. He looks exactly like he does when he goes to dinner on Sundays. It pisses me off how easy it must be for guys to get dressed. He seems to have no trouble pulling off normal and looking entirely too beautiful doing it.
I try not to look as uneasy as I feel while he stands in the entryway, taking me in. I ended up in a pale blue sleeveless dress with a dark-blue Greek-inspired design running in a band around the very bottom. It’s definitely not on the cutting-edge of awesome, but it’s simple. I thought it looked good and it felt like what I thought normal should feel like. I twisted all of my hair back in a loose knot at the nape of my neck. I know the scar at my hairline is probably all sorts of obvious but he’s seen it so many times already, I just don’t care.
“You look different,” he says, repeating the same words he used the first night I ended up at his house, and I smile because it’s exactly how I’d like to look tonight. “And distractingly pretty,” he adds softly, his lips turning up just slightly.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going now?” I ask. It’s been driving me crazy all day. I hate not knowing things.
I’m a planner and a control freak, which is hard for a person who usually has very little control over anything.
“No,” he says simply, taking my hand and helping me into the truck.
And then we drive. And we drive.
And we drive.
“Seriously, Josh. What the hell?” No wonder he picked me up so early. We’re on a freaking road trip.
“You’ve said that four times since we left.”
“Yeah.
Because seriously, Josh.
What the hell? Where are we going?”
“Close your eyes. Relax. I’ll let you know when we’re there.”
***
“Sunshine? We’re here.” I open my eyes and look at the clock on the dashboard. 6:10. Seriously, Josh. What the hell?
“Where are we?” I ask, trying to figure out what the point of this two hour drive was.
“Dinner.”
We’re in a parking lot. I look out the window and see the sign for an Italian restaurant I know far too well and I know that this is not happening. Through the glass on the side of the building I can see a man in a suit playing the piano but it’s not him I’m seeing anymore.
“What are you staring at?” Josh asks.
Me, in an alternate universe, I think.
“We’re in Brighton?” I ask, trying to control the near hysteria in my voice.
“Yes.” He’s wary now. I think I’m scaring him a little, which is fine, because he’s scaring me.
“Why are we in Brighton?” I force some calm into my demeanor because freaking out isn’t going to get me anywhere right now, and when I say anywhere, I mean the hell out of Brighton.
“Because we have reservations.” His voice is tentative. He’s eyeing me like at any moment I might completely lose my mind.
I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything.
“You like Italian food and I looked at the ratings for like fifty places in a two-hour radius and this was the best one, plus I was able to get us in. What’s wrong?” He’s confused and I can’t blame him for it.
“Josh, there are like five hundred Italian restaurants at home. You could have taken me to any of them. Why did we drive two hours to have dinner?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
I wanted to talk to you. He says it like it’s the most obvious answer in the world. He drove us two hours away for dinner, to a place where no one would know us, so that we could have a conversation. I want to laugh and cry and hug the living crap out of him. I kiss him instead. As soon as my lips are on his, his hand is at the back of my neck and he’s pulling me against his chest like he’s been waiting for this forever and he’s not going to let me get away. But I don’t want to get away; and if the steering wheel wasn’t there, I would climb into his lap just to be closer to him.
Then he shifts just slightly and I’m not kissing him anymore. He’s kissing me. And when he does, part of me is lost. But it’s the part that’s twisted and mangled and wrong, and for just that moment, with his hands in my hair and his lips on my mouth, I can pretend that it never existed.
“I thought you were pissed,” he says when I pull away. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“I am, but not at you.” My hands are still wrapped around his upper arms and I really don’t want to let go.
“At what, then?” he asks, brushing the hair that came loose out of my eyes.
“Everything else.”
He did all of this so that we would be able to go out and actually talk to one another and he brought me to the one place where we can’t do that. He’s just staring at me now like he doesn’t know what that means and he’s not sure where we go from here. I’d like to just go home and sit in his garage where everything is comfortable and I can sand down wood and watch piles of sawdust grow around my feet and feel like I’m okay for however long I stay there.
There’s something in the way he’s looking at me that freaks me out, but I can’t look away. He leans in again and I don’t move at all until I feel his lips on mine.
There’s a reverence in the way he kisses me that frightens me, because it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever felt.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a really long time, I just wanted to do it again.”
“How long?”
“Since the first night you walked into my garage.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I confess.
“Why?”
“I had just thrown up. I think it would have ruined the moment.”
“As opposed to this moment which is now full of romance.” He smiles and I let go of his arms and sit back, trying to figure out what to say.
“Do you want to go in?” he asks finally.
I shake my head. “We can’t stay here.”
“Why not?” he asks, and I feel terrible for taking this away from him. Just another thing that I can add to the list of disappointments I’ve leveled at people I care about. I don’t want Josh Bennett’s disappointment, too. I don’t think I can handle it. But I don’t have a choice right now. There’s no amount of disappointment that can get me in that restaurant. I look at Josh and wish I could just kiss him again instead of having to answer, but I know I’m not getting out of this one.
“Because it’s where I’m from.”
***
Our attempt at normalcy ends up being bad pizza at a hole-in-the-wall we found somewhere on the road between Brighton and home, and there’s nothing about it that’s normal. It’s not even extraordinary. It’s perfect and I want it to stay perfect, but nothing ever does. People like Josh Bennett and I don’t get perfect.
Most of the time, we don’t even get remotely tolerable. And that’s why it scares me. Because, even if there was such a thing to begin with, perfect never lasts.
***
We pull in to Margot’s driveway just before eleven and I look at Josh because I don’t know why he brought me here instead of back to his house.
“I had a good time tonight,” he says.
“Shouldn’t I be saying that to you?”
“I don’t know. Is there a rule?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I concede. “I had a good time, too. It was fun. All things considered.” I still feel bad for ruining his plans.
“No things considered,” he says gently, lifting his hand to my cheek before leaning over to kiss me. Just once. And it isn’t perfect. It’s soft and warm and true and real. “It was fun. Nothing else matters.”
Nothing else matters. If I had a penny right now, I’d wish that were true; I want to believe it more than I’ve ever wanted to believe anything.
“Then why are you bringing me back here?” I ask.
He shrugs sheepishly. “I thought it would be kind of presumptuous to expect you to sleep with me on the first date.” I yawn before he even finishes speaking. “If all you’re expecting is sleep, then I’m a sure thing.”
“Well,” he smiles, “far be it from me to turn down a sure thing.”
And with that, he backs his truck out of the driveway, and we go home.