How to Love

Aaron’s been coming with us lately—he’s a sucker for this Nutella bread that’s basically just cake, chocolate, and hazelnut with an orange-sugar glaze—and this morning he meets us by the fountain just like always, trendy sneakers and the sturdy expanse of his body, one hand in my back pocket as we walk. Aaron is the only person in my life who makes me feel legitimately small.

He’s quiet today, though, sort of broody. His forehead is furrowed underneath his cap. “What’s up?” I ask finally, reaching for a sip of his limeade, nudging his solid shoulder with mine. He smells clean and citrusy, like the soap in the bathroom at his place; there’s a tiny cleft in his chin where my thumb fits almost exactly. “You’re being weird.”

Aaron shrugs, noncommittal. I’m expecting a no, I’m not or a don’t worry about it, the kind of guess what’s in my head I’m used to when it comes to the men in my life, but instead he sits down on a bench near the soaps and beeswax candles and scrubs a hand through his sandy hair. “Can I ask you a question without you freaking out?” he starts.

Right away my whole body goes cautious, perking up like a ferret—but how could he possibly know? “Yeah, definitely,” I reply. I think of Cade and me as kids, playing dumb like that. I pull the stroller closer, so I can see the baby’s face. “Of course.”

“Did you go to Sawyer’s after you left my place the other night?”

Um.

“Did you follow me?” is the first thing I come up with, from zero to completely wigged in 2.5 seconds. The sun is beating down on my neck. There are, like, six different emotions happening here right now, no question—guilt and this weird indignation, anger at Sawyer and myself. Most of all I’m scared I’ve blown this. Aaron looks at me like I’m insane.

“No,” he says immediately. “Jesus. I saw Lorraine at work, and she mentioned she saw you over there. I don’t know. I’m just asking—”

“Lorraine followed me?”

“Reena, nobody was following you!” Aaron looks a little annoyed. “Calm down for a second. She lives over there. Near the LeGrandes, I guess. She knows them, so she mentioned it to me.”

I—oh. “That’s it?” I ask.

Aaron frowns. “Is there something else?”

“No,” I say quickly. “No, definitely not.” He doesn’t know. I’m being crazy. “I’m being crazy,” I tell him, staring hard at the pavement between my feet. “I’m sorry.” I rub at the base of my ponytail for a second, trying to figure out how to play this. I know I can be secretive. It’s not a quality I particularly like in myself, but there’s no way I can tell him the whole truth. What happened with Sawyer was a stupid mistake, some bizarre one-time muscle-memory thing. It’s never going to happen again. “I’m sorry. Yes, I saw Sawyer the other night.”

“You did?” Aaron says—and God, his face, I feel terrible, I feel like the worst person in the world. He looks pissed, yeah, but more than that he looks hurt. “Seriously?”

“He’s Hannah’s dad, Aaron.” I’m being deliberately deceptive, as if somehow that’s all Sawyer is—somebody I knew a long time ago, a footnote in my life as it stands. It’s not fair of me, I know that, but just—the last thing I want to do is mess things up with Aaron. “Of course I’m going to see him now that he’s back. He wants to be in the baby’s life, and we just need to … figure out how that’s going to look, I guess.”

I reach for his hand, run my thumb over the calluses on the pads of his fingers—there’s a scar in the meat of his palm, long and thin, from a piece of jagged metal on a schooner he helped restore back in New Hampshire. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Aaron had stayed in Broward for high school—if I’d have noticed him then, his wry smile and the flecks of amber in his dark brown eyes, or if I’d have been too dumb and distracted to see.

He shrugs now, a hint of sulky mulishness I’ve never seen from him before. “No, I know,” he says finally. He looks at Hannah for a minute, takes the damp, half-chewed cookie she holds out to him with no hesitation at all. “Look, Reena,” he tells me. “I grew up with a lot of bullshit in my life, okay? I don’t operate like that anymore. I like you a lot. I want you to know that I like you a lot. But if you’re not at a place in your life where this can go somewhere …” Aaron shakes his head. “I guess I’d just rather have that out there now.”

I feel myself blushing, this warm pleased flush that starts in my chest and radiates outward, my whole body heating up in a way that has nothing to do with the humidity index. I get my hands on either side of his face and plant a kiss against his mouth. “I like you a lot,” I tell him, fingertips scritching though the hair at the base of his skull. “This is just … I don’t know, an unexpected development, or something. But there’s nothing going on between me and Sawyer, okay?” I swallow the guilt and uncertainty, smile as he reaches up to tuck a bit of hair behind my ear. “I would tell you if there was.”

After a moment Aaron half smiles back at me, reluctant. A brass band sets up at the end of the street. Eventually he holds out his hand and we head back through the market: crowds and orange citrus, the sunshine state.

* * *

At the beginning of the summer, Shelby and I had a standing date for yoga after my art class on Thursday mornings, but then for three weeks in a row one or both of us were so late that we couldn’t get in, so now we have a standing date for breakfast at the Greek diner across from the yoga place for which we are always, mysteriously, right on time.

She’s there before me today, sitting at our usual table with two iced coffees in front of her, and she nudges the darker one toward me as I sit down. “Watch out,” she says quietly, red hair falling like a theater curtain over her face. “Marjorie’s in a mood.”

“Good to know.” Marjorie is the extremely tall, extremely skinny waitress who works this shift at Mount Olympus. Half the time she’s thrilled to see us and half the time she hates our guts, and there is virtually no rhyme or rhythm or way of predicting at all. It adds a real element of surprise to a Western omelet. I nod briskly, reach for a menu. “I’ll choose fast.”

“I think you better.” Shelby dumps some more cream into her coffee, takes an experimental sip and wrinkles her freckled nose. “So what’d you learn in school today, honey?” she asks, once I’ve ordered—very politely—a couple of eggs over easy. “You have any homework for me to sign?”

I grin. “Got some spelling words you could quiz me on, if you want.” Shelby’s the one who got me to sign up at Broward to begin with, right after Hannah was born. She was worried, and probably rightly, that I’d never see anybody my own age again if I wasn’t required to show up someplace where they took attendance. “Dork.”

We drink coffee and try, with negligible success, to get Marjorie to smile when she brings us our food. We make plans to take the baby to the beach. Shelby’s dating a girl named Cara up in Boston now, a political communications major with huge hipster glasses about whom I am desperately curious and who, Shelby tells me, might be coming down at the end of the summer. “You’ll like each other,” she promises, although secretly I can’t imagine Shelby’s sad teen-mom friend from home is particularly high on this chick’s list of must-meets. Still, Shelby seems so happy; I sort of can’t wait to lay eyes on the reason why.

“So,” she says as I’m finishing my toast, and just from the barely perceptible change in her tone, already I’ve got the sinking feeling I know where this is going. “You and Sawyer.”

“Me and Sawyer what?” I say, and it comes out a little more defensive than I mean. I take a deep breath, file the ragged edges down. “Did Aaron say something to you?”

“Did my brother talk to me about his girl problems?” Shelby snorts. “No.” She reaches over and snags the last few abandoned home fries off my plate. “He also kind of doesn’t have to, though.” She shrugs, like What can you do. “Twin thing.”

I nod, chew slowly. “Right.”

“Right.” Shelby takes a long sip of her coffee, then sits back in the booth and eyes me across the cracked Formica. She can do this; I know from experience. She can wait me out.

“What?” I demand finally, literally throwing up my hands. My fork clatters on the table. Marjorie shoots me a filthy look. “There’s nothing happening with Sawyer. Believe me. Sawyer is a disaster. Me and Sawyer together is a disaster.”

“And yet?” Shelby prompts, then repeats it three more times: “And yet, and yet, and yet.” She grins, like she’s trying to take the sting out. “That’s from a poem, right? I feel like that’s from a poem.”

I snort. “Probably,” I tell her mildly, doing my best to rein it in. I feel like the worst kind of turncoat. Because