How to Love

what happened with Sawyer—one-time thing or not—is bigger than just messing around on Aaron. It’s a hundred times more complicated than that: Shelby and her family have only ever taken care of me. My family has only ever taken care of me, really, and here I am lying to everyone like it’s junior year of high school all over again. I hate it. I’m not doing it. No way.

Shelby only shrugs. “Look,” she tells me. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you I don’t have any kind of emotional stake here. I love you; I love my stupid brother. Of course I want you guys both to be happy. And of course I want you both to be happy together, if you can.”

“Shelby—” I start, and she holds up a hand to stop me.

“But if you can’t—and I’ve seen this movie before, I know how stuff goes with you and Sawyer—then as long as you’re not shitty about it, I just want to tell you that I’m going to really try and not be shitty about it, either.” She shrugs again, like she’s tired of this conversation. “He likes you, though. Aaron does. I can tell.”

“I like him,” I tell her immediately: a reflex, like looking up at the sound of my name. “I like him a ton.”

“Well,” she says. “Good.” Shelby frowns, peers across the diner for Marjorie. “I think I should have ordered extra bacon,” she tells me, and we don’t talk about it again after that.

28

Before

One damp afternoon at the end of February, I swung by the restaurant during my free period, hurrying—I wasn’t working, but I’d left my calc book in the office the night before and wanted to see if I could grab it before I had to get back to school for a newspaper meeting.

“Goddamnit,” was the first thing I heard. The restaurant was deserted—the lull between lunch and dinner —and Roger’s voice was booming from the office. “Where in the hell have you been?”

“Look, it’s not gonna happen again.” That was Sawyer. Sawyer was here. I froze. Where had he been? He’d been gone? I hadn’t seen him in weeks, since the night I’d stayed over, but I figured he’d been avoiding me.

“You bet your ass it won’t. We’re not doing this. I’m not going to have police officers calling my house. I’m not having you disappearing for weeks at a time. If you want to live in that squalor and throw away your education and ruin your life, that’s your business, but I won’t have any part of it.”

Police? What the hell had he done? I thought of the not-aspirin in his sneaker the night I’d slept over. I thought of his broken hand from last year. I stood there like I’d been hit by lightning, fingertips scrabbling the edge of a tablecloth, feeling absolutely one hundred percent rooted to the floor.

“Get out of my sight, Sawyer. I don’t even want to look at you.”

I could hear my heart beating, fast and skittish. I crept a little closer to hear. “For God’s sake, Dad—” Sawyer started, but Roger cut him off, closed for business.

“I mean it. And don’t you dare swear at me.”

“Fine.” I heard Sawyer get up, and I made for the front door as fast as humanly possible. I tried to keep it as quiet as I could, but the strap of my bag caught on the back of a chair and I had to pause to untangle it. My hands shook as I worked it free.

“Oh,” Sawyer said, when he rounded the corner and saw me. He looked pissed. “Hey.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” I replied immediately, then backtracked. “I mean. Hi. I, um, left my book.”

“In the office,” he told me with the vaguest hint of a smile—blink and gone. He hadn’t shaved. “On the desk. I figured that was yours.”

“Yeah. Well.” I started to move past him, but he caught me by the wrist.

“Where’re you going?”

“To get my book,” I said, glancing fast, down at our hands, up at his face, back down again. It came out bitchier than I meant.

“Aha.” He squeezed once, let go of my arm. “Sounds like a plan.”

“Yeah. So. I’m going to go and … do that.”

Sawyer nodded. “Okay.”

I made my way into the office, mumbled a greeting at Roger, grabbed the damn textbook, and fled back outside. Sawyer’s Jeep was parked at the curb, and he was leaning against the driver’s side, arms and ankles crossed. “Need a ride?” he asked.

I swallowed. “No.”

“Want one anyway?”

“Sawyer …” The wind was blowing. A car sped by. “I have a meeting.”

He shrugged. “Skip it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Are you kidding me? I almost asked. Because I’m trying to get you out of my system. Because I don’t always like the way I act when I’m with you. Because we had sex, and you fell off the face of the earth.

“Why did the cops call your house?” I asked instead. Sawyer grinned. “I thought you didn’t hear anything.”

“I lied.”

“Fair enough. Take a ride with me and I’ll tell you.”

“That’s how girls get killed.”

“How’s that?”

“They get in the car with sketchy guys.”

Sawyer just cocked an eyebrow. “A walk, then.”

I should have said no. I should have gone to my stupid meeting. I should have done basically anything else besides what I actually wound up doing, but that had never stopped me before when it came to Sawyer, and even as I thought about the abject hell these last few weeks had been, I nodded instead. “A quick one,” I said after a minute. “Around the block.”

Sawyer nodded once, considering. “Around the block,” he said.

We set off in the direction of Grove Street underneath the bright February sky—past a jewelry store, the dry cleaners. This felt a little ridiculous. For a while, neither one of us talked. “So here I am,” I told him finally. “Walking. What did the police want?”

Sawyer shrugged. “I got in a little trouble at a bar. Drank too much.”

I rolled my eyes before I could stop it. “Do you think that makes you more interesting or something?”

“Hmm?” That got his attention. “What’s that?”

“The whole brooding, king-of-pain thing you do.” I felt punch-drunk. He was gone already; I had nothing to lose. “I mean, I know girls fall for it. I fell for it. But do you think it makes you more interesting? Because, you know?” I shrugged. “It doesn’t.”

“No.” Sawyer smirked a little, impossible to read. “I guess it doesn’t.”

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Go ahead,” he allowed. “Hit me.”

“Why did you waste your time with me?” I was comforted by the rhythm of my boots on the sidewalk, for some reason found courage there. “I mean, those girls … the ones at your concert, or the ones who come into the restaurant. I feel like they probably would have … I feel like it probably would have taken at least a little less effort with them. Less of a preamble.”

Sawyer stopped walking. “I don’t want them. I told you that.”

“Right. You hate your type.”

“Reena, I’m sorry I didn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, cutting him off, lying. “I mean, I wasn’t really expecting anything from you anyway.”