How to Love

30

Before

“Look at him,” Shelby said, crossing a party of five off her list as she stood at the podium on Thursday night—spring break of junior year, the beach teeming, the whole restaurant packed. She gestured toward the bar, looking disgusted. “He thinks he’s Don Juan fricking DeMarco. You know, if I was all over the clientele like that, you can bet your ass I’d hear about it. Or, God forbid, if you were.”

“What?” I glanced behind me, a basket of bread in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other, and tried to appear as uninterested as humanly possible. I knew Shelby wasn’t exactly a giant fan of whatever I had going on with Sawyer. “You call it hanging out, I call it masochism,” she was fond of saying, wrinkling her freckly nose. “Potato, po-tah-to.”

And maybe it was masochism: Sure enough, at this particular moment Sawyer was leaning over the bar, engaged in animated, definitely flirty conversation with two girls I half recognized from school.

“Hm,” was all I said before delivering the bread basket, doing my best to ignore the thick, sour shot of jealousy, the dropping sensation in my chest. We weren’t even technically dating, I didn’t think. Two weeks after the scene on the sidewalk, and I still didn’t know what we were.

Whatever. It was fine. Sawyer liked girls. Right now he liked these girls.

Except, I realized as I passed Shelby on my way back to the kitchen, they were both holding half-empty wineglasses. “Oh, what an ass,” I muttered.

“Nolan, party of four?” Shelby called. She turned to me, perched primly on her stool. “Do it. Cowboy up.”

I made my way over to the bar, glared until I caught his attention. “Talk to you for a sec?”

He grinned at me, pulled the rag off his shoulder and dropped it below the counter. “Hey, beautiful.”

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped, as he followed me into the back hallway, near the office.

Sawyer frowned. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not nice.” I scowled and glanced at the girls, one of whom had SEXY spelled out in rhinestones across her shirt. I hated that. It was like having to explain a joke. “Do you ever think? I mean…” I paused, struggled to find words. “Do you ever think?”

“I don’t—” Sawyer put his hand on my arm. “What are you talking about?”

I wriggled out of his grasp. “Did you serve them?”

“Did I serve who?”

“Those girls.” I nodded in their direction. “Helga and Olga, or whatever the hell their names are.” I swallowed. “Did you serve them?”

“Yeah,” he said, no hesitation at all. He looked confused. “Why?”

“They’re in my gym class, Sawyer. They’re in high school.”

“Oh.” He glanced at them, then back at me. “Whoops.”

“Whoops?” I sounded shrewish, I knew, but at this point I didn’t care. “Really, whoops? That’s a good way for my dad to lose his liquor license.”

“Reena, relax. Nobody’s gonna lose their license. I didn’t think to check, but—”

“All I’m saying is that maybe if you’d spent a little less time—” I broke off. A little less time what, exactly? Looking at hot girls was what, but I couldn’t say that out loud.

Sawyer blinked at me. “Wow,” he said, after a moment. “Okay. You’re pissed.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“It’s sort of cute.” Two indentations that just missed being dimples appeared at the corners of his mouth.

“Stop saying stuff like that to me.” I scowled. “You know, not every girl in the whole world is impressed by you.”

He nodded seriously. “About three-quarters.”

My God, he was such a bastard sometimes. I could have screamed.

Shelby swooped in just then, cool fingers curling around my wrist. “Quite the crowd you got over there, chief,” she said, nodding at the bar.

He nodded. “I’m on it,” he said, looking at me. “Reena—”

“Forget it,” I said, shaking my head. “Forget it.”

I stomped off, plastered a smile on my face, went back to my tables, and steamed my way through the dinner rush. A couple of hours later I was standing in the back hallway, looking out the window at the patio and drinking a cup of coffee, when I heard him come up behind me. “Slacker,” he called me, by way of hello.

“I’m on my break.”

“I know. I’m kidding. Listen, Reena, about before—”

“Don’t,” I interrupted. Already I felt stupid, felt jealous, felt young. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I dropped the ball, okay? I’m sorry. But nobody got hurt.”

“Sure. You’re right.” I started to brush past him, but he grabbed my arm. I pulled away. “Don’t.”

“Why?” He looked genuinely confused. He looked like Christopher Robin. “Reena, I don’t know what your problem is with me tonight, but—”

Just then Sawyer’s words were cut off by the loud, shrill whoop of the fire alarm: I saw his face crease, his eyes widen. “Holy shit,” he said softly, and when I turned to look behind me, I saw the smoke leaking from the kitchen door.

“Oh my God.”

“Shit. Move,” he said, flipping the handle on the back door and pushing me through. I could hear people yelling inside.

“Sawyer, my dad—”

“Reena!” He grabbed at my arm and steered me onto the patio. My coffee cup smashed on the pavement. “Go.”

* * *

It was a grease fire, I learned later, small and fast and stinking. Nobody was hurt, but the damage in the kitchen was enough to close us down for the rest of the weekend. Dark, damp-looking stains crept up the walls like crooked fingers: the whole dining room reeked of oil and smoke.

My father put a hand on my shoulder as I sat alone in a booth a couple of hours later. He’d already sent Shelby and the rest of the waitstaff home. “I have a couple of things to finish up here,” he said. He looked exhausted; earlier I’d seen him munching Tums and I let myself worry, for one quick minute, about the stress on his heart. The idea that we could have lost the restaurant made me feel panicky and protective of the place and my father both. I thought of leaving for college in a few months and felt a pang of missing him, even though he was right in front of me. “Can you make it a little longer?”

“I can take her, Leo.” That was Sawyer, materializing out of nowhere like a ghost—I’d been half convinced he’d left, no good-bye or explanation, like that night in the hospital all over again. “I can drive Reena home.”

My father looked at Sawyer for a long minute, then back at me. Finally he sighed. “Straight home,” he said, and I knew he must feel even worse than he looked. “I mean it.”

“Straight home,” Sawyer promised. “Absolutely.”

I nodded, stood up, waved good-bye to my father. Sawyer pushed open the front door of the restaurant with one broad shoulder and swore softly as a blast of wind sliced inside. “Freezing,” he said—although it definitely wasn’t cold for any place besides Florida—and he took my hand so casually that I wondered if he even knew he’d done it. I swallowed and tried to ignore the petty contact, the shock waves it sent through my bones.

“Don’t you have a jacket?” he asked. He wrinkled his pretty nose as we hurried around the side of the restaurant to the parking lot.

“It was in the kitchen.” The sky looked heavy, full of thick, purple clouds.

“Fat lot of good it’s going to do you in there,” he said, opening the passenger door. “There’s a sweatshirt in the backseat.”

Kid had manners, at least, I thought. Lydia had made sure of that. “I’m okay,” I lied.