indirectly. And that’s not—” She stops short, shakes her head. “I don’t want you to think I’m mad at you for dumping my brother.”
“Then why are you mad at me?” I explode. I glance around, self-conscious—there are a couple of businessmen drinking late lunches at the bar, an elderly couple or two eating early dinners. I lower my voice. “Seriously. Why are you mad at me?”
“I’m mad at you—” Shelby sighs again. “I’m mad at you because Sawyer got back here and you like, forgot that you’re kickass. It’s like now that he’s around again all the hard work you did doesn’t even matter. And it’s not anything against Sawyer, I don’t want you to think that, either, especially when everybody in your family thinks he’s the Antichrist—”
“Thanks,” I interrupt, and Shelby pushes out a noisy breath.
“I just feel,” she says crisply, “like you’re forgetting yourself over a dude.”
Now I’m the one who’s pissed. “What am I forgetting, exactly?” I demand. “That I live at home with my father who can’t even look at me most days because he legit thinks I’m the whore of Babylon? That I’m a waitress, and I’m probably always going to be a waitress? Or that I’m eighteen years old with a baby to take care of and no conceivable way of getting out of this stupid place?” God, where does she get off, honestly, Shelby with her college scholarship and brainy girlfriend and limitless doctor future, who gets to pack up at the end of the summer and fly thousands of miles from here? What on God’s green earth could she possibly know about how
Sawyer doesn’t give up, of course. I’ve spent my life reading his face like tea leaves, and there was something about the way he looked at me before I went tearing out of his parents’ kitchen the other night that let me know that, as far as he’s concerned, we aren’t done. By the middle of the week, it’s only a question of when.
He holds out until Thursday. I’m stretched on the porch swing with my laptop when his Jeep pulls up, and even in the orange half-light I notice again what bad shape it’s in these days: It was never a particularly nice car to begin with, and now it’s dented like a coffee can, rust speckling the doors. From the sound of it, the muffler is shot.
The hair on my arms perks up even though it’s still eighty degrees, and I close the laptop harder than I mean to, not wanting Sawyer to get a look at the screen: While all my magazine subscriptions have lapsed and I’ve taken my email address off the contact list of every travel website clear across the internet, I’ve still got a weakness for the blogs. I can waste whole nights clicking through: staring at the bright, hypersaturated images captured by women passing through San Diego or spending a year in Jakarta, reading stories about the food they’ve been eating and the people they’ve met along the way. It’s torturing myself. I don’t know why I go out of my way to do it.
So far, I haven’t been able to make myself quit.
“Hey,” Sawyer calls softly, making his way up the front walk. He’s wearing dark, holey jeans and a T-shirt, and he’s left his shoes in the car. His feet are pale against the concrete. There’s a giant plastic cup in his hand.
“Okay, I’ve gotta ask,” I tell him, squinting a little across the lawn. “What’s with all the Slurpees?”
Sawyer shrugs, tips the cup in my direction. “Cheaper than booze.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, wondering about the full story there, but in the end I just leave it alone. “Your teeth are gonna rot right out of your head,” I warn him; then: “What were you going to do if I wasn’t sitting out here?”
“Who said I was here to see you?” He smiles as he climbs the steps, then sits down sideways on the top one so he’s facing me, leaning against my house. It’s quiet inside, the windows dark. My father had a stress test this afternoon and went to bed early. Soledad followed not long after that. “I was going to knock on the door.”
I raise my eyebrows. “It’s late.”
“Ah. Woulda thrown rocks at your window then, maybe.” He nods at the laptop. “Were you writing?”
“Nope.” I shake my head neatly, taking some weird perverse pleasure in saying it. “I told you I don’t write anymore.”
“I remember you saying that, yeah.” Sawyer looks at me carefully. “It’s a bummer, though. I thought maybe you were just giving me a hard time.”
“Because obviously everything I do is about you?”
Sawyer rolls his eyes. “Is that what I said?” he asks, no particular irritation behind it at all. It sounds like he knows he’s got to wait me out and is willing. “Seriously. Did you hear me say that just now?”
“Screw you,” I fire back, imitating his tone. His patience riles me up, makes me want to fight him. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you not to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t
I raise my head and look at him, sitting on the floor like a penitent. I sigh and I tell him the truth. “Sawyer, me liking you has never, ever been the issue.”
He smiles—I wish he didn’t have such a pretty smile—and changes tactics. “Come sit by me,” he says this time.
“Why?”
“’Cause I’m asking you to.” He bends over and grabs a handful of shiny white pebbles from the path leading up to the porch, begins to throw them onto the lawn one by one. They skip across the slick green grass as I shake my head.
“Sawyer,” I tell him. “No.”
“Why not?”
I don’t really have a good answer for that one—not one I can tell him, at least—so I get off the swing and perch on the top step. He slides down so he’s sitting below me, his chin about level with my knee. “That one is new,” I say. There’s a deep blue star on his bicep that wasn’t there before; it stands out against his skin like a brand.
“Got it in Tucson.”
I feel my eyebrows go up, that expression Shelby calls the Big Furrow, when she and I are speaking. “What were you doing in Tucson?”
Sawyer looks up at me, smiles a little. “I worked on a farm.”
“Seriously?”
“Soybeans,” he tells me, nodding once. “And in a pottery place.”
I laugh, I can’t help it. “You are out of control.”
“What’s out of control about that?” he asks, all innocence. “I ran the kiln.”
“I see.” Of course he did. Probably Sawyer could have any job, do anything, drive a forklift or a race car or turn water into wine. “Where else did you go?”
“Oh, man.” Sawyer considers. “Well. New Orleans, right when I left here. LA.”
Los Angeles is dirty and full of neon. You can’t drink water from the tap in Los Angeles. I know this: not because I’ve ever been there, but because like so many other things I read it in a book.
“Kansas, for a while.”
“Kansas.”
“Uh-huh. I’d never been. It’s flat there.”
“So they tell me.”
“Missouri. Flat there, too.”
I close my eyes and wonder how I am doing this, how we’re talking just like we used to. On the breeze I smell the ocean, close and endless; my pulse ticks like a bomb inside my throat. I hum at him a little, unwilling to commit either way.
“New Mexico,” he says, like a litany. After a moment his hand brushes my heel. “Austin.”
I try not to notice—I believe in accidents—but then his palm slides up the back of my leg, across the muscles
