gathering—but still, it wasn’t exactly an unattractive fantasy.
“So, how many people in here do you think are spies?” Sawyer asked, taking a long gulp of orange juice and grinning like he’d read my mind. “It’s the perfect cover, right?” He dragged a piece of bacon through a puddle of syrup. “Nobody would ever suspect.”
“Except you,” I pointed out, laughing. I was hugely full but I wanted to keep eating anyway, to hang out in this crappy diner for the foreseeable future. To drink so much coffee I began to vibrate.
“Well, and you, now.” He nodded at an old lady at a table not far from ours, flowered housedress and bright orange Crocs. “Take her, for instance. You think she’s just sitting there minding her own business eating her Grand Slam, but the whole time she’s a special operative for the CIA.” Sawyer raised his eyebrows ominously. “I’m just saying, she could be into some real crazy James Bond shit.”
“Oh, yeah?” I leaned in close across the table. “What’s her alias?”
“Moons Over My Hammy,” Sawyer replied without missing a beat. He nudged my leg with his under the table, hooking one ankle around mine. “Duh.”
Once Sawyer paid the bill we headed back to his place without really talking about it, like we both sort of knew that’s where we’d end up. Purple-green weeds sprang up from between the cracks in the walk. Inside it was quiet and empty-seeming, all his various roommates out or asleep, that vaguely abandoned feeling houses get in the middle of a weekday. The air smelled a little close. There was a half-finished bag of Doritos on the grimy- looking futon and beer bottles scattered on the coffee table, plus one that had toppled over without anybody bothering to wipe its contents up off the floor. Sawyer grinned guiltily. “I, uh. Didn’t clean this time,” he admitted.
“It’s fine,” I said quickly, although in truth it bummed me out a little to think about him living here day in and day out. I thought of Roger and Lydia’s airy, immaculate Craftsman, full of refurbished antiques and plush area rugs that squished pleasantly under the soles of your feet. I wondered if Sawyer had a long-term plan.
I didn’t have a whole lot of time to mull it over, though, because in the next second he was wrapping his arms around me from behind, kissing all along the place where the back of my neck met my shoulder. I shivered inside my gray tank top. “You still like me?” he asked quietly, mouth tipped down low right next to my ear as he walked me in the direction of the staircase. “Even though I live with a bunch of slobs?”
And—yeah. I really,
Afterward we napped for a while, Sawyer’s body warm and solid under the covers and both of us in and out of sleep. He traced the freckles on my shoulders with one gentle thumb. I wanted to wrap him up inside the comforter and keep him for days and days, for the two of us to just hang out here forever; I was terrible at napping, normally, but with Sawyer everything felt easy and relaxed.
We were making out again, sleepy, Sawyer shifting his weight back on top of me and the slow slick of his mouth along my jaw, when his bedroom door banged open: “Yo, you home?” Iceman asked loudly, then: “
I froze, hugely, hideously embarrassed, and let out a startled gasp. I’d put my tank top back on a little earlier to get some water, so it wasn’t like he could see anything, exactly, but still. Sawyer’s shirt was off; my hair was probably a disaster. We were definitely in the middle of something pretty specific. I felt my face flush hot and red.
Sawyer, though, seemed basically unbothered. “Hey, dickhead,” he replied, rolling over and peering at Iceman like they’d run into each other in the kitchen or on the street. “Who used all the toilet paper, huh?”
Iceman snorted. “Oh, yeah, sorry, that was totally me. Here, I can make it up to you.” He dug into his pocket for a minute and produced a baggie like the one I’d found in Sawyer’s shoe the night I stayed over, maybe half a dozen pills inside. Tossed it on the bed. “S’what I came up here to give you in the first place.” He waved to me then, like maybe it was just occurring to him how enormously awkward it was for him to be standing there looking at us like a couple of zoo animals. “Hi, Reena,” he said.
“Nice,” I said to Sawyer once Iceman was finally gone, rolling my eyes and throwing back the covers. I felt vulnerable and kind of gross, like whatever snow globe I’d spent the day inside had been unceremoniously shattered. For the first time since I’d gotten in Sawyer’s car this morning, it occurred to me that maybe I should have gone to school after all.
“What?” Sawyer frowned up at me, still lying on his back with one arm tucked up behind his head. “Don’t be upset. He didn’t know you were in here. It was an honest mistake.”
“He stayed and chatted for like twenty minutes!”
“He did not.” Sawyer smiled up at me, winning. Held a hand out for me to take. “Okay, he kind of did. I’m sorry, you’re right. I should have told him to get lost right away.”
I huffed out a noisy breath, but I took his hand anyway. Sawyer tugged until I was sitting down on the bed again, tucked against the angle of his body. I picked up the baggie that was nestled in the sheets. “How long will it take you to go through these?” I asked, counting them out with my index finger through the plastic. I was strangely curious about them—they looked so innocuous, like aspirin or Altoids or something—but at the same time just being in the same room with them made me nervous. I’d never seen Sawyer use. “Hm?” I prodded. “How long?”
Sawyer shrugged into the pillows like he didn’t want to answer. He was still holding on to my hand. “Long enough,” he said after a minute. I didn’t ask any more questions after that.
We came downstairs for food a little while later and found Iceman and Lou sacked out on the futon,
“Oh.” I shook my head before I even really thought about it, as instinctive as not taking candy from strangers. “Nah, I’m okay,” I said.
“You sure?”
I was. Sawyer wasn’t, though, so I settled myself in a bean-bag chair in the corner while he smoked, watching a lady in a lime-green tube top argue for child support on Channel 5. “Don’t pee on Judge Judy’s leg and tell her it’s raining,” Lou said. Sawyer laughed.
I picked at my cuticles, bored and antsy. All of a sudden I was acutely aware of everything I’d blown off. I wasn’t somebody who skipped quizzes or didn’t show up for meetings, not ever. By the time Judge Judy awarded tube top lady her back payments, I could feel a full-on anxiety attack nipping at my heels.
I checked my watch—it was only two thirty. If I left right this minute, I could make my newspaper meeting, at least. Maybe catch Ms. Bowen before she left for the day and explain to her that I’d been sick but felt better now. I looked around for my backpack, trying to remember if I’d brought it upstairs when we came in, and my fidgeting caught Sawyer’s attention. “S’wrong?” he asked, already mellowing out. I wondered if hanging out with me all day was something he needed to mellow out from.
“I should go,” I murmured, trying to climb out of the beanbag as gracefully as possible. “It’s getting late.”
“What?” Sawyer frowned at me from where he was sprawled on the dingy carpet, ankles crossed and back against the arm of the futon. “Why, ’cause of the weed?”
Right away I blushed, glancing at Iceman and Lou. I didn’t want them to think I was some uptight killjoy— even if I kind of felt like one, like somebody who couldn’t enjoy something as ostensibly harmless as cutting one day of school. “No,” I said quickly, “it’s not that, I just—”
“It kind of seems like it’s that,” Sawyer interrupted.
“Okay, well,” I said, finally laying eyes on my backpack—it was right near the bottom of the staircase, where I’d dropped it before Sawyer and I stumbled up to his bedroom earlier. I got up and hefted it over my shoulder. “It’s not. I just skipped a lot of stuff today, is all. I’ll see you at work, okay?” I headed for the front door, backpack clutched close like the protective shell of a turtle. It felt like this day had turned around really fast.
Sawyer caught up with me on the tiny front stoop of the bungalow—a good thing, probably, since I’d realized as I crossed the threshold that I had no idea how I was getting home. “Reena,” he said, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Come on, don’t leave mad.”
“I’m not mad,” I said, and I wasn’t, really. I didn’t know exactly what I was. I couldn’t figure out how you could go from feeling so close to a person one minute to not being sure if you even knew them the next. “I honestly do need to go. I had a lot of fun today, seriously.”
