“Among other things.”
I had sort of expected him to deny it, but Sawyer only shrugged. “It was way before you. Before Allie, even. It wasn’t important.”
“I asked you point-blank, and you lied.”
“You said it was going to upset you if I had had sex with her! You basically asked me to lie to you.”
“I absolutely did not,” I snapped, swinging a wide right turn onto Commercial. “I was being honest. I was expecting the same thing from you.”
“Reena, sweetheart, you don’t want me to be honest with you.”
“What is
“It means …” He trailed off. “It means that you somehow got this idea in your head of who I am that doesn’t necessarily correspond to reality. And when I don’t act the way you think Sawyer LeGrande should act, you get mad. Like I haven’t learned my lines or something.”
“First of all, that’s not true.” Was it? “Second of all, I never asked you to act any way except to be up-front with me. Honestly, I think you’re the one who has a script of how Sawyer LeGrande should act. Like you have to be too cool for school one hundred percent of the time. You don’t. You just have to be a human.”
He shrugged. “I was just … I thought I was telling you what you wanted to hear.”
I thought of Allie for the hundred thousandth time.
“Reena.” Sawyer huffed a quiet laugh, disbelieving. “Is that why you hate her so much? Because you think I like her?”
“No, that’s why I hate
“Don’t say you hate me.” That got him, a little; his eyes narrowed like I’d landed a blow. “That’s mean.”
“So is lying.” I turned into the driveway of the house he was living in and slammed the brakes. “Go to bed, Sawyer. I’ll bring your car back here tomorrow.”
“If that’s what you want to do.” He got out of the Jeep and for a moment I thought he was going to huff into the house without saying good-bye, but he made his way over to the open driver’s side window. “Kiss me.”
Up close, he wasn’t looking so good: pale and almost waxy-looking, eyes bright as they’d been the other night in my room. He smelled like the inside of a bar. I pecked him on the lips, quick and antiseptic. Sawyer made a face.
“Are you serious?” he asked, shaking his head a little. “You’re not going to kiss me?”
“I did kiss you.”
“That wasn’t a kiss.”
“Sawyer …” I was struggling. “If you’d just eaten a whole bag of Doritos, I wouldn’t kiss you then, either.”
“What does
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“You know, Reena, I just think that maybe if you tried—,” he began, and just like that I was one hundred percent closed for business.
“Don’t you dare,” I managed, arms crossed in front of my chest like I was freezing, even though it was eighty degrees. “Do not.”
“Hey,” he said, hands up, taking a step back. “Hey. It’s me. Relax.”
“Well, don’t try to peer pressure me!”
He laughed. “I’m not trying to do anything to you. I just think everybody should try everything once.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s so boring, Sawyer.”
“How is that boring?”
“Why do you need me to validate you?”
“I don’t!”
“So do what you want to do!”
“So don’t act like I’m a piece of shit when I do it!”
“I’m not.”
“You are!”
“This is ridiculous.” I gripped the top of the steering wheel, rested my forehead on my knuckles. “Maybe I shouldn’t go with you anymore.”
“Maybe not.”
“Okay then.” I shrugged, threw my hands up. Blue light spilled over his face. I felt like this had gotten away from me somehow when I wasn’t paying attention. “Just … okay.”
Sawyer reached into the Jeep, running a hand through my hair and down my cheek. I turned my head and pressed my lips against his palm. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said slowly, but even then it felt like good-bye.
39
After
I’m not sleeping when the phone rings in the middle of the night—just lying in bed and worrying about my father, thoughts like a freight train hurtling stopless through my brain. I launch myself across the mattress to pick it up. “What?” I say immediately, voice panicky and shrill, demanding. “What? What? Tell me.”
“Reena,” Soledad says softly, and I think I’ve never been more afraid in all my days on God’s green earth. “Reena. It’s all right.”
He’s okay, she tells me calmly. He came through the surgery, critical but breathing. For now there’s nothing to do but let him rest. “I love you,” she says before she hangs up, my hand pale-knuckled and sweaty around the receiver, chin on my knee in the dark. “And whatever else happens, sweetheart—your dad loves you, too.”
I hang up. I cry for a while. I sit silent in the center of the mattress, like it’s an island in the middle of the sea.
Finally I get out of bed.
I open my door and gasp: There’s Sawyer sitting on the floor in the hallway, head back against the molding and elbows on his knees. He’s taken off the button-down he wore to dinner—it seems like days ago that he walked into my house with Roger and Lydia, all stupid and brave—and the cross on his upper arm peeks out from the sleeve of his undershirt. “Hey,” he says, suddenly alert. “How’s your dad?”
“Okay, I think. Soledad says okay.” I squat down so that we’re at eye level, voice quiet so we don’t wake the baby. “Whatcha doing?”
Sawyer shrugs a little, half-embarrassed. “Keeping watch.”
“For intruders?”
“Basically for you.” He makes a face. “I’m sorry. That was a really lame thing to say. I don’t mean to freak you out.”
“You’re not freaking me out.”
“I’m freaking me out a little.”
I shrug. “My dad’s okay,” I tell him. “For now, at least.”
Sawyer smiles. “Soledad on the phone?”
I nod. I’m not surprised to find him out here, is the truth of it—like somehow this is inevitable, the natural course of things. Maybe he’s a homing pigeon. Maybe I’m his home. “Do you ever think that this is really not the right place for us?” he asks.
I squint a bit, not entirely sure what he means. “Every day,” I tell him. “But like I said before, where am I going to go?”
