How to Love

“Not you,” he says, urgent, like there’s something I’m not understanding. “Us.”

“Us?”

“What if we got out of here?” he asks. “When your dad is better, I mean. Just … what if we took the baby and went?”

I swallow my heart back down into my chest. “Where?” I ask.

Sawyer looks right at me and smiles, huge and simple as a map of the world. “Everywhere,” he says.

Everywhere.

“Sawyer.” Right away I think of all the reasons why it’s impossible, of the places I’ve never been and all the things I haven’t done yet. I think of a road stretching all the way across the country and I think of all the nights I’ve spent alone, and when I see he’s still waiting on an answer, I give him the only one that makes sense. “Why don’t you just come and sleep where you belong?”

A vertical line appears between his eyebrows; his eyes turn a deep emerald color, birthstones in the dark. “Are you sure?” he asks after a minute, and his voice is lower than I have ever heard it. “Don’t say it if you’re not sure.”

“Uh-huh.” I’m surprised at the steadiness of my own voice. His fingers clench and unclench; I take one of his fists and force it open, place my own hand inside. “I’m sure.”

I pull him to his feet and into the bedroom. Outside through the open window I can hear the rain starting to fall. The heat never breaks here, not really. My spine thuds softly into the sheets.

Sawyer hums a little sound into my temple: Beneath his soft, bristly hair the curve of his skull feels both familiar and strange. I get my arms around his neck to keep from flying apart at my joints and we’re holding on to each other like it’s the last day, when all of a sudden, all at once, Sawyer goes completely still.

“Say you love me,” he orders quietly. He’s not moving at all.

“Hmm?” I say into his shoulder. I look up. He’s balancing his weight on his forearms and I can see the freckles across his face as he hovers over me. “What?”

“Say you love me,” he repeats, and in the dark flash of his green eyes I can see this is very important to him, some kind of promise he’s made to himself. He doesn’t want me to make him do this without saying the words. “Reena.” He is almost pleading. “Say you love me.”

Don’t do this to me, I want to tell him. You can’t. I can’t. When he left I held that I love you tight in my sweaty palm, tucked into my shirt like a talisman. I love you. The one thing he gave me that I didn’t give him ten times over. The one thing I kept for myself.

“Sawyer,” I say, thumb skating across his eyebrow, trying to stall. “Come on.”

He looks right at me. “Say it.”

If I say it, and I lose him again, it might kill me. If I don’t say it, I might lose him right now. My heart is knocking away inside my chest. “I can’t,” I whisper finally, and I feel like the worst kind of coward. “I’m sorry.”

He closes his eyes for a second and I tense like I’m waiting for a blow, fully expecting him to roll away from me, to pull on his jeans and get the hell out of here once and for all. But then:

“Okay,” Sawyer says, on a long, quiet exhale. I can feel his ribs expand and contract against my chest. “It’s okay.”

“We can stop if you want,” I offer stupidly. “I get if you want to stop.”

Sawyer smiles down at me, quick and vanishing. “I don’t want to stop.”

So. We keep going.

It’s strange and heartbreakingly familiar to do this with him after so much else has happened: All at once I’m remembering a hundred different things I forced myself to forget about, the telltale hitches in his breathing and the scar at the center of his chest. The back of his knee is warm when I tuck my foot there. He looks at me the whole entire time.

When it’s over we lie on our sides facing each other for what might be days, gray light and the sound of the wind in the palm trees outside the window. I feel the weight of his gaze like something physical, a sheen of sweat coating my skin. Finally I can’t hold it in anymore; just breathing is like a hurricane. “Seattle,” I say.

He raises one eyebrow. “Seattle?”

“I think everywhere should start in Seattle.”

“Seattle it is,” he tells me like a certainty, and after that we fall asleep.

40

Before

Sawyer going to parties without me was almost worse than going with him. Sometimes he showed up in my driveway afterward, flicking the headlights on his Jeep, waiting in the dark until I came downstairs to let him in. I shushed him as we climbed the stairs, always terrified that tonight would be the night my father caught us. I tried not to think of where he’d just been and what he’d been doing as we lay in my bed talking about all kinds of things: music, our families, the various scientific facts Sawyer had gleaned from an early childhood spent, I learned, buried in books about the weather. “Tell me about thunderstorms,” I’d whisper sleepily. Tornadoes. Droughts.

Maybe the problems started then, when I ran out of meteorological phenomena to ask him about, or maybe they started a long time earlier, even before the night he showed up at my house way later than usual, sweaty and skittish, spacey and pale. “You okay?” I asked, once I’d locked us inside my bedroom, the two of us hidden from the sleeping world.

Sawyer nodded vaguely. “Mm-hmm.”

“You sure?”

“I said yes, sweetheart.”

He was always a patchy, haunted sleeper, but tonight he tossed more than usual, tangling the blankets, breathing hard. I ran my palm up and down his backbone, trying to quiet him down, but it was like he was waiting for something to attack. Like he wanted to get up and prowl.

“How many?” I asked finally, the third time he drifted off only to wake violently a moment later. He was making me nervous. Clearly Sawyer’s extracurriculars skewed toward the illegal, but I’d never seen him like this. I tried to remember what I’d read about how easy it was to overdose on pills. “Sawyer. Hey. How many?”

“What?” He sounded annoyed. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Sawyer—”

“Reena.” His voice was sharp. “Let it go, will you?”

Then why did you even come here? I wanted to demand. Instead I gave up, rolling over to face the wall. “Sure,” I said sullenly. I had a calc test in the morning; I was more tired than I wanted to admit. “Well, try not to die, will you?”

That got his attention. “Hey,” he said, moving closer, pressing the length of his body flush against my back, burying his face in my hair. “Hey. I’m okay, all right? I’m sorry. I’m not going to die. I was stupid tonight. I won’t do it again.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t understand what I had with Sawyer: I couldn’t figure out how he could make me so happy and so miserable all at once. But I let him hold me anyway, our pulses tapping out a syncopated rhythm, our breathing finally evening out. My eyes had been closed for a few minutes when he said it: “I love you,” he muttered, so quiet, like a prayer whispered into my neck.

“Hmm?” I was nearly asleep myself, edges blurring; I was one hundred percent sure I’d misheard.

“I love you.” He said it again, clearer this time, right into my ear, breath tickling. I felt like a hydrogen bomb. I tried to be very still, but I knew he could feel my entire body tensing, a runner ready to begin a race—

Get set—

Go.

I opened my mouth, shut it again.

Oh God.