by Jay McLean
It’s not just a couple of days she’s off school. It’s an entire week. I call Brian, ask how she is and he tells me that she got a horrible flu when she was at UNC over the weekend. She’s so sick that she can’t even come home. She’s holed up in his dorm room but it’s fine, he tells me, because Cooper’s there and he’s taking care of her. I wonder if Brian knows about New Year’s Eve and the houseboat and Cooper’s lack of taking care of her then—one night. How the hell has he taken care of her for an entire week?
If I didn’t have to finish these stupid sets and compete in a race and take the twins to basketball and then Lachlan to a birthday party and hand deliver Logan’s now-weekly piss cup to Misty at the police station, my ass would be in my truck, driving to UNC, punching Cooper in the face (fuck, I want to do that so bad) and throwing Laney over my shoulder to take her home. She’d sit in my apartment and I’d take care of her. Soup, meds and back rubs. I’d nurse her back to health and she’d call me her hero and she’d dump Cooper and then we’d have sex on the bed where I put the final nail in the coffin of bringing her back to life. Shit. I’m Dad with a dog story and there was my tangent.
But, I do have to do all those things, and I can’t even call her to see how she is because that fucker still has me blocked.
Monday rolls around, opening night, and everyone involved in the play, including Miss Lepsitch, is going out of their ever-loving minds because the costumes! Where the fuck are the costumes? I begin to panic as much as everyone else because now I feel like I’m part of this insanity called The Spring Play, and dammit, I worked hard for it. In the afternoon, Leo tries calling Lane. Garray tries calling Lane. Even I try calling Lane—it doesn’t even ring. Logan sits on a makeshift throne made for King Capulet, or Sir Capulet, or whatever the fuck Juliet’s dad was, and says, “You know, maybe Cooper’s one of those crazy cats who’s, like, stupid obsessed with our little Laney, and he’s got her hidden in a dungeon or something. She probably loves him because of that… what’s it called? You know that thing…” He clicks his fingers while my brain throbs. “When the captured fall for their captor?”
“Stockholm syndrome,” Leo tells him.
“Bruh,” Garray says.
“Or you know,” Logan continues, and I wish he’d shut the fuck up. “Maybe he’s that fucking in love with her he killed her and then himself, like this here,”—he raises a finger, spins it in circles—“Romero and Juliet.”
Leo says, “Romeo and Juliet, dickwad. Smoke another joint.”
“Can’t.” Logan jumps off the chair. “Hot Cop Lady is all up in my shit thanks to Luke.”
Swear my brain literally explodes and for some fucked-up reason, I actually believe (for a second) that Logan is onto something. I mean, Cooper’s not a fucking nutjob, right? He’s just your standard self-entitled dick.
“Costumes are here!” Miss Lepsitch shouts, and I practically sprint over to her.
“Where’s Lane?”
“Who?”
There are people everywhere now, trying to find their costumes amongst the pile in her arms.
“Lois! Where’s Lois?”
“She just dropped these off. She’s gone back home. She must really not be feeling well.”
I tell the boys I’m out and put Leo in charge, then waste nineteen seconds arguing with Dumb Name about why he’s not in charge simply because he was born a couple of years earlier.
Luckily, Logan butts in. “Get over it, pindick. Let Luke find his Juliet.”
I make my escape while they go toe-to-toe, and I get in my car and I think about Laney and think about who would actually win if Logan and Dumb Name got in a fist fight. Dumb Name’s tall, scrawny but lean. But Logan carries enough unjustified anger to set off security gates at an airport. Cameron told me once that emotion always wins when it comes down to a fight. Always. So yeah, I’d probably put my money on Logan.
I park in Lane’s driveway and go right to the basement door. The outside light isn’t on, but I don’t expect it to be because I haven’t knocked on it since September 25TH.
There’s no answer, so I move to the front door. Again, no answer. I creep around the house looking through all the windows, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone home. Laney’s car’s here, but Brian’s isn’t. Maybe he took her to the hospital or something. Maybe it was more than just a horrible flu. I call Brian. He says he’s at Misty’s getting ready to see the play. He doesn’t know where Laney is. She’s not answering her phone.
Fuck.
I picture Laney in a dungeon.
I picture Laney dead in a dungeon with dead Cooper next to her.
Dad calls me, tells me he’s on his way to the play with the younger boys and that I should come home because Laney isn’t in a dungeon. She’s not dead. She’s sitting on my apartment stairs.
I’m out of breath when I get to her and it’s not because I’m unfit, it’s because I was worried. I pick her up off the stairs and hold her and hold her, and she winces in pain because she’s sick, you idiot.
“What’s with you?” she asks when I put her back down.
“Dungeons and Stockholm and Romero.”
Her eyes widen. “What?!”
I take a calming breath. “Logan.”
She raises her hand between us. “Say no more.”
The second we’re in my apartment, she looks over at the empty kitchen sink. “No dishes?”
I shake my head. “No dishes.” Then I take her hand, lead her over to the couch. “Sit,” I order.
She sits.
I go to the kitchen, take out the canned chicken soup, pour it into a pot and switch on the stove. Then I get a microwavable heating pad from my room and throw it in the microwave, wait for one minute, take it out, stir the pot, go to Lane, and place the heating pad on her back where I know she likes to be rubbed. “What are you doing, Luke?” she asks.
I shrug. “You’re sick.”
“And you’re sweet,” she says.
Okay, here’s a story that’s going to take you on a real tangent.
One time, in tenth grade, I dated a senior named Rachelle. Rachelle was the head cheerleader, the hottest girl in school (excluding Laney, of course) and she was interested in me! Logan overheard me having a conversation with Dad asking for some shifts so I could buy Rachelle some fucking bag she kept showing me. Logan shouted that I was pussy-whipped. Lachlan was in the room, and pussy-whipped is not something you say around a four year old because four year olds ask a lot of questions, like “What does pussy-whipped mean?”
Logan left the room, leaving Dad and me to answer because fuck Logan. Anyway, Dad explained that pussy-whipped meant that you didn’t like cats and you whipped them. So now, almost three years later, Lachlan makes it his mission to make sure I’m never around cats. The point of this story? I’m pussy-whipped by Lane, and she’s not even my girlfriend. Because the truth is I’d planned all of this—not the how it happened or the way it happened, but I planned on her being in my apartment and me taking care of her. Proof: the soup that’s currently heating on my stove.
I get the soup, put it in a bowl, watch her eat the soup. After she puts the empty bowl down on the coffee table, she says, “You know why I always do your dishes when I walk in?”
She was gone a week, and I missed her voice and her hair and her eyes and her coconuts, lime and Laney. “Why?”
“Because I never know what to do when I walk in here, so I do the dishes and you either sit on the couch and turn on the TV or you sit on the floor and do your homework, and once you’re settled, I follow your lead.”
“Really?” I ask.
She smiles. “Really.”
“And what would happen if I went to my bedroom and stripped naked?” Too far, dickhead. But then she gives me a sound that shifts reality, and I know she’s good, and I’m good, and we’re great.
I pull her feet on my lap and notice what she’s wearing for the first time. Baggy sweatpants and an oversized hoodie and it’s not even cold out
side. “How long were you waiting for me and did you walk here?”
“Not long and yes, why?”
“Because you’re all bundled up like it’s the middle of January. Are you cold? You want me to turn the heat up?”
She pokes my leg with her feet, and I start rubbing them through her socks and seriously, cats, hide from me. Whip whip whip.
I don’t even want to tell you the effects I have from the sounds she makes when I start massaging her feet, because truth? It’s a little embarrassing, and now her head’s tilted back on the arm of the couch, and her eyes are closed, and her chest are breasts, and they’re moving, and she murmurs, “I have to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I broke up with Cooper.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
LUCAS
Girls and guys are so different. Girls say things like: “We loved each other, but we didn’t like each other, or maybe it was the other way around.”
Guys say: “We were both kind of over it, you know?”
And I’d never been on this end of a breakup story, one being told by a girl, and I kind of wish that Lucy had dated more when she was younger so I could’ve eavesdropped on her conversations and been prepared for this. As it turns out, Lane was the one who broke up with Cooper, yet she’s the one crying on my shoulder while he’s probably balls deep in angry rebound sex. “I know it sounds dumb,” she says, sniffling into my shirt. “It’s just he’s the first real boyfriend I’ve ever had, and he’d become such a huge part of my life and now… now he’s gone.”
The conversation’s been going for thirty-eight minutes, and swear it’s like reeling in a fish. You throw the line, they bite, then slowly, gently, you have to pull in the line, and sometimes they fight, move away, and you can’t rush so you keep going, slowly, gently. She keeps making up excuses, and the excuses turn to regrets, and the regrets turn to reasons to go back to him and slowly, gently, with my words, I reel her back in.
She says he was controlling, and I agree. She says he was unpredictable, and I agree (even though I have no idea what she means), but she also says that he was there for her at a time when she felt like no one else was, and I (reluctantly) agree.
“I never really thought that I had confidence issues, you know?” she says, staring ahead. “He had this way of making me see things differently. Or just, making me see in general. And I think I needed that. After what happened with you and me—”
“Laney,” I say through a sigh, cutting her off.
She turns to me. “No, it’s okay. I can talk about it now… and I think we should talk about it. Don’t you?”
I didn’t think her being here, her saying “I broke up with Cooper” would lead to this; her and me talking about my regrets. “I never meant to hurt you,” I tell her. “When I left you that night, I had every intention of coming back to you. Of spending…” the rest of my life with you… “the night with you. And then…”
“I know.” She laughs once. “I think I had so much invested in that one night. It was stupid.”
“Ouch.”
“No. What we did wasn’t stupid. I didn’t mean that. I meant I had so much invested in you and me and that was stupid.”
Still ouch. “And now?”
“Now what?”
“How do you feel about you and me?”
She smiles, drops her gaze. “I feel like I just got out of a really complicated relationship so…”
“So… I’ll wait?”
“Lucas,” she whispers, her smile getting wider.
I ask, “When did you actually break up with him?”
Her shoulders hunch, mind searching. “I haven’t been completely honest… with a lot of people.”
“What does that mean?”
“I haven’t been sick,” she admits. “I’ve just been… gone.”
“What does gone mean? And answer my question.”
“Promise you won’t be mad?”
I nod once.
“I broke up with him the night after he showed up at school. Cooper drove us to his dorm while I spent the entire ride preparing what I was going to say and how I was going to say it—break up with him, I mean—and we got to his room, and I did and said everything I prepared in the car, and I was going to call you, ask you to pick me up, but he refused to let me leave.”
“Refused how?”
“Just stood by the door, you know? I was going to wait for him to fall asleep and sneak out of there, but Cooper doesn’t sleep—”
“He doesn’t sleep? Like, ever?”
Her head moves from side to side, but her eyes stay locked on mine. “Ever since he’s been back on the team, he’s started taking these ADHD meds, and now and then he crashes, and crashes hard, but he doesn’t actually sleep, you know?”
“He has ADHD?” I ask. We’re both sitting up now, facing each other.
“No! That’s the thing. He doesn’t. But he buys them off some guy on campus and he pops them like candy along with all these other meds and it keeps him awake and alert for days on end so he can keep up with his classes and his training and his dad’s bullshit business agenda and his dad’s bullshit in general.”
I don’t care enough to keep talking about Cooper, so I ask, “Where the fuck have you been, Lane?”
She sighs, takes a sip of her water. “I managed to escape—”
“Escape?!” Christ, maybe Logan was onto something.
“You know what I mean! The next morning, he went to meet the guy for some anti-anxiety drugs, and I left, but I didn’t have a car, so I caught a bus to Charlotte and by the time I got there I was exhausted, and Cooper had been calling like crazy and I knew if I went home he’d find me and want to talk some more so I got a hotel room for the night and I’ve been there since.”
My eyes are so wide I can feel them stretching my face. “You’ve been there for more than a week?”
She nods.
“But your dad said you were sick.”
Another sigh. “I asked Cooper to tell him that, and we both kept up the front. I told Coop I was visiting my mom—he doesn’t know about her. Not like you do.”
I WIN. Just saying.
She adds, “I just haven’t been ready to face Cooper or my dad or you, and I needed the time. You understand, right?”
Not really. “Yeah, Laney, I understand.”
And with the explanations done, she goes back to crying, and I do my best to let her go through her emotions on her own, no matter how hard it is not to shake her and tell her that her tears are wasteful and that guy was a fucking dick.
An hour later, Leo and Logan visit the apartment and tell us how opening night went. The rundown goes like this:
Logan punched Garray.
Leo got the girl’s number.
Juliet said, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?” and Lachlan shouted, “Sexing!” and the entire theater laughed and laughed and laughed.
But Laney doesn’t. She smiles, but there’s no reality-shifting sound and the guys see it and they make an excuse to leave, and Laney goes to wash the pot and the ladle and the bowl used for her soup I’d made when she wasn’t even sick. “I’m sorry you missed it,” she says when I step behind her.
“I don’t care. I’d rather be with you.” I shut off the water and dry her hands with a cloth, leave the dirty dishes in the sink. I keep one hand around hers, the other reaching up to cup the side of her face. She flinches, probably afraid I’ll make a move now that she’s single, but I’m not a dick, and I don’t want to be her angry rebound fuck.
I want to be her everything.
“You look tired,” I tell her, and she does.
She whispers, another sob forming in her throat, “I’m so tired, Lucas. Of everything.”
I lead her to my bed, move the covers to the side and wait for her to get in. “You want one minute?” I ask, and she frowns, removes her glasses and puts them on the nightstand.
She settles on the pillow, her eyes drifti
ng shut. “Luke?”
“Yeah?”
“How do you get over it, you know, move on?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask that question,” I say, shaking my head.
“But you’ve dated a lot of girls before, so… how?” She looks so desperate, so in need of closure.
I hate asking the question as much as I hate already knowing the answer. “Did you love Cooper?”
She doesn’t miss a beat. “Yes.”
“Then I can’t give you the answers you need, Lane. I may have been with a lot of girls, but I didn’t love any of them.” I look away. “I mean, there was one,”—You—“and that lasted all of one night.”
Her gasp is soft, but still, I hear it. “And that one girl?” she asks. “How did you get over that?”
“As soon as it happens, I’ll let you know.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
LUCAS
The next morning, I run my regular route. Twice. I don’t stop at the crossroads because the crossroads won’t lead me to her. It took her just over three minutes to fall fast asleep last night, and I watched her for a few minutes more. Then I thought about doing something really stupid: going through her phone. I didn’t, of course. But I wanted to. Because the entire time she sat with me, told me about the breakup, I could tell she was holding back. I just didn’t know what. But I trust her, believe in her, in us, and I know—in time—she’ll let me in.
Lane’s still sleeping when I get home and because of my extra route, I don’t have time to make her breakfast like I wanted to. I sit on the edge of the bed and shake her. She flinches awake and gasps for air, her eyes wide.
“Hey,” I try to soothe. “It’s okay. It’s just me. Were you having a nightmare or something?”
It takes her a few minutes to settle her breathing, gain focus, and when she does, her eyes meet mine. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I think… yeah. I must’ve been dreaming.”
